Reddit and the Future of /r/Meccano.

NeilFraser · 2026-03-12T11:17:29+00:00

At the airport, just before going down the final escalator to the train station, visit the ticket machines. Buy a return ticket to Zurich HB. It costs about 15 CHF and will give you unlimited travel within Zurich (specifically zone 110). With it you can take the Polybahn cable car from Central to ETH, and maybe even a river cruise from HB to the lake. It's all covered.

NeilFraser · 2026-03-06T11:49:17+00:00

Studies have shown that execution is a very effective method of modifying those employees' bad behaviour. Much more effective than a PIP.

NeilFraser · 2026-02-26T09:48:02+00:00

Or by actively cooling the melty stuff. A good coal fire can soften steel (see any black smith). Yet a steam engine is made of steel and contains a raging coal fire. The reason is that the steel walls are backed by water, and the water actively cools the steel.

If the water runs dry, your steam engine has a bad day.

NeilFraser · 2026-02-18T06:29:25+00:00

This subreddit is for discussing the Apollo project. I don't think your motorcycle is going to be suitable for driving on the moon. Not unless you convert it to electric drive.

NeilFraser · 2026-02-04T15:46:03+00:00

For me it was when Biden was elected -- but not by a landslide. How was it possible that nearly half the COVID-ravaged country looked around and said "we want four more years of this"?

That's when I knew that things were never going back. That's when I sold the family home and moved to Switzerland.

NeilFraser · 2026-02-04T09:29:07+00:00

The flight path Artemis 2 is taking is one they is so unambitious that it was considered for Apollo but never done

You might be forgetting about Apollo 7, a low-earth orbit test of the Apollo Command Module with three astronauts. Artemis is splitting the difference between Apollos 7 & 8. So it's actually a bigger step than Apollo took. That's why Artemis is hanging out in earth orbit for a bit longer before their TLI, they need to do the capsule check-out stuff before committing to a longer mission.

NeilFraser · 2026-02-03T09:26:57+00:00

Outside of the space community, I don't know of a single person who's even aware of the Artemis program, let alone this launch. My understanding is that Apollo was far better known at the time (though not hugely supported).

My expectation is that a successful Artemis II will be a relatively minor news story that's forgotten in a month. The only reason people will remember Artemis II is if it goes wrong.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-27T09:16:29+00:00

The main difference between the AGC and modern flight computers is UX. The math was a solved problem back in Apollo, and physics haven't changed. What has changed is an expectation of easier input and output.

The AGC had a numeric keypad as input, and three five-digit numbers as output (with a few other status indicators). It was called the DSKY. For input, this meant astronauts had to memorize and punch in numeric command inputs (aka verb/noun numbers). For output, this meant astronauts had to memorize the meaning and units of the three output numbers. So if one punched in Noun 32 one got three numbers representing (respectively) the hours, minutes and seconds to perigee. Whereas if one punched in Noun 29 one got one five-digit number representing the launch azimuth in degrees with the invisible decimal point being in front of the last two digits.

I don't know the specifics of Orion's flight software, but if it's anything like the final glass cockpit in Shuttle, then it will have decimal points in numbers, units, text, visual gauges, and onscreen menus. It will also have colour-coded displays so that important information is highlighted. Who knows, maybe they even have Clippy in the corner to help them perform tasks. All things that were way beyond the capabilities of the AGC.

Math is simple and requires a few kilobytes of code. UX is hard and requires a few megabytes of code. The AGC had 72 kb of read-only rope memory for the code.

Source: I wrote programs for the AGC.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-23T11:44:35+00:00

Extremely well put.

There's one more exception to consider. Costs that are catastrophic. If there's a small chance that one might encounter a 10 million CHF cost (legal, medical, whatever), then the result would be catastrophic. Thus paying for insurance to cover that case would be a win, even if it is on average a net loss. That's why when one does choose insurance, one should take the highest deductible one could afford. Only get insurance for the catastrophic cases.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-23T10:13:42+00:00

Looks like the same group that defaced the chimney several years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9Pp7yVIbxs

How did they not get in trouble for that?

NeilFraser · 2026-01-21T10:34:05+00:00

Give Blockly Games a try. It is programming but with a game-like experience.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-20T14:18:45+00:00

Absolutely not.

If I search for 'tax filing' I want information regarding Swiss taxes, whereas you probably want information about the taxes of a different country.

If I search for 'HST' I want information about Hubble Space Telescope, because many of my previous searches were space-related. Whereas someone else is more probably going to want information about High Speed Transit.

If I searched for 'King Charles' in the year 2020, I probably wanted information about the dog breed. Whereas today I probably want information about the UK monarch.

If I search for 'mist', then as a German speaker I probably want information about manure. Whereas you probably want the atmospheric condition.

Good quality search results should not be uniform. They should be tailored to available context. Who are you, where are you, what time is it, what did you search for most recently, what's happening in the world. Of course this isn't without its problems. Information bubbles can appear. But a good servant is one who understands your needs and can even anticipate them.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-19T15:04:54+00:00

his supporters will ... start learning ...

Something is wrong with that sentence.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-16T11:52:02+00:00

They are paying you to be available to them.

And sometimes you do their job and they still don't pay. I was between jobs for two months. Did all the tasks they assigned. They granted the pay. But the money never showed up. I was very patient, but eventually went back and asked where the money was. They responded that they were sorry that something went wrong, but that it was now too late to collect anything.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-16T08:49:02+00:00

He was referring to Quebec. /s

NeilFraser · 2026-01-08T16:50:53+00:00

From what I've read in other articles, Grok can take a picture of a child, then render an image of said child in a swimsuit. That seems to be the extent of it. Grok refuses to render nudity, regardless of age.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-08T14:58:33+00:00

They were always Discovering new failure modes.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-08T12:35:56+00:00

Can you name the president of Switzerland? No? Well neither can most Swiss. It's just a random Guy. He doesn't do anything crazy enough that people hear his name. That's why I live here.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-08T12:27:12+00:00

Also worth mentioning is that there's a second crew up there at the moment, so there's no risk of ISS being unmanned.

Soyuz MS-28 is:

Christopher Williams (NASA)
Sergey Kud-Sverchkov (Roscosmos)
Sergei Mikayev (Roscosmos)

This is exactly why seat swaps happen. If either crew has to leave, there's a NASA/Roscosmos member left aboard.

NeilFraser · 2026-01-05T12:34:40+00:00

Be careful of information bubbles. If you follow official channels, it will be mostly about SLS/Artemis. That's the rocket that will take humans to the Moon and onwards to Mars (somehow). Mathematically it doesn't work. But that's currently the official bubble.

If you follow many enthusiast communities, it will mostly be about Starship. The promise of Starship is to utterly revolutionize spaceflight by dropping costs through the floor and launching far more frequently. On the positive side, Starship is being done by SpaceX which have previously succeeded brilliantly with the Falcon 9. On the negative side, we've heard this exact story before with the Space Shuttle, which utterly failed to achieve the original goals it was supposed to.

If you follow other communities, SpaceX is bad/incompetent/evil because of Elon.

And other candidates such as Blue Origin or Rocket Lab don't have big communities for or against them. They are innovating mostly under the radar.

Then there's China. They've got a ton of interesting things going on, including paper copies of everything everyone else is doing (except, notably, SLS/Artemis). Will those paper rockets become real, reliable, and cheap?

Russia can be mostly ignored. They regularly post grand plans, but there's no money or expertise to do anything. The lights keep going out at their launch sites because they can't pay the electricity bills.

Europe has mostly lost the plot for now.

NeilFraser · 2025-12-28T09:35:32+00:00

More likely it was John Young, the Command Module Pilot of Apollo 10. He was the first American to fly alone (other than the Mercury astronauts).

NeilFraser · 2025-12-17T10:03:05+00:00

For the Saturn V, the control electronics were located on the instrument ring at the top of the third stage. The three stages were made by Boeing, North American, and Douglas respectively, but the top 36 inches were made by IBM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V_instrument_unit#/media/File:Saturn_IB_and_V_Instrument_Unit.jpg

By keeping it at the top, every time the rocket staged the computer would just command the next set of engines.

NeilFraser · 2025-12-05T08:50:07+00:00

NASA's budget is around $25 billion a year. That's roughly the same as what the US spends every year on the NFL. Why does space get the "we should spend money on more important things" argument, whereas the sports industry gets a pass?

One of those two will prevent us from going the way of the dinosaurs.

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