I've noticed that sometimes the same Claude model will make logical errors sometimes but not other times. Claude's performance is highly temporal. There's even a graph! https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
I haven't seen anyone mention this publicly, but I've noticed that the same model will give wildly different results depending on the quantization. 4-bit is not the same as 8-bit and so on in compute requirements and output quality. https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...
I'm aware that frontier models don't work in the same way, but I've often wondered if there's a fidelity dial somewhere that's being used to change the amount of memory / resources each model takes during peak hours v. off hours. Does anyone know if that's the case?
I'm not sure that graph shows a time-based correlation. The 60% line stays inside the 95% confidence interval. Is that not just a measurement of noise?
One of the biggest lies about the surveillance state is that it'll be professional.
NSA employees have used multi-billion dollar American surveillance assets to spy on women they're infatuated with. There's even a cute term for it, LOVEINT.
In another instance, a foreign woman who was employed by the U.S. government suspected that her lover, an NSA civilian employee, was listening to her phone calls. She shared her suspicion with another government employee, who reported it. An investigation found the man abused NSA databases from 1998 to 2003 to snoop on nine phone numbers of foreign women and twice collected communications of an American, according to the inspector general's report.
People aren't able to imagine the ramifications of pervasive surveillance because there never has been such pervasive surveillance in human history. And humans are terrible at predicting how this is going to change things. Especially, with LLMs in the mix.
Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board; the world that's coming will be many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
i’m surprised it went anywhere even inside the government. and imagine all the cases we don’t know about.
not only that but
- someone in the Senate (Wyden?) recently said it’s worse than anyone thinks and people would be outraged
- a judge from the FISA court, said FISA should be revised
Looks like the judge I'm referring to is Collyer. Not quite a call for reform, but she did say the FBI is abusing the court.
> Consequently, in an extraordinary public order on Tuesday, the secret court’s presiding judge, Rosemary Collyer, directed the Justice Department and the FBI to conduct a thorough review of all submissions the bureau has made to the FISC. They have about three weeks (until Jan. 10, 2020) to explain what steps have been taken to assure the candor of each submission.
> Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board; the world that's coming will be many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
The future black markets are going to be filled with all sorts of illegal "private comms" devices to give us our privacy back. I am sure there are sci-fi novels with this theme.
IIRC Snowden said the same in his biography - that the NSA had a bro culture and they abused their powers to obtain compromising images and texts (often sexual) and share them around.
If you're going to use technology to illegally spy on millions people, at least do it with some professionalism and restraint. Bastards.
all this techno surveillance should just be straight out banned by law. the little extra security it might offer is not worth the huge costs in privacy and other unforeseen impacts
> Unless a very strict line is maintained for privacy across the board;
> many, many custom, tailor-made hells co-existing as tumors off of the back of state and corporate surveillance infrastructure.
We already live in this world. Most of the conversations here on HN are naturally America centric, and the situation with the rest of the humans on the planet is secondary. The more distant, the less interest.
For most of that world, please for help are sent via stomach churning amounts of appeals on via WhatsApp. The hope is that someone knows someone at a platform to get them help.
Something like being having your non-consensual intimate imagery shared, means you are pretty much done. Since a majority of people live in nations with more conservative mores (on average) than the west, this means an absurd number of lives ruined.
Fraud, pig butchering scams, are examples of outright crimes. Tech isn’t much better when it comes to customer support. You want to recover your account, or reach a human? Good luck.
I’d love to hear a counter argument for this position: Tech platforms are as valuable as they are, because they do not pay the support costs they incur.
Why is this necessary if I'm paying Anthropic with a credit card? A credit card requires a) credit worthiness, b) a line of credit from a bank based on the individual's identity, and c) regular payments. Why isn't a credit card enough? Why can't certain features be paywalled?
If someone is doing something deeply unethical with Claude, let's say they're using a clade of Claudes to launch cyberattacks, then doesn't Anthropic have fine grained telemetry, payment history, API usage / prompting / requests, and other details necessary to investigate? What does a government photo ID provide Anthropic that these data points don't?
At this point, people usually ask "what if they use stolen credit cards?" or are "state backed?" then well... if they're state backed / using stolen credit cards, then they're also capable of using stolen IDs or state-sponsored "legitimate" IDs.
It doesn't make much of a difference to organized crime / state backed assets. Or, Anthropic. But it makes A HUGE difference for entrepreneurs, founders, and just plain old consumers who use the service.
It's an asymmetric risk.
It's one thing for your credit card to leak, you can get a new one. It's harder for lower-tier / dumber criminals to socially engineer into your personal information for impersonation / ID theft with just a credit card number. But it becomes a lot easier with your scans of your ID.
Unless you're connected with an org of interest, have b/millions in crypto, most better organized groups / state actors won't usually (no guarantees) steal your identity. Identity theft is very much a SME operation in cybercrime.
So when Persona inevitably gets compromised and everyone's personal IDs inevitably gets leaked, the threat posed to entrepreneurs, founders and consumers is higher than the inverse.
I don't understand why Anthropic would expose themselves to the liability; when arguably they have all the tools baked right in.
I don't use their tool for writing. Perhaps it's ego, but I think I'm a better writer. But I shared the above text and asked Claude Opus 4.6 on Max thinking, "What would you say about the argument that the Anthropic has the best tool for threat prevention baked right in?"
Claude is the threat prevention. It's sitting between every user and every potential misuse, in real-time, at every interaction. It refuses harmful requests. It detects prompt injection. It flags dangerous patterns. Anthropic has built the most sophisticated content-aware security layer in history — and it operates at the interaction level, where misuse actually happens.
A JPEG of someone's driver's license sitting in a Persona database does exactly nothing at the moment someone tries to use Claude for harm. Claude's own refusal system does everything.
So the full argument stacks:
1. Credit cards already verify identity (bank KYC)
2. Anthropic's telemetry already detects misuse patterns better than any static document
3. The AI itself is the security layer — real-time, context-aware, at the exact point of interaction
4. Photo ID adds zero marginal security — while concentrating breach risk on users
Three layers of existing protection, all superior to a photo ID. The ID is the weakest link in the security model and the highest-risk data asset in the system. It's the only component that, when breached, harms the user more than the company.
You should write this up.
Persona collects far more info on you than a name and credit card number. There are also some obfuscation services for cards (will it reject a prepaid debit card?), which would require them to go through extra steps to get your actual identity.
>I don't understand why Anthropic would expose themselves to the liability; when arguably they have all the tools baked right in.
What liability? When has a company ever faced any significant penalty for irresponsibly handling people's private data?
> Why is this necessary if I'm paying Anthropic with a credit card?
You can have a CC / Visa / MasterCard when you are under 18 years old, but you need to be 18 or older for Claude. That would be one reasons why CC does not work.
Or maybe they suspect you opened a second account after your first got banned for whatever reason. Like you said it's easy to get a new card.
Incidentally I checked my local laws and it's not possible in any of the banks (UK) to add the underage person to my CC account due to their ToS and perhaps regulations.
Debit? Sure, some banks will issue them to 11-12 year olds. Credit? Apparently not.
It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home.
I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.
That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?
Yes, and the memories of Apollo are made rosy by hagiography. I even wrote an entire thing to explain why, https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri... (yeah, shameless plug, sorry - it's more for the citations than not. You can read the standards and reports I've linked to)
But if I'm allowed to repeat myself from elsewhere in the thread and the meat of the above thing,
It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't.
We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive, as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff.
People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time.
The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth.
And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability.
Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.
Adding to it - Apollo 13 was a mission where 3 men should have died, but somehow didn't. If it had happened while the LM was on the moon, you would have had the CSM lose power, and then two men on the moon would have had no way to return home.
(And for the shuttle design mission - my understanding is it was likely the ability to do a HEXAGON-style film return mission in a single orbit, before the Soviets knew what was happeneing.)
note - I can't verify any of the following, it's more - for lack of a better term - aerospace nerd fan theory at this point.
Post-collapse, people think that the Buran justification was paranoia. But based on what I've read / seen (though this is getting hard to source, so I might be just good ol' hallucinating here), they weren't entirely wrong. The subtext around that large payload bay had to do with the Soviet pursuit of systems like Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment... that weaponized space.
Again, there's a reason for those ASAT tests. There's a reason for the weird specifications set in the early 1970s for the Shuttle. And I don't think deploying a spy satellite alone is it. But this is speculation. AFAICT, nothing was put on paper.
It would have been an incendiary WW3 starting act to capture a Soviet asset. But I think it is understandable if certain people within the American blob wanted that capability at hand.
I wish I was immortal. I'd drop everything for a decade and try to find people from the time who're still alive (and some still are!) and ask them these questions directly - on the record – for posterity's sake. I suspect, we came much closer to war via space than most people think. And because we didn't, we'll eventually repeat these mistakes.
Yes, you're right. I'm not going to pretend that this is a serious proposition. There isn't a lot of evidence to support it.
For me, it's a fun conspiracy theory to engage with. I'm only doing this for the love of the game as it were. Please don't take it that seriously.
But you have to admit, it is a fun theory. A lot of the claims made by the Russians / Roscosmos are most likely false, but if you notice the article says,
> The only concrete document referred to is an intelligence memo that Defense Minister Sokolov supposedly received on February 24 about the assignment of the French astronauts. Whether such a memo really landed on his desk that day is questionable (after all, Baudry’s assignment to 51E had been publicly announced by NASA in August 1984), but the idea that the assignment raised some suspicions in Soviet circles about the objectives of the Challenger mission may not be so far-fetched. There had always been a high level of paranoia in the Soviet Union about the military potential of the Space Shuttle. Misconceptions about the military applications of the shuttle, such as the belief that it was capable of diving into the atmosphere to drop bombs over Moscow, had been a key factor in the Soviet decision to develop Buran in 1976. The Buran orbiter was a virtual carbon copy of its US counterpart in shape and dimensions, exactly to counter the perceived military threat of the Shuttle. Furthermore, a couple of developments in the Shuttle program in early 1985 may have fueled the Soviet paranoia. The Shuttle had flown its first dedicated Defense Department mission (STS-51C) in January 1985 and a controversial laser experiment in the framework of SDI was planned for the STS-51G mission in June.
Whether or not said documentation can be trusted, which bits could be taken as true v. what's just insane paranoia is something that would require more work to discount than most would think. Because, as I've said, the numbers do line up from the article,
> The least one can say is that Salyut-7, which was 13.5 meters long and had a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, would have fit inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay, whose dimensions were 4.6 by 18 meters. In fact, after the final crewed mission to Salyut-7 in 1986, the Russians significantly raised its orbit in hopes that one day it could be retrieved by Buran, which had the same dimensions as the American shuttle.
The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.)
Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
> If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
While I have no reason to believe this particular escapade, I do expect that there are a thousand such wild stories that have remained secret. Watergate seems obvious and explosive to moderns, but at the time it could easily have gone undiscovered or unremarked. How many other similar scale plots, domestic and international, succeeded or failed without ever being surfaced into the history books? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thousands? Millions? Trillions? Hectoseptisquintillions? "Ignorance is not a datum." Teach that as catechism from 1975 and we might have been spared the "rationalist" scourge altogether.
Nice article, although I'm not so sure about this part:
> There’s a reason why there wasn’t an Apollo 18, or 19 and 20. Even though funding had been secured, an executive decision was made to kill the program early, because LoC was inevitable.
Was funding really secure? I believe that was the main sticking point; a quick search [0] seems to confirm this, and the John Young quote below backs it up: "Even if they’d had the money..." Not to say the risk wasn't a factor too of course, but it doesn't look like funding was otherwise guaranteed.
Anyway, I think what sets the risk of the Shuttle apart from Apollo is summed up nicely in one of the quotes (in reference to the Apollo program): "The awareness of risk led to intense focus on reducing risk." In the Apollo program, there was a pattern of rigorously hunting down and eliminating any possible known risks, leaving unknowns as the primary source of risk; on the other hand, the Shuttle program let known risks accumulate continuously until crews paid the price for a bad draw.
When debris hit Atlantis on STS-27 [1] and the shuttle only survived on a one in a million stroke of luck -- the completely broken tile happened to be over an aluminum mounting plate -- it should have been taken as a free lesson on one more known source of risk to eliminate. Instead, it led to seven people dying completely preventable and unnecessary deaths a few years later.
Spaceflight is inherently risky, it's true. That's why things like the Orion heat shield are so worrisome; because it is physically possible at our current level of technology to make it safer, and yet for political / funding / etc. reasons we're not doing the best we can.
So there were 3 Saturn V already assembled and in existence.
Did the CSMs and LEMs exist? CSMs had a similar serial number scheme. And they designated "Block 1" and "Block 2" (iterations of the spacecraft design based on testing) CSM-0## and CSM-1##
The CSM used in Apollo 17 was CSM-114. On wikipedia it says that CSM-115 and CSM-115a were never fully assembled and cancelled, but if you look past that, you can also see that Skylab used, CSM-116, CSM-117 and CSM-118. These were Apollo CSMs, fresh off the same assembly line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_command_and_service_mod...
So there were 3 CSMs.
What about LEM? Similar number scheme, LM-## which is incremented with each one made. So first one was LM-1 and the last one used on Apollo 17 was LM-12. LM-13 is on display in a museum. LM-14 was on the production line (along with LM-15??) and a "stop work" order was issued and they were scrapped. Yes, they were literally broken down and turned into scrap. https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-lunar-modules-lm14-lm15...
So NASA had 1 LEM and 2 were on the way. I think, we can charitably say that there were 3 LEMs available at the time. I think it's fair to say that...
So the Saturn Vs existed and had been paid for. The CSMs existed and had been paid for. The LMs existed / were on the line and had been paid for. The crews existed (and had been partially paid for).
So what is the "funding shortfall" that caused America to stop going to the moon?
The "funding shortfall" here is the money required to pay for the ground crews and personnel for carrying out the mission. And that amount was $42.1 million out of $956 million for Apollo. The total NASA budget was, $3.27 billion that year.
> NASA was canceling Apollo missions 15 and 19 because of congressional cuts in FY 1971 NASA appropriations, Administrator Thomas O. Paine announced in a Washington news conference. Remaining missions would be designated Apollo 14 through 17. The Apollo budget would be reduced by $42.1 million, to $914.4 million - within total NASA $3.27 billion.
$42.1 million. NASA admin just couldn't find $42.1 million of ground staff salaries etc out of the remaining $2.3 Billion budget.
It's probably a coincidence that this happened right after Apollo 13. The decision was announced on September 2nd, 1970. Apollo 13 happened in April, 1970.
----
So yes, the funding was there. I suspect the "funding cut" argument was an attempt to save face; after the US Government (and I mean the Government, it's clear both the White House and Congress were involved) decided to cut the cord post-Apollo 13.
I also suspect this is one of the many "open secrets" lost to time. It might have been known by "everyone" in the know at the time, but those who knew died off, and history crystallized around the written page.
Thank you for the in depth reply! You make a very good point, and the timing of Apollo 13 with the budget decision is pretty damning, I'm convinced.
I will point out however that the budget was congressionally-mandated, and no funds were allocated for moon landings as they were in previous years; it would have been illegal to use funds dedicated to other areas for moon landings. Maybe I'm being overly pedantic here, but to say the 'funding was secured' as in the article implies the decision to cancel the remaining programs lay with NASA leadership; it would be more accurate to say that funding for the remaining programs, though possible, was not secured, most likely as an attempt to save face by congress/govt.
No, that's a great point. Let me rephrase it, they couldn't go to congress in 1970 and say, "hey, we've got $2.3B in other parts of NASA, here's what we're happy to cut so that we can keep Apollo."
Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled in 1970. 3+ years ahead of Apollo 18. Apollo 17 didn't happen until December 1972.
The US couldn't plug this funding "shortfall" in 3+ years out of the many, many parts of NASA?
It's pretty clear that the decision to kill Apollo had been made. The money is just how they chose to do it so that the POTUS didn't have to go on record cancelling Apollo. There was no room for negotiation. POTUS and Congress had decided that Apollo needed to die and so it died. How it died was relevant only so far as to serve as a mechanism to save face.
> the 'funding was secured' as in the article implies the decision to cancel the remaining programs lay with NASA leadership
Yes, you're right. I just don't know how else to put it. The capital outlays for the components of the missions had already been committed to ahead of time. The physical capital was present; the main cost of the missions; those assets existed / were in place. I don't know what the right language is over here.
We can look at what NASA did after the Columbia disaster; namely, redesign the external tank, employ stricter quality control of the foam across the board, better monitoring of the heat shield integrity, and adding contingencies for being stuck in space with a damaged shuttle.
- They replaced the specific foam insulation that struck Columbia with external heaters, and redesigned other areas where foam was necessary to ensure greater structural stability + minimize damage to the shuttle in case of breakage. They also began more thorough inspection of any heat shield panels that would be reused between missions
- They added various cameras, both on the shuttle and on the ground, to monitor the heat shield throughout launch, plus accelerometers and temperature sensors. Also, the heat shield was checked manually on every mission once in orbit for damage, both with an extension to the Canadarm, and with ISS cameras when possible (a funky maneuver [0] where they would do a backflip to flash the shuttle's belly at the ISS for it to take high res pictures)
- Every mission from then on had a backup plan in case the shuttle wasn't in a state to return to Earth (this wasn't really the case before then, which is kinda wild). Another shuttle was always ready to launch, with a new configuration of seats to allow for sufficient crew space
- They sent up equipment and materials for repairs in space with every launch, though admittedly the usefulness of that was dubious and the repair kits were never used
Perhaps 'eliminate' was too strong a word, but there's no reason these precautions couldn't or shouldn't have been taken before it resulted in deaths and the loss of a spacecraft. (well, other than the aforementioned funding/politics/organizational failure)
>Every mission from then on had a backup plan in case the shuttle wasn't in a state to return to Earth (this wasn't really the case before then, which is kinda wild). Another shuttle was always ready to launch, with a new configuration of seats to allow for sufficient crew space
Actually the backup plan almost every time was to just stay on the ISS until another Shuttle could be prepared. They only had another Shuttle on standby a couple times, during missions where they weren’t going to the ISS.
>They sent up equipment and materials for repairs in space with every launch, though admittedly the usefulness of that was dubious and the repair kits were never used
Yeah it wasn’t even useful for a situation like Columbia. It didn’t lose a few tiles or something, it had a giant hole punched into its wing.
There’s no fixing that in space. So I personally think they focused on situations they could theoretically fix, even though those situations weren’t what happened to Columbia.
The solution to a Columbia situation was the aforementioned stay at the ISS. The idea was to have many solutions for a range of situations. No reason to throw away a billion dollar shuttle if there is a repair in space option
It was a hole punched in the reinforced carbon-carbon panel that made up the leading edge of the wing.
They didn’t use tiles on highly curved parts of the Shuttle, like the nose and the wing leading edges. Those areas were structural heat shields, so not tiles at all.
Worth mentioning, this is all particularly fresh in my mind because of a recently released video by the excellent Classic Aerospace History channel on YT, "A Brief History of the Space Shuttle". It's two hours long and provides a reasonably detailed overview of the program, would recommend if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtmOVxcga-Y
The risk couldn't have been entirely eliminated, but most likely the external tank insulation could have been modified to at least reduce the risk of chunks breaking loose and damaging the thermal tiles during launch.
Im not really convinced SLS and Artemis are best effort projects; we improve through refinement, and the only way to get there is cadence. More launches with the same general mission requirements.
One launch a year is not even close to what we can manage with our current technology, to the point where the scope is too small to be legitimately worth doing.
Its not solely a matter of energy; its about opportunity for learning. The current scale is too small to be worth doing at all.
If it was a program of something like >50 payloads over a decade, that gives enough opportunity for refinement, in cost, safety, and scale manufacture methods to actually see something new.
The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program actually requires.
I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.
This is exactly what I mean though; the technical decisions for the SLS, and every bit of "institution" that follow are so flawed that I dont believe you can draw a path from this to future work.
It doesnt matter if you are actually running missions, if the scale is so small and wasteful that its not meaningfully comparable to the aspirational future missions.
> We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new.
It's absolutely wild to me that we went from inventing flying machines to putting people on the freaking moon in the span of a human lifetime. What we've accomplished with technology in the last 500 years, let alone in the last century, is nothing short of remarkable.
But, yes, in the grand scheme of things, we're still highly primitive. What's holding us back isn't our ingenuity, but our primitive instincts and propensity towards tribalism and violence. In many ways, we're not ready for the technology we invent, which should really concern us all. At the very least our leaders should have the insight to understand this, and guide humanity on a more conservative and safe path of interacting with technology. And yet we're not collectively smart enough to put those people in charge. Bonkers.
> It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
That's not true at all.
It is entirely within current technical and fiscal means to launch a much more robust and powerful craft that is capable of goign to the moon and returning with lower velocity by sending it up in pieces with Falcon 9 (Heavy) and assembling it in LEO before launching to the moon.
This mission architecture is intrinsically compromised by social constraints in the form of pork barrel spending dsfunctional decision making process.
Given current levels of technology, this would require docking with a series of space tugs. Not impossible, but Blue Origin is the only organisation working on this at a meaningful scale.
There was also Nautilus-X which never made it beyond the concept stage.
Mir and the ISS were built this way and the Space shuttle, Dragon, and Soyuz have/had no problem docking with the ISS.
If you feel constrained by the size of the Falcon Heavy fairing the now defunct Bigelow Aerospace launched several prototype inflatable habitats that apparently tested well in LEO.
Combine this with a lunar cycler[0] orbit and you could keep reusing the same craft over and over and expanding to it if you want to ferry the astronauts to the moon.
You'll note that everything I'm describing requires existing technology and very proven techniques (except maybe the inflatable stuff) but the thing it doesn't require is a giant rocket like SLS or Starship. I'm not saying that we shouldn't build machines like that, it's just that they really aren't needed for a mission like this and I question why something like SLS was built in the first place.
It is very reasonable to question why SLS was built - during much of its history there was no reason or destination and the destinations that were used changed periodically.
OTOH, Statship has a very good rationale for existing - it is required to be the size it is to support full reuse with reasonable cargo to orbit and lower the cost of launch another ten times.
I strongly disagree that Artemis couldn’t be made safer today. If they had delayed Artemis I until the ECLSS was available to run in space for the mission, that would have improved Artemis II’s safety and possibly eliminated the need for the extra Earth orbit. If they had replaced the Artemis II heat shield (or swapped with III’s Orion) they would have reduced the risk of 2 & 3. SLS+Orion is already safer than the Shuttle with improved SRB knowledge and better abort modes on ascent.
If Congress and NASA had assured SLS and Orion weren’t so expensive and slow to manufacture, they would have the money and hardware to fly more test flights without risking crew. If Congress hadn’t mandated using left over STS parts, there could have been a cheaper and faster to manufacture clean sheet design that wasn’t so inefficient it can’t deliver Orion to LLO.
NASA certainly took many risks back then. People remember Apollo 11 for the landing, but for example on Apollo 8, with a fire roughly 2 years earlier that killed 3 astronauts, they had one manned mission (Apollo 7) and then immediately sent Apollo 8 around the moon with ONE rocket nozzle that had to work (and no LM to escape into, as the Apollo 13 astronauts had to do), basing their faith in trajectory mechanics which hadn't been tested that far out
The ejection seats on Gemini were a joke, and there's an anecdote Gene Kranz tells in his book about Gemini 9 where he thought it was too risky for them to cut away the shroud on the thing they were going to dock with (the Agena having blown up on launch) but NASA was this close to overriding him and doing it anyway (they were saved by the astronauts vetoing it, which was good because the EVA, separately, that Gene Cernan did was incredibly harrowing. he was sweating, way overworked, could barely see)
Artemis certainly seems safer at least in launch. It has an escape system that could be triggered throughout launch. In comparison shuttle could not abort at all until srb separation and after that could have needed risk aerodynamic manoeuvres.
>It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer"
Absolutely it is, if NASA was not constrained by congress to use shuttle components to build the spacecraft, they could have had double the payload mass capability at least (the Saturn V was almost twice as capable, we should be able to do a little better now). This would provide tons of extra margin for safety, and allow a shorter and thus safer route to the moon as well.
If I may be allowed one nitpick. Without fully understanding the FAA doc you link to in the article, I think it would be better to say something like loss of a plane is a 1 in a billion event for commercial airplanes. Many types of parts used in airplanes and jet engines break at much higher rates though, they just don't necessarily cause a plane loss when they do.
Wouldn’t the soviets or any other adversary prepare against letting NASA capture their satellites? You need a very small amount of C4 in the satellite to destroy the shuttle in the event of capture. Tampering with other entity‘s satellites can best be done with satellites. That also frees resources needed for bringing life support systems to orbit.
But at that point if you're building in a self-destruct for a weapon that can be so dangerous it's worth sending a shuttle to take it away from you, surely it's better to adversarially trigger the self-destruct and not bother sending the shuttle. So the C4 option might simply be a bad idea: make it more difficult and costly to remove your weapon, rather than triggering your own self-destruct.
There are easier cheaper ways of destroying a satellite than sending a space shuttle. We would have only sent a space shuttle to capture it for intelligence purposes.
The Smithsonian article on John Young that you linked to is a good one. The only John Young quote they didn't include that I wish they had was his response to the proposal to make STS-1 an on purpose RTLS abort: "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
I don't think it's sad to admit that we may never know the answer. I'd like to be surprised, but the laws of physics make it pretty unlikely. Besides, maybe the other species are worse than us.
I often think about the shuttle program in relation to all these crazy complicated, wildly expensive, and incredibly fragile space telescopes we're sending to LEO or the Earth-Sun L2. Would be damn useful to be able to repair/upgrade these things like with Hubble.
Obviously I realise the shuttle program was pretty far away from being able to head out to the Earth-Sun L2(AB, and wasn't even working towards it. But man, it would be nice to have that ability.
For JWST, for example, besides not being designed for repair, it is incredibly delicate and having a spacecraft approach would likely destroy the heat shield and break it permanently.
"As of 1 April 2026, there have been five incidents in which a spacecraft in flight suffered crew fatalities, killing a total of 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts.[2][how?] Of these, two had reached the internationally recognized edge of space (100 km or 62mi above sea level) when or before the incident occurred, one had reached the U.S. definition of space at 266,000 ft, and one was planned to do so. In each of these accidents, the entire crew was killed. As of April 2026, a total of 791 people have flown into space and 19 of them have died in related incidents. This sets the current statistical fatality rate at 2.4 percent."
2.4% is not bad given how new this still is and how extreme the speeds and energies are.
Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion.
I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planets might be much more massive than Earth. On one with 3X our gravity a space program might never get going.
NERVA as envisioned had terrible thrust to weight ratio, not really usable to launch from a Super Earth. Nuclear lightbulb, orion or heck NSWR would likely work though. And bonus points for not having to think about landing systems for the return trip. ;-)
In that case aliens from a super Earth would be unable to get off it unless they decided to salt their biosphere with fissile waste. NERVA is at least contained if it works properly.
So no space program from a super Earth until they figure out not just fusion but compact high density fusion that could fly. You’d need stuff like in The Expanse, or at least in that rough ballpark.
Using fission is something they probably wouldn’t do unless they faced an existential reason forcing them to go to space, like deflecting an asteroid.
I’m a little obsessed with Orion though. The fact that the math works on that lunacy. The good old devil’s pogo stick.
If you could make pure fusion bombs it would be maybe politically viable, especially if you also use superconducting magnets to make it less just brute force. You’d still induce a little radioactivity from neutrons but it would be short lived and not even close to fissile fallout bad.
To see that thing launch. From somewhere very remote though, probably Antarctica. And from many miles away, and probably with welders glass. But damn. That would be epic.
Yeah the more I learn the more I buy the rare Earth explanation.
Life may not be that unusual but it might be mostly just goo: little extremophile type bacteria and maybe very tiny creepy crawlies living in deep seas, underground, in liquid mantles in ice moons, etc.
But to get stuff even as sophisticated as frogs and bunnies, let alone something that can try space flight, requires a place that is all of: big, stable, with abundant energy, with high enough metallicity, and in an environment well shielded from flares and impacts.
Stability is definitely good but excessive stability leads to stagnation. A perfect example of this is what's been coined as the "boring billion"
"In 1995, geologists Roger Buick, Davis Des Marais, and Andrew Knoll reviewed the apparent lack of major biological, geological, and climatic events during the Mesoproterozoic era 1.6 to 1 billion years ago (Ga), and, thus, described it as "the dullest time in Earth's history"
You might enjoy reading about theorized “Superhabitable” planets. A super earth with about twice the mass of Earth would likely have plate tectonics and even more internal heat. Plus, if it orbits a K-type star that’s about 85% of the mass of the Sun, it could remain habitable for tens of billions of years.
By comparison, Earth may be barely habitable. It is amusing to think that we may be living on the galactic equivalent of Australia.
Perhaps the upside is that our gravity well is low enough to make routine spaceflight possible.
> I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket
Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and expensive missions in history, it’d be extremely unlikely to lead even to a base, let alone a settlement.
Yet with all that, people still talk about the Fermi paradox as though it’s a mystery.
It makes me think we’re really dealing with a kind of religious belief. Religion backfills reality with comforting fantasies, like life after death. In this case, the fantasy that there are much more advanced, interstellar spacefaring civilizations than ours elsewhere in the galaxy. This implies that humans too could one day become an interstellar species (with enough grit and determination and pulling back on the control stick and yelling, I suppose!) But somehow, mysterious effects prevent us from ever observing any evidence of this belief.
It’s a logical extrapolation if you think life is a natural phenomenon. It would be exceedingly weird to see no evidence for it, but of course we have not been looking long or far.
And yes, space flight is brutally hard. Look up the history of sailing. Look up the Polynesian indigenous peoples and how long that took, through multiple waves of exploration, or the people who walked across a land bridge to North America during the ice age. Space flight is easier and safer than some of those feats, given the tech they did it with at the time.
If there is a fantasy it’s the idea that we’d have bases on the Moon and Mars by now. What we are doing today is the equivalent of early Polynesians hollowing out some logs and going fishing.
Natural doesn't mean likely. Say life rarely gets started, because it requires some kind of accidental evolutionary engine involving rivers and clay crystals, some unusual conditions of weather and geology. Then say life rarely gets complex and big, because mats of bacteria can be the dominant species indefinitely. So the universe is mostly dead, and the living parts are mostly slime. Then say actual human-like intelligence, the kind that tries really hard to imagine new things to meddle with and new spaces to explore, such as exploring the space space, is a freakish mutation and is unlikely to be adaptive at first. So it rarely happens and then usually dies out straight away. The rare instances of complex life, then, are mostly just floating around in oceans wiggling their complex limbs fecklessly. So those are two terms in the Drake equation, with an extra one about complexity added in the middle, and they multiply together to make things very unlikely by an unknown amount. We don't know what the numbers are. It might be natural that there isn't any sign of life out there, if the small probability of spacefaring life is smaller than space is big.
Ultimately we don’t know. We have not been looking far or long.
SETI BTW is kind of a joke. The only way we would hear anything is if someone was very close or was intentionally blasting a signal at us at incredible transmit power (like terawatts or more). Radio signals fade pretty quickly.
> It’s a logical extrapolation if you think life is a natural phenomenon.
No, it really isn't. Taking life on Earth as an example, almost all of our technological signatures are effectively undetectable as little as 5 light years away. See e.g. the paper "Earth Detecting Earth" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02614). The maximum detectable distance for unintentional signal leakage is 4 light years - about the distance to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. So if we're looking for that kind of signal, we have a population of exactly one star system that we might be able to detect something from, at the maximum end of the detectable range.
The paper also lists a couple of exceptions, which are the highly directional Deep Space Network and planetary radar, theoretically detectable at 65 ly and 12,000 ly respectively. But these only cover small parts of the sky for short periods, making interception of such signals extremely unlikely. Also, signals like that have only been transmitted for decades at most, so there are at most a few thousand star systems that could conceivably have intercepted one of these signals.
All in all, while the probabilities involved can't be calculated with certainty, they do certainly lean towards it being very unlikely for us to have detected another technological civilization. Which is consistent with what we actually observe.
Detecting non-technological signs, like atmospheric gases, is more feasible but also not necessarily definitive. E.g., the recent evidence for dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18b is considered a tentative candidate for a biosignature, but is in no way definitive.
In short, the Fermi "Paradox" mainly confirms what we now know about the difficulty of detecting life beyond our solar system.
As for spaceflight vs. sailing, at some point extrapolation from analogies just breaks down, and interstellar travel is certainly one of those cases. The energy demands, distances, timescales, technological limitations, radiation issues, economic and political issues, etc. all combine to make it an effectively impossible project.
I suspect that it is NOT a weaker system than before, it is more accurate about the mortality rate. In other words, there are fewer "unknown unknowns" than there were in the 60s and 80s, partially because of explosions that took out previous astronauts.
(Some would snidely say as long as they don't put seven people on the rocket they'll be fine.)
1 out of the 12 crewed Apollo missions resulted in the death of the crew, so a 1 in 12 effective mortality rate.
Apollo 13 was a very close call. If that had ended in failure the mortality rate would have been 1 in 6.
So 1 in 30 would be a pretty clear improvement from Apollo, and we are a lot better and more thorough at modeling those risks and testing systems than we were during the Apollo program.
Is 12 enough of a sample size to make a statistical judgement? What if there were 20 more which didn’t have a loss of life? Is it then 1/30? What if there were 20 more?
The risk factor is calculated _per mission_ from what I understand. You can have three accidents in a row and nothing for decades but the risk itself can still be 1 in 30.
Your point is fair and and important distinction. I think when estimating a risk factor though, this empirical data, while a low sample size, is a valuable statistic because it's empirical, and not that small of a sample size. Maybe going forward, we have 3 risk levels:
- Historical. Low N as you say. (Even though each mission and spacecraft is different and they're spread out over time, there's value in this)
- Bureaucrat number; absurdly low, but looks good to politicians etc
- Engineering estimate
Yes, actually. This is similar to having a 100 year flood five years in a row. It doesn’t mean that the flood occurs only once in 100 years. _On average_ it’s 1/100 probability of occurring in any given year.
But then, Apollo 1 was after all the first mission on the Saturn V. I think we should assess even its pre-launch risk much higher than the rest of them. Similarly Artemis II has a much higher risk than the subsequent ones will have.
But we’re talking about the risk of a defined set of events that have concluded, not a prediction of the future.
Of course Apollo would have likely had a better average if it had continued, but the risk of the Apollo program, as executed, included things like the first flight of the Saturn V.
If the final empirical mortality result of the Artemis program is 1/30 or less, it will be better than Apollo in that statistic.
A comparison of acceptable mortality is where this discussion began. If Apollo was acceptable at 1/12 (We did it, it was apparently acceptable as the program was not cancelled due to mortality rate) then an acceptable mortality of 1/30 is stronger than Apollo, not weaker.
If I toss a coin four times and it comes up heads three and tails once, it doesn’t mean that there’s a 75% chance that this coin lands heads up. Be careful about conflating risk factor and mortality rate.
But you doing better is independent of the risk involved. The chances of you getting 3/4 heads or better is around 31%, so theres ~69% chance you’ll do worse next time round. Doesn’t change the fact that each coin toss is still 50/50.
> Doesn’t change the fact that each coin toss is still 50/50.
That assumes a fair coin. The fact is you don't know what the odds were of getting heads or tails for that particular coin, all you know is that you got 3/4 heads. And in this analogy, a few hundred coins have every been made, in maybe a dozen styles, none of which have been fair, so you have no good reason to believe that this particular coin should have 50/50 odds of landing heads up.
And it may be, but the important thing is we don't have priors that lead us to expect it to be fair.
We are not dealing with the tautologically true statement that we are assuming the 1/1000 estimate is correct and thus the odds are 1/1000 no matter what we measure. We are dealing with whether or not we can safely reject the hypothesis that the true odds are 1/1000 based on the actual observation of 1/12.
Billions of coins have been minted, and flipped a countless number of times, and we can do the physical analysis of coins such that we know the odds of a coin not being fair, without deliberate intervention to make them such, are astronomically low. As such no one is going to reject the hypothesis that a coin is fair based off of a small number of coin tosses. Hell even if you got 10 heads in a row, while the odds of that sequence is 1 in 1024, we would probably conclude it was luck rather than that the coin was flawed.
For spaceships on the other hand, those priors don't exist. We need to look at just the data from this particular test. The odds of a 1/1000 event occurring in the first 12 attempts is 1 in 84. For rejecting the hypothesis that a mass produced coin is fair, those odds aren't bad; but for rejecting the null hypothesis that the apollo capsules were just unlucky it's way over the reasonable threshold.
The original discussion was about acceptable mortality rate. Artemis's target is 1 in 30, which is better than the empirically observed mortality rate of the actual Apollo missions. The mortality rate is a target. And if that target is an improvement over the actual outcome of the Apollo missions, I think it's difficult to say that the target is weaker than Apollo's, which was the claim up the thread that I was responding to.
The public doesn't care if Apollo had a theoretical risk rate lower or higher than 1/12, what they saw was that 1/12 missions resulted in the death of the crew. The NASA administrator explaining that their estimated risk was only 1/1000 doesn't change the real-world perception or outcome.
It honestly says something about how absurdly risk averse our society has become that an 1/30 chance of death is considered too high for a literal moonshot. You can advertise a 1/3 rate of slowly choking in vacuum and I bet you will still get a five mile long queue of people signing up for the mission.
If you want a historical comparison, over 200 men left with Magellan on his voyage around the globe and only 40 returned.
Or the extreme casualty rates experienced by the (mostly very young) East India Company clerks in Calcutta. From Dalrymple's The Anarchy:
"Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year."
Agreed, but people were often forced into those conditions. Or were forced to make an impossible survival decision.
Were Magellan’s men volunteers? For example, in the incident with The Wager, 1,980 men left on 6 ships, and only 188 survived. Men of the original men were press-ganged (kidnapped to crew these ships), and a lot of them were even taken from an infirmary and not in great health. And, of course, conditions were pretty terrible.
So yeah, we’re more risk adverse… and also a lot better at keeping people alive. I think most people would not have signed up for some of these really risky endeavors if they knew the true risk.
Maybe we should be glad that afawct none of the people exposed to the risks of artemis ii mission were force on it against their will. I'd bet the even in The Wager you would have have some clear headed people who knew the risk and still chose it
Crazy indeed, glad that someone else has already mentioned Magellan, because that’s whom I also had in mind. Not sure there’s a solution for this because at this point the risk scare has been institutionalized among most if Western (and not only) society.
It's worth noting that Magellan lived in a time of extremely high infant and childhood mortality. Approximately 30% of newborns would die in infancy, and the odds of reaching 16 were only about 50%. This wasn't just skewed by people in poor circumstances, even the wealthy elite in society with the best access to resources and medicine of the time faced grim odds. Everyone went through their formative years with the understanding that their survival was unlikely, they watched their siblings and friends of the same age die, they were raised by parents who knew damn well that half their children likely wouldn't make it,and their society was structured around the assumption of an heir and a spare. Under such circumstances, the value of human life, and thus the reward necessary to justify risk, would logically have been much lower.
Indeed, it's rather amazing to think about just how recently things changed. The generation that first went to the moon had a much lower infant mortality rate than in the 1500s, but it was still about 20 times higher than today, and critically they were all raised by parents and lead by people who had grown up around normalized high infant mortality rates. Boomers are the first generation where infant mortality was continually below 5%, and millennials are the first generation to be raised by parents who considered their children's survival to adulthood a given. And of course that's for the developed world; global infant mortality only fell below 5% in 2010. Right now is the first time in human history that you can say with 95% confidence that a random human newborn will survive to adulthood. We should be much more risk averse than our ancestors, we are on average anteing up many more happy, healthy years than they were.
You're acting like if it fails they can just say "Well we said it was 1/3!" and then just get on with it. "Oops we lost a zillion taxpayer dollars and no one will mind and maybe they'll give us more money this time around!" That's just not how the world works.
That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.
I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
Space is hard. If we didn’t accept these parameters we wouldn’t go to space. Apollo lost one entire crew and almost two, the Space Shuttle lost two missions where the whole crew died. The risks are real.
We stopped going to the moon because it's a vanity project. It's expensive, risky, and there isn't much more science to do or that can't be done by robots.
A lot of advancement is multipurpose. CNCs are more accurate than machinists, computers are faster. And we have a lot of the technical knowledge written down.
Machinist never stopped working even after advanced CNCs proliferated. Humans had records of how things were made and yet new generations had to relearn it - and fail in the process.
This mission is not about sending stuff out to deep space. Its about sending out new generation of humans to deep space.
Even if you could guarantee that these new humans have exact same experience of past humans, can we guarantee that past decades simulations or theoretical knowledge acquired - while NOT actually doing something - will effectively reduce the chances of mortality?
If we got to a point where going to the Moon was significantly safer than that, we’d better start trying things even more ambitious and risky or we’ll stagnate as a species. The fatality rates for circumnavigating the globe or settling in North America or attempting to invent a working flying machine were much, much higher than that.
It's unclear if the shuttle was actually safer or if NASA is just more honest about the odds of catastrophic failure.
There are reasons to think Artemis is safer. It has a launch abort system that the shuttle lacked. Reentry should also be much safer under Artemis; the capsule is a much simpler object to protect.
Crossing the Atlantic and the discovery of the Americas? How many deaths were acceptable during that initial period of exploration? That’s where we still are with space.
And the atmospheric entry is still the same as 1969. Physics doesn’t change.
They could go twice the same distance, the risk would be roughly the same at that point. It's mostly the complexity and changes that make it more risky once the initial trajectory is in place.
You need a lot more impulse and more fuel to go twice as far. Probably more correction burns. A longer final burn before entering the atmosphere. So the risk of loosing the engine is much higher and probably increasing more than linear with burn time/change of impulse.
The shuttle didn’t accomplish that much and didn’t get us as far as Artemis just did, the risks are well worth it. Nobody is forcing the astronauts to do their astronaut thing, imo they’re aware of the risks they’re taking, and kudos to them for that.
Come on! No one is forced to get on the rocket. If you don’t think it’s worth it, don’t go!
From a social perspective, I
would recommend to think of the average death per capita of an effort, which is effectively nil for Artemis (very few astronauts vs us population) compared to generating electricity with coal, which kills many annually.
Eh yeah? This is frontier, pioneer stuff. We should have a greater appetite for risk as long as it’s completely transparent and the astronauts know what they’re getting into. Realistically though, there is essentially a rocket a day going up and they rarely fail anymore, so the true risk is probably much lower than 1 in 30.
Astronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to complete the mission and make it back safely, but every single person who signs up for a space mission wants to take that risk, and we don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that space can be safe, that accidents are avoidable, or that the astronauts themselves don’t know what they’re signing up for. A mission that fails should not be considered a failure unless it fails because we didn’t try hard enough.
My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.
1) Eventually you will die, no matter what. It can be the most mundane thing. Slipping on a ketchup splatter can cause great damage for example.
2) It's a profession where you intentionally kill people, so, that changes the calculation for your own risk.
3) It's a unique opportunity.
(and potentially)
4) Gives a sense of living / be in history books for his family.
So you have a possibility of a guaranteed exciting life for a death that you anyway will have, but doing something you love, it's not too bad.
> but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
They understood it to be extremely risky immediately. They understood the ice issue early on as evidenced by the fact that they completely changed the coating on the external fuel tank to try to compensate for it. They also added ice bridges and other features to the launch pad to try to diminish the risk. They also planned for in orbit heat shield tile repair. They specifically chose the glue to be compatible with total vacuum conditions so they could actually detach and rebond a whole tile if necessary. They developed a complicated and, unfortunately wrong, computer model to estimate the damage potential of ice strikes to the heat shield tiles. What they _finally_ came to understand was that you just have to swing the arm out on orbit and take high resolution pictures of the vehicle to properly assess it's condition.
NASA was and always is very bad at calculating systemic risk. They have the right people developing risk profiles for individual components but they've never had the understanding at the management level of how to assess them as a complete vehicle in the context of any given mission.
> Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle.
The huge advantage they now have is a capable launch escape system which can possibly jettison them away from the rocket should any issues arise during ascent. That was the one thing the shuttle could not possibly integrate.
On the other hand they could take a far larger crew to orbit and maintain them comfortably for several weeks during the mission. The "space bus" generated a healthy 21kW from it's fuel cells and created so much water that you had to periodically dump it overboard. This was a blessing for the ISS because you could bag up all that excess water and transfer it for long term use.
Anyways.. as you can tell.. I just really loved the shuttle. It was a great vehicle that was ultimately too exceedingly tricky to manage safely.
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle
Do you have a link? I’m asking because it is very easy to make mistakes when comparing risks. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 translates that into “That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.” If that interpretation is correct, given Artemis has a crew of four, that looks more like a 1:120 chance of a mortality of 4. I think that would make it an improvement over the space shuttle.
That’s precisely my point. The question is what a crew mortality rate of 1 in 30 means.
If it means that, on average, a team member dies every 30 flights, with a crew of four, it’s likely there are fatalities in ‘only’ one in every 120 flights.
For space shuttle, that number was about one in every 60 flights. So, with that interpretation, Artemis would be about twice as safe as the Space Shuttle.
If, on the other hand, it means that, if you step aboard Artemis, your chance of dying during the flight is about one in 30, the Space Shuttle would be about twice as safe as Artemis.
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30.
How did they arrive at that number?
(Eg. Did they arbitrily establish the target at the outset? Or did it evolve by gauging the projected failure rate of their core mechanical etc. systems as those began to take shape, then establishing a universal minimum in line with that, to achieve some level of uniformity and avoid drastically under/over-engineering subsequent systems?)
> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle.
I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk.
The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer.
The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987.
I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee.
The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.
Huh, COMPLETELY off-topic and bordering on weird, but I saw something on your profile that was eerily reminding to an idiosyncrasy I've personally possessed. I clicked your profile and saw the first line in your bio was a hexcode for salmon/persimmon color; my favorite color as well, and I used to religiously use it in much of my projects as #FF7256 - it's even my HN banner color. I was curious on what the color or its application means to you?
The craft has aerodynamics and speed. It might be figuratively true "unrecoverable" but if it takes e.g. 2 weeks to complete a return, their oxygen and food and batteries ran out. Alternatively if it enters too fast they return ... in pieces.
I think you're being a pedant, if your point is a grazing entry causing rebound skip ultimately returns to some orbital path downward.
You seem to intentionally be ignoring the original quote that any error may have caused them to be flung into space. This is patently false unless the one math error is pumping in hundreds of pounds more propellant and burning far longer than the scheduled burns. NASA would need to make a significant series of mistakes beyond orbital math for the "flung out into space" statement to be true.
They certainly could've gotten the return wrong but with a perigee of 119 miles they arent even in a stable orbit and likely could deorbit themselves using only rcs thrusters at apogee, or by just waiting a few orbits.
This is underselling the risks. On top of the many trajectories which push them into unrecoverable situations, leaving them stranded in orbit, there can be trajectories where the moon gives a gravity assist strong enough to fling the spacecraft into escape velocity, fulfilling the OP.
In fact, the trajectory they chose for this mission exploited the opposite effect to yield a free return without propellant expense.
In the modern day, the chance of a math error being the root cause behind this failure mode are vanishingly small, but minor burn execution mistakes that do not require hundreds of extra pounds of propellant are definitely plausible. They were extremely common in the early days of spaceflight and plagued most of the very first moon exploration attempts. Again, with modern RCS this is unlikely. But reentry is still incredibly tight and dangerous. Apollo famously had a +-1° safe entry corridor, and Orion is way heavier and coming in even faster. If their perigee was off they could’ve easily burned up or doubled their mission time, which they may not have been able to survive.
The amount of things that would have to go wrong for the craft to get an accidental gravity boost and be ejected would be significant.
I feel like the original claim paints the whole thing as on a knife edge and barely achieved by virtue of not making a single mistake. In today's age with so many moon landing deniers and worse I feel like we should be specific about where the actual dangers challenges and unknowns there were here. In reality, the orbital mechanics are one of the simplest parts of the entire problem, at least when we're talking about a moon flyby
Yes, this is a fair point. I agree that orbital mechanics is trivially easy compared to everything else. The chances of a math mistake in particular are null, these trajectories have all been calculated years in advance.
The moon's gravity turns out to be "lumpy" because its density is not constant. This was detected by the Apollo missions and caused them to make errors in orbit calculations. This source of error could have influenced the flyby.
I’ll agree, it seems crazy that it left earth, made it to the moon, and never really left earth orbit at all. That the furthest we’ve been away is still destined to return on its own.
Watch the NASA video carefully. It's clear that, even before the "loop" begins, Artemis is slowed down and is soon going to reverse direction relative to Earth. Which of course it would anyway, as you say--because, as the video you linked to points out, it doesn't have Earth escape velocity. The TLI burn gave it just enough velocity to reach the Moon's orbit with a little extra speed left over to get it about 4000 miles further.
But what would not happen without the Moon there is the "backwards" part of the loop--the part that took Artemis around the far side of the Moon. The Moon's gravity is what did that. In the Moon-centered frame in the video, yes, it looks like just a slight deflection--because that frame is moving with the Moon, whereas Artemis was moving backwards--in the opposite direction from the Moon in the Earth-centered frame.
Without the Moon there, Artemis would never have moved backwards, relative to the Moon's orbit, at all. Its trajectory in the Earth centered frame would have been a simple ellipse, with a maximum altitude from Earth a little higher than what it actually achieved (since the Moon's gravity did pull it back a little bit).
No, it's not. You aren't responding to what I actually said. See below.
> the “free return” would have happened if they launched entirely in the wrong direction.
But it would not have been a free return that let them see the far side of the moon, which is what I said. The Moon's gravity is what made that possible. And that was very significant.
I'm sorry that you disagree with the correct things I've said. Your "source" is a YouTube video--hardly a rigorous scientific or engineering treatment. And I posted upthread in another response about the limitations of the viewpoint the video takes. Have a nice day.
Hmm. Maximum speed attained by Artemis II when they left their initial orbit was about 11.1 km/s IIRC. While this is somewhat less than true escape velocity from Earth (11.2 km/s) and you are technically correct, it is also enough of a speed that if you fly away in any random direction (and not a carefully calculated one), perturbances from the Sun and other massive objects will probably prevent you from reaching any sort of stable orbit around the Earth, and you will start bouncing around the inner Solar System in an erratic way.
I certainly wouldn't like to model that trajectory for months or years.
The sun’s pull on the ship at the outside limit at the moon, is obviously negligible compared to the pull of the Earth. This should be obvious, because otherwise the moon would have left long ago.
Why is this so difficult to understand? Honestly I think that misleading NASA graphic did a lot of damage.
You throw in acceleration, which I never mentioned and doesn’t matter. The Artemis II never left Earth’s gravitional pull, the original issue was effectively what if it missed - and the answer is no big deal.
That is not how statistical calculations of risk are made. If the crew has 1/30 crew mortality rate, and there were 30 crew members, that does not mean there is a 100% chance that one dies.
While there is negligible chances that only a portion of the crew were to return, the outcomes are closer to black and white of nearly 29/30 full crew return and 1/30 no crew return.
I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.
That's physically not possible due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't.
We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive (8 NASA, 2 sister MIL programs), as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff.
People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time.
The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth.
And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability.
Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out.
How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.
I think we are a long way along from digging out Dr Feynman to look into why a shuttle exploded.
Unless you happen to have some deep links into NASA, in which case please elucidate us all, then why not celebrate a happy and safe return from a sodding dangerous mission that involved things like >25,000 mph relative velocity and some remarkable navigation.
When you depart earth (close quarters gravity, air resistance, things in the way), everything moves really fast, really fast and any acceleration becomes an issue really ... fast!
The moon moves, the earth moves: both famously in some sort of weird dance around each other and both orbit around the sun. Obviously the moon affects the earth way less than vice versa but it still complicates things.
I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
> I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
I have been excited for Artemis--yes it's big and expensive and late, but look how it has brought out the best of what humans can be--but, despite all that, the heat shield situation was textbook "normalization of deviance." Just as the O-rings were not designed to have any damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, just as there was not supposed to be any foam or tile damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, so too was the Artemis I heat shield not supposed to come back with damage, but they...
I'm not trying to be negative, and risks are inevitable, but the resemblance to me was uncanny. The lesson with normalization of deviance is that a successful result does not inherently mean a safe decision. After all, most of the time that you play Russian Roulette you will escape unharmed.
Actually the heat shield was the exact opposite of normalization of deviance. When the Artemis I heat shield behaved in an unmodeled way, they spent two years analyzing the issue, modified their test system to create all conditions of reentry, came up with a new model that took into account more variables and explained the results seen on Artemis I, then duplicated those results in test to confirm. The condition of the Artemis II heat shield is a sign that they were most likely correct.
I still think they shouldn’t have flown astronauts on Artemis II without an unmanned flight to reduce risk, including other systems like ECLSS as well as the heat shield. But it was the opposite of normalization of deviance.
That's a fair point: they did tests and made changes to adjust for what they found, and that isn't normalization. That is a contrast to prior experiences
I was drawing the comparison through the lens of using hardware that was known to be flawed for the mission by convincing themselves it was actually fine. Particularly since they did redesign the heat shield based on the analysis, but it was too late to install on Artemis II, so that new shield will debut with Artemis III
I agree that in sum, it would have been nice to be able to do an unmanned test, but that would have been an exceedingly difficult and expensive decision to make. I look forward to seeing the results for the Artemis II heat shield
There will always be issues on something a mad as putting some people on a firework and shooting them at a moving target 100,000 miles away from a moving platform.
The heat shield failure was a test and the result was a working heat shield, when it counted. That's the point of tests. NASA already had several working heat shields from the old missions but the new one needed testing - for the shape of the craft etc. They already had a lot of data from the old efforts (that worked).
I think that exit and re-entry are almost routine now, provided your rocket doesn't explode. The tricky bit is out there in space and trying to make the moon a resource of some sort.
The new one failed in ways it was not designed to fail. In C-compiler terms it was "undefined behavior." In Donald Rumsfeld terms it was an "unknown unknown."
The mere fact that the outcome was successful does not inherently indicate that the decision-making was safe: the O-rings "worked" for 24 missions and the foam/tiles "worked" for 111. Nevertheless there were ample warnings and close calls.
Reentry from the Moon is not routine. Re-entry speed was about 40% faster than from low earth orbit, and kinetic energy goes up by the square, so about double.
Yes, and the four RS-25 main engines on the SLS rocket (Space Launch System) are literally SSME's harvested from the shuttles (Space Shuttle Main Engine). Of course that means they are re-usable. So sad to see them plummet to the ocean floor. Perversely Rocketdyne is building cheaper non-reusable versions of the RS-25 for future missions.
The Artemis SRBs incorporate design changes to address the causes of the Challenger failure. Specifically they changed the joint design, added another o-ring, and they have electric joint heaters to keep the seals warm.
Yes, Challenger - although program management knew they were violating a launch constraint (temperature), and it was the low temperature that produced the conditions necessary for SRB failure.
As with any aerospace mishap, it's a chain of events, not just one cause.
I believe what it destroyed was the strut holding the booster to the tank. When the strut burned through the assembly came apart and aerodynamic forces did the remainder of the destruction.
Jared? Sounds familiar, is it a friend of yours? If yes should you not disclose it? The casual first name use basis is a tell. You wouldn't say "glad Bill is cooking something up" about Gates. This kind of parasocial familiarity with billionaires is how PR becomes indistinguishable from fan fiction.
Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets.
"His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one.
The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but.
When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering.
On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress...
We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials
Almost everything you said is false, but to pick on a couple of issues, on Polaris Dawn he did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer that flew with him to test the spacesuits in space. That transparent review was enough to convince skeptical experts, journalists and the astronauts that the issues were understood and the work arounds adequate.
I think your projection is the beam in your eye you are blinded by.
"Almost everything you said is false" and yet you could not name one thing. If my claims were wrong, you would correct them. You did not, because you can't.
You claim the Artemis II review convinced skeptical experts.What actually happened was Isaacman ( or shoud I say Jared? ) convened a January meeting to present NASA rationale for flying a heat shield they already knew was flawed.
CNN was denied access, only two journalists were invited, largely off the record. Isaacman own words afterward, that the meeting "only reaffirmed my confidence", tell you the conclusion preceded the review and show a level of manipulative representation, that hint he will go far in the current administration.
The most qualified skeptic in the room, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut, heat shield research engineer, and member of the first shuttle crew to fly after Columbia, walked out unconvinced. He said NASA "definitely does not have the data to show that it's safe" and that the agency was using "the same flawed thinking and crude analysis tools, similar to Columbia, similar to Challenger." He wrote an open letter to Isaacman warning that this "exhibits the same patterns that preceded past catastrophes." He estimated 1-in-20 odds of disaster. Danny Olivas was a man on the payroll, Charlie Camarda no.
On Polaris Dawn you say Isaacman, did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer. You are making my point for me. The spacesuit engineer was Sarah Gillis, a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX who spent 11 years training astronauts, including the NASA crews for Demo-2 and Crew-1. She was there because she helped build and develop what was being tested. Isaacman was there because he paid for the mission.
Following test procedures that SpaceX engineers wrote, on hardware SpaceX engineers designed, inside a spacecraft SpaceX engineers built, does not make you an engineer. It makes you a test subject with a checkbook. A patient in a clinical drug trial also "does the same tests and reports results" as the researchers but that does not qualify them to run the FDA.
Which brings us to the question you seem to have avoided.
Why was Isaacman selected as NASA Administrator? He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which has a five year global payment processing deal with SpaceX's Starlink.
He has no aerospace engineering background, no government management experience, no science credentials. During his confirmation hearing, when Senator Markey asked about his ties to Musk, Isaacman claimed they were not close :-)) and that he had not discussed his NASA plans with Musk...
But when Markey asked whether Musk was present at his interview with Trump, a simple yes or no question... Isaacman refused to answer.
A payments CEO with financial ties to SpaceX, nominated by a president who received hundreds of millions from Musk, who can't say whether Musk was in the room when he got the job... If you don't see the problem, you either are not looking or dont want to look.
I mean it's the first space crew on an anti-science mission, right?
The point of them being there isn't discovery, it's to try to discourage anyone who wants try to understand and protect the planet that we all rely on for life
This is one of the most legible, well-detailed, and well-written article I've seen on perceptual hashing. It must have taken months of effort to pull off, and I'd love to see the author write about other things.
But the article fails to take its statements to their logical conclusion, in one section, he writes,
> Every false positive means an innocent person's content was flagged — a family photo, a medical image, a piece of art. It means unnecessary investigation, potential harm to reputation, and erosion of trust in the system. At scale, even a 0.01% false positive rate means thousands of wrongful flags per day.
and,
> In practice, the industry errs heavily toward minimizing false negatives — catching every possible match — and then uses human review to resolve false positives. This means the system flags aggressively but confirms carefully. The cost of a false positive is an investigation. The cost of a false negative is a child.
>
> This is also why the hybrid approach from Chapter VI matters. Perceptual hashing against a verified database has a low false positive rate — but not zero. Certain images (blank, solid-color, simple gradients) produce hashes that collide with database entries by coincidence, not because they depict abuse. Production systems include collision detection to filter these out before matching. Classifiers for unknown material have a higher false positive rate still (the model is making a judgment, not a comparison). By layering them — hashing first, then classifiers, then human review — the system can be both aggressive and precise. But no layer is perfect, and the threshold remains a human decision.
If there is a way to "include collision detection to filter these out before matching" then why do they "then human review?" The author starts the next section with, "Three Steps. No One Sees the Image."
But they do human review to eliminate false positives? Both statements can't be simultaneously true - "no human ever sees it," or "by layering them — hashing first, then classifiers, then human review — the system can be both aggressive and precise."
Secondly, although I'm not a researcher, I think I and a lot of researchers would love to see this "aggressive, but precise algorithm" that eliminates collisions (an imprecise term - while here it means an image of a background or a setting that ticks off the similarity system; it's still not exactly a collision in the classical sense as the algorithm is a type of clustering with hashes) without making the algorithm useless? As far as I'm aware, no such algorithm exists without either becoming useless or having significant false positives. But I might be wrong.
At one point in the article, the author says, "The cost of a false negative is a child." This "aggressive and precise" system diverts resources from actual investigations and prosecution. A few examples,
A more precise example, as the author mentions PhotoDNA,
> LinkedIn found 75 accounts that were reported to EU authorities in the second half of 2021, due to files that it matched with known CSAM. But upon manual review, only 31 of those cases involved confirmed CSAM. (LinkedIn uses PhotoDNA, the software product specifically recommended by the U.S. sponsors of the EARN IT Bill.)
PhotoDNA's "aggressive and precise" have a 58.6% false positive rate when tested. That means nearly 60% of the cases it generates for investigations wasted investigators time, leading to fewer investigations overall.
> In the process of reporting images, the occurrence of false positives—instances where non-CSAM images are mistakenly reported as CSAM—is inevitable. *One officer told us that there are “a lot” of CyberTipline reports that are images of adults.124* More false positives will mean fewer cases going unreported, and platforms must decide what balance they are comfortable with. False positives and false negatives can be minimized with better detection technology. One respondent criticized platforms for relying on their in-house technology. They perceived those as inferior to solutions offered by start-ups, suggesting that this choice might be driven by profit motives.125 Platforms, however, might have reservations about using third-party services for screening potential CSAM due to legal and ethical considerations. An NGO employee highlighted platform concerns, asking, “Can we trust these organizations? What ethical due diligence have they done?”
The uncomfortable truth is that people are trying to use technology to fix a structural problem. Usually, most victims of CSA (including me) know the abuser. In my case and others, at least one adult knew (or suspected) and did nothing. More maddeningly, even when reported and the CSA is discovered and the perpetrator is punished, the victims are reabused within the foster care system. https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/sexual-abuse-of-ch... 40% of children in foster care experience some type of abuse. Most never get the help they need.
I think the impulse to create systems to monitor everyone's phones for CSAM comes from a good place. But it's energy misdirected; better investigations into exploitation networks, investment in foster care and care for abused children and teens, heck even child AI companions capable of reporting abuse for children suspected of being abused would lead to better outcomes than scanning everyone's phone.
It doesn't matter. This is how Facebook started. It's how a lot of things started.
Young people doing (sometimes questionable) experiments.
The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison" is an indication of the dark times we're headed towards. A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm. And the norms are changing.
I am pretty pro-privacy. And yes, I find it to be fairly thoughtless, but that's no reason for coercive intimidation. The fact that this was the reaction to someone doing an experiment speaks poorly about the society it took place in, and explains why there haven't been any major breakthroughs - in consumer tech, science or the arts – from within that country.
More generally, HN's reaction is disappointing. This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble. The fact that most people on HN want to crush that rebelliousness – that hacker spirit – is sad to me.
I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
If this were completely uncharted territory, you might have a leg to stand on here.
But you are correct that this is exactly how Facebook started, and we know exactly how that goes, the poster is correct that this just leads to harassment at scale.
The author's response was the main problem, showing a complete lack of character or ethical concern.
There is a world of difference between being a hacker with a sense of rebelliousness and a jerk who thinks there should be zero consequences to their actions.
If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself. Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.
> If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself.
I don't think many here would disagree with you.
> Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.
I'm gonna disagree with you. Maybe it's because I live in the Bay Area so the culture is affected by the proximity of tech companies. But my family in the middle of the country mostly seem to be on the same page, so I don't know how you explain that. It may be that I'm drawn to people who care about these topics and some degree of sameness is expected within family dynamics resulting from the parents' values raising us. Whatever.
I think a good portion of society considers FB a garbage product but don't know of an alternative and just accept it for what it is. I think a smaller portion of society recognizes that they are amoral and terrible for society. How many countries have now discussed legislation to limit kids accessing social media (whether you agree or disagree)? That didn't spring out of nowhere fully formed. Years of criticism got us there.
> Maybe it's because I live in the Bay Area so the culture is affected by the proximity of tech companies. But my family in the middle of the country mostly seem to be on the same page, so I don't know how you explain that.
I can explain that. 100% of Americans add up to roughly 5% of the worlds population. As such, there are billions of non American users with very different viewpoints and opinions.
Yes, we really should be! You’ve hit it on the nose with that point: Facebook has been a stalker with effectively legal immunity in a lot of people’s lives for quite a long time. I’m glad to see others realizing it, too. The more that do, the sooner their formerly-untouchable behavior becomes unacceptable.
"There is a world of difference between being a hacker with a sense of rebelliousness and a jerk who thinks there should be zero consequences to their actions."
Given the external consequences of certain actions, for all intents and purposes that "world of difference" may exist only inside their skull.
Go, have your fun, experiment, fuck around, push boundaries. Don't make profiles for me based on info you found, public or not, and then sign me up to receive notifications for messages on it without my permission.
Yeah, Facebook started in college, but it didn't start with scraped data and auto-generated profiles.
I suppose it would be worse without the notifications, even though they are form of spam, because then you wouldn't know what some anonymous posters are writing under a purported profile of yours.
Speaking of which, the author is possibly an even bigger asshole than Zuckerberg. Oh you don't like what anonymous somebodies wrote about you under a profile you didn't even create yourself (because I did it for you)? Why suck my dick!
I don't think this person belongs in prison, but the internet also isn't the place it was in 2004? You do bear responsibility for what you do online, and this was irresponsible. We should encourage kids and others to experiment and make mistakes, but the kid shouldn't have put up this website and should have taken it down as a responsible member of the community
I’m pretty sure thefacebook didn’t scrape data. It was also private.
I got into trouble in college which nearly became a police matter simply for scraping emails. I didn’t even store the data. I was just testing a tool that I had created and actually found a data bug in the college’s IT system where it gave me access to all the emails instead of access to only the group that I was supposed to be part of.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I self reported (actually I reported the bug to IT thinking I would be rewarded, lol) it would have become a police matter. Because I self reported before they reached out to me the Dean and college President let it remain a code of conduct violation.
"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.
>I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
I agree-ish with everything generally except this. I don't think this is a global thing at all. I think this is at best a subset of people in mostly western nations.
That said, I no fan of the author or his actions (which paint him like a real jerk). The facts don't really support the benefit of the doubt you're giving him here.
> The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison"
Straw man fallacy. Literally nobody here has said he deserves to be in prison.
> This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble.
It saddens me that you don't recognize a difference between "thing that gets you in trouble" and "thing that harms others". Getting in trouble is not the problem here.
Devil’s Advocate: I would expect a dumb teen to not understand the history and blast radius of social media like a former teen that grew up on that trash did.
Huh? This is not a "dumb teen" smoking weed in the parking lot, this is a student at IIT Delhi, which has a sub 1% acceptance rate and is one of the most elite schools in the world, that is smart enough to make a social media app.
> this is a student at IIT Delhi, which has a sub 1% acceptance rate and is one of the most elite schools in the world
Elite schools are full of dumb people. Being good at math doesn't automatically give you emotional intelligence.
> that is smart enough to make a social media app
What, like it's hard? I could've sworn making a Twitter clone was in plenty of "Programming for Dummies" books during the 2010s - and they didn't even have access to LLMs!
That should have been the first clue that this was a bad idea. Nevertheless, the author pressed on with the bad ideas.
They even mention how they watched "The Social Network", a biopic about a very damaged narcissist who is oblivious and/or indifferent to how he hurts people. And the author sees this as something to repeat! It'
> A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm
A metric "deviates from the norm". The phrase you're looking for is "violation of norms". [0]
> is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm. And the norms are changing.
They don't seem to be. There seems to be consensus in the comments that the author's behavior was distasteful and violated norms.
Unfortunately, you can't explain away literally anything anybody does wrong simply by claiming they were only "deviating from the norm", and that should be accepted no matter what, for the sake of building adaptivity. A society which accepts anything, including hurting innocent kids, is a society which will quickly collapse.
Cut the BS. If you're going to turn morality on its head, at least speak with your own words. Don't preach with em-dash-riddled word soup.
> This is how Facebook started.
And along with it, commercial mass surveillance, monetized addiction, and destruction of free societies. Oh, and their decision enabled the Rohingya genocide too.
> A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm
Excusing a harassment platform or non-consensual female rating site for university students as social tolerance is gross.
> And the norms are changing.
Oh sure. The tech billionaires' wet dream are coming true at the expense of everyone subject to their whims.
> The fact that this was the reaction to someone doing an experiment speaks poorly about the society it took place in
Calling these acts as mere "experiments" tells us what you think about the suffering of others.
> explains why there haven't been any major breakthroughs - in consumer tech, science or the arts – from within that country.
What an arrogant and ridiculous take, but sadly, I recognize this line of reasoning. You think there are legionnaires of the Antichrist busy at HN trying to halt technological progress!
> that hacker spirit
So let's screw over a bunch of kids for "rebellion," that's the "hacker spirit" now?
> I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
Most people are watching the ultra‑wealthy get richer while losing control over their own lives.
This 1984-style rhetoric wrapped in emotional manipulation makes me sick.
Great swathes of adult nations vote for and tolerate idiocracy writ large, whilst young people are trying something, anything, in a strange new society. I can't always agree so I stop and think more, if it's not already too late.
I agree like 1000%, I just think HN's a bitter place in general. lol well doesnt really matter.
like I honestly don't really get what the need to freak out this much was, I was "moderating" it, so like if you dont like something someone said [0] , you cuold have just told me and i'd take it down. There are a 1000 other sites that do something like this.
And also I think people are really really overlooking the 'cool' part of the website, which i thought would be the real discussion at hacker news, like all the design choices i made, the virality, everything, like that was really fucking cool i think...
anyways, thanks for being rational man...
[0] btw i just think in general people should grow a thicker skin.im not trying to be insensitive, but it'll just be better for them if they do, like people have said a lot of shit about be, but how can you let randos on the internet ruin your mood man. go live your dreams out.
>... I honestly don't really get what the need to freak out this much was, I was "moderating" it, so like if you dont like something someone said [0] , you cuold have just told me and i'd take it down.
IT SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN UP THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T CREATE THEIR PROFILES, YOU DID. It doesn't matter if you were moderating anything, nobody involved gave their consent. You forced them into that position.
>And also I think people are really really overlooking the 'cool' part of the website, which i thought would be the real discussion at hacker news, like all the design choices i made, the virality, everything, like that was really fucking cool i think...
At no point in your linked post do you stop and highlight those things. There's no discussion of the technical aspect, how you streamlined your code, prepared to scale, what makes your code special or unique, what about the UI/UX might be unique or groundbreaking, what's running on the backend, nothing.
No, your entire post was about how you refuse to see how what you did is wrong while you complain about the reactions that everyone else had. You failed to talk about anything else but your ego and your hubris, how you would rather tell someone, "bitch come suck my dick," instead of trying to have a constructive conversation with them, and now you're mad that that's all that we can see?
Good god, child.
Edit: And for the record, it wasn't even natural virality, it was forced. People only visited your page because you forced their profiles to be on there and then told them what you did. For something to be viral, people have to want to go their and use it on their own. I am not shocked at all that you cannot see this.
The only reason your social network got "viral" is because it was a harassment machine and outrageous. People had to see what was going on to gauge how fucking awful it was.
You built a car wreck. Something so terrible that people had no choice but to look.
Obviously, fucking obviously, if you make profiles about people without their consent then they will be drawn to see what is going on. You can achieve the same thing by making a website where you post everyone's home addresses. Don't get any ideas.
None of this was impressive, at least not from a conceptual view.
Hey Boris, thanks for the awesomeness that's Claude! You've genuinely changed the life of quite a few young people across the world. :)
not sure if the team is aware of this, but Claude code (cc from here on) fails to install / initiate on Windows 10; precise version, Windows 10.0.19045 build 19045. It fails mid setup, and sometimes fails to throw up a log. It simply calls it quits and terminates.
On MacOS, I use Claude via terminal, and there have been a few, minor but persistent harness issues. For example, cc isn't able to use Claude for Chrome. It has worked once and only once, and never again. Currently, it fails without a descriptive log or issue. It simply states permission has been denied.
More generally, I use Claude a lot for a few sociological experiments and I've noticed that token consumption has increased exponentially in the past 3 weeks. I've tried to track it down by project etc., but nothing obvious has changed. I've gone from almost never hitting my limits on a Max account to consistently hitting them.
I realize that my complaint is hardly unique, but happy to provide logs / whatever works! :)
And yeah, thanks again for Claude! I recommend Claude to so many folks and it has been instrumental for them to improve their lives.
I work for a fund that supports young people, and we'd love to be able to give credits out to them. I tried to reach out via the website etc. but wasn't able to get in touch with anyone. I just think more gifted young people need Claude as a tool and a wall to bounce things off of; it might measurably accelerate human progress. (that's partly the experiment!)
* destroying your body, stripping your bones, getting diabetes and temporarily (or permanently) disabling yourself with issues no healthcare provider will take seriously for decades to come for 2.6 babies in your youth.
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Someone called this a "belief."
There's a 10% to 4% probability that the average teenage girl will die from childbirth, given the cumulative risk of pregnancies in nations without modern medicine.
That's the default state of the human condition. Maternal mortality is frequent and 1 in 25 to 1 in 10 for women without modern medical interventions.
There's a reason why the more women become aware of the risks and downsides of pregnancy – the less likely they are to go through with it. Even when indoctrinated from the start. The only sane solution in an otherwise insane world is technological, external gestation / exowombs.
This happens, but it's not representative. Interesting belief, it seems like it should be self-extinguishing, the cultures that don't believe this kind of thing will tend to take over over time.
Most of the world is below replacement rate (~2.1 TFR), the rest will get there in a decade or two. Educated, empowered women delay having children, have less children, or no children. Holds across both developed and developing countries.
> Dallin H. Oaks, the newly appointed prophet and president of the church, said that while birth rates within the church are higher than national numbers, they've still declined "significantly."
> Catholic University of America demographer Stephen Cranney crunched the numbers on the religion's families. In 2008, about 70% of Latter-day Saint women ages 18-45 had at least one child at home. In 2022, that number was 59%, a rate of decline mirrored in the American population at large.
Any uptick in birth rate in the US from first generation immigrants quickly reverts to the mean for subsequent generations.
That study has 7 to 12% error ranges for the LDS group. Even with that, the share of LDS women with a child at home is 50% more than non-LDS. Lastly, there's a huge difference in rate of decay when a group is at, above, or below replacement rate. If everyone's declining, but they're declining far slower, that still proves my point that the composition of these communities in 80 years could be far different if current rates hold.
Utah has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and average children per women is 1.8 in the state. It’s always hard to predict the future, but I argue the evidence is clear LDS fertility rates will rapidly coalesce with others within the next few years, maybe faster if young followers leave the church faster.
> In 2007, according to Pew, the LDS church retained 70% of childhood members in the U.S. (n = 581) In 2014, that was 64% (n = 661), and in 2023–24 it had declined still further to 54% (n = 525).
> That 54% current retention rate looks better than the GSS’ 38%, so that’s potentially good news for LDS leaders. But once again, we’re witnessing a clear drop from the fairly recent past. Both major U.S. surveys that track childhood affiliation are saying that more people are leaving than used to.
> What’s more, this is being driven by younger adults. In the general population, younger adults are noticeably more likely to have no religious affiliation than older adults — either because they’ve left religion or they grew up without one. It shouldn’t surprise us that it’s true in Mormonism as well.
So, the cohort leaving the church the fastest are the ones with fertility. What does this do to LDS fertility rate trends? It likely bends them downward.
Once you hit ~1.5 TFR, low fertility trap kicks in.
> Demographers in the early 2000s coined the “low-fertility trap,” hypothesizing that a series of self-reinforcing economic and social mechanisms make it increasingly difficult to raise the fertility rate once it dips below a certain threshold. The academics posited that lower fertility results in increased individual aspirations for personal consumption but at the same time it also results in an aging population and less job creation—and thus greater pessimism about the economic future—which in turn disincentivizes having more children. Moreover, as the average family size grows smaller and smaller generation after generation, the social norm of an ideal family size shrinks, too. These forces together lead to a persistent “downward spiral” for the fertility rate that can be impossible to reverse.
> China’s not the only country in the region or the world facing this kind of demographic crisis. Fertility rates across developed nations globally have almost uniformly dropped over the last few decades. China’s neighbors Japan and South Korea have among the lowest, and policymakers there have invested billions of dollars and pondered uniquely targeted policies, respectively, to try—so far unsuccessfully—to get young people to have more children.
Several European countries have already fallen in this trap. As pensioners comprise an increasingly large fraction of voters, pandering to them becomes far more politically attractive than investing in the future.
Most women have watched someone go through a difficult pregnancy in their lives before they hit 20. It's not a "belief" for the people who live through it.
People used to die – frequently – from this "belief." And women still do.
The belief I was talking about was that that was at all representative of the median case, and the implication that it’s not worth the risk to have kids (this was before you added the big chunk about mortality being 4-10% in places without a good medical system). I have first hand experience of some of the potential difficulties, so I know it happens, but I also know that it’s not every pregnancy, most are fine, and that if you do have difficulty, a high quality healthcare system can usually get you through it.
And this belief is interesting, because it seems like one of the most evolutionarily unfit ideas possible, at least on the individual level. But maybe it’s good for the survival of the group if it decreases resource contention.
It's interesting to me how cautious NASA is being with Artemis II. I wrote about the risk / mortality calculation behind this, but everything from the trajectory, the decision not to do an orbital insertion, the checkout in high-Earth orbit is very cautious.
I wish this mission took greater risks. Or, just at least go as far as Apollo 8, but stay for a bit longer, and try out new things. It would be fun to take a finicky low mass radio telescope experiment to the far side of the moon.
It is not possible for them to say a bit longer because Orion doesn’t have the deltaV necessary to go into LLO and orbit the Moon like Apollo 8. Orion is like HlS in that it is the worst possible craft for a mission to the Moon, but it’s the one we have. At least Starship has a potential future for further missions.
> “the expert evidence we have heard strongly suggests that the use of autonomous robots alone will very significantly limit what can be learned about our nearest potentially habitable planet” (Close et al. (2005; paragraph 70).
>
> Putting it more bluntly, Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, has written:
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> “[t]he unfortunate truth is that most things our rovers can do in a perfect sol [i.e. a martian day] a human explorer could do in less than a minute” (Squyres, 2005, pp. 234-5).
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
They are not going to land on the Moon! They are just going to sit in a can for two weeks and take photos. (OK. Tthe can is on top of a lot of burning explosive material and if they don't aim correctly they will get in a weird trajectory that will kill them. Not for the faint of heart.)
I'm not sure if they can override the commands send from Earth, but turning on and off the engines like in the Apollo XIII movie is like 100 times less accurate than the automatic orders. It's not 1969, now computer can play chess and aim to go around the Moon better than us.
Also, there is still Artemis III to test the live support equipment with humans inside, before Artemis IV that is spouse to attempt landing on the Moon.
I haven't seen anyone mention this publicly, but I've noticed that the same model will give wildly different results depending on the quantization. 4-bit is not the same as 8-bit and so on in compute requirements and output quality. https://newsletter.maartengrootendorst.com/p/a-visual-guide-...
I'm aware that frontier models don't work in the same way, but I've often wondered if there's a fidelity dial somewhere that's being used to change the amount of memory / resources each model takes during peak hours v. off hours. Does anyone know if that's the case?
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