> The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.
- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
There's a lot, A LOT of money in play here. Technical reasons are usually the cause, but I wouldn't completely discard sabotage if there's some way they could get away with it, if only to improve procedures.
(Assuming you are referring to last night's incident, not the 2016 one.)
No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anything from a suicidal pyromaniac with a hammer to a hacker messing with engine control software and prediction markets, to a nation-state actor.
A sufficiently advanced technological field is one where any expert would start laughing at you for suggesting "hardening" against bullets. The denominator for rockets is always mass. Most of the difficulty is derived from not just doing a thing, but doing it in as lightweight a way possible. There are rocket stages that won't even stand up under their own weight, we have to inflate them like balloons just to move them.
There are rarely mentioned cases where you do actually want to be able to pierce a rocket with a bullet. Mostly related to recovery (or not...) post-flight.
Someone should invent a drinking game based on how long it takes for someone to drop Elon’s name in a thread about a totally different aerospace company.
> After ULA won an $11 billion block buy contract from the US Air Force to launch high-value military payloads into the early 2020s, Musk sued in April 2014.
This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.
Oh what is that, the most "ethical" AI company on the planet making deals with literal democracy undermining fascists?
I'm starting to think the problem with "ethical" AI was always that no company could ever act ethically in the long term. They are and always will be a cancer to society and AI will only serve to amplify this further.
Yet it just so happens OAI donated millions[0] to the trump admin in the past. And they were immediately there to pick up the slack.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this sounds like classic quid pro quo. I would not be surprised if the ousting of anthropic was in part caused by these donations.
Hell, I would have thought it likely that anthropic was doing the same thing. Of course that was proven wrong, but for OAI I wouldn't even be guessing. This has always been what sama does.
As someone who is new to the whole google cloud ecosystem, the amount of dark patterns they employ are absolutely shocking. Just off the top of my head:
1. You never know how much a single API request will cost or did cost for the gemini api
2. It takes anywhere between 12-24 hours to tell you how much they will charge you for past aggregate requests
3. No simple way to set limits on payment anywhere in google cloud
4. Either they are charging for the batch api before even returning a result, or their "minimal" thinking mode is burning through 15k tokens for a simple image description task with <200 output tokens. I have no way of knowing which of the two it is. The tokens in the UI are not adding up to the costs, so I can only assume its the first.
5. Incomplete batch requests can't be retrieved if they expire, despite being charged.
6. A truly labyrinthine ui experience that makes modern gacha game developers blush
All I have learned here is to never, ever use a google product.
As your local vision nut, their claims about "SOTA" vision are absolutely BS in my tests.
Sure it's SOTA at standard vision benchmarks. But on tasks that require proper image understanding, see for example BabyVision[0] it appears very much lacking compared to Gemini 3 Pro.
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