Max Mileham

Wolfpack Nation #RolexGang
I took that moon picture 😳🌔

[Simon Willison @simonw]

I wrote about the completely wild incident where OpenAI were testing a new model and it broke out of its sandbox and broke INTO Hugging Face to steal the answers to the benchmark https://t.co/HGr5lFuAZA

[YT: Kofie @Kofie]

$13 at Cookout? 10 years ago, that would give you some equity in the company

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

This is how media lies to you in real time.

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

If a few people do the right thing, that so-called rocket will never roll back to the pad and instead be converted into a permanent museum/memorial/warning to mixing political expedience and engineering.

Remember, we're told that Artemis II's Apollo 13 once around the Moon profile is oh-so-important. But just the cost of just these two months of launch delays is more than enough to launch a Falcon Heavy+Dragon on exactly the same mission, with considerably less fuss and considerably less risk. For the ongoing cost of SLS+Orion we could launch a crewed lunar flyby on Falcon Heavy every month!

Every day that Congress and NASA prolongs the agony of this program is a day that the CCP takes comfort in our inability to pragmatically govern ourselves and moves closer to snatching territory in Taiwan and the Moon.

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

Unfortunately the diagrams that are crucial for understanding the implications for loss of 6 DoF control are redacted. But...

"Without the precise actions of the crew and
flight control team, this event could have resulted in a loss of the Starliner crew."

Yikes yikes yikes.

NASA is extremely protective of the ISS. SpaceX cargo Dragon had to jump through many hoops to prevent any possibility of damaging it, and Russia has managed to crash into space stations a few times over the years.

If Starliner had been uncrewed, NASA would have noped out of that docking instantly. But with crew aboard, they spent a few hours desperately keeping the guidance system on life support and got just enough thrusters working just well enough to limp to the docking - probably saving the crews' lives.

And yet, at the time, the "managed narrative" emerging from Boeing and their mouthpieces all over NASA was "this is fine, don't worry about it" as though NASA could expect Butch and Suni to voluntarily crawl back into that death trap and attempt to ride it back to Earth.

This is early Soyuz program level failures, where everything went wrong, and a couple of the crews died. We got so damn lucky.

I read through 100 pages of recommendations. Not one errant manager is named. Not one recommendation mentions personnel as a potential issue. What are the odds, that of the hundreds or thousands of people working on this program, every single one just happens to be the best person for the job? All they need is for a few dotted lines to be drawn on the org chart and a quick pep talk and their organizational efficacy will magically shift from F to A+?

Boeing already spent >$6b on this turkey. That's $3.5m for every day between now and the ISS splashing somewhere in the Pacific - if it manages to last until 2031 without the cracked Russian node letting go. The Administrator stated that post-ISS orbital activity will still require capsules. Right. I'm *sure* Vast and Axiom are positively begging Boeing to let them use Starliner to fail and/or kill their customers on their commercial space stations.

There is a path forward here for Boeing, and it isn't performative mickey mouse tweaks around the edges.

[Max Mileham @TotheMaxMileham]

@SwiftOnSecurity Thank you for sharing this, have been wanting to check out Ace Combat forever and this game is incredible so far!!

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a "successful wet dress rehearsal" despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface. For reference, the lower flammability limit, and system requirement, is just 4%, beyond which this nightmare fuel can burn and detonate in air.

The "wet dress" was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a "(no) confidence test" on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.

The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they've had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.

Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world's first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS's botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!

Furthermore, we are assured that the engineering on SLS/Orion is so rigorous and the team is so elite that it's totally okay to test fly this turkey with four currently living astronauts on it, not to Low Earth Orbit like some kind of participation trophy Starliner repeat, but all the way around the Moon, on a completely unique, untested configuration.

On the same week that a key SLS contractor's solid fueled booster rocket engine, launching a critical national security payload on a flagship national rocket, managed to explode, for the second time in three flights, for no apparent reason.

I'm going to say it. What do @CAgovernor and @SenTedCruz have in common? They both want to be President and they both will apparently go to the hilt to defend the worst national flagship infrastructure contractors in the history of the entire world. Why are they determined to ally so overtly with such conspicuous losers? What can they possibly be getting from such a raw deal? How can they possibly be so desperate?

We can choose to roll the dice with four lives on Artemis II. If they survive the launch, they can snap some really cool photos with their newly certified iPhones of the Moon shooting by out their window as they follow a trajectory that Apollo 13 took only under extreme duress. They can fulfill Artemis II's (I kid you not) "science objectives" by performing a visual inspection of the Moon that you can do yourself in the comfort of your own backyard with a $200 pair of binoculars.

But when (not if) something goes horribly wrong, I do not want to hear "no-one could have seen this coming" or "we followed a rigorous flight rationale process" or "we checked all the boxes" or "this was the best we could do".

At this point, the safest thing about the SLS and Orion is that they're so FUBARed that it might not even be possible to get them to T-0.

Astronauts and taxpayers deserve far better.

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

The sundowning starts earlier every day

[Riccardo Spagni @fluffypony]

This is the best response to Ring’s new neighbourhood surveillance feature

[Scott Manley @DJSnM]

I've been saying that the Moon was a more obvious first step for a long time - if we can't figure out living on the moon we're not living on Mars.
Starship works for both regardless.

[devilette @deviIette]

Bad Bunny said “God Bless America” then brought out the flag of EVERY country in the American Continent to remind gringos the world doesn’t revolve around YOU

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Buttigieg: In a country that amended its constitution so you could not purchase a beer and then realized it was a bad idea and amended it back, surely we can have an amendment clarifying that a corporation is not a person and money is not speech.

[🐢✨America Is Musty✨🐢 @DragonflyJonez]

Cooked all of them right here gotdamn 😂

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

[Andrew McCalip @andrewmccalip]

Data centers in orbit? Of course that’s your contention. Of course it is.

You just finished watching a Scott Manley video on radiative heat transfer and now you think you’re gonna disrupt AWS with a few solar panels and a rideshare slot.

You’re gonna believe that right up until next month when you crack open DeWitt and Incropera and start throwing around σT⁴ like you just invented radiation physics, quoting emissivity tables for polished aluminum like they’re forbidden knowledge.

Then you’ll finally open SMAD and realize your radiator isn’t some static plate glowing into the void. It’s a dynamic structure with a wicked case of thermal flutter reminiscent of Hubble’s arrays. You’ll be quoting beta angles and Earth albedo coefficients and wondering why your deployable array grenaded in vibe when the first bending mode clocked in at 38 Hz instead of the 50 Hz you promised in CDR.

After that you’ll get real ambitious, quoting Johnson and Fabisinski on inflatable polyimide PV structures, pretending you actually understand what happens when your 25-micron Kapton sail is tensioned off a Toray T1100G Cycom 5250-4 boom that has been sun-baked at 120 °C for six months in LEO. You’ll cite “areal density optimization” like gospel while your resin creeps, your modulus drops, and your perfectly flat film turns into a potato chip.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because launch costs are about to fall another order of magnitude once Starship hits cadence. The cost per kilo will—"

Drop by tenfold and the economics flip.
Yeah, I’ve heard that one. The Wired 2012 quote, “You wouldn’t build a Boeing 747 and throw it away after one flight.” I remember. I even asked him about that over lunch once, whether the market was actually elastic enough to handle the supply increase from reusability.

Turns out it wasn’t. Non-Starlink launch mass in the United States grew at 13.7 percent CAGR from 2015 to 2023. Payload demand didn’t scale with flight cadence, so prices didn’t collapse, margins just swelled. That’s why they had to invent Starlink. When the market can’t absorb your rockets, you start building your own payloads.

Is that your thing? You read some Marc Andreessen “American Dynamism” manifesto and suddenly start ignoring the engineering realities?

You start throwing around a few buzzwords to impress the Twitter anons and earn some street cred for having a contrarian opinion?

One, don’t do that.
Two, you dropped a 500-thousand-dollar seed check on a concept that could have been debunked by a dollar-fifty worth of tokens from Grok.

"Well, at least I’m a capital allocator. We’ll be skiing in Hokkaido while you’re doing bolt preload calculations for some bridge somewhere."

Yeah, maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal or anonymous. I’m out here asking why the hell we’d melt the brains of a thousand aerospace engineers just to save four cents per kilowatt-hour on solar electricity.

First principles isn’t about getting nerd-sniped by a shiny-object problem. It’s about asking whether we should be solving that problem at all.

But hey, if you’ve got an issue with that, we can always take it up with E.

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

WOW! FOX NEWS CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT ME (GAVIN C. NEWSOM), AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR!!! TONIGHT THEIR ENTIRE PRIMETIME LINEUP WAS ABOUT ME! JESSE WATTERS KEPT CALLING ME “DADDY” (VERY WEIRD, NOT INTERESTED, BUT THANK YOU!). SEAN HANNITY (VERY NICE GUY) NEARLY CRIED BECAUSE I WON’T TAKE HIS “ADVICE.” SORRY SEAN!!!! THEN THEY DRAGGED OUT THE B-TEAM OF DUMB DUMBS: “MEATBALL RON,” TOMI “TOILET” LAHREN, AND TEDDY “CANCUN” CRUZ (HE EVEN FLEW BACK SPECIAL FROM MEXICO!) ALL WHINING ABOUT ME, GCN! THEY HAD TO “PLAY THE MUSIC” TO SHUT TED UP ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL HAIR (I GET IT! SO JEALOUS!). TOTAL DISASTER. MAGA HATES ME BECAUSE THEY HATE YOU. THEY HATE THAT CALIFORNIA IS THE 4TH BIGGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD. THEY HATE THAT CRIME IS DOWN, THAT WE’RE #1 IN FARMING (I LOVE THE FARMERS!), MANUFACTURING, TOURISM & TECH… ALL WHILE WE GIVE AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE, FREE SCHOOL MEALS (MAKE AMERICA PREGNANT AGAIN!), PAID “BABY LEAVE” FOR MOMS (THEY SHOULD NOT RETURN ANYWAYS!!), $20 MINIMUM WAGE & SO MUCH MORE FOR THE PEOPLE!!! THEY HATE THAT DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING. FOX & MAGA HAVE NEWSOM DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!!! THEY SHOULD CRY HARDER! SAD!!! — GCN

[Team Deeper Picture @Thedeeprpicture]

"NFL lawyers are winning against science" has me ☠️ he's not wrong. . .

[ski @kantguardcoach]

they restored that feeling this weekend. i’m proud of everybody involved except them cops

[Max Mileham @TotheMaxMileham]

Everyone needs to read Termination Shock

[SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity]

Remember kids 85 year olds can drive without a test because they vote that's it that's the entire reason there's nothing deeper about it. They don't even vote to kill people with their cars they just show up on voting day that's it.