gravitas's recent activity
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Comment on Starship was doomed from the beginning in ~space
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Comment on Starship was doomed from the beginning in ~space
gravitas (edited )LinkDisclaimer: I've been watching the Starship program since it started and I want to see it succeed. I'm fairly certain that Super Heavy and Starship weigh more than this today, dry. And I have just...- Exemplary
Disclaimer: I've been watching the Starship program since it started and I want to see it succeed.
The Super Heavy Booster weighs 160 tonnes dry, doesn’t make it to space, and its peak speed is only roughly 4,600 mph. Meanwhile, Starship has a dry mass of around 150 tonnes, makes it to space, and reaches an orbital speed of at least 17,500 mph. This means that during landing, Starship has over 13.57 times the kinetic energy of the Booster! And that doesn’t account for the fact that Starship carries significantly more propellant during landing than the Booster.
I'm fairly certain that Super Heavy and Starship weigh more than this today, dry. And I have just one more nitpick here: calling the entirety of EDL (entry, descent, landing), "landing", is imprecise.
There's no way Starship carries more propellant than the Super Heavy booster during their respective landings. The Super Heavy booster is igniting 13 Raptors for a few seconds, and then scaling down to 3, for a total burn time of 20 seconds.
Time Milestone 00:06:20 Super Heavy landing burn start 00:06:40 Super Heavy landing burn shutdown 01:06:20 Landing burn start 01:06:30 An exciting landing! Meanwhile, the Starship second stage starts out with 3 Raptors, and switches down to 2, for a total burn time of 10 seconds.
Because the bellyflop manoeuvre is a no-go, Block 2 is designed to slow down more with its retro rockets (where the rockets are fired in the direction of travel to slow down). This should make landing more viable, as the craft should be more controllable. This would also enable the front fins to be shrunk and the heat shield to be thinned, saving weight. But this will also require more propellant, especially as the rockets have less thrust than planned. This is why Block 2 is larger and heavier than Block 1.
The proposed trajectory is idea-shaped nonsense.
SpaceX has planned to shrink the front flaps since before Flight 3, from what I remember. Starship Flight 10's second stage landed in the same way as Block 1 ships did, with a bellyflop, landing burn, and flip.
The only way that using Raptor as retro rockets is going to help out with heating is with hypersonic retropropulsion (the heatshield has heat load from 110km to 30km, roughly, where the current landing burn ignites at <1km altitude.), and I don't believe this is feasible. There simply is not the propellant load to do any kind of reentry burn.
If you want to know what retrorockets for an orbital spacecraft looks like, Stoke Space's Nova rocket is engineered from the ground up to support hypersonic retropropulsion! It has its heatshield surrounding the engine bay, with a ring of nozzles around it. I believe they also vent hydrogen into the bubble of plasma that the engines' exhaust traps? Very cool technology, I want them to succeed.
Will could be proposing some other retro rockets on Starship's heat shield, but Block 2 Starship doesn't have any rockets on its heatshield, which you can tell by just looking at it. Starship today has only Raptors and ullage-powered cold gas thrusters for propulsion, and cold gas thrusters can barely control Starship while it's in space. (See flights 3 and 9!)
But then, saying "the craft should be more controllable" implies starting the Raptors sooner for landing burn? You can't start it much sooner. Starship is subsonic for 1m45s, and the Raptors only have the propellant for maybe 10-20 seconds? And even if you have to run the Raptors for longer, that's still a bellyflop and a flip!
But Starship isn't going to switch away from Raptors any time soon.
This puts incredible pressure on SpaceX to save weight anywhere they possibly can, which is why the rockets keep failing.You can’t make them much lighter than they already are.
There is always incredible pressure on SpaceX to save weight anywhere. A ton removed from the second stage is a ton more payload to orbit (not counting the 0%-10% decrease in fuel required to land.) A ton removed from the first stage is anywhere from 1/5th to 1/10th ton of payload to orbit.
Indeed, we can see this with the planned Block 3 version of Starship. It is even longer than Block 2 to accommodate even more propellant to help increase its shrinking payload and ensure it can slow down enough to land. But somehow, it weighs significantly less than the smaller Block 2.
Where have these weight savings come from? They aren’t changing any major materials. They aren’t changing any structural designs. They aren’t redesigning the entire engine or fuel tank setup. The only way is if major systems are built with a smaller safety factor, making crucial systems vulnerable and weak.
But somehow, it weighs significantly less than the smaller Block 2.
Okay, I was going to write a rebuttal to this, but I didn't actually find a source for Block 3 being lighter? I expected it to be on one of SpaceX's presentations where they show different Starship versions, but those make no mention of dry mass. Admittedly, I didn't look very far. Maybe Elon has said this at some point; he says many things.
Also, they're using Raptor 3's on Block 3 Starship, which (theoretically) will not require external shielding, as SpaceX has stated:
@SpaceX
Raptor 3 (sea level variant)
Thrust: 280tf
Specific impulse: 350s
Engine mass: 1525kg
Engine + vehicle-side commodities and hardware mass : 1720kg@SpaceX
Performance stats of previous versions:
Raptor 1 (sea level variant)
Thrust: 185tf
Specific impulse: 350s
Engine mass: 2080kg
Engine + vehicle-side commodities and hardware mass: 3630kgRaptor 2 (sea level variant)
Thrust: 230tf
Specific impulse: 347s
Engine mass: 1630kg
Engine + vehicle-side commodities and hardware mass: 2875kgRaptor 3 is designed for rapid reuse, eliminating the need for engine heatshields while continuing to increase performance and manufacturability
You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.
Some (petty!) quibbling on this point. My understanding of SpaceX's philosophy is this:
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You can always reduce risk with more money.
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No matter how much you reduce risk, there will be unknown unknowns.
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Therefore, it's better to get every component to 1% risk, and plan for a few failure, than get 0.01% risk on every component.
SpaceX could have spent twice as much and three times longer and gotten to where they are today, with no debris sent into the Gulf or the Turks and Caicos or the Turks and Caicos (again!).
Flight 10 shows the result of this philosophy; after 3 brutal failures, after the first design of the Payload bay didn't close, everything worked.
(Tangent Alert: In my opinion, as soon as you're in the philosophy of "it cannot fail", improving any part of the process becomes vastly harder. Why redesign anything if the old one is flight proven and the new one could doom a launch?)
NASA has taken the other side of this tradeoff, where nothing can fail because they're launching people.
They're launching Artemis II with astronauts on board, with Artemis I's heatshield design which showed unexpected behavior. (Artemis I was the first in-flight test of Orion's heatshield since EFT-1 in 2014, and they changed the design in-between.) They're mitigating this with a new reentry trajectory, which has never been tested. And it will work! Heck, Artemis I would have been a success with astronauts on board!
Also, they're going to revise the heatshield to fix this problem! This will probably (unless they decide to do a flight test, which personally I'd consider unlikely) debut on Artemis III, again with astronauts on board.
Artemis II is also the first Orion flight to launch with working life support:
So for Artemis I, we had a pressure control system that maintained, you know, habitable temperatures within the cabin. But for Artemis II, we’re flying new hardware to this time to, you know, to provide CO2 removal and humidity removal for the, for the for the crew. [...]
— Houston We Have a Podcast - Artemis II: The Orion Spacecraft, Chris Edelen & Kenna Pell, 2025-08-22
Again, this will work! NASA will spent a lot of money and a lot of time to make things that won't fail, because NASA is risk-averse at every level and also they're launching people and willing to spend near-infinite money to not kill people.
It's worth noting that life support is one of the easier systems to test on the ground. Not so for reentry or aerodynamic control or propellant tanks.
This is a tradeoff! Feel free to debate it!
SpaceX could have easily done this. They already proved they could land a 1st stage/Booster with the Falcon 9, and Falcon 9’s Booster could launch a 1/10 scale Starship into orbit. Tests of such a scaled-down model would help SpaceX determine the best compromise for using the bellyflop manoeuvre and retro rockets to land. It would help them iteratively improve the design around such a compromise, especially as they will be far cheaper and quicker to redesign and build than the full-scale versions.
From where I'm standing, SpaceX has already found very nearly the best compromise between the bellyflop and using the landing engines. High-altitude flight tests with SN10 and SN15 proved the bellyflop and landing will work. Integrated flight tests 4, 5, 6, and now 10 have shown successful bellyflop and landing. They did this with extensive computer modeling and the high-altitude Starship hop campaign.
Not only that, but these tests would highlight any of the design’s shortcomings, such as the rocket engines not having enough thrust-to-weight ratio to enable a high enough payload. This allows engineers to do crucial, complete redesigns before the large-scale version is even built.
Today, the rocket engines are ~18t of a ~150t second stage. Reducing their mass to 0 [i.e. infinite thrust-to-weight] would add ~18t of payload capacity.
It's on the first stage that thrust matters more. On the first stage, each engine lifts a exit-area-sized column of propellant. Increasing the thrust here allows for a taller rocket, which increases the fraction of mass dedicated to tankage. The weight (as part of the thrust-to-weight) of a rocket engine is kind of not important?
Besides, I feel like the Raptor engine is in a pretty good place already. They're test-firing Raptor 3 on stands today, which has a theoretical thrust-to-weight of 160, while Raptor 2 is at 80.
Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; they might as well keep shoving money at the beast)
As far as I can tell, NASA's Starship HLS contract is for upwards of $4 billion ($2.9 billion for Artemis III, and $1.1 billion for IV). These contracts are milestone-based, meaning that NASA and SpaceX agree on milestones, and SpaceX is only awarded money for demonstrating these milestones.
That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
It is trying to revolutionise the space industry. Its concept, design, and testing plan are totally different from any rocket developed in the last 50 years.
It has already launched 10 times, which would be a staggering achievement for any program "optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible".
In summary, this post is vague, is barely refutable, and where it is refutable, wrong.
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Comment on They stole my voice with AI in ~tech
gravitas Link ParentThe voice generation here is almost certainly a machine learning model, trained on other recordings of voices. If there are any artifacts from the process of digitally recording voices, they’ll be...The voice generation here is almost certainly a machine learning model, trained on other recordings of voices. If there are any artifacts from the process of digitally recording voices, they’ll be replicated along with the actual signal.
There may be artifacts that the machine learning model produces, but these are unintentional and will be fixed by a better model.
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Comment on What small questions do you have that aren’t worth a full topic on their own? in ~talk
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Comment on CrowdStrike code update bricking Windows machines around the world in ~tech
gravitas Link ParentCrowdStrike is software that businesses install on their computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux) to monitor and prevent malware (in short). If you don’t have it installed, you’re in the clear. It’s...CrowdStrike is software that businesses install on their computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux) to monitor and prevent malware (in short). If you don’t have it installed, you’re in the clear. It’s not a Windows component—although only Windows computers are affected by this bad update.
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Comment on This GitHub profile has a custom background in ~comp
gravitas Link ParentAh, good catch on the interaction! Yeah, that’s a little more serious than changing the background, hah.Ah, good catch on the interaction! Yeah, that’s a little more serious than changing the background, hah.
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Comment on This GitHub profile has a custom background in ~comp
gravitas LinkI was immediately worried that this could be an issue (although in any case the impact would be limited), but it turns out... nope. GitHub’s security is on point. (who’d’ve thought?!) Request...I was immediately worried that this could be an issue (although in any case the impact would be limited), but it turns out... nope. GitHub’s security is on point. (who’d’ve thought?!)
Request failure message
Content-Security-Policy: The page’s settings blocked the loading of a resource (img-src) at https://example.com/ because it violates the following directive: “img-src 'self' data: https://github.githubassets.com https://media.githubusercontent.com https://camo.githubusercontent.com https://identicons.github.com https://avatars.githubusercontent.com https://github-cloud.s3.amazonaws.com https://objects.githubusercontent.com https://secured-user-images.githubusercontent.com/ https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/ https://private-user-images.githubusercontent.com https://opengraph.githubassets.com https://github-production-user-asset-6210df.s3.amazonaws.com https://customer-stories-feed.github.com https://spotlights-feed.github.com https://objects-origin.githubusercontent.com https://*.githubusercontent.com”
If you’re like, a regular person, the above inscrutable message means that an attacker cannot use GitHub to initiate a GET request to an arbitrary domain, whenever someone’s profile is loaded.
If this worked (again, GitHub’s security totally prevents any of these attacks), this could either:
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Leak someone’s IP address when they visit a GitHub profile (this is a privacy leak, but one that’s generally accepted by the Internet; nothing would be leaked besides the IP address and this is not a big deal).
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DDoS someone. I was going to say that this isn't a big deal because GitHub traffic is minimal, but all you’d have to do is have a thousand references to some large file, different query parameters, and a lot of traffic to that profile, and maybe you could raise somebody’s CDN bill by a few dollars (ballpark).
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Cross-site request forgery, which fortunately has been wholly solved by the Internet At Large.
Which means that the worst impact of this flaw is basically that somebody could change the website’s background. (The Internet has gotten very good at removing potential attack surfaces, by necessity!)
I’d imagine this to be fixed by patching whatever math renderer GitHub uses, along with maybe some CSS magic? I’m not familiar enough (read: at all) with stacking contexts to know if they could be used to clip any
z-indexelements to an element.Using an
iframewould isolate it too, but it wouldn’t work in this case because aniframedoesn’t change size to fit its contents. -
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Comment on NASA finds more issues with Boeing’s Starliner, but crew launch set for June 1 in ~space
gravitas LinkSo this leak was in the Service Module’s port doghouse (one of four), and on helium manifold 2 in that doghouse. Each of the 28 Reaction Control System thrusters have a flange to supply them with...- Exemplary
So this leak was in the Service Module’s port doghouse (one of four), and on helium manifold 2 in that doghouse. Each of the 28 Reaction Control System thrusters have a flange to supply them with MMH (monomethyl hydrazine; fuel), NTO (nitrogen tetroxide; oxidiser), and helium. The helium is used to actuate valves on both the Reaction Control System thrusters and the Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control thrusters.
They can’t open up the flange to look at the helium seal while Starliner’s stacked, in the Vertical Integration Facility, because MMH and NTO are not exactly the most fun chemicals to be around; they’d have to de-stack Starliner to open up that system, which could delay the launch a month or more.
The service module is the section of Starliner that performs the deorbit burn before separating from the crew module for its reentry and burning up in the atmosphere. So there won’t be another chance to take a closer look at the seal unless they go for a de-stack, but this isn’t a big deal: they already have a good grasp on what’s happening. If Starliner is delayed again past the current batch of launch windows (June 1, 2, 5, and 6), I’d expect a de-stack and a closer look at this seal.
What surprised me was that this leak was 70 PSI per minute. This seems really high! But it turns out that the leak is from an area that has a volume of 15 cubic inches and a nominal pressure of 750 PSI. And from an informed guess, Starliner has about 12,000 cubic inches of helium storage at a nominal pressure of ~4,500 PSI. Assuming linear pressure → density, this leak alone would take almost a month to bring the main tanks down to 750 PSI. So the “70 PSI” part is, in my humble opinion, pretty misleading.
And if the leak does get worse, it can be isolated in flight by shutting down the manifold that the leak is from. I'm guessing that there aren’t any valves between the manifold and each thruster, but if there were the individual flange (along with its thruster) could also be isolated.
And the helium there only has to be pressurized when thrusters are needed, so it could probably be depressurized while Starliner’s docked to the ISS (International Space Station) which would mean the leaky section is only pressurized for 4-5 days. (The system is pressurized during the launch count, both because the thrusters would be necessary during a launch abort and to remove the possibility of a failure after launch. While it’s docked at the ISS, there isn’t any imminent danger if the thruster system can’t be started up.)
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Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative
gravitas Link Parent“The worst thing that can happen” has now changed to “only one person listens to it” :) Congrats on the releases!“The worst thing that can happen” has now changed to “only one person listens to it” :) Congrats on the releases!
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Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative
gravitas Link ParentYep, I’m making all of it. The image I had in mind was the car in front of Casey breaking, Casey not breaking hard enough, the bike tipping forwards and ejecting Casey towards the car. Thanks for...Yep, I’m making all of it. The image I had in mind was the car in front of Casey breaking, Casey not breaking hard enough, the bike tipping forwards and ejecting Casey towards the car. Thanks for the good feedback here!
Thank you!
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Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative
gravitas Link ParentThank you! I’m writing these on-the-day, but I don't think it's quite automatic writing—it’s definitely cleaned up a lot, and I have been (and still am!) too far on the scale towards...Thank you! I’m writing these on-the-day, but I don't think it's quite automatic writing—it’s definitely cleaned up a lot, and I have been (and still am!) too far on the scale towards editing-as-I-write; and I’m hoping that the deadline will force me into automatic writing by necessity.
I haven’t been purposefully tying the music into the writing, but I’m in the same headspace and it seems like it's working out more often than not. And yeah, one of the main motivations was to do something productive with the free time I’ve had lately. And I have found this a lot of fun; thanks again!
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Comment on What creative projects have you been working on? in ~creative
gravitas LinkIn an effort to shift my brain away from quality gear, and into quantity gear, I’ve spun up my own website and set a goal to publish some creative work every day (self promotion, you can go visit...In an effort to shift my brain away from quality gear, and into quantity gear, I’ve spun up my own website and set a goal to publish some creative work every day (self promotion, you can go visit at https://3e8.dev/daily/, self promotion over). I’m only three days in so far but I’m almost proud of what I’ve made so far, and I'm actually a little surprised that my brain has been able to hit deadlines all along (although, as mentioned before: perhaps a little premature.)
And I'm a little hesitant to say things like, “we’ll see how long it lasts” (or indeed talk about confidence at all!) because a significant percent of all problems ever are confidence problems, and confidence problems can always be solved by simply lying. I have tried to get myself into the mindset of “I will be doing this” with this project, and to be honest it's been a lot more effective than I expected. Maybe that’s been helped by publishing only on my own website, which has the (deserved) reputation of a ‘screaming into the void’ deal.
Rambling over. Feedback would be appreciated: do your worst!
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Comment on European Space Agency satellites to test razor-sharp formation flying in ~space
gravitas Link ParentThe occulter (OSC) uses cold gas thrusters. These work by opening a valve to release a high-pressure propellant, where the mass flow itself accelerates the spacecraft. (I'd expect the gas to be...- Exemplary
The occulter (OSC) uses cold gas thrusters. These work by opening a valve to release a high-pressure propellant, where the mass flow itself accelerates the spacecraft. (I'd expect the gas to be something like nitrogen, but I couldn't find any details.) These are pretty much the simplest possible thruster: a tank and a valve. ("Cold" here refers to there being no ignition, not cryogenic temperatures; the OSC's propellant tanks run at a modest 14°C–34°C.)
The other spacecraft (the coronagraph, or OSC) uses hydrazine thrusters, which run their single propellant over a catalyst to release energy.
Cold gas thrusters are relatively inefficient, with a specific impulse of around 70, limiting the total delta-v of the spacecraft. This tradeoff is perfectly okay for stationkeeping because there's less atmospheric drag at these altitudes.
From the article:
The CSC is responsible of performing the main orbital maintenance impulsive manoeuvres with monopropellant thrusters.
To me, this reads as the CSC using hydrazine thrusters for coarse alignment (orbital parameters, keeping the right distance away) to the the occulter, which is then only responsible for fine alignment.
Crewed spacecraft tend to use hypergolic propellants which are relatively efficient, in the ballpark of 300 seconds of specific impulse. These propellants are also storable at ambient temperatures, and hypergolic thrusters are easy to scale up to high-acceleration burns.
Long-duration stationkeeping in low earth orbit, or (more famously) interplanetary probes, can use ion thrusters which are highly efficient (thousands of seconds of specific impulse, reducing fuel mass requirements for the same delta-v), but use so much electricity that high-acceleration burns aren't feasible.
For short-lifetime spacecraft (upper stages, orbital transfer vehicles), cryogenic propellants are possible. These run at very low temperatures (ballpark: -200°C), and at least in the case of upper stages, require high thrust to avoid falling back into the atmosphere.
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Comment on Can hydrogen help the world reach net zero? in ~enviro
gravitas Link ParentHydrogen has good energy density per mass, but not per volume. As just one data point, the 2014 Toyota Mirai's hydrogen tanks (interior volume of about 120 liters[1]) weigh 87.5kg, and hold only...Hydrogen has good energy density per mass, but not per volume. As just one data point, the 2014 Toyota Mirai's hydrogen tanks (interior volume of about 120 liters[1]) weigh 87.5kg, and hold only 5kg of hydrogen.[2][3]. That's somewhere around 170kWH of energy. The equivalent mass in gasoline would be 33 gallons (or 125 liters, roughly the same volume!), containing about 1000kWH of energy. Of course, gas engines are less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells (~66%[4] to ~40%[5]), and I'm ignoring a lot of things around the drivetrain, too—fuel cells, batteries, electric motors, gas engines all take varying masses and volume.
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Comment on Introducing the Epic First Run program in ~games
gravitas Link ParentFor what it’s worth, game publishers set regional prices, not Steam, although they do publish recommended rates.For what it’s worth, game publishers set regional prices, not Steam, although they do publish recommended rates.
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Comment on YouTube's privacy settings now block you from seeing suggested content in ~tech
gravitas Link Parentthe homepage blanking happens when view history is disabled, not with subscription privacy.the homepage blanking happens when view history is disabled, not with subscription privacy.
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Comment on The Val Programming Language in ~comp
gravitas Link Parent(this reply is kinda obsoleted by @skybrian's answer because I was too slow on the draw :) Mutable Value Semantics Almost all languages nowadays have some form of reference semantics. For example,...(this reply is kinda obsoleted by @skybrian's answer because I was too slow on the draw :)
Mutable Value Semantics
Almost all languages nowadays have some form of reference semantics. For example, objects in JavaScript have an identity --- if I have some code that gives someone else an object, and they modify that object, my reference to the same object reflects those changes.
To contrast this, an array (not like C/C++'s arrays) in Swift has value semantics. If they're passed to a function, and that function modifies it, it doesn't affect the array that it was copied from. If the array's items are reference types, they won't be cloned, however.
Swift also has implicit memory management. While JavaScript uses garbage collection, Swift uses reference counting --- code is added to your functions that keeps track of how many referents exist to any reference-typed value. It also keeps reference counts for data structures like arrays, so that instead of copying the array all the time, it can only copy it right before it's modified. That's called Copy-On-Write (COW).
As a lower-level example, Rust doesn't have reference types. If you pass a nontrivial value (roughly any type that implements
Drop--- which run code roughly whenever they go out of scope) anywhere, you can't use it again, ensuring that it'll only be "dropped" once.But Rust still has first-class references, a way to safely pass pointers around that are verified, at compile time, to be "shared XOR mutable". Mutable references are guaranteed to not be shared, and values are guaranteed to not be modified whenever any references to that value exist. This system is the source of a lot of Rust's complexity.
Val only has second-class references. This means that it doesn't have to deal with anything like Rust's lifetimes, removing a lot of complexity from the language. Val also has similar "move semantics" to Rust, meaning it doesn't have to do any implicit reference-counting like Swift.
Zero-Cost Abstraction
In JavaScript and Swift, garbage collection and reference counting respectively are costs that can't be opted out of. In Swift, passing an array around adds code to increment and decrement the reference count, and modifying it adds code to check if it's aliased, and if so, to copy it.
Rust and Val have the same "zero-cost abstraction" philosophy.
For example, Rust has generic code, which can be passed arguments of different types. But a generic function is equivalent to manually duplicating it and changing all the types, so these don't add any overhead at runtime.
As another example: in languages like Haskell, Ocaml, and Python, almost all values are "boxed" which is a fancy way to say each individual value has its own memory allocation. This adds pointer lookups to nearly all code. (I believe Ocaml at least has small-int optimization, where small integers are instead unboxed.) Whereas in Rust, memory allocation is generally opt-in.
The rest...
...is beyond me. :)
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Comment on Distrohoppers, what's your flavor this week? in ~comp
gravitas Link ParentClearing the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable should work. If you're running it from a terminal/command line, you can just run WAYLAND_DISPLAY="" [command]. (If this doesn't work, you may also...Clearing the
WAYLAND_DISPLAYenvironment variable should work. If you're running it from a terminal/command line, you can just runWAYLAND_DISPLAY="" [command]. (If this doesn't work, you may also want to tryenv -uWAYLAND_DISPLAY [command]---this will remove the environment variable instead of setting it to the empty string.)From the KDE application launcher, you can right-click on an application, go to "Edit Application" and then the "Application" tab, and put
WAYLAND_DISPLAY=""in the Environment Variables input. This may or may not work; I tried it out for Discord and it didn't work, but it looked like it should work for Zoom installed from the AUR---other package managers may be similar. -
Comment on Distrohoppers, what's your flavor this week? in ~comp
gravitas LinkI've been running Arch for a couple of years now. On the other hand, I've hopped through several window managers: i3 bspwm River ...and finally, KDE on Wayland Overall, Wayland has been more...I've been running Arch for a couple of years now. On the other hand, I've hopped through several window managers:
- i3
- bspwm
- River
- ...and finally, KDE on Wayland
Overall, Wayland has been more stable in my experience. For example: on X, the display defaults to 60hz. (I'm not sure when this started---I only had this experience after switching to Wayland and back again) I can just run
lxrandrand change the refresh rate to 144hz every time I reboot, but KDE just works, all the time.Annoyingly, KDE only lets me use 60hz or 144hz, whereas my fork of River could switch to 120hz (which is also useful for viewing 60fps content without stutter, but in my experience, I've never noticed this); on Wayland, hitting frame pacing is much more important because of [very complicated reasons] :)
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Comment on Lost Ark is being review bombed after incorrectly issuing permanent bans to inactive players, which leaves a mark on their Steam profiles in ~games
gravitas Link ParentNot sure about DOTA, but the CSGO Rulebook says “The TO [Tournament Organizer] will not qualify, nor allow in any qualifying event, any player who has been "Valve Anti-Cheat" banned ("VAC Banned")...Not sure about DOTA, but the CSGO Rulebook says “The TO [Tournament Organizer] will not qualify, nor allow in any qualifying event, any player who has been "Valve Anti-Cheat" banned ("VAC Banned") in CS:GO.”, i.e. VAC bans for Lost Ark would not affect CS:GO major tournaments.
But the ban isn't a VAC ban: It's a Game ban, which, as far as I know, any developer can use.
If a space company that's being led by rich con man who has never done any engineering can launch 29 customer payloads in a year, why aren't any other companies getting better CEOs and outcompeting them?
[edited to improve clarity and be less argumentative]