Murder Kitten retweeted
BREAKING: A robot developed by Caltech and funded by DARPA has successfully built part of a structure in orbit without astronauts, marking what researchers describe as the first autonomous construction of a structure in space.
The experiment, called ASTRA, uses a robotic arm to retrieve individual structural tubes and connecting joints, then assemble them into sections of a larger framework directly in orbit.
Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in March, the system has spent approximately six months in space testing the technology.
The robot successfully constructed a new section of a truss structure, demonstrating that spacecraft could eventually assemble large structures from smaller components rather than launching them fully assembled.
The experiment is part of DARPA's NOM4D program, which aims to enable construction of enormous structures in orbit, potentially hundreds of meters or even kilometers across.
Potential applications include:
> Giant space telescopes
> Large satellite communications antennas
> Orbital solar power stations
>Future space infrastructure too large to fit inside conventional rockets
The demonstration did not complete the full planned antenna, but establishes an important proof of concept for autonomous orbital construction.
The technology could eventually allow the size of structures built in space to exceed the physical limits of the rockets used to launch their components.
Link to official report submitted by Caltech: sciencedaily.com/releases/20…
ALT Concept art showing how a NOM4D-inspired device might one day autonomously construct a truss structure in space. Credit: DARPA, Colie Wertz
Murder Kitten retweeted
Former CIA officer turned whistleblower John Kiriakou talks about India's caste system.
Murder Kitten retweeted
In my time of studying the military I know of 2 things that get the US Navy hard enough to cut diamond.
1. Port call in Thailand
2. The words “prepare to repel boarders”
Murder Kitten retweeted
I miss my slipstick. Heinlein knew how to make a slide rule sound like treasure. From Have Space Suit—Will Travel. #Heinlein #SlideRule
Murder Kitten retweeted
Nou kenbe pwomès nou…
Nou detwi kay Lanmò San Jou ak katye jeneral gang 400 Mawozo a.
Pifò ladan yo kouri ale san yo pa menm eseye goumen.
Ala lach yo lach! 🥲
Murder Kitten retweeted
America, you are the only country on Earth that cannot see how bright it is.
There's an old saying in Japan: the darkest spot is at the foot of the lighthouse.
The light goes out across the whole sea. Ships a hundred miles away steer by it. But the people standing right underneath it? They're in the dark. They have no idea.
That's you. You are standing at the foot of the lighthouse.
So here's what it looks like from out here, on the water. And please don't interrupt me, because I'm Japanese, and it took me a lot of courage to be this loud.
You build tiny wooden houses on posts in your front yards. You fill them with your own books. You put a little door on them with no lock, and you let complete strangers take whatever they want. You call it a "little free library." In my country, a small wooden house where you leave gifts for people you will never meet has a different name. We call it a shrine.
When something terrible happens in one of your cities, by sundown there is a line around the block. Not to look. To bleed. Thousands of people, standing for hours, to give their own blood to someone they will never meet. There have been nights your hospitals had to send people home, because there was too much of you.
Every August, your teachers walk into stores and spend their own money on crayons. Not for their own kids. For twenty-eight children who aren't theirs yet. Nobody asks them to. They do it every year, like a prayer.
Tonight, somewhere in Ohio, a man who worked fifty hours this week is standing in the cold, coaching nine-year-olds who can't catch, for free. He bought the snacks himself. He will do this for eleven years. Nobody will ever give him a trophy. He'll be too busy handing them out.
You think this is normal. You think everybody does this.
America. Everybody does not do this.
Now let me tell you about one light. Just one.
Eleven years ago, my wife's cousin's daughter, Hinako, followed her father's job to a town of eleven hundred people in North Dakota. She was nine. She knew exactly zero words of English. That whole first winter, she didn't say anything to anyone. Not at school. Not at home. She just walked to school and walked back, past a little free library on the corner, outside the house of an old widower named Orrin.
One morning in November, there was a Japanese picture book inside.
The next week, there was another one.
Every single week, for a year, there was a new Japanese book in that box. In a prairie town a very, very long way from any Japanese bookstore.
Hinako took every one. She read them at night under her blanket. By spring, she was laughing again. By the next fall, she was reading English.
She never knew who did it. She was nine. She thought it was magic.
This summer, Hinako went back. She's twenty now. She knocked on Orrin's door to finally say thank you.
Orrin had died in March.
His daughter let her in. On the kitchen table, there was a stack of receipts from a bookstore in Seattle. Fifty-two of them, held together with a rubber band. And a spiral notebook, in an old man's careful handwriting.
Orrin couldn't read Japanese. He never knew what any of those books said. He just wrote down the date every morning, and one word.
"Taken."
His daughter said he stood at the front window every morning at 7:45 to watch the little girl walk past the box.
"Those were his favorite seven seconds of the day," she told Hinako. "He said you were the only one who ever needed it."
Orrin never thought he was doing anything special. Neither do you.
That's the thing about lighthouses. They never see their own light.
So let me be the ship out on the water for one minute, and report what we see.
From over here, America, you're blinding.
Murder Kitten retweeted
Elon Musk explains his 5-step process for running companies:
"First, make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you.
It's particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Everyone's wrong no matter who you are.
Everyone's wrong some of the time. So make your requirements less dumb. Then try very hard to delete the part or process.
This is actually very important. If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you are not deleting enough.
The bias tends to be very strongly towards let's add this part or process step in case we need it. But you can basically make in-case arguments for so many things and for a rocket that is trying to be the first fully reusable rocket.
There's never been a fully reusable rocket. People don't understand. This is like the holy grail of rocketry. So you've got to delete the part or process step. Super important.
You can't hedge your bets. That's why the grid funds, for example, do not fall down because that's a whole extra mechanism that we don't need.
Also, whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department. Because you can't ask the department. You have to ask a person. That person who's putting forward their requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement.
Otherwise, you can have a requirement that basically an intern two years ago randomly came up with off the cuff and they're not even at the company anymore. These things are often just way more silly than you think. So step one, make your requirements less dumb.
Step two, delete the part or process step. If you're not adding things back in 10% of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough.
And then only the third step is simplify or optimize.
The third step, not the first step. The reason it's the third step is because possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
Everyone's been trained in high school and college that you've got to answer the question. Convergent logic. So you can't tell the professor your question is dumb. You'll get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone's basically, without knowing it, they've got a mental straitjacket on. They'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.
And then finally, you get to step four, which is accelerate cycle time.
You're moving too slowly, go faster. But don't go faster until you have worked on the other three things first. You can always make things go faster.
And then the final step is automate.
Now, I've personally made the mistake of going backwards on all five steps multiple times. Literally, I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted.
One example I've talked about before is there were these fiberglass mats on top of the Model 3 battery pack that were in between the floor pan and the battery.
And it was at one point choking the battery pack production line. And I was basically living on the battery pack production line trying to fix the line.
It was choking the entire Model 3 production program. So the first mistake was I tried to fix the automation, like make the robot better. So automating was a mistake. Then accelerating was a mistake. Then optimizing was a mistake.
And finally, I said, what the hell are these mats for?
And I asked the battery safety team, what are these mats for? Are they for fire protection or something?
They said, no, they're for noise and vibration. Then I asked an NVH, a noise, vibration, harshness team, what's it for? They said fire safety.
So literally, it was like being in a Dilbert cartoon. Actually, I feel like I'm in a Dilbert cartoon quite frequently. So then finally, OK, great, let's try a car with the fiber glass mats and without. And they put a microphone to both and see if you can tell the difference.
In fact, I was like, which one is which? So we just deleted them and just bypassed this $2 million robot cell.
It was just a complete pile of nonsense."
Murder Kitten retweeted
I asked Japanese kids a question:
“What is the most American thing you can imagine?”
“An enormous hamburger!”
“A giant pickup truck!”
“A cowboy with a hat!”
“An NBA player!”
Then one boy thought for a moment and said:
“Maybe it’s when Americans help people they’ve never even met.”
I asked him why.
“Because my teacher told us about American volunteers who helped Japan.”
I had no clever response.
Sometimes the simplest answers stay with you the longest.
Murder Kitten retweeted
So a mall closed 24 years ago and a company wants to come in and drop 5 billion dollars into this community.
An activist would rather keep it abandoned, generating no taxable income.
Years from now, she will complain about how it was the white man’s fault and that she is still living in poverty.
Murder Kitten retweeted
Thank goodness we kept that empty abandoned giant concrete pad rather than creating more jobs and generating more tax revenue.
Murder Kitten retweeted
$$$ 2nd Draft of Harvester is finally complete. Current length after the first complete pass using my wife's feedback: 277.5k words.
Going to take the rest of the night off, maybe tomorrow, and then I'll go through all the beta feedback and see what needs tweaked. I have definitely learned just how inadequate my ideas were to speeding this up at the start of editing. Bleh.
Murder Kitten retweeted
At a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store in North Carolina, I saw an eighty-year-old man sitting alone by the fireplace wearing a navy blue cap with gold letters that read: USS Kitty Hawk CV-63, Yokosuka Japan.
In Japan, every kid growing up near Tokyo Bay knew the giant silhouette of the Kitty Hawk, the conventional aircraft carrier that called Yokosuka home for ten years.
I walked over before my country fried steak arrived, bowed slightly, and said, "Excuse me, sir. I am from Japan. Thank you for standing watch in Yokosuka."
The old sailor looked up over his reading glasses, and his whole face lit up like a porch lamp. He introduced himself as Mac, a former aviation machinist's mate.
"Well, pull up a chair, son!" Mac said, waving the waitress over. "Darlin', bring this gentleman some hot biscuits and sawmill gravy on me!"
Mac reached into his worn leather wallet and pulled out a laminated snapshot from more than twenty years ago, showing a young American sailor with his arm around a smiling Japanese shipyard mechanic in front of a Yokosuka ramen stall.
"That's Kenji," Mac said, tapping the photo with a calloused finger. "Best machinist I ever met. When my wife and I had our first baby in Navy housing and my car broke down in the rain, Kenji drove his tiny white truck over at 6:00 AM with a pot of hot chicken soup his wife made."
A young American couple at the next table stopped playing the wooden triangle peg game to listen.
"People on TV talk like the world is falling apart," Mac told me, gripping my forearm with surprising strength. "You tell folks back in Japan that this old squid in North Carolina still prays for Yokosuka every single night."
1.real photo
2.AI-image
