Starship seemed promising at first if you didn’t ask too many questions.

But, after back-to-back failures and having never come close to completing its design brief
(including actually landing Starship and making the spacecraft fully reusable),
as well as a litany of painful design flaws, such as only being able to take 50% of its promised payload capacity to orbit,
many are starting to question the viability of this idiotic machine
and its “iterative design process.”.

And so they should.
Indeed, with the most recent launch failure as context,
it becomes evident that Starship was doomed from the get-go
and that SpaceX might never be able to rectify this mess

https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-was-doomed-from-the-beginning

Via Reuters:

"People streamed onto the expanse of grass surrounding the Washington Monument under gloomy skies and light rain. Organizers told Reuters that more than 20,000 people were expected to attend a rally at the National Mall."

And oddly enough, they didn't storm the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the government.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-opponents-ready-take-streets-with-nationwide-protests-2025-04-05/

I appreciate that so many are calling the "replace SSA COBOL systems in months using AI" idea out for the risk and difficulty inherent in replacing such a large and entrenched system.

We should also do a better job of articulating a key danger, which I'm sure the people expecting to pull this off don't understand: COBOL handles numbers and arithmetic in a way designed to maintain precision that is not supported natively by modern languages.
https://archive.is/K2TX3

https://werd.social/@ben/114246047179621958

Trump’s brutal crackdown on free speech is unprecedented in the US

Trump is making good on campaign promises:
“Any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump told donors last May.

To aid the government’s hunt,
far-right, pro-Israel groups such at Betar US have been flagging individual student protesters.
The state department has also said it has launched an AI-enabled “catch and revoke” initiative,
which will scrape social media to find “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups”.

And there are signs that this is just the beginning.
Weeks before the 2024 election, the ultra-conservative Heritage Project thinktank released
“Project Esther”, a 10,000-word blueprint for quashing pro-Palestinian and anti-war protests.

The Trump administration has not confirmed whether it has taken cues from the document,
but it has adopted many of its suggestions, including pushing universities to restrict protests and reform their curricula.

Last week, under threat of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding,
Columbia caved to the administration’s demands to implement stronger disciplinary measures against pro-Palestinian protesters and take control of one of its academic departments away from faculty.
The university agreed to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism that academics and activists say could be weaponised to harass and expel critics of Israel.
Even Kenneth Stern, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College and the lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, said he shares this worry
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/30/trump-crackdown-free-speech?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other