A typical test stand would have maybe a thousand channels of relatively slow data (pressures, temperatures, flow rates, valve states, etc), and maybe up to a few hundred of channels for essentially audio data from vibration sensors. This amounts to sub-gigabit per second data rate overall.
If very high speed video / multiple video cameras are used, this could generate massive data rates, but unless something interesting happens it is not clear how important this data is.
In flight, the telemetry data rate from the entire Falcon-9 used to be measured in megabits per second per stage, plus the video stream. It was not a huge amount of data. Presumably now with Starlink they send a lot more telemetry from Starship, but in flight the engines typically have far, far fewer sensors compared to the ground testing.
It's fast. Two skilled pressmen working together could do 200 to 250 impressions per hour or about one every 15 seconds (which might be 4, 8, 16 pages on each impression depending on page size). That was the speed text was put to paper from Gutenberg all the way until steam presses arrive at the start of the 19th century. The screw press also applies an even uniform pressure across the whole page; that's hard to do manually and impossible to do in 15 seconds. Screw-press you can do drunk, and many printers did. (Just read Ben Franklin's account of how much his fellow printshop workers drank: [0]) Source for all this: I studied early modern history and especially history of the book.
Movable type is an amazing invention, without which the whole history of the world would look utterly different. Everyone who has the slightest interest should try setting some movable type if you can find a printshop in your city offering classes (I did; it's fun). It's harder than you might think and you learn why skilled compositors and printers were quite well-paid by the standards of early-modern craftspeople. But you also see the enormous efficiency gains because once that type is set up, the marginal cost of producing each copy is low.
[0] https://blog.lostartpress.com/2013/06/18/strong-beer-that-he... : "My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner; a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he supposed, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour."
Mark Kurlinsky's "Paper" covers the early history of printing presses in Europe in great detail. Printers and their presses followed, or instigated, the local paper making industry. There is less focus on the evolution of moveable type there, but I'm also reading "Thinking With Type" by Ellen Lupton which hits the highlights in the history of typeface design.
I was fortunate enough to be chosen to talk to astronauts on the ISS from the ground and ask them a question, and as far as I can tell from searching this awesome resource, I think my question was unique.
I asked Ann McClain and David Saint-Jacques what experiment or module they would add to the ISS if they could pick anything. They both agreed that a rotating wheel that simulated gravity would be helpful for experiments and quality of life.
This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.
xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.
It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.
There's a lengthy discussion to be had here, and there's enough lawyerspeak in every provider's data retention policy to wiggle out of anything. A few notes from their current data use page:
> If you enable “Privacy Mode” in Cursor’s settings: zero data retention will be enabled for our model providers. Cursor may store some code data to provide extra features. None of your code will ever be trained on by us or any third-party.
Note the "may store some code data" and "none of your code will ever be trained on". In general you never want to include actual customer code in training the data, because of leaks that you may not want. Say someone has a hash somewhere, and your model autocompletes that hash. Bad. But that's not to say you couldn't train a reward model on pairs of prompts + completions. You have "some code data" (which could be acceptance rate) and use that. You just need to store the acceptance rate. And later, when you train new models, you check against that reward model. Does my new model reply close enough to score higher? If so, you're going in the right direction.
> If you choose to turn off “Privacy Mode”: we may use and store codebase data, prompts, editor actions, code snippets, and other code data and actions to improve our AI features and train our models.
Self explainatory.
> Even if you use your API key, your requests will still go through our backend!
They are collecting data even if you BYOK.
> If you choose to index your codebase, Cursor will upload your codebase in small chunks to our server to compute embeddings, but all plaintext code for computing embeddings ceases to exist after the life of the request. The embeddings and metadata about your codebase (hashes, file names) may be stored in our database.
They don't store (nor need to store) plain text, but they may store embeddings and metadata. Again, you can use those to train other things, not necessarily models. You can use metadata to check if you're going in the right direction.
Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok
THEORETICALLY the government has _some_ restrictions against monitoring US citizens (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/soci...), and it sounds like none of those are deemed to apply if you're using a VPN, per the original article.
What changed is he took the mask off. He was always the sleaze that he is today, but a lot of us were fooled into believing he wanted to do something good.
He brought good things due to high-conviction bold moves though, like democratizing EVs, reusable rockets, and most of all, actual internet in airplanes.
Is it accurate to say Tesla democratized EVs? The Roadster came out in 2008 but was over $100k. Over its lifetime they only sold around 2500. It was always a rich person's car.
The first 21st century EV in the US that was aimed at a more mainstream mass market was the Nissan Leaf which launched in late 2010, and in the first year sold 4x as many units Tesla Roadster's lifetime sales.
Tesla took a significant step toward an EV for the less rich with the Model S in 2012. It was still a lot more expensive than a Leaf (about 80%ish more for a base Model S) but way less than the Roadster.
The Leaf was the world's best selling EV in 2011-2014 and 2016, and in 2020 was the first to reach 500k sales.
It wasn't until 2017 with the model 3 that Tesla had a car that, like the Leaf, was priced in the range typical middle class families could afford. That's when they took off, and they caught up and passed Leaf in cumulative sales in early 2021.
- he most certainly did not democratize EVs, although he said the plan all along was to make cheap EVs it wasn’t until other car companies started “democratizing” EVs that his had was forced (and delayed)
- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink
I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
>Having reportedly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk even voiced his pro-Dems alignment in 2022 when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had “strongly supported Obama for President” in 2007.
I think he turned after Tesla was snubbed at Biden's 2021 EV summit because although it was the US's largest EV maker it wasn't unionized and Biden was in with the unions.
There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").
This is your regularly mandated PSA that the quote about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" comes from Schenck v US, which used that analogy to justify why the government could ban people from protesting the draft in WW1. It is not good law anymore, and has been fully superseded since the Brandenburg v Ohio case which limited the exemption to "imminent lawless action."
Read the links. It wasn't just that. People from the administration were actively talking with social media companies and telling them to take stuff down. At some points they even demanded it.
andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?
They didn't. Fbi told Facebook etc to be on the lookout for Russia pushing stories to influence elections etc, they didn't ask them to do anything specific. Bidens campaign did ask Twitter to remove nudes of his son, which already broke Twitters own rules. This is why the twitterfiles were a nothing burger.
2018 (tham luang cave rescue) is when the cracks really started showing up, so the trajectory was probably set a while earlier.
The tendency was probably always there given the serial lying about self driving started circa 2015, or the weird ego trip of ousting the founders and getting himself called co-founder, but if we’re looking for a point event the removal of his long time PA in 2014 still stands out to me.
What did he do specifically to crater his reputation?
Is it his politics? He seems to have reasonable beliefs there. It's not like he's been supporting Trump unconditionally. He doesn't always agree with Trump. Is it because of his stance in favor of free speech? How is that a bad thing? As someone who doesn't like any side of politics, I don't get it.
Two very public Nazi salutes without any attempt to deny it afterwards will certainly crater anyone's reputation. It's not really politics, but more a question of humanity, but then people don't become billionaires without having a contempt for others and a desire to underpay and mistreat everyone you come into contact with.
Fair enough, I see that online all the time. Here’s my take.
Raising your hand alone is a common gesture that pretty much everyone has done. Saying “my heart goes out to you” gives plausible deniability. But making the hand gesture while clicking your heels together and snapping to attention with a stern jaw-jutting look on your face is pretty unmistakably a nazi salute.
Elon has publicly denied it was a nazi salute, but any normal person would go a step further and also disavow neo nazi ideology in the same breath. But doing that would break the dog whistle effect.
Some people say he’s just trolling, and yes, Elon likes to troll. But trolling or not, it has the same effect if you don’t also renounce neo nazism. It normalizes and shows you are comfortable with it.
Can I prove he’s a neo nazi? No I haven’t gone through his wallet and found his membership card. But his support for the AfD and all his great-replacement-theory adjacent talk are strong signals.
No they haven't. You've likely been misled by seeing still images of their hand in that position, whereas if you see the video, then it's clearly nothing like a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the video of Musk makes it incredibly clear that it's a Nazi salute and he has not denied that as far as I know.
His politics also seem to align very much with white supremacy and the far right.
That doesn't seem like a denial from Musk, but instead he's just accusing others, but the article doesn't include specific quotes.
From what I remember of the incident, he specifically didn't deny that they were Nazi salutes, but merely hinted that they may have been a Roman salute, though that's pretty much the same thing.
I can't recall any time that he's tried to distance himself from Nazis or their ideology.
Although the ADL didn't think that it was a Nazi salute, most other Jewish organisations thought that it was and Germany very much condemned it, so on balance reasonable people should conclude that it's generally thought of as a Nazi salute. Also, former ADL national director Abraham Foxman described the gesture as a "Heil Hitler Nazi salute".
Reasonable people can simply watch the video and see for themselves - it very much looked exactly like a Nazi salute to me.
Here's video of Musk performing his fascist salutes. He did it deliberately, he did it with gusto, he grunted with the effort, and he did it twice just to make sure:
He did deny it multiple times on Twitter/X. Probably your news source of choice is the one which omitted this fact.
I think it probably did look a bit that way and maybe he did it for engagement, maybe he intended to create controversy or maybe it was none of these things. In any case, it wasn't an actual Nazi salute.
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