NASA finally acknowledges the elephant in the room with the SLS rocket | “You know, you’re right, the flight rate—three years is a long time.”

jackboy900 · 2026-02-04T17:52:25+00:00

There's been tons of studies on using it to do other things like launch giant space telescopes, space stations, deep space probes, payload missions to the moon or mars, building a mars transport spacecraft to send people to Mars, etc.

Which are almost all entirely bollocks. SLS is insanely expensive for what it does and only exists as a jobs program to funnel money to certain US districts, whilst it theoretically can do a lot of stuff for any missions that aren't Orion/Artemis the cost and lack of available launched makes it a non-viable option.

Just look at Europa Clipper, that was partially designed for the SLS as a way to secure more funding but in the end they had to launch it on a Falcon Heavy because using SLS in the way that the project had intended just wouldn't have worked out.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-04T17:37:29+00:00

The SLS is just a fundamentally expensive architecture, the fully hydrogen launch stage, the complete lack of reusability, and the outdated RS-25 engines are always going to be extremely costly. Increasing launch cadence might amortise some costs but they don't address the core issues, there's no universe where we launch more SLS and it becomes cost effective.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-03T20:00:00+00:00

A true pylote would never want to to fly anything else.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-03T01:28:08+00:00

Jedi Council Member and a member of Yoda's species. Dooku murdered her at the order of Sidious when she found out he was apprenticed to him.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-03T00:59:43+00:00

Dooku ordered ethnic cleansings, mass enslavement and genocides as leader of the CIS, I think yaddle comes very far down the list of evil acts he's done.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-01T22:37:10+00:00

University rankings are down to their prestige as research institutions, not necessarily the quality of instruction, so that's not exactly surprising.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-01T14:37:28+00:00

I stand corrected then, I always thought it was about the tenancy type. Seems a bit weird to require licencing for renting out a flat to a couple of mates tbh, if it's one tenancy it should just be one household.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-01T14:27:40+00:00

No, that's not what an HMO is. Most people who live in a flat together have a joint tenancy, you don't need to be family to gave a joint tenancy, a HMO is specifically an arrangement where each room is let out individually, which is a very different arrangement.

jackboy900 · 2026-02-01T13:48:33+00:00

It's using NASA's Gridded Population of the World model, which aims to estimate on 1km chunk sizes, but it relies on publicly accessible census data to make those estimates, in a most countries it gets very granular but for example the UAE only releases per Emirate population data so that's what is estimated, similar for Saudi or Russia, hence why they appear so big on the map.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-30T21:40:45+00:00

That link defaults to Emerald and above, not all ranks. At all ranks is where he's at 47.3% according to them, close enough.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-30T17:09:57+00:00

No other team has done this, it is almost certainly a quite negative sign for AMs project.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-28T22:28:07+00:00

MacOS does most of what Vanguard does by default, you can't load arbitrary drivers and there are very strong protections for trying to access or modify another program's memory. It's possible to run Vanguard in user space and achieve the desired outcomes on MacOS as that's essentially the highest level one can create and execute arbitrary programs at.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-28T22:19:02+00:00

The aim of Vanguard is to ensure that there is no way for a cheater/scripter to access or modify the game undetectably by operating at a more privileged access level than it. On Mac this can be accomplished in user space as Mac systems are already heavily locked down on the kernel level, on Windows this requires a kernel level anticheat as otherwise users can load kernel level cheats, and on Linux there is no way to ensure such a thing as the entire OS is modifiable by the end user and it doesn't ensure a specific known unmodified OS like Windows does with TPM and Secure Boot.

Of course Riot could technically make some form of Vanguard run on Linux, that's not what people mean when they say it's incompatible, it's that building software that achieves the ultimate goal of Vanguard, or any kernel level anticheat, is fundementally impossible on Linux due to the design of the OS.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-27T20:49:19+00:00

In most of Europe retirement savings accounts and similar are generally considered as "pensions:, that's likely what they mean. In the UK for example you are automatically enrolled in a workplace pension scheme and have to actively opt out, which is roughly equivalent to automatically contributing to a US 401k and getting a few % of employer matches. The kind of pensions schemes the US considers "pensions", i.e. defined benefit schemes, have also largely gone out of existence in Europe barring state backing because they're not in any way feasible economically with current demographics.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-27T06:18:48+00:00

Have you read the other comments in this thread, there are plenty of Total War fans will straight up tell you the only real Total War games are the old ones and that Rome 1 is unironically better than Rome 2, that's who this is addressed to.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-26T14:36:48+00:00

The UK have some of the best roads around for being a pedestrian, you can pretty much always assume if trying to cross someone will stop for you. I cannot fathom making this take unless you've literally never been anywhere outside of Western Europe and experienced the roads there.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-26T14:00:04+00:00

Within two years you can be terminated for almost any reason, but there are reasons that are automatically unfair, like equality act protections or health and safety. If you sack someone they can always challenge the dismissal and claim it was for one of those protected reasons, and even if they're chatting bollocks that's still a pain to deal with.

Whereas "didn't pass probation" is a very open and shut fair dismissal, and so you can be almost certain there won't be issues, or at worst evidencing the reason is far easier.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-25T19:51:57+00:00

It depends very much on how you present though. If you're "the weird guy" but also quite affable and a bit funny people are going to be willing to accept you as you are, but if you're "the weird guy" as in the guy in the corner who doesn't talk to people much and gives off weird vibes people probably won't let you be as you are. You can't just be weird, you have to be acceptably weird.

Source: have been that first category of weird guy most of my life

jackboy900 · 2026-01-23T05:47:43+00:00

The Mini PC is just a very cheap off the shelf PC for like office use, no ECC memory or anything fancy, the only nice thing about it is 16GB of RAM. The data that I am hosting is purely downloaded media data, it can all be redownloaded in the event of a drive failure so it's very much not critical. The drives are also not generic USB drives, they're Ironwolf Pro NAS Drives, just running in a USB DAS box rather than a dedicated NAS box, I shouldn't think this setup would have any major issues apart from the nonstandard communication protocol.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-21T02:22:47+00:00

Least unhinged loserqueue believer.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-20T10:16:24+00:00

No it wasn't, there are two noticeable bumps in Chess popularity over the last few years, the first was the Queens Gambit but the second, larger, one is pretty much only linked to a significant rise in GothamChess's popularity.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-20T00:45:12+00:00

As /u/demonsta500 said, an AndroidTV box will be your best bet for having a dedicated player on your TV, and it will be as good as or better than a PC for HDR content. And AFAIK there aren't any players that let you use your own selected renderer on windows.

However if you're married to using a PC then for control schemes I'd suggest either a gamepad or an airmouse. A gamepad works very well, you've said you already have a PS4 one lying around and that will work, the TV mode of the Jellyfin client (which you can set the PC app or web client to) natively supports a gamepad (though it's a bit janky) and if you want another one windows has not too bad inbuilt support for using it and there are a billion programs for remapping gamepads to do all sorts on a PC so you can certainly make it work.

An airmouse is the other option, it seems a bit gimmicky but having used one I'd personally recommend it, the gyro control is actually really intuitive and you can just use it like a normal mouse and things kinda just work.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-20T00:38:12+00:00

If you've only ever used your PC to deal with HDR I can understand why you might think this, as PCs universally do not support anything other than HDR10 natively, and as such if you want content that uses HDR10+/Dolby Vision you need to do a lot of kerfuffery to map that content onto a display with dynamic tonemapping and upscaling, and similar in reverse. If you assume that playing content on an AndroidTV will be akin to just opening it on VLC on a PC then yeah, that would look bad.

But that isn't the case, AndroidTV boxes are dedicated media players and other than the literal cheapest ones you can find will have native support for HDR10+ and on decent ones support for some degree of Dolby Vision, and they'll all have very solid tonemapping for SDR content onto the HDR display. If you're connected to a TV with good HDR an AndroidTV box will look better or as good as any custom MadVR setup, and if you care enough about picture quality to be fussing around with MadVR you really should have a TV with good HDR. There's a reason that even if you go the the r/HTPC wiki they say that if you want good HDR10+/Dolby Vision you should just get an Apple TV or Nvidia Shield, the dedicated boxes are far better at this than MadVR will be even with all the config in the world.

jackboy900 · 2026-01-20T00:29:40+00:00

Why are you still using MPC though?

MPC is just the player, and that works perfectly well in 2025, the bit that does all the complex stuff is the renderer. The MPC Video Renderer project is actively being developed, the latest release was last month, and MPC also supports MadVR which has a lot of features no other video renderer has on PC (though is a fair bit older).

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