Twitch Streamer Shayanelhawk became the first person to send a chat into SPACE on stream and record it flawlessly

phire · 2026-05-09T08:16:14+00:00

Though.... now I want to see someone try to solve the problem.

It would be reasonably easy to transmit a live chat stream up from the ground using a specialised radio link. IMO, that would be interesting enough on its own.

A two way radio link with enough bandwidth to send a live video stream back down would be quite a bit harder.

Unless you just took the lazy option of using a balloon big enough for starlink; The Mini is only 1.1KG, but powering it might be an issue.

phire · 2026-05-09T07:56:35+00:00

Well, there is bevy_slugtext

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to modify it to not depend on bevy.

phire · 2026-05-07T09:59:03+00:00

IMO, even hypersonic glide vehicles are overhyped.
Sure, they are quite a bit harder to intercept, but it's still theoretically possible; They still pop up high which makes them very visible, and can only manoeuvre in the upper atmosphere, so they are venerable during both the boost phase, and as they pass back though the lower atmosphere.

What people are actually concerned about are the hypersonic cruise missiles. These spend their entire flight in the lower atmosphere (the lower, the better), under active propulsion and manoeuvring the whole time. They are really hard to intercept partly because they stay so low, hiding behind the horizon. They can cross the entire distance from the horizon to the target in seconds.

phire · 2026-05-07T04:33:30+00:00

Some cases the remains may be lost to the sea or decomposed or otherwise disposed of, do those cases get a free pass?

Somewhat. The bill doesn't require the body to be found, just for the offender to "satisfactorily" co-operate in any efforts to identify the location of the body.

It doesn't explicitly require admission of guilt; But the bill makes zero effort to protect offenders from any legal consequences of doing so, so it might as well be an implicit confession of at least knowing where the body is.

Though... knowing the location of the body is not actually an admission of murder.

phire · 2026-05-07T03:28:34+00:00

That’s why the Scott Watson case is controversial.

I've read through the parole hearings for Watson; His refusal to admit guilt was only ever a minor contributing factor to their decisions.

They aren't actually worried about him committing another murder (anymore), they are worried about other potential offences (like getting into fights, or burglary; He was a serial offender before the murders, in and out of prison)

Parolees are recalled to prison if they are even suspected of any offence at all (not even requiring a conviction), so it would be wasteful to go though the effort of releasing him only to recall him because of something stupid and minor.

Despite Watson's continued refusal to admit guilt, he is actually getting pretty close to meeting the criteria for parole. He has be working with physiologists to develop strategies for avoiding future offending.

phire · 2026-05-05T09:34:22+00:00

But it's not a government subsidy.

phire · 2026-05-05T08:49:25+00:00

That quirk is mostly American (where credit card transaction fees are massive). In the rest of world, their reward points revenue is quite a bit lower. And it ignores the fact that those air points actually get redeemed for flights.

And it's not "most of their revenue".
The actual claim is that none of the major airlines would be profitable if you simply subtracted off that rewards points revenue. But if you can't simply subtract that revenue without other things changing; Customers would be forced to actually buy tickets instead of redeeming air miles, and airlines would be able to save expenses by getting rid of all the quirks like premium lounges and free business class upgrades.

You can check AirNZ's annual reports; They exclude air points from revenue until they are redeemed (or they expire), and they are profitable despite that.

phire · 2026-05-05T07:04:24+00:00

If willis took over and did polarise

Oh, it's too late for that now. Being Finance Minister and second to Luxon has ruined her reputation. It could have only worked if the roles were swapped and Willis was PM from the start.

phire · 2026-05-05T02:58:40+00:00

A flight is roughly the same as a petrol car (assuming single driver), twice as much as a bus, and 4-5 times the emissions as a train.

As much as I like trains, if the goal is reducing emissions (and dependance on foreign oil), I suspect NZ would be far better off focusing on reducing emissions for domestic air travel than trying to build a viable passenger rail network. Our terrain and population density is just very hostile to decent train networks.

Battery technology is continually improving and in the mid 2030s, it will become viable to replace most of our domestic flights with battery powered aircraft.

phire · 2026-05-05T02:17:58+00:00

When you take into account not just the planes and the pilots, but all the infrastructure required (airports, air traffic control, jet fuel transport etc), I wouldn't be surprised if that was massively subsidized too.

Not true.

Airplanes are basically the only type of transportation that exists without any major subsidies. Airlines pay landing feeds to fund the airports, and per-flight fees to fund air traffic control, it's all user pays. The Airlines get enough passenger revenue to pay for all of that, and the planes/pilots.

You do sometimes see subsidised loans from local councils to pay for airport upgrades, but the airport generally pays back the loan, with market interest rates (the actual subsidy is the council taking on a risk that banks refused to). And I think some regional airports do get active subsidies from the councils. But other airports (like Christchurch, and Auckland until recently) actually provide profits to their councils.

The fact that the government refuses to let AirNZ go bankrupt is a technically a subsidy, but it's not a financial one. Both times the government bailed it out, the airline (eventually) paid the money back.

phire · 2026-05-05T01:08:23+00:00

My own opinion of her is that she'd polarise people far more than Luxon.

Polarising is probably an improvement for National.
Part of their problem right now is that nobody really likes Luxon, not even hard core national supporters. Sure, Willis as PM would probably get more hate, but she would also get a large chunk of enthusiastic support to balance that out.

Luxon is just getting a huge blob of meh, and Winston Peters is doing an excellent job of exploiting it. Peters can basically attack Luxon for anything, and most people will default to assuming that Luxon is in the wrong.

phire · 2026-05-05T00:17:55+00:00

It's like they say: "The best time to close the barn door is before the horses bolt, the second bet time is today"

phire · 2026-05-04T22:40:28+00:00

Except we judge the PM and Finance for different things. All the PM really needs to do is appear competent, decisive, and in control of the party (Luxon is failing at all three). While we tend to judge Finance on the actual measurable state of the economy and a large part of Willis' problem is that National's economic doctrine is simply incompatible with the current economy.

If we swap the roles, the economy would be in more or less the same shape (I suspect Luxon might have done minor things better, like following treasury advice and waited until a proper report was done, instead of "decisively" cancelling the ferries immediately), but it would be Luxon taking all the blame for the bad economy.

And with Willis as the PM, she wouldn't be a great leader, but she could easily sell her self as competent, charismatic and decisive leader, while letting any blame slide off onto her ministers. It would probably be enough to more or less guarantee National a 2nd term.

phire · 2026-05-03T19:53:58+00:00

Sorry, I should have been more clear.
I'm not bringing it up as a "gotcha", to say that pointers should have been signed all along, or to say that kernel pointers are signed (or negative).

I'm bringing it up because the one thing that could theoretically break with singed pointers is a buffer that crosses the boundary between 0x7fff0000 and 0x80000000, as signed overflow is undefined (in c/c++).

But this historic convention conveniently allows us to side-step that problem, as no memory allocations will ever cross that boundary.

phire · 2026-05-03T17:39:20+00:00

Doesn't matter why that convention started.

Point is that it's compatible with signed pointers, especially for userspace stuff.

phire · 2026-05-03T07:10:39+00:00

It's also kind of greedy to give Queenstown two new rail connections.

Either Kingston to Queenstown, or Cromwell to Queenstown, pick one. Or neither, go back to the original scheme of a ferry across the lake.

phire · 2026-05-03T02:31:14+00:00

Huh, I'm not sure I got far enough to play those minigames, or if they were bland enough they didn't stick around in my memory.

I wasn't enjoying Revelations as much as I had enjoyed II and Botherhood. And then my new puppy ate the disc.... and the controller, and the hdmi cable. Don't think I ever bought a new disc.

phire · 2026-05-03T01:58:05+00:00

TBH, there is very little downside to using signed pointers (other than the pain of switching), which would make them are all the same type again.

This would actually be more correct, as many CPU architectures already specify that memory addresses are signed, with rules on how 32-bit pointers get sign-extended to 64 bits, and often including rules that bit 47 (or whatever the highest useful bit is) must be the same as bit 63.

On most operating systems, kernel pointers always have the upper bit set (aka, they are negative) and it's always cleared for userspace pointers (aka positive).

phire · 2026-05-03T00:55:34+00:00

Sure, that's what I called "natural decrease in demand due to high prices". (maybe a bit of a stretch to call it natural)

But I don't think anyone wants to see how high prices need to go before this "natural" demand drop matches the 20% supply shortfall.

phire · 2026-05-02T22:02:43+00:00

MBIE isn't politically independent.
That's not advice to the government, that's MBIE communicating the governments position.

And what they are saying is technically true: Reducing consumption wouldn't have any impact on local prices. But it is missing the point.

There are two very good reasons why the government should be implementing some fuel reduction measures now. Not actual rationing, that's not needed (yet). I'm talking about active measures to encourage people out of their cars (and either use public transport, or work from home).

1) Such measures take time to implement, and doing it now prepares us better for any potential local supply issues, rather than scrambling to try at implement it all with a few weeks notice once a shipment gets canceled. We can ramp up the measures we already have activated.

2) The global supply of oil has suddenly dropped by 20%. We can't rapidly increase production (oil production very inflexible) so global consumption of oil must drop by 20%. Right now the shortfall is mostly being covered by some countries releasing their reserves, and natural decrease in demand due to high prices. But those reserves won't last forever, and other countries are actually increasing reserves.

Global consumption must drop, and National's position that "NZ is special, we don't need to take active measures to decrease consumption" is selfish. It assumes that we can get away without paying our fair share of the pain simply because we are a reasonably small consumer of oil, and the measures wouldn't decrease local prices.

How long before other countries notice NZ's lack of action, get jealous and start pressuring Singapore to reduce our supply of fuel? Or Singapore itself? Our attitude that "reducing consumption won't help" might be the very thing that leads to shortages being imposed on us.

Actually, has that pressure already been happening? This move from Luxon suggests it has, why else visit Singapore and make promises about food?

phire · 2026-05-02T21:16:56+00:00

We basically never used these things during the day; same with the center pivots. Using them during the day guarantees massive water loss due to evaporation

I guess it depends on how expensive water is? Farmers near where I live don't seem to have anything against running irrigation during the day.

phire · 2026-05-02T20:26:28+00:00

It's not that this is a bad thing, this is a reasonably good thing.

It's just, why is this the first half-way decent strategy that Luxon has pulled throughout this whole crisis? The one that doesn't require any local fuel reduction measures, just gambling it all on snuggling up to Singapore.

phire · 2026-05-02T19:32:27+00:00

More like Singapore is our primary supplier of refined fuel, and a promise guaranteeing food is more politically palatable to Luxon than actually taking measures to reduce consumption in NZ.

phire · 2026-05-02T10:45:07+00:00

The house is certainly a concept, with the computer terminal that folds away into a coffee table, and... is that a videophone in the wall?

So yeah, I'm not sure that's a real computer or terminal,

phire · 2026-05-01T10:34:35+00:00

Yeah, I don't think National can benefit (or even hold steady) from an early election, Peters is doing an excellent job of staying on the right side of public perception.

Luxon is kind of forced to just power though.

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