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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The engineers and managers at NASA are not stupid, and they are not cavalier with astronaut’s lives. They’ve read the Rogers Commission and CAIB reports, and many of them remember Challenger and Columbia firsthand. But they exist in a context.

    That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.

    I really don’t think it’s a stretch to say the first thing isn’t really a factor at all in why this is being rushed, this is 100% down to Trump wanting either a distraction or to be able to say “well I put someone on the moon”















  • You know what’s really stupid about this

    Notepad existed for decades, resisting the general trend of Microsoft software, and it continued to do one thing, and do it well (for the purposes of this argument, let’s not get started on line endings)

    If someone wanted to do more than just view text files, there was wordpad, a stripped down word processor, that would have been the perfect application to add support for markdown to.

    Except they killed it, because enough people must have realised that the word processor bundled with the OS did everything they needed without having to pay Microsoft a subscription for Word.

    So now Microsoft is trying to turn notepad into the rudimentary word processor that people expect to come with their OS, destroying the aspect that made it useful