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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:

    1. SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.

    2. they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.

    3. the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA’s SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).

    4. the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA’s original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.

    5. finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.

    Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don’t need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.








  • With Tailscale and other mesh VPN, by default all your machines are client and servers. If you have 3 machines A, B and C, when machine A wants to send something to B it will connect to the server that B has.

    These mesh VPN have a central server that is used to help with the discovery of the members, manage ACLs, and in the case one machine is quite hidden and not direct network access can be done act as a relay. Only in that last case do the traffic go through the central server, otherwise the only thing the central server knows is that machine A requested to talk to machine B.

    You still have to trust them if you want to use their server, but you can also host your own server (headscale for Tailscale). Though at this point you still need to somewhat trust Tailscale anyway since they re the ones doing the client releases. They could absolutely insert a backdoor and it would work for a while until is is discovered and would then totally ruin their reputation.




  • If you are in an enterprise environment, it is easier to sell Ubuntu - at least there is a company that can provide support for it behind. Companies want to make sure someone is on the hook to fix an issue that would be blocking to them, and this is much harder with something like Debian.

    That’s why Red Hat is used that much in companies, and what Canonical main revenues are coming from.

    But as a selfhoster, I use Debian by default for my servers. Only if there is a very specific need for Ubuntu would I switch, and I am frankly tired of the Snap shenanigans on my desktop (thinking of migrating to PopOS or KDE Neon).








  • I’ll provide an ELI5, though if you actually want to use it you’ll have to go beyond ELI5.

    You contact a web service via a combination of IP address and port. For the sake of simplicity, we can assume that domain name is equivalent to IP address. You can then compare domain name/port with street name/street number: you need both to actually find someone. By default, some street numbers are really standard, like 443 is for regular encrypted connection. But you can have any service on any street number, it’s just less nice and less standard. This is usually done on closed networks.

    Now what happens if you have a lot of services and you want all of them reachable at address 443? Well basically you are now in the same situation as a business building with a lobby. Whenever you want to contact a service, you go to 443, ask the reception what floor they are in, and they will direct you there. The reception desk is your proxy: just making sure you talk to the right people.