I was staring at my passport at the Kosovo-North Macedonia land border and noticed for the first time that the US passport font has a 5 pointed star in the A-hole, which is a surprise when it has no whimsy anywhere else.
Ben Brockert
@wikkit
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Space. Travel. Not yet space travel.
The AI use is so lazy that now people are using AI to make programs that generate prompts for other AIs, and then spamming their pre-slop facility using AI text.
Prompting the slop is so hard that you have to have pre-fab mini slop to be expanded into larger slop.
Then maybe you put it into another AI to summarize the big slop for you?
Korean commercial launch company Innospace had the first liftoff of their Hanbit-Nano rocket last night. It cleared the tower, but during the first stage burn it crashed and exploded.
The first stage is a hybrid motor, meaning it uses liquid oxygen like most rockets but solid paraffin wax as the fuel. Hybrids are generally terrible for a variety of reasons for which I could go on about at length. Australia also has a hybrid launcher that failed this year.
UK had a second canal breach of the year. Their canal network is huge; it was a predecessor to rail, with aqueducts and tunnels and many places where it's a lot more than just a strip of ground dug out. There's little industrial use of it now, but people live on 7 foot wide, 70 feet long steel boats full-time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2lvq0yk9dko
Because 2025, there were at least two YouTubers close by when it happened, https://youtu.be/6FuNqijdUDM?t=487 and https://youtu.be/X4DGXAPE_lA?t=374
One more this morning on my walk to the train station, felt a bit “liminal spaces”.
M̴a̴n̴y̴ ̴B̴o̴t̴h̴a̴n̴s̴ ̴d̴i̴e̴d̴ I missed free hotel breakfast to find out that the Pristina-Skopje train is not running, despite the 2025 schedule posted on their website.
In the unlikely chance anyone finds this via search, the only train running in Kosovo is the Pristina-Peja 2x daily, as far as I can tell.
Very atmospheric freezing smog tonight in Pristina, Kosovo. They really go all out for Christmas in a >90% Muslim country, it takes a while of wandering around to notice that there's nothing specifically Jesus-y. Just Santas, lights, trees, baubles, and two squares covered in temporary restaurant stalls.
Been cloudy most of the last month but is clear tonight, so made an attempt at seeing a Geminid meteor. In a very light polluted city with no car though, so I walked up the hill to a park with an abandoned monument that somewhat blocked the glaring lights of other parts of the park.
Didn't see anything. It's exactly freezing out, so I was unwilling to lie down on the concrete.
Had a fever most of this week, down to crud in the lungs now, so we'll see if this was a bad idea tomorrow.
A plot by "shell_jim" showing that China is getting worse about leaving upper stages on the higher end of LEO.
This needs to be addressed by international treaty. There's no reason to be leaving huge sources of future debris in >5 year orbits.
Finalized to an M7 a couple miles from the border with a big array of aftershocks. Felt out to Anchorage, Juneau, Fairbanks, and Whitehorse. Fortunate that basically no one lives there.
