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Starlink is increasingly interfering with astronomy, scientists say
  • Kessler syndrome isn't really that much of a risk specifically with Starlink (for now at least), as SpaceX seems to be doing things right despite Musk. They're in such low orbits that even with a catastrophic loss of control, they'll deorbit very quickly. The real risk comes as more companies and countries try to get a piece of the megaconstellation pie. Starlink in its own seems to be fairly safe and sustainable on its own, but that may quickly change when communication for collision avoidance maneuvers needs to be international.

    Despite Musk's well-earned reputation for being a shithead, SpaceX has this far been doing the right thing far more often than most other space companies, and while it's certainly possible that will change, the Starlink constellation will entirely disappear very quickly without constant replenishment, so it's not as if we'd have no chance to act if they begin to show signs of concerning behavior. What's far more worrying to me in terms of Kessler syndrome is the recent escalation around space warfare, as tensions between Russia, China, and the US continue to boil and nobody seems willing to really commit to making space a neutral zone. Even with space historically being an area of strong international cooperation despite politics (just look at the ISS), that unfortunately seems to be rapidly changing.

  • Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team
  • Well they said .NET Framework, and I also wouldn't be surprised if they more or less wrapped that up - .NET Framework specifically means the old implementation of the CLR, and it's been pretty much superseded by an implementation just called .NET, formerly known as .NET Core (definitely not confusing at all, thanks Microsoft). .NET Framework was only written for Windows, hence the need for Mono/Xamarin on other platforms. In contrast, .NET is cross-platform by default.

  • Raptor 3, SN1
  • Game publisher claims 100% crash rate with Intel CPUs – Alderon Games says company sells defective 13th and 14th gen chips
  • I'm worried it's a lithography issue. The recent GamersNexus and Level1Techs coverage seems to point that way, at least to me. For example, they mention CPUs working fine for a while, then suddenly becoming increasingly unstable. There's so much that can go wrong with lithography that could cause that kind of behavior, and we know they've been having issues given the whole 14nm debacle.

  • FSR 3.1 vs DLSS 3.7 vs XeSS 1.3 Upscaling Battle, 5 Games Tested
  • I've found it depends a lot on the game. In CP2077, DLSS+frame gen looks great to me with full raytracing enabled. But in The Witcher 3, I found frame gen to cause a lot of artifacts, and in PvP games I wouldn't use regular DLSS/FSR. In general I've found the quality preset in DLSS to be mostly indistinguishable from native on 3440x1440, and I'm excited to try FSR 3 when I get the chance.

  • Federal agency warns critical Linux vulnerability being actively exploited
  • This is a use-after-free, which should be impossible in safe Rust due to the borrow checker. The only way for this to happen would be incorrect unsafe code (still possible, but dramatically reduced code surface to worry about) or a compiler bug. To allocate heap space in safe Rust, you have to use types provided by the language like Box, Rc, Vec, etc. To free that space (in Rust terminology, dropping it by using drop() or letting it go out of scope) you must be the owner of it and there may be current borrows (i.e. no references may exist). Once the variable is droped, the variable is dead so accessing it is a compiler error, and the compiler/std handles freeing the memory.

    There's some extra semantics to some of that but that's pretty much it. These kind of memory bugs are basically Rust's raison d'etre - it's been carefully designed to make most memory bugs impossible without using unsafe. If you'd like more information I'd be happy to provide!

  • AMD Ryzen 9000 desktop series with 16, 12, 8 and 6 Zen5 core configs reportedly launches in July - VideoCardz.com
  • IIRC it's an APU thing, and last I heard it was just a rumor (could be out of date). Either way, non-LTSC is EOL in a year and a half. If you're putting in a Zen 5 CPU, the best choice is realistically either Linux or Windows 11 Pro, since Pro can turn off all the bullshit through group policy. My Windows machine I have to have is on 11 Pro and it's basically Windows 10 with a slightly different taskbar. No Copilot bullshit, no ads, no Bing in Windows Search. If you're ok your taskbar on the bottom of the screen, IMO it's the best choice as long as you have to use Windows.

  • Air Force IDs airman shot and killed by Florida police
  • He was in his apartment. There was a call to the police about an argument in the building. The officer went to an apartment that is said the be the wrong one, banged on the door and shouted to open up. Fortston answered the door with a piston in his hand, pointing at the floor. The officer shot him.

    According to the media, Forston was on the phone with his girlfriend for a while by the time the police were called. It seems to me that, as far as the officer was aware, the only "crime" that occured was "an argument", and it sounds like the officer also had the wrong apartment. Unless I can view the bodycam footage it's hard to be certain but this definitely sounds like he was killed because he was black and had a gun.

  • Nasa to create time standard for the Moon, where seconds tick faster than on Earth
  • I'm only an armchair physicist, but I believe this isn't possible due to relativity. I know that, at least, there are cases where two observers can disagree on whether an event occurred simultaneously. Besides all the other relativity weirdness, that alone seems to preclude a truly universal time standard. I would love for someone smarter than me to explain more and/or correct me though!

  • am i going insane or is this seriously live reentry plasma???
  • As spacecraft reenter the atmosphere from orbital speeds, they're going so fast that the atmosphere is compressed enough (and so gets hot enough) to free the electrons from the atoms in the air. This forms plasma. The special thing here is that we got live video during this portion of reentry; the free electrons in plasma heavily interfere with radio communications, so in previous missions there has been a full communications blackout at that time. Starship did not experience that blackout, which is unique. I'm not qualified to say exactly why, but the team was stressing that Starship is big enough that it "punches a hole through the atmosphere". Another factor could be the 4(?) starlink terminals on the leeward side providing redundant communications signals.

  • Worthy rule
  • You're looking for Fred Rogers, more commonly Mr. Rogers. He was the host of the popular children's show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and is revered for having been incredibly compassionate both in public and private.

  • What's the last significant new idea or philosophy you heard about and thought was really interesting?
  • I was very intrigued by a follow-up to the recent numberphile video about divergent series. It was a return to the idea that the sum of the integers greater than zero can be assigned the value -1/12. There were some places this could be used, but as far as I know it was viewed as shaky math by a lot of experts.

    As far as I recall the story goes something like this: now, using a new technique Terrence Tao found, a team was seemingly able to "fix" previous infinities in quantum field theory - there's a certain way to make at least some divergent series work out to being a real number, and the presenter proposed that this can be explained as the universe "protecting us" from the infinities inherent in the math.

    It made me think about other places infinities show up in modern physics (namely, singularities in general relativity) and whether a technique something like this could "solve" them without a whole new framework like string theory is.

  • Apple
  • Even as an (older) zoomer in the US, this was never a thing for me. No one cared what phone you used. If you had an Android you wouldn't be in iMessage group chats but no one judged you for it.

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