• 6 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Once upon a time, air travel was the purview of the rich and famous. Early aviators like Amelia Earhart were celebrities, but their once-dangerous routes are now flown hundreds of times a day by commercial jets that most people can afford to fly on. The reason we all fly around today is that aviators discovered a virtuous cycle of scale -> profit -> investment -> scale that enabled the industry to develop ever larger and ever more efficient aircraft.

    The same thing is going to happen with Spaceflight over the next few years. It took us about 60 years, but we have finally reached the point where lots of ventures can make profits in space, which should hopefully trigger another virtuous cycle that will end with affordable space travel for all



  • Something that some of the other replies have missed is that older movies were often shot (and a lot of actors were trained) from the perspective of a “stage play for the silver screen.” Stage plays have to work for large audiences, and so they tend to feature more exaggerated voice / body movements. These tricks were used on movies for a long time, but have faded as visual effects and sound recording have gotten better



  • Hasn’t this always been the case? Software development is a balance between efficiency of code execution and efficiency of code creation. 20 years ago people had to code directly in assembly to make games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, but today they can use C++ (or even more abstract systems like Unity)

    We hit the point where hardware is fast enough for most users about 15 years ago, and ever since we’ve been using faster hardware to allow for lazier code creation (which is good, since it means we get more software per man-hour worked)