Space Concordia, a Canadian university space-oriented student group, which is sort of amateur-level given that it’s driven by students and donations, attempted to reach space not that long ago with a liquid fueled single staged rocket. Here is a video of the launch https://www.youtube.com/live/610YciEs8qg?t=4594&is=aAWo8Y7vi...
Thank you so much for sharing this video, it's just amazing to see a bunch of young amateurs getting so excited about things that would have been virtually inaccessible 20 years ago.
It’s beautiful to see. They have put in such extreme amounts of hard work to get that thing into the air. Designing a robust affordable liquid propelled rocket from scratch is hard. There are so many design decisions, complex simulations, manufacturing difficulties, and tests for every little part of that 11+ m rocket. Accounting for extreme forces, heat variations, vibrations, wind, atmosphere, liquid sloshing, rotation, etc during ascent and descent. It’s not only mechanical/aviation engineering but also software, electrical, sourcing donations, documenting everything in forms of design and risk assessment reports etc etc.
You also have to try to account for every little possible failure mode before launching which is why rockets seldom succeed on the first attempt.
And then dealing with authorities to create new launch sites and permits which probably hasn’t been done in decades in Canada.
Indeed, there are so many different ways a rocket a fail. Launch rail buttons detach, motor chuffs, motor explodes, fin falls off, structural failure (banana), parachute doesn't fire, parachute doesn't deploy, parachute detaches - to name just a few.
thank you for the feedback, it totally makes sense to want those fetures. and yes, I've also seen that there are a lot of sites like that.
its tempting to implement but also comes with more complexities, which Im at this stage not that exited to hop on. I'm thinking of:
- need for a backend with login/authentication -> kills the endless scalability aspect of only having a frontend.
- there are soo many competing tools already existing. Im not sure what my moat would be.
- For me, as a freelancer with max 1 assigments per month so far, a standalone pdf-maker like this one is preferred over being locked in to a Saas product.
- in that case I would want support for e-invoices which seems a bit bureaucratic to get in place
Thank you for testing it and the feedback! I have added support for a second VAT row now (withholding VAT) which is negative. Let me know if it covers your needs :)
It’s going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play out.
One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.
Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.
And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.
Making a good mechanical design is difficult, it usually involves making several iterations which in the physical world takes a lot more effort than iterating on software.
One thing that always bothered me is that most people with 3d printers seem to design things on their own from scratch and rarely take on others designs, improve them and share them. There is little collaboration going on for 3d prints in comparison to software. Except from maybe ~10 widely successful projects that now have healthy communities improving them.
Why is GitHub and similar sites not used more among makers?
You're assuming that CAD tooling is mature enough to enable that.
There is no standard format for CAD projects/design files. STEP is a standard format for exporting finished designs.
There are many CAD-with-code platforms, but none of them converged on a shared language the same way there are multiple competing C compilers.
I might be beating a dead horse with this one, but standardizing around FreeCAD isn't possible either, because it isn't good enough to compete with commercial CAD software like Solidworks, OnShape or Autodesk Fusion. Blender is almost there though, but for mesh-based free form 3d modeling.
Then on top of that, a 3d model on its own is useless. You need to manufacture the part. Printers have varying capabilities and something that has turned out to be particularly essential is multi color printing, since it allows embedding text and markings onto a print but not every printer is capable of doing it or doing it economically.
Ordering individual parts is expensive, which means you'd rather buy a full kit from someone who is getting volume discounts.
One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy.
If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change. Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks. People’s attention spans would recover, making them more capable of listening to opposing views and engaging in meaningful discussion. The overall quality of public debate would improve, and political leaders would be chosen based on objective, long-term policies rather than emotional manipulation.
The reinforcement-learning algorithms that drive these feeds are fundamentally unnatural. They represent a massive, uncontrolled social experiment on humanity—one that is far too powerful for our psychological reward systems to handle.
What needs to happen is education. Education on how the attention economy works. People must learn to resist becoming social media junkies, because every hour surrendered to these platforms reinforces the very systems that distort public discourse. When we lose control over our attention, we don’t just harm ourselves—we actively worsen the societal conditions that enable manipulation, polarization, and poor political leadership.
> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds,
The age groups who spend the most time on TikTok and Instagram are the least likely to have voted for this administration.
There were populist demagogues getting elected before social media and cell phones, too. This isn’t a modern thing.
I know everyone wants to use this moment in politics to blame their own pet peeves, but blaming social media junkies for this election just isn’t consistent.
Exactly. The 60 and 70 year olds I spend time with, women especially (not a dig, but an observation), are just as addicted to facebook as the Instagram / TikTok crowd are to those platforms.
I dont hink doom scrollers are the root cause, but I belive in that we would have a better political debate and better successful politicians if people who spend a lot of time in feeds were aware of the income they generate for platform companies, and how this fuels the attention economy, which in turn amplifies these problems. One of them being: it incentivizes politicians to be populistic in order to be heard through the noise and be successful.
> One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders who make decisions not in the interest of their population, but in service of their own pursuit of power, is social media and the attention economy.
We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.
> If people stopped spending hours each day scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds, media incentives would change.
Many people willingly choose the distraction, they just don't want to bother with politics and stuff. Social Media is just today's most popular distraction at the moment. And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.
> We had the same problems before social media. It's not the cause, just a symptom.
It may not be the cause, but I think it's also not quite just a symptom. To me it looks like social media has taken an existing problem and made it worse, for all the reasons the parent comment describes, and then some.
> And Social Media is also useful for those who seek education. It's really more about motivation and presentation than the medium itself.
Also true, but I'm not sure this is prevalent or impactful enough for it to avoid being a net-negative. Also don't forget about the motivation & presentation of the platforms - they also have some outcomes they can optimize for, and I think there's a strong case to be made that they're optimizing for attention theft.
> Journalism would become more thorough and responsible, rather than optimized for outrage and clicks.
For that we would need a new funding model for journalism. Local journalism (i.e. local newspapers, radio and TV stations) used to be financed by classifieds and ads. Classifieds are long since gone off to the Internet and ads have been replaced by Google Maps plus Facebook, so there's no monetary stream - and as a result of that, there's barely anyone left holding local politicians and companies accountable. Yes, some places have "citizen journalists" and bloggers, but these usually do not have the funds to pay for legal teams and court proceedings, so they usually only target government stuff.
Something like taxpayer-paid media is way too easily corruptible by the government, just look at Hungary for the worst possible outcome. "Mandatory contribution" systems like the BBC or Germany's public broadcasters aren't that easily corruptible, but it still happens - just watch the shitshow every few years here in Germany when the contribution needs to be raised.
I disagree completely. It is very obviously LLM-written, and I would much rather read grammatically poor English than LLM-written text, which has a dystopian vibe and just makes me depressed.
I always have been using em-dashes with specific spacing:
1. replacing parentheses —given that the em-dash in pairs for me mark more-relevant-to-the-main content than a parenthesized expression would— so I use the same spacing as `()`
2. replacing colon or just finishing the sentence with a subsentence— so the spacing goes like for a colon.
Probably unfounded grammatically and against any style guides, but this spacing makes sense to me.
The main reason for populism is that the incumbent governments do a consistently poor job satisfying their constituents' preferences and interests, so people get desperate to find something / someone different that might work better. Always has been, always will be, social media or not.
We haven't invented a governance structure yet that would be immune to this, although some are better than others. I'm sure the current social media algorithms are harmful as well. You can ban viral algorithms, but the hostile actors whose literal job it is to drive polarization / populism will just find other strategies to effectively deliver their message.
"Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education, not to mention the many limitations, taxes, and bans. I mention smoking as an obviously-bad-thing that everyone knows is bad. Education succeeded, and yet, here we are, still puffing poison. But you can also look already-polarized political topics. There's been no shortage of education on those topics either, but if that worked well enough, we wouldn't be decrying populism right now.
> "Education" is nice and all, but millions of people keep smoking despite the obvious harm and decades of education
I think there’s a missed opportunity for media to make it explicit that by giving their time and attention to these platforms, people are directly generating profit. Way too many assume their involvement has no real effect, but it does. I suspect people would be far less willing to log in if it were clear that each session generates, on average, X dollars in revenue. It’s a business model most people still haven’t fully digested.
I know all about their business models, yet I couldn't care less how much money Facebook gets from ad clicks. Them making a profit is not directly harming me.
The things that are harming me are a lot more complicated than that, but people don't have the attention span to be educated about such complex issues. It's easier than ever to spread "education" now. The fact that it doesn't stick is not some grand conspiracy – most people simply don't care.
> One of the main reasons we end up with populist leaders [...] is social media and the attention economy.
This problem of democracy was already discussed in ancient Greece. Social media might have exacerbated it, but it's not new. Over the millennia, nobody found a valid solution, or at least one that is devoid of other problems.
Education is not the solution, as we are probably the most educated populations in history and we are all still prone to the same problem. And who decides what is the correct education? Every side has their own definition, so there you have another problem.
What about exploring new, AI-native ways to monetize?
For example, creators behind libraries like Tailwind could sell Claude skills or MCP server solutions.
If I could pay $20 to make my AI agents significantly better at writing state-of-the-art Tailwind code — while knowing that my purchase directly supports the Tailwind community and its long-term sustainability — I would happily do so.
