Seeing this news story made me briefly fear that they’d found a way to replace this glorious mechanism. Thankfully not. In fact, they’re going to shoot more droplets, more often!

So much more fun than LEDs.

Give me a backup camera without a screen and then we’ll talk. Doubly so because once you’ve got that screen, no automaker will resist making it do other things.

My 2010 Tacoma has a 2 inch square in the rear view mirror that works wonderfully.

I actually like that a lot. Does the job without providing a (practical) target for infotainment. TIL.

You piqued my interest. What is the alternative output for a camera without a screen?

These days I guess we could do gpt with voice out to recite a poem about the kid you're about to hit?

Haha... I think gp meant touch-screen, but thanks for the chuckle :)

My old F150 had a screen in the rear view mirror. I miss that.

My SO's Buick Enclave has a screen behind the rearview mirror that can be set to show the backup camera. Works okay, but I prefer the actual mirror and just use the dash display. That said, vision issues, so not driving since around this time last year.

This makes me genuinely sad. SpaceX was the one thing of his that Elon has largely avoided screwing up. Imho, this is in large part due to Gwynne Shotwell. She seems to have the personality (not to mention, personal wealth) to kick Elon in the head when he tries to mess things up.

What’s happening now is nothing more than a transparent effort to couple the AI hype-wagon to SpaceX in order to drive the valuation higher in the minds of investors who still think that LLMs will completely transform society.

I’ll be thrilled if the rocket folks can avoid being distracted by this nonsense, but I’m not optimistic.

I’ve been following SpaceX since something like the 2nd Falcon 1 launch and this is the worst thing I’ve seen happen. Sad times.

I think it’s just financial, I don’t see this as being detrimental or disruptive to SpaceX much at all.

Not that kind of bus. A “satellite bus” is more of a standardized platform onto which mission-specific payloads are integrated. Saves having to design an entire spacecraft from scratch and gives you a known-good set of functionality.

So, a set of standard software RPCs (remote procedure calls) and APIs (application programming interfaces) and not another electrical signalling standard. Got it.

Thanks for the correction.

So, I guess the next question is what are you folks actually using at the electrical signalling level to talk? (If you are not allowed to say, I understand.)

No, not RPCs/APIs either. A satellite bus is a physical object[1], which defines the mechanical standards for mounting payload modules.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_bus

Nothing about this struck me as a sign that money wasn’t well-invested. From the headline, I was picturing “we raised and then I blew it in Vegas”.

Nothing wrong with admitting to uncertainty and insecurity. I mean, there are two types of people — those who suffer doubt sometimes, and those who don’t admit it. Give me the first kind any time.

Did you miss the quotation marks around “upgrading”?

> Maybe they can launch a taxpayer funded EuroTube and EuroGram.

Ok, but only if one of them is called “EuroVision”.

Notice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center.

Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.

To my eye, there are exactly two effective ways of dealing with the state of media distribution today:

1. Piracy 2. Just say no, recognizing that none of this stuff is necessary to live.

The alternative of jumping through the ever-changing set of hoops necessary to watch particular content is entirely unappealing.

I would’ve expected a hardware-based lithium-ion charge controller which would continue to work regardless of what software runs on the main CPU(s).