Well there’s always going to be penny pinching and greed, but because each team‘s job is singular and siloed, their success or failure is based on their only job. So there is a separation of pride. The launch team’s only job is to launch the rocket, they have no vested interest in the mission or how well it was built. So a cost saving move that would help the mission but hinder launching the rocket isn’t one that would be made by the launch team.

That being said, nothing says that this won’t change as soon as more privatization happens in this sector.

Fun fact: the Shuttle was intended to have ejection capabilities, they were removed by the request of the Department of Defense. They provided extra funding for the Shuttle on the stipulation that it reach very specific orbits including a polar orbit that was only achievable by an extreme weight reduction. In fact later Shuttles also had to be modified to even make it to the ISS with a valuable amount of cargo. Columbia, the first Shuttle to fly to space, was always too heavy to make it to the ISS. The reason this happened is the president at the time, Jimmy Carter if I remember correctly, made some interesting and specific threats about their own capabilities to the Russians. These modifications were to make good on those threats.

Luckily in this case, the people who build the rocket aren’t allowed to launch them for this very reason. Even NASA has a completely different team of people who launch rockets (in Florida) than who build them (Alabama, Mississippi, and others) or run the mission (Houston).

The actual launch range is run by the Space Force and they have the final say on when and where you can launch and where you can’t be during launch (officially called an exclusion zone).

Seems to be missing some ports I distinctly remember, like USB B, IR, mini Toslink, dual PS/2, dual e-SATA/USB A, powered USB A, mini coax, BNC, and a few others. Not to mention proprietary crap like HP LifeDrives.

Edit: Mini and Micro HDMI also missing.

Thanks! But $500 is still more than I can afford right now. I almost got one when they had the refurbished LCD model for like $280 or whatever it was but I couldn’t even swing that at the time.

Edit: Wow, at least one person on there has their 64 gig LCD model listed for $900…

For me the touchpads are one of the big selling points. I see what you mean by the only $200 difference offering an entirely newer processor and screen, but I honestly don’t know why they would’ve done it with only a tiny touchpad on one side.

One question I immediately have though, because it took me a minute to even find the Legion go S and there are apparently two different versions of it (2025 & 2026), is how much is valve style support worth? Even though Lenovo is my go to for prebuilt machines right now, I’m not sure I trust them with $1000 handheld over the amount of time that the steam deck has existed.

I’m curious what exactly you mean; Like are you saying it’s just too expensive for what it is or too old or what?

I always wanted one of the white Steam Decks, but I have yet to be able to afford one regardless of color. Now it looks like I never will.

In 18 months I have had 2 interviews out of hundreds of jobs applied, one of which ghosted me after the interview and the other relisted the job the next day…

You are getting interviews?

Yeah, some of the very first neural networks were created in the early 50s. TV is an interesting example and I am glad you mentioned it. Different components of what make up (analog) TV and TV broadcasts were ready to go in the 30s but weren’t adopted in mass for nearly 20 years due to WWII. Likewise a lot of other technologies were put on hold or redirected for the war effort and computing technology is no different. This is part of why it feels like technology exploded after the war.

I understood what you meant. I was trying to point out that a lot of AI companies like IBM haven’t invested in LLMs in the same way that, for instance, Open AI has. IBM isn’t really at risk of failing if the bubble pops, as their AI models and other products have been in use for decades, but Open AI has nothing else to show for its investments and is yet to be profitable.

Likewise, I’ve been unemployed for 18 months and have watched as several things I would really like to get have become too expensive anyway.

AI has been around since the 50s. We just keep changing what we call AI. The only difference with LLMs is this time they actually tried to sell it as a real sentient solution and it’s biting them in the ass because it isn’t any better than anything that came before and in many ways is actually worse. I feel like people totally forgot about when Watson beat Ken Jennings.

This, and it also gives them the ability to tell who’s a bot and who isn’t. For somebody who’s entire income is based on advertising, being able to guarantee advertisers actual human eyes on is worth a lot of money.

I remember an article going by several years ago on Reddit that was talking about how lunch lines at schools had started using fingerprint IDs for the kids. And this was basically the same general consensus in the comments, that the whole idea was just getting kids used to biometric security. That the cost of the security system itself could’ve just paid for a bunch of kids lunches if that was the actual problem.

Depends on what position of the planets they’re talking about or something I’m sure.

My grandma used to say “put your wants in one hand and take a shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.”

The point is these are school computers, they shouldn’t be treated any differently than a computer lab computer just because they’re at your house.

Some of it was VC money, but quite a bit of it was the exact same thing that happened when the App Store became popular. People were going out of their way to try to create things that would be bought out by larger companies.

I was around in the 2000s when YouTube got bought by Google. I don’t disagree that the Internet used to be a blast, but I do disagree that corporate interests weren’t already fucking it up and going into overdrive by the end of the 90s.

I would argue that started happening the moment they got online. The dot com crash didn’t happened for nothing.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you’re saying but this sounds like an entitlement issue. Kids don’t need to be able to do more than schoolwork on school provided computers.