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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 19th, 2024

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  • ICBM development started decades before moon landing, same in USSR. It’s true that first space rockets were reused ICBMs, but the tech diverged after that. ICBMs use different fuel because they need to be stored for years with full fuel tanks, for quick deployment. There is no such requirement for space rockets. Space rockets are also much more powerful - you could fit dozens or even hundreds of nukes on Saturn V which is impractical - you don’t put all your eggs in a single basket. Saturn V was never intended to be used as an ICBM.




  • I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

    Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.

    Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).


  • They absolutely can implement China-level censorship right now, they have technical capabilities. In fact there have already been tests of complete isolation from foreign internet in remote regions of Russia.

    They just don’t use it much, yet. I guess they are afraid of consequences and prefer to let people live pretending that nothing has changed. He will go slow with it. Russia is still tightly integrated with western culture and economy (e.g. they have a strong IT industry and internet isolation will kill it for good). Russian culture has been aligning itself with European culture for centuries. They watch western movies and tv shows, read western books, half of the memes they use are from anglophone internet, etc. They are much closer culturally to Europe than to China, even despite all the politics.

    Also legally the initial versions of this thing are from 2005, I think? Rather old. Just nobody cared.

    2014 is when it started for real. At first the laws were rather innocuous (protect the children and stuff). But with each year they were “improved” to become more and more oppressive. Putin is smart enough to realize that if you do it incrementally then there will be less protests and he will appear as a good guy, “protecting the people”. It was the same with “foreign agent” laws.
















  • Variable names shouldn’t need comments, period. You don’t want to look it up every time this variable is used in code, just to understand what it holds. Of course there are always exceptions, but generally names should be descriptive enough to not need additional explanation.

    And context can also come from names of other things, e.g. name of a class / namespace that holds this variable. For example AccessibilitySettings.HighContrast, where AccessibilitySettings holds all options related to accessibility.