Webster

Imagine being a kid (or any age) in the 1870s and experiencing this series of inventions being announced/implemented:

Genuinely excited for the iPhold!

Hoping John Ternus can finally fix the iPhone autocorrect sooj

@latestinspace If you want to see exactly where voyager 1 is check this out: space-explorer.org

🚨 Voyager 1 now only has two instruments still operating • One that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields — the rest have been turned off to conserve power • It's been flying through space for almost 49 years • It's expected to reach a full light-day away around November 2026 — roughly 16B miles away

@Rainmaker1973 Fly around and see how far Voyager is here: space-explorer.org

Voyager is slowly going dark. NASA has been forced to shut down one of Voyager 1’s science instruments to keep the legendary spacecraft alive. After nearly 49 years of continuous operation, engineers have officially powered down the Low-Energy Charged Particle (LECP) sensor on Voyager 1, now located more than 15 billion miles from Earth. The move was not due to instrument failure, but rather a deliberate survival strategy. The spacecraft’s plutonium-powered generators lose about four watts of electricity every year. By deactivating this instrument, mission controllers hope to prevent a critical power shortage that could cause the entire spacecraft to shut down permanently. At this immense distance, communication is extremely challenging — it takes roughly 23 hours for a signal to travel one way between Earth and Voyager 1. Although the loss of the particle sensor ends that particular data stream, two other key science instruments remain active, continuing to send back valuable information from interstellar space. NASA is now exploring even stricter power-saving measures to extend the mission as long as possible. This latest shutdown is expected to buy Voyager 1 at least one more year of operation, allowing humanity’s farthest-reaching explorer to keep sending data from the edge of the solar system and beyond. The spacecraft may be fading, but its journey is far from over.

@anishmoonka If anyone wants to fly around and see how far voyager 1 is: space-explorer.org

In November, a NASA spacecraft that has been drifting through space since 1977 will be so far from Earth that light itself takes a full day to reach it. Send it a message on Monday morning, you won't hear back until Wednesday. It's called Voyager 1. For more than 45 years it has been gliding at 38,000 miles an hour on a straight line out of our solar system. It has not adjusted course since 1980. Every year it loses about 4 watts of power from the small chunks of plutonium that keep it warm and transmitting. It's like your phone's battery shrinking a little each year, except the spacecraft weighs as much as a small car and nobody can walk over to plug it in. The whole spacecraft runs on 69KB of computer memory. That is less than a single photo on your phone, and its signal home crawls back at 160 bits per second, slower than dial-up internet from the 1990s. A modern smartphone has roughly 175,000 times more memory than the computer that left Earth before most people alive today were born. NASA built it to last five years. The original mission ended at Saturn in 1980. Everything after that, leaving our solar system in 2012 to become the most distant object humanity has ever built, was a bonus. The plutonium core will probably run out around 2036. That gives us maybe a decade of data from a place no other machine will reach in our lifetime. Then the radio goes quiet for good. Bolted to its side is a gold-plated copper disc carrying 116 images, 90 minutes of music from around the world, natural sounds of Earth, and greetings in 55 languages. In about 40,000 years it will drift within 1.6 light-years of a small red star called Gliese 445. If anyone ever finds it, nobody we know will be alive to hear about it.

I have 17 year old 12v battery that still works- in case you want to take it to the lab @Panasonic_cp @panasonic

@aakashgupta Just buy a Brother printer- you’ll be set!

Printers haven't improved in 20 years because improving them would destroy the most profitable business model in consumer hardware. HP made $4.2 billion in printing revenue last quarter. Ink cartridge margins run 60-70%. Hardware margins are close to zero. The entire business depends on you buying a $30 printer and spending $300 a year on ink to feed it. Every possible improvement works against that math. Longer-lasting cartridges, more efficient printing, better paper handling that wastes fewer pages. All of those shrink the $4.2 billion number. So instead of improving the printer, HP spent two decades improving the lock-in. Firmware updates that brick third-party cartridges. Subscription plans that disable your printer if you cancel. Chips on cartridges that report "empty" at 40% remaining. Region-locked ink. Canon and Epson run the same playbook. Three companies control 75%+ of the consumer printer market and all three discovered the same thing: the customer already accepted that printers suck. There is zero competitive pressure to make them better because nobody switches printer brands expecting improvement. The setup experience still feels like 2004 because the setup was never where the money was. The money was always in the cartridge you replace six weeks later.

Made with @Lovable

Includes both Voyagers and the SpaceX Roadster. Thank you @NASA for the data. If you have a 3D model of the Roadster and Starman please do send it over @SpaceX.

Decided to build a space exploration game for my kids to learn about the planets and feed their curiosity about space. Includes a simplified version and a to-scale version of our solar system.

Overall like the new direction just wish the sides were done better, not very BMW-esque on the sides.

@PositivFuturist Side profile is very blob like. Missing the “motion” older cars had.

The last cars Germany makes before they’re eaten by BYD - and they’re dull as fuck, a monument to the ideology that’s killing Europe.

@CrazyWeeMonkey Dunno the car design term, but this new car lacks a sense of “motion” BMWs usually have. See LCI E90 side profile

proportions of the Neue Klasse i3 are VERY E36

@TSLAFanMtl Is there another example of such a big gap between the base trim and th next trim up? Great deal for those ok with RWD.

Such a big price gap between this and next model up, especially in Quebec ($22k +15% sales tax = $25k!) Will be hard for most people to justify buying anything else if they're interested in a Model Y. Let's hope the volume incrementality offsets the cannibalisation.

Let’s go!

A future with tons of software “small businesses” with very low overhead able to out price large incumbents.

Hot take: Seems like the real threat to SaaS isn’t mom and pop stores vibe coding a solution- it’s tiny teams building a competing solution and crushing incumbent margins. Over the long term software becomes low margin.

Either I’m in serious decline or Apples keyboard and predictive logic is trash.

@u_m_a_m_i Random but - gazelles aren’t going to just hangout if there’s a cheetah nearby

It’s remarkable how Chinese companies refuse to hire Western branding agencies, leaving even their luxury products to sound like temu grade dropshippers.