Yes that section raised my hackles too, to the point where I'm suspicious of the whole article.
The solution, in my opinion, is to either document that strclone()'s return should be free()'d, or alternately add a strfree() declaration to the header (which might just be `#define strfree(x) free(x)`).
Adding a `char **out` arg does not, in my opinion, document that the pointer should be free()'d.
Yeah, at the least you'll need an understanding of ULPs[0] before you can write code that's safe in this way. And understanding ULPs means understanding that no single constant is going to be applicable across the FLT or DBL range.
The reference is that the anime character "Naruto"[0] wears the same colors and roughly the same uniform as a Japanese recovery worker[1].
During disaster work, you see swarms of recovery workers and the joke/reference being made is that this looks like Naruto doing a "shadow clone" technique.
There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic.
> There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible
Hard disagree. Many Perl programmers enjoyed engaging in code golf (always just for fun, in my experience), but in my nearly 30 years of programming Perl, I never encountered anything that I would call pressure to do so -- not from anyone.
One-liners is one of the ways you can use perl. You can also use it as the embedded language in some larger project. As perl CGI. As mod_perl. etc. There is no "cultural pressure" to use any of these. You can choose to mess around with one-liners and you can choose to spend time shaving a few characters off your code. Or not. None of this is the one true way. This is not python.
Specifically, after 133_076_755_768 steps, the 1-dimensional pattern reoccurs translated by two pixels. On skimming the thread I haven't determined if that shift is parallel or perpendicular to the line.
I see what you're saying, but I think it's a misunderstanding. 1D here only means that there's some state where the active cells are confined to one row — but one row within the ordinary 2D GoL plane. I'm sure the next iteration leaps off the line immediately. Search for "Blinker" here to imagine how it could start spreading off the line.
Search has become so bad that zero hits is not the indicator it used to be, even DDG is struggling now.
It's really evident in situations like this where you are looking for something specific. Seems like they all pushed too hard on the AI and the results are for averaged search queries. Using quotes and -term have become less helpful
Conspiratorially, I wonder if this is intentional to drive more traffic to ai. I find myself using Google Deep Search more, which is honestly a better UX if it would stop writing damn reports and just give me a brief with links. Alas it ignores any instructions to change it's output format
Over eleven years after Blue Origin patented landing a rocket on a barge, and nearly ten years after SpaceX's first "ASDS" (barge) landing, Blue Origin has finally successfully landed a rocket on a barge.
We should be impressed they did it before their patent expired.
although, they were doing it with a more complicated vehicle than the falcon 9, so the delay is "somewhat" understandable.
And only "somewhat," because new glenn seemed to take forever compared to starship. It does go to show, maybe the highly iterative approach that spacex takes really is faster (or, it could just be spacex has more highly skilled engineers, but I for one can't tell what the reasons are).
It's not about the delay, they can take as long as they want to build what they want to build. I object to their attempt to use patents to block competitors for decades when they didn't even have a product yet.
ah, yeah, patent trolling is pretty horrible (and Bezos is known for this - one click)...
... although, just to play a little devil's advocate, Bezos doesn't get enough credit for jump starting private spaceflight companies. Blue Origin was started 2 years before SpaceX. Am sure Blue Origin racked up a ton of patents.
yeah, didn't state it clearly. only meant that Blue Origin has actually been at it longer than SpaceX, and probably has around the same amount of patents as them because of it. Yeah, Blue Origin doesn't get as much credit for commercial space flight as spacex, and rightful so, but seems like they still did contribute a great deal (in fact, Blue Origin was the first to complete a vertical takeoff and landing, although it was with a suborbital vehicle).
Iterations are faster than modelling, no different for software where testing in prod with actual users ends up being quicker than in a testing environment.
Iterations in hardware businesses are far more expensive, particularly for early stage (by revenue not age) companies like Blue Origin. Outside of the Vulcan engine sales, joy rides and NASA grants they don't have much inflow and depend on equity infusion.
SpaceX also would find it tough without Starlink revenue to fund iterations for Starship. Similarly the early customer revenue ( plus the generous NASA grants) contributed to iterate on F9 be it Block V or for landing etc.
Beyond money, it also requires the ability to convince customers to be okay with the trade-offs and risks of constantly changing configurations, designs.
It is not that people do not know iterative testing with real artifacts is quicker, but most are limited in their ability to fund it or cannot convince customers, regulators to allow them.
Yeah, it does seem like iterative development with hardware is an extremely cash intensive way of development. And yes, what a genius move to fund a lot of this development with Starlink - it's amazing this seemingly off the cuff idea is such a cash cow, and it seemed at least like they got it up and running relatively quickly. Yeah, regardless how someone feels about Elon these days, Starlink has got to be up there for one of the most brilliant moves by an entrepreneur of all time.
And to come back to you point, yeah, I do see, you need the funds first to be able to support such a cash hungry way of development - which, on a tangent, kind of disappointed me (and a few others online) when Stoke Space decide to build their own 1st stage instead of just focusing on their unique 2nd stage. Like many in the past have mentioned, it seems like they'd be getting to space a lot quicker if they had just designed their 2nd stage to fit on a Falcon 9.
Starlink was not that amazing as a business decision.
If one expects to generate orders of magnitude more supply of a good (launch capacity), then one needs to expect the existing (conservative, long lead-time) market will have insufficient demand.
So one needs to generate additional demand.
So one needs to find a profit-generating business that's limited by mass in space / launches, where each component is inexpensive enough that its loss doesn't bankrupt the company.
Space-based telecommunications falls out pretty obviously from those requirements, given the pre-Starlink landscape (limited, exquisite assets serving the market at high premiums).
In small irony, it's also the exact same possibility space optimization that led to Amazon starting with books: Bezos didn't give a shit about books specifically, but he did like that they were long-tail, indefinitely warehouse-able, and shaped for efficient shipping.
In novel logistics spaces, it's better to find the business that matches capabilities than the other way around, because the company's core competency and value is their novel logistics solution.
It was an obvious market, that was visible years before the project was announced. I don't think any one was surprised, it was not like Apple launching iPod or the iPhone.
What was impressive is at that they solved a lot of hard problems like satellite manufacturing at scale, phased array dishes, or fleet management of thousands of satellites or laser interconnects between satellites, and so on, for basically a side project to increase their primary product demand enough to justify the reuse being a useful feature.
Hmm, don't know, easy to say it was obvious in hindsight. But over the years, Google project Loon and other similar attempts at increasing internet coverage (think Facebook tried too at one point) have not been nearly as successful. Yeah, still not convinced it was obviously going to be successful, but maybe am missing some aspect you're seeing.
Market was obvious, solutions weren’t as you cite there were many tech failures, it was just a logical extension to their business that is not really hindsight.
It was not the same kind of new market entry Apple did with the iPhone or even the iPod , or Amazon doing AWS, which if we claim today as obvious would be hindsight
Well, sure, agree that there is a natural logic to the idea, but to actually go through with something that no one has done before and actually execute it (which as we all from the tech/sci industries here know), and also do it on a large scale and be very successful is an entirely different matter. Yeah, the number of things that need to go right is still pretty high, and at least to me, was extremely impressive. But to each his own.
It was also a great move because they could take more risks launching their own Starlink satellites and prove out the reliability of the Falcon 9 to others. They also are very had to compete with when they build, launch, and deploy the system all in house.
Was thinking this too. It reminds me of how TSMC's fab has a lot more volume than Intel's, because TSMC has outside customers and high-volume is what is needed to perfect a chip fabrication process (getting many more chances to fix any problems, and once you finally do, have the volume necessary to make it profitable). What a great idea it was:)
You get lot more data when running real world experiments .
For off world missions, the best examples are the Soviet Venus missions of how iterating and sticking with the goals helped do some incredible research which would be hard to replicate even today .
The benefit of not doing quick and dirty is why we got out The longevity of voyager or some of the mars rovers or ingenuity.
They were "launching cities" as one of their program chiefs said. Yes, when you can arbitrarily tax you population you can afford these loud propaganda headlines.
Hard to draw super hard conclusions. Could also be that the bets made on Falcon turned out to be particularly good, vs a more methodical approach Blue Origin took. The highly iterative approach _may_ be faster, but I don't see any evidence yet that it will _always_ be faster. Just depends on how good your bets are and how much in-flight testing you happen to have to do based on a design.
Would be interesting to see more detailed information like specific engineering issues being resolved one way vs another.
Falcon beat New Glenn to the punch, but New Glenn is probably more capable overall, so it's not an apples to oranges comparison. Completion of Starship would really help the iterative approach case though (ignoring the junk it leaves scatter around the world when it goes boom)
People need to remember that New Glenn is completely artificial in market terms. Blue Origin had literally infinite money, and if not sponsored by the richest man on the planet it could never exists. And New Glenn even if its 'better' then Falcon 9 (yet to be demonstrated) will likely never make back its development cost.
I think people just don't understand what an absurd amount of cash burn Blue had for the last 10+ years.
So when it comes to iterative vs methodical, this is a perfectly clear case. SpaceX did it faster and for an amount of money that is so much less then Blue that its hard to even compare the numbers.
Go back and just look at how many people worked at Blue, and then do the math on what their cash burn rate was just for people.
Rocket Lab is also taking a more methodical and less iterative approach with Neutron, which should be ready some time next year. If they make that work well, that will be another point in favor of a methodical approach.
There should be an in depth academic study on their two approaches, it seems like it'd be valuable.
To me at least, given the (probably) positive affects iterative dev has (overall) had on software development, my personal feeling is it'd be useful for most other types of engineering. But (as someone else also pointed out) iterative is much more expensive in hardware fields, given the high cost of materials, and you need to have a lot more funds to build hardware this way.
Spacex tends to "build rocket factories" instead of building one rocket. So they can launch and reuse hundreds a year. They're repeating this with starship.
It's hard to know what BO is doing because they're so quiet all the time, but to what degree is this scaling true for them also?
Going by the Tim Todds interview with Jeff Bezos it seems like BOs approach is very similar in this area. It looked to me that the machines they had there to build NG is set up to produce rockets in large quantities. He talked about their goals with the second stage, and that they’re looking at making a reusable version but that in parallel they’re also doing cost optimisations that may make it so cheap that reuse doesn’t make sense.
Was talking with someone else, yeah, focusing on a rocket factory instead of just building a couple of rockets does seem like a good idea. Allows you to build a lot of test articles during development, even ones that you'll launch like Space X, and during real flights, you'll have a lot of rockets available for real launches.
Yeah, Bezos has been putting most of his attention there for the past few years. And why not? What's more interesting, running a online marketplace (which still actually seems pretty interesting), or building rockets to fly into space:)
It'd be a win for me, probably not for him. Or investors, sadly, at least not in the short term. I would turn off the non-Amazon sales platform. It might be feasible to save the brand, but of course the immediate effect would be a loss of that revenue stream from all the random Chinese "brands" that flood it with cheap garbage and counterfeits.
Or at least make a persistent toggle switch in the UI where you can say "I never want to see a single product that is not shipped-from-and-sold-by-Amazon." And end commingling with any product that Amazon itself sells, if that is occurring.
That's why they don't let morons like me run big business :). I care about things that only matter when you are a small business apparently.
Ah, focus on quality of products being listed. And, maybe that means there is room for a high-end competitor to Amazon eventually (am not seeing this anytime soon, but maybe in a couple decades??)
Yes, but it's also a harder problem, aiming to reuse everything instead of just the first stage.
And they have at least reached orbital velocity on several occasions, so they could have physically orbited. They just purposely chose a trajectory that wasn't an actual orbit.
Agreed. And even if they don't ever fully reuse the second stage, they still could use this gigantic working rocket as a (probably still) very cost effective to transport things into space.
Blue Origin just launched two 550kg probes to Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun).
SpaceX sent a similar mass Tesla Roadster on a Mars-crossing trajectory in 2018, Psyche to an asteroid at around 3 AU in 2023, and Europa Clipper to Jupiter/Europa (5.2 AU) in 2024.
It would be a waste of time to develop right now, if it isn't on starship it would be a dead end in terms of progress. So they are better off just waiting until starship can be sent.
Blue Origin has not sent a rocket to mars in the sense that SpaceX wishes to send Starships to mars. They have sent a probe. SpaceX has launched probes to far further celestial bodies than Mars.
Anyone who is paying attention knows that Starship is mostly going to be a launch vehicle for Starlink. It's very unlikely that the upper stage will ever support external payloads.
Why wouldn't they make it for external payload if they get the cost per kg lower than F9?
Running starship only is going to be cheaper than running both rockets, except if the economics of starship are worse (in which case, it would not be used for starlink either).
... but alone. We don't want some Expanse-like scenario down the line with fascist part of mankind completely unhinged. Once he is over then colonize all you want.
12% odds for 3 years seems fairly resonable for a manned landing.
Your statement of "Starship will never go to Mars. It's very unlikely it will go to the Moon" which sounds like it includes even unmanned test landnings is a quite different beast.
There are more possible bets on manifold, you do you.
I'm not really a betting man, but given the HLS budget is spent and most of technology is not nearly developed I'd say even an unmanned Moon landing is at least 5 years and $10 billion away and Mars is pure fantasy.
What does that mean? Starship is basically self-funded by SpaceX and the amount of money they got for the HLS contract is something they blew way past even before the contract, that doesn't make much sense.
I'm not sure they mean financially, I think they mean protection from being made unexpectedly homeless. There are an array of tenancy laws to prevent this from happening, but they don't seem to cover bankruptcy of hotels.
The solution, in my opinion, is to either document that strclone()'s return should be free()'d, or alternately add a strfree() declaration to the header (which might just be `#define strfree(x) free(x)`).
Adding a `char **out` arg does not, in my opinion, document that the pointer should be free()'d.
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