Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878880

Points: 10

# Comments: 0

However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.

It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.

On a funnier note, the 9 in Falcon 9 is the number of engines. So blue origin is somewhat picking up on their naming scheme. Or, by BO's scheme, it'd be the Falcon 9x1, or the Starship 33x6.

The practicalities of their illegality then comes down to enforcement. Given the current executive branch's behavior related to enforcement of laws, that can mean anything from "melt them all down", to "don't do it", to "if our friends start doing it, it'll be legal, if our enemies start doing it, we'll enforce".

People seem to have surprisingly different internal experiences. I don't know how common 4d visualization is, and I suspect even those capable require exposure to the concepts and practice. However I do think it possible.

2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.

Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:

3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).

SLS Block 1: >27,000 kg (59,500 lb)

SLS Block 1B: 42,000 kg (92,500 lb)

SlS Block 2: >46,000 kg (101,400 lb)

Vulcan Centaur: 12,100 kg (26,700 lb)

New Glenn: 7,000 kg (15,000 lb)

Orion crew module by itself weighs 10,400 kg (22,900 lb), the service module is 15,461 kg (34,085 lb).

Orion is a heavy spacecraft. SLS, like or not (I don't), it has a lot of lift. Unless you're sticking an Orion inside of a Starship (lol), Orion basically dies with SLS.

It's not unheard of. Eg, Blender earns $261,360/month. (https://fund.blender.org/) Companies should more eagerly support open source projects they rely on with funding. It keeps their dependencies competitive with much more expensive commercial products, and a broad base of donations prevents a project from being dominated by specific large corporate interests which might run counter to their average user.

The fees seem high for such a small blemish. Automated rule enforcing systems are very frustrating to hit. They usually enforce good rules, but overly strictly and often trend into gotchas that are intentionally exploitive. (Eg, red light cameras that have reduced yellow light times.) I doubt the savings of those fees being put into renters who do leave damage marks will be passed on to those who don't.

If I have a bin of apples, and I say it's 5 apples wide, and 4 apples tall, then you'd say I have 20 apples, not 20 apples squared.

It's common to specify a length by a count of items passed along that length. Eg, a city block is a ~square on the ground bounded by roads. Yet if you're traveling in a city, you might say "I walked 5 blocks." This is a linguistic shortcut, skipping implied information. If you're trying to talk about both in a unclear context, additional words to clarify are required to sufficiently convey the information, that's just how language words.

The US and Russia were at war, though they did not directly engage with each other due to the threat of mutual nuclear destruction. Along with various proxy wars, technological dominance in space was a key factor in this war. If one side gained enough advantage, they could potentially leverage it into using it to win a direct war. Another factor is that Kennedy's assassination protected the program from political pressure within the US.

Since then, other factors have turned the attention of the space program: The USSR fell apart and didn't pose much of a threat, reducing the budget to a fraction of the size. The Space Shuttle was designed to be the next big thing in space, as a reusable launch vehicle; it could only do low earth orbit and fell short of its goals. Focus shifted to science, and a lot of good science could be performed in low earth orbit; This has lead to, for example, the significant achievement of a continuous human presence in space since the year 2000. Finally, the accepted risk for Apollo was several times what is acceptable today. Even if we had all of the old hardware on the launchpad ready to go for another mission, NASA would never put an astronaut on it.

Edit: just remembered the second stage is hydrogen. So it might be flaring that, or maybe the smaller flare off to the side is hydrogen.

Original: the AP is restreaming the launch here: https://www.youtube.com/live/Yb-27DvLcN8?si=W1Qt7DfaSz7yxuL9