And yes, the TVC adds very little to the complexity of Raptor 3's appearance: it still looks like science fiction, even when operating in Starship. Had TVC been present in the original SP1 image that had Tory accusing SpaceX of misleading everyone, it would have made no difference.

> TLDW

That video has beautiful shots of Raptor 3 firing and gimbling. It's worth watching.

Fun times.

The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).

Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.

Let's not be this flippant about where the real pressure for this is coming from. Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles. It's important to know who they are when we aim our finely honed fingers, even if we find that these folks were formerly virtuous and mighty green energy advocates, because if your solution is merely different figureheads, all that will really change is the scale of the bribes.

[1] https://www.datacentercoalition.org/members

O_DIRECT was resisted by Torvalds and others, but it's there today, and used by supposedly important platforms. Nvidia even has an API to DMA data to and from GPUs that uses O_DIRECT. There are folks working on new async WAL O_DIRECT for PostgreSQL as well.

So what can be said? mmap(2) isn't sufficient for certain cases. Torvalds has faced and successfully navigated difficult design choices in a pragmatic manner. What else?

The lesson I take is this: there are levels to implementation complexity and value. The wisdom to decide the appropriate abstraction level is crucial. You are unlikely to be equipped well enough to beneficially utilize O_DIRECT, but it's not impossible and some, in fact, are so equipped.

Fortunately we typically have more efficient means to deal with such hardware, but not always, and it would be a shame to break the intended model when this is the case.

So apparently, in the US, the culture, expertise and infrastructure do exist to do these things.

That is true of all such systems, from MCUs to the greatest CPUs ever made, and all prevailing software stacks running on them. Nothing about RTIC precludes servicing interrupts in a timely manner. It is based on a mathematical model of concurrency called Stack Resource Policy (SRP) and is entirely capable of reliably implementing whatever interrupt regime you imagine your "complex" system requires, with zero risk of priority inversion.

> prioritization is a job for the OS, not the hardware

So say you. The long and storied history of fragility and failure related to scheduling and interrupt handling suggests there is opportunity for greater rigor than the conventional muddle you assert as best.

One approach is to do everything in ISRs, a la RTIC. That requires efficient, vectored, nested, tail-chained, base priority-ed interrupt silicon, and a lot of it, but it is feasible and elegant where this exists, such as Cortex NVIC. Emerging RISC-V devices with xCLIC (ch32v, gd32v, newer ESP32 and others) are potentially even better.

I really appreciate that the author took the time to add the Embassy vs RTIC addendum.

There are precisely 1.0 ways to do that: make all of the alternatives more expensive.

That's it. Nothing else will move the needle.

I don't believe it is possible: every policy one can imagine, short of establishing a GULAG system to compel compliance, has powerful opposing interests, including workers themselves. It would require the sort of comprehensive and sustained focus that a nation aspiring to nearly suicidal liberalism can not deliver.

Both designs (I6 and boxer) can have perfect primary and secondary balance. An I6 should be a smooth ICE, but there are other sources of vibration in these systems beyond inherent balance of reciprocating components.

Back in the pre-history of Radio (before and during WW1,) electro-mechanical alternators were used to generate low frequency RF in powerful transmitters. Some of those designs would spin at 20K RPM.

That's it in a nut shell. Take a few minutes and go solve all your browser problems.

I don't share that view at all. Updates and patches handled known risks. Updates and patches are often years late: side channel vulnerabilities were dealt with only many years after the problems were endemic. Valuable latent vulnerabilities were and are horded and traded, by entities ranging from ghetto spammers to nation state actors.

I don't argue the AI makes attack cost "super low." It's obvious that this is true. My problem is this notion that there was a time when "safety" could be "assumed." That time did not exist. Perhaps it was possible to pretend such things by people for whom stakes were low, but for many people, the stakes have always been too high to indulge such thinking.