> Seems like a big issue is I'm guessing insistence on having this be a solo operation for cultural reasons.
I had to do some stool collection and it took every ounce of willpower and a N95 mask to prevent me from vomiting everywhere. And that was my poop. I think it's more than cultural, there's a strong visceral reaction.
On the other hand, I can pickup my dog's poop no problem.
Having an repulsion for shit is a healthy adaptation. But it seems that for some people they're much more sensitive.
Similarly, it's probably useful for a primitive person to vomit on sight of a familiar person vomiting, collective protection. Definitely a trait to find out before going to space!
The one I've never got is how so many people faint or become I'll when they see blood. Always seemed like a massive maladaptive that should create even more risk in a presumably dangerous situation. If a tiger attacks me in the night and the guy next to me faints because I'm getting eaten, we'll both end up dying.
It seems maladaptive. I faint (sometimes) at the sight of my own blood, and must look away when nurses draw it. I also get queasy when even talking about blood or reading about it. I can't think of any good reason this would be helpful; in fact keeping my cool would be advantageous.
Rival tribe comes and kills Lug and Glug. You faint at seeing the bloodshed. They assume you died. They leave. You live and pass on your fainting genes.
Alternatively it could just be an overshoot of the behavior to recognize that you bleeding is a dangerous situation. These behaviors probably follow some gaussian distribution in their potential "effect" among the population and fainters are on a long tail of that distribution.
> Microsoft is the go to solution for every government agency, FEDRAMP / CMMC environments, etc.
I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.
Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all. They have the necessary contacts and consultants to make it happen.
> Thinking that the solution is a full reset is not necessarily wrong but it's a bit of a red flag.
The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.
Thanks. That was exactly the plan. Full rewrites are extremely risky (see the 2nd System syndrome) as people wrongly assume they will redo everything and also add everything everyone always wanted, and fix all dept, and do it in a fraction of the time, which is delusional and almost always fail. Stepwise modernization is a proven technique.
As someone who had worked adjacent to the functionally-same components (and much more) at your biggest competitor, you have my sympathy.
Running 167 agents in the accelerator? My gawd that would never fly at my previous company. I'd get dragged out in front of a bunch of senior principals/distinguished and drawn and quartered.
And 300k manual interventions per year? If that happened on the monitoring side , many people (including me) would have gotten fired. Our deployment process might be hack-ish, but none of it involved a dedicated 'digital escort' team.
I too have gotten laid off recently from said company after similar situation. Just take a breath, relax, and realize that there's life outside. Go learn some new LLM/AI stuff. The stuff from the last few months are incredible.
We are all going to lose our jobs to LLM soon anyway.
> I've been involved with FEDRAMP initiatives in the past. That doesn't mean as much as you'd think. Some really atrocious systems have been FEDRAMP certified. Maybe when you go all the way to FEDRAMP High there could be some better guardrails; I doubt it.
I never said otherwise. I said that Microsoft services are the defacto tools for FEDRAMP. I never implied that those environments are some super high standard of safety. But obviously if the tools used for every government environment are fundamentally unsafe, that's a massive national security problem.
> Microsoft has just been entrenched in the government, that's all.
Yes, this is what I was saying.
> The author does mention rewriting subsystem by subsystem while keeping the functionality intact, adding a proper messaging layer, until the remaining systems are just a shell of what they once were. That sounds reasonable.
It sounds reasonable, it's just hard to say without more insight. We're getting one side of things.
Well, part 3 at least explains something I've observed; the platform is incredibly unstable. The same calls, with the same parameters, will often randomly fail with HTTP 400 errors, only to succeed later(hopefully without involving support). That made provisioning with terraform a nightmare.
I won't even dive too much into all the braindead decisions. Mixing SKUs often isn't allowed if some components are 'premium' and others are not, and not everything is compatible with all instances. In AWS, if I have any EBS volume I can attach it to any instance, even if it is not optimal. There's no faffing about "premium SKUs". You won't lose internet connectivity because you attached a private load balancer to an instance. Etc...
At my company, I've told folks that are trying to estimate projects on Azure to take whatever time they spent on AWS or GCP and multiply by 5, and that's the Azure estimate. A POC may take a similar amount of time as any other cloud, but not all of the Azure footguns will show themselves until you scale up.
> $93 billion over 13 years doesn't feel like a great deal
So, around 7 billion a year?
We are at around half of the total Artemis cost just one month after the Iran invasion. One week of this war finances one year of the Artemis program. Do you think that's a better deal?
Compared to the military spending, that doesn't even register. Maybe you should be mad about that.
> it's just a matter of wasting enough money for some people to have the time of their life.
That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.
Yes, we have been screwing up our planet. On that note alone, we should develop capabilities to access resources beyond our planet. We could have made that same argument before we had the capability of launching satellites ("why are we wasting resources sending something to space that can only beep while people are dying of hunger?"). Nowadays, they are crucial if we want to have a chance at saving what remains of our planet.
Moon missions may not give an immediate benefit, but we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.
I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.
> That's such a cynical viewpoint. We are not doing this so that astronauts can have fun.
Don't get me wrong: I would totally love to be in their shoes, I completely understand why they want to do it.
> Nowadays, they are crucial
This is the typical "we need to do it because it's hard, and we don't know what we will learn from it, and BTW there are things we developed for the space program that got into civilian use" argument.
But it is flawed. For one, we know a lot more today than we did in the 50s. It would be like saying "in the past, they thought that the Earth was flat, so who knows, maybe tomorrow we will realise that humans are capable of telekinesis". The truth is... "most likely not".
> we have always benefitted from scientific and technological advancements from space missions. I doubt it's going to be different this time.
Let's play a game: you're not allowed to read about it. Off the top of your head, what technological advancements did the different space programs bring? Gemini? Apollo? Soyuz? The space shuttle? Mir? The ISS? And if you manage to give more than one correct answer to that, do you genuinely believe that it wouldn't have been possible to develop that technology without the corresponding space program? I doubt it.
It's like saying that we needed to spend billions developing a race car in order to improve the stability of a skateboard. Technically, that is wrong, so the only argument I heard to defend the idea was something like "because brilliant people would be interested in developing a race car, but if it wasn't possible, instead of improving skateboards, they would be bureaucrats or financiers". Not very convincing.
> I'd certainly prefer countless more moon missions than a new aircraft carrier.
Agreed. But that's not a justification for spending billions sending humans in space for their own pleasure (and not without risk) and for the pleasure of all the nerds who enjoy working on that (and I count myself as part of those nerds).
While I agree with the sentiment that sending manned missions to the Moon is kinda useless, unfortunately diverting those money to "noble purposes" is an utopia because that's not how things work.
In practice if those billions don't fund NASA programs they go into making some billionaires richer, Oracle laying off 30,000 people to fund data centers that will be obsolete by the time they are ready and similar stuff. Not a dime towards noble goals of humanity.
Well NASA cut off on environment programs, I guess the money wouldn't have to go very far.
And to be fair, Artemis contributes to making some billionaires richer. Sending humans to space has always been a great PR stunt to convince the people that they should continue accepting that the taxpayer money gets used for space programs. Turns out that in 2026, space programs are more commercial and less about science. SpaceX is all about commercialising space and making... ahem... one billionaire richer.
The Apollo program had a big impact on the development of integrated circuits, turning software engineering into a real discipline, and fly-by-wire technology. Could this have happened without? Probably yes, these technologies aready somewhat existed, but the program pushed them much harder than they would have done otherwise. Same thing for later space missions, they pushed technology to the limits of the time.
A good example here is solar panels. They were invented before the space race, but for what, why do you need them on earth? We had cheap oil and fossil fuels, nobody cared about renewables. But for the first 50 years after they were invented satellites was what kept them alive, as it made sense to use that technology there. That gave them a real use case, which continued investment and development into them.
I doubt today we would have the same level of satellite technology today if the space race didn't happen, so it's unlikely we would have the same level of solar panels either.
Sure, you may look at it from that perspective. Or, you could look into it as restoring a capability that we used to have, and potentially enable further, more interesting missions.
I am not _too excited_ about the SLS itself as it looks like a political compromise, just as the shuttle was.
> and potentially enable further, more interesting missions.
The further we go as humans is Mars, and it's useless. The next star is so, so, so far away that even considering reaching it with "something" requires a revolution in fundamental physics. No need to build rockets for that, just a whiteboard and physicists, I guess.
And saying that we go to Mars is extremely generous. The engineering of the rocket going there is fun, but if you want to send humans there, they have to survive the trip. Including, for instance, eating and drinking and breathing air for the duration of the trip. Those are not solved problems. Chances are that we as a society collapse long before we get to send humans to Mars.
I'm just not that jazzed on what we could possibly learn. I can go on a big road trip and eat, sleep (but probably not poop) in my minivan; what does that teach me about moving to a new city or country? I can drive across the country and do a loop around Houston's ring road; that tells me nothing about what it's like to live there.
We could have sent the ship without astronauts to test all the systems and learn the only real valuable question: does this thing work? Instead we get drama & politics, and a much more expensive mission.
Indeed. I _have_ been able to (mostly) talk about things that I was dissatisfied about, but out of dozen bosses I had, that was with only two. I wouldn't trust the others to start looking into a replacement the moment I gave even a hint of dissatisfaction. For some others, I could express disagreement about outcomes or company policies, but in some cases even pushing too much on those topics can get you fast tracked out. I have seen it happen.
To be able to have (again, mostly) honest conversations with a boss or HR is a privilege. In 99% of the cases, HR is there to protect the company, there were only a handful of HR employees that went above and beyond. And even then, you had to make sure not to use some triggering words. I mean this in the literal sense, there are a few things that, if you say, that triggers an automatic HR response, regardless of who you are talking to. Hinting of leaving, even with an unspecified timeframe, is one of them.
You could simulate pixels with divs if that's all you had. Or you could create an image in memory and save to file. You could write the text for it and save as SVG.
For a CPU based ray tracer, you don't need any output capability at all(unless you want it to be interactive, which school assignment raytracers usually don't have to).
They may not be "thinking" in the way you and I think, and instead just finding the correct output from a really incredibly large search space.
> Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes
Anthropomorphizing isn't any better.
That also dismisses the negative evidence, where they output completely _stupid_ things and make mind boggling mistakes that no human with a functioning brain would do. It's clear that there's some "thinking" analog, but there are pieces missing.
I like to say that LLMs are like if we took the part of our brain responsible for language and told it to solve complex problems, without all the other brain parts, no neocortex, etc. Maybe it can do that, but it's just as likely that it is going to produce a bunch of nonsense. And it won't be able to tell those apart without the other brain areas to cross check.
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