Thunderbird all day err’day. Yes, it has its quirks, but on the whole, it’s still by far the best mail client.
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100%. Outlook is actually fairly buggy in some areas. Juggling profiles can be messy etc.
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I don’t know, everything about the mission feels a bit off. I trust that the astronauts will get home safely, but everything else feels extremely amateur. These windows problems (why even windows in the first place?), the toilet breaking as soon as they get to orbit, problems with the heatshield that are still not solved, the broadcast itself was extremely bad and not at all representative of humanity once again returning to the moon, etc. Maybe they blew all the money on SLS and the rest was cut to hell. Comparing these broadcasts with Apollo, with their limited multimedia tech, is just embarrassing.
The heatshield story is mind blowing. It’s the exact same heatshield material as in the Apollo CSM, but instead of inserting it in a honeycomb pattern like in the CSM, they did it in blocks to save manual labor and costs. This, coupled with the heavier spacecraft leads to the blown out pieces of heatshield we saw in the pictures, since the material turns into gas on re-entry, which is trapped by the larger block design and blows up due to internal pressures.
Maybe it’s not a good idea to have moon missions on tight budgets?
I agree. But, the original Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions were very haphazard as well. The whole project was designed to test things in flight, with very small margins of error.
The Apollo missions have been a small obsession of mine (if you just want to read one book, make that “Carrying the Fire”, by Michael Collins. If you just want one podcast, check out the Apollo 13 series on the Brady Haywood podcast). From the various first hand accounts, it is clear that everyone involved was aware that failure and death were always a possibility, and indeed several crew did die. It is actually a bit of a miracle that so few disasters happened, including the infamous Apollo 13.
Its just that we’ve gotten a bit blasé about these things, as low earth orbit missions have become routine. But the energies and engineering involved in farther missions are much more daunting. I just worry that we’re doing these things purely for publicity now, a sort of cold war cargo cult by our overlord crybaby. If so, they might soon find out that movie logic doesn’t often work out in real life.
I guess I’m still not over watching “Don’t Look Up”, an infinitely depressing modern day version of “Idiocracy” that explores our trust in politics and tech billionaires. Highly recommended movie, but don’t expect it to make you happy, despite the comedic trappings.
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Yeah of course, at the end of the day Artemis is around 10-20x safer. I think it went from 1/20 to 1/200 change of mission failure.
Yeah, exactly. I also believe the NASA broadcasts changed a lot. The corporate, educational, inclusive, broadcast style is just weird, it feels like they are talking about anything but the mission itself. I don’t know how to explain beyond that, it just feels extremely off
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Thunderbird is fine for casual usage, but as it still does not handle maildir reliably, it is not an option for SOHO users who have a lot of email. Above a certain total mail size, you get lockups and crashes in Thunderbird. Sure, mbox was never designed for this kind of usage, but it is a shame they still don’t do maildir. I found that Evolution is the only viable alternative for users who need a traditional GUI.
Of course for power users, you have mu(4e), which is amazing.
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A lot of my career was spent working in proximity to NASA. My observation is that they have a lot of very smart technologists, but engineering was something they had to work hard at understanding. But, that’s the US government dynamic, first order of business is managing whatever budget Congress allocates, because that’s the law. And, the contractors do the engineering stuff to keep things straight. Some organizations have a more ‘in-house’ culture, like the Forest Service, but the military and aerospace organizations are very dependent on contractors being able to bring the engineering talent to the table for their complex needs.
I’m following the Artemis II mission, mostly because it represents a life I left behind when I retired. We used NASA’s risk management process in the last program I worked, mainly because a lot of our management and engineering folk were ISS buildout ‘refugees’, so when the kibitzers at the Ars Technica threads talk about risk, I can usually set the record straight. This whole mission is really just a shakeout of a new vehicle stack, fundamental component for the goal of some sort of persistent occupation of a plot of moon surface, probably on the order of our Antarctic presence. The new administrator, Jared Issacman, seems to have his head on straight about priorities in such an endeavor. Oh, and it’s not just a US endeavor, there’s a Canadian astronaut on board, and the service module is a European-contributed (ESA) article.
Godspeed folks, praying that the mission planners are on the mark with burns and vectors…
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I think they are doing just fine. Just poking fun at their multiple Outlook experience and having to remote in (I am sure that they have a self-contained system hardened and resilient to external bad-actor intrusion 
).
Yes, we have a Canadian there. Good thing these partnerships still exist even as everything else is falling apart.
I cannot wait for the photography, videography and astronaut interactions with Earth. Will be awesome.
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“It is an unfortunate truth of the human condition that we believe our own bullshit, even when it is ridiculous. But we are also pretty good at detecting other people’s bullshit and enjoy telling them so, especially when we disagree with them. That is why group argument can lead to better outcomes than you might expect.”
The best articulation of these ideas that I’ve seen, written by some of the key academics involved.
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I think that framing the whole discussion in terms of “biases” is not very productive. Yes, various cognitive biases exist and influence our behavior, but if there weren’t any, different people could still have diverging, but legitimate interests.
Democracy is not an epistemological framework for discovering the “truth”, like the solution to a math problem.
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The authors — unlike the pop literature, the so-called rationalist movement and some libertarians — aren’t really talking about biases as something to be overcome as an individual but rather saying it’s in our nature to argue our case, only grudgingly admit we’re wrong, and to find it much easier to see the flaws in others’ arguments than our own.
Yet well designed institutions whether scientific or democratic can benefit from bringing people together to argue their case in good faith and benefit from the outcome of finding a group consensus exactly because of our ability to more easily see the flaws in others’ arguments.
You’re right that there is no “true” output from democracy. The idealist best outcome is one in which competing interests are allowed to make their case and reach a compromise.
The “myside bias” the authors refer to isn’t in the output, it’s in our nature as individuals and it’s not removable, no matter your education, intellect, whatever, so yes, I don’t think they mean a biased individual who can somehow be corrected but rather a tendency we have as humans that democratic institutions need to be designed around to take advantage of its features.
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I think that the article is focused on the argument of Jason Brennan’s book. I haven’t read the latter, but I am not sure if the argument about voters having limited information etc is very relevant about modern democracies.
If you read, for example, The Federalist Papers (late 1700s!), it is apparent that irrational or underinformed voter behavior and what they call sustained “passions” has been well understood by the founding fathers of the US and they designed the institutions accordingly.
Yes, these are not new problems. The old podcast episode that led me to the article, covers some of this:
I’m not sure what you mean exactly by limited info and modern democracy. Is it that we have access to a lot more information? If so, I agree, but also think that information isn’t the universal solvent of misunderstanding that we might hope.
In fact, I think there have been studies suggesting that the better informed, better educated in the ways of argumentation can be more biased as they are better equipped to cherry pick information to back up their own arguments.