Donald Mitchell

The Soviet Exploration of Venus, Bossart: America's Forgotten Rocket Scientist. Bell Labs, Princeton University, Microsoft Research.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

Some links:
Rumble: https://t.co/8CnjhjzoxZ
Github: https://t.co/IxIkfH6I0m
Venus: https://t.co/g0UWTuZ0Ew
Tesla: https://t.co/7B3dumBi4M
Books: https://t.co/7ck2qHE2Bg
Blog: https://t.co/JaCE4itJ7W

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

It will only rain once this winter .... from November until April.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@MikeBenzCyber Let's create a passkey, you can unlock AOL with your face.

But my computer doesn't have a camera.

Passkey created. Now you can unlock AOL with your face.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

Well I spoke too soon. About 4 hours into the audiobook, Elevenlabs just started repeating long chunks from earlier int he book, then a chunk from near the end, than back to something in the middle, then ended. Totally fucked up.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

"After the second rotational element, irradiation of the planet will begin. When the concentration of ionization has fallen by half, the Great Movement will commence."
-- Venusian recording before spacecraft explosion over Tunguska.

Stanislaw Lem's book, "The Astronauts" is long out of print in English, and reportedly that translation was very bad. I had GPT-6 translate a pdf of the book in its original Polish (about 100 minutes of thinking time), then ElevenLabs generated a multi-character audiobook.

They both did an excellent job. An international cast of character speaking in accurate accents is a level of production you rarely find in human-made audiobooks.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@brivael Ancient questions. Athenian democracy killed Socrates, incited disastrous wars and ultimately collapsed.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

A second video about Charlie Bossart that covers his early life and career in aviation engineering.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

The edited dubbed version of the movie.
https://t.co/aoSeQDEKYB

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@3Dmattias That's about the best you get from Notebook, it's very automatic. If you want good video you still need to do quite a bit of work with something like Kling.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

The first ICBMs in the world were the Soviet R-7 and the American Atlas missile. Both featured novel designs unlike previous simple liquid fuel rockest such as the V-2.

Atlas was designed by the Belgian-American engineer, Charlie Bossart. I wrote a biography of him, and this short video came from feeding the book to Gemini Notebook.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@skepticalone44 @kid_kazuma Fascism with Chinese characteristics.
Mao had central planning, but after Deng you had more like state-supervised mixed economy, which is basically what Mussolini advocated.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@bitcloud My take was Mussolini proposed a totalitarian social welfare state but without revolutionary changes to family and property relationships. Instead of class war, he thought the state could harmonize the classes.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

The R-7 was designed by Ukrainian engineer S.P. Korolev. There are a number of biographies of him.
R-7 was made from an Aluminum-Magnesium alloy, not as strong as stainless steel, but easier to work with and weld. It also employed a parallel stage design based on analysis by M.V. Keldysh. It saved weight by being suspended from the center rather than resting on its base before launch.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@jmacftw ChatGPT's recommendation for a new PC workstation

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@jmacftw Xeon 654, 18 cores
ASUS Pro WS W890E-SAGE SE
128 GB ECC RDIMM
RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell 24 GB ECC, or 5060 Ti 16 GB to start
2 TB NVMe system drive + 4 TB NVMe data/game drive
Quality 1000 W ATX 3.1 power
Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL case
Noctua NH-U14S DX-4677
existing 4K EIZO

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@jmacftw 3080 I mean (I type too fast). RTX 3080 Ti. Which at the time was a hot card, but probably cannot run local AI models.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@jmacftw My current PC was built around Nvidia 3800 tech. I've played with making toy AIs just using AVX vector math.

Maybe I should build a new machine. Hmmm...

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@WesternLensman Some people assume pure democracy is the perfect system, and somehow the Constitution was mistaken when it departed from that. But party leaders know exactly what they are doing by subverting the system.

[Donald Mitchell @DonaldPMitchell]

@marcosatorres @SawyerMerritt He might have to. 🫤