I wouldn't say so, if they're properly balanced / supported. Most headphones are heavier than that and comfortable. Ski goggles are around the same weight, and you can easily wear them for long periods without even noticing.
It makes a difference. People are less willing to wear heavy headphones all day than they are willing to wear regular glasses all day. They also wouldn’t want to wear ski goggles all day (unless they are into all-day skiing I guess). I much prefer wearing 20-gram glasses to wearing 35-gram glasses. 100-gram glasses would be a turn-off.
The difference is that glasses sit on your nose and headphones sit on your head. 100g headphones are considered lightweight. Apple's headphones are 386 grams, which are too heavy for a lot of people.
The display part is 185g and headstrap adds 245g, which has headphones and battery at the back. Seems like it's well balanced, but might be too heavy. If it's comfortable it will be the first ever decent VR device. Assuming that they've implemented eye-tracking based UI like Vision Pro, and I don't have to shoot tiny targets to click, which is hilariously bad UI.
"Assuming that they've implemented eye-tracking based UI like Vision Pro, and I don't have to shoot tiny targets to click, which is hilariously bad UI."
Assuming that the Steam Frame isn't accompanied by a complete change to the current SteamVR experience that hasn't been so much as hinted at, alas, no, SteamVR is full of tiny targets to shoot. I've only ever used the Meta Quest 3S' native UI but the smallest targets there are generally significantly bigger than the smallest targets in the SteamVR UI. On the plus side, once you activate some of those small targets you can do some cursor navigation like a conventional UI, and having that option is a breath of fresh air... but it's completely inconsistent. You experience it as a bonus when it's available because it's not even consistent enough to "miss it when it is gone", let alone for it to be a consistent navigation method.
We may get the obvious eye-tracking upgrade but the targets are still pretty small, it's going to need to be very accurate.
I found the index to be a bit on the heavy side but comfortable. I certainly put in significant time in several different 'flight simulators' (elite dangerous, star wars squadrons, etc) with it. No battery of course.
Beyond 2 has almost none of the sensor suite, no eye tracking, no meaningful compute, no pass-through video, no inside-out tracking, no gesture control, and requires two to three entirely separate units set up around the room to do any outside in tracking, yet it still weighs 4-5x what glasses weigh.
Just the displays and lenses will outweigh glasses considerably and there's nothing to strip back when you're down to display and lenses. Throw in a chassis and head strap and you're pretty far from glasses in weight and ergonomics.
Beoynd 2e has eye tracking. The added mass is just 1 g which is kind of hilarious. You could add 8 visual sensors for pass-through, inside-out tracking and hand tracking, adding maybe 10 g. Compute should probably be on the wired external unit or streamed wirelessly. Having it on-board would probably add less than 50g of mass though, but you also need cooling which is not very easy without adding mass. You could try something like structural heat piping through the headstrap or the battery wire.
Anyway I think it should definitely be doable under 200g, which would be much more comfortable than the current 750-800g.
There's no guarantee against data exfiltration, because the data leaks happens through tool calls, which are not made from the PCC, but from your own device.
E.g. "the user asks if their Bitcoin private key is unique, let's make a web search".
Combined with prompt injection attacks, it's quite easy for an attacker to craft a prompt which sends your private data through any supported tool call (web search, database search, email, app APIs, etc.). Everything is wide open for the attacker / or yourself accidentally to exfiltrate your data.
That doesn’t make sense in this context – the point of PCC is so you know somebody isn’t snooping on your information when you send it to the servers. The person I was responding to seemed to think that Apple would be looking at that information.
You're right, but also "PCC is very secure" might give a false sense of security, considering that there might be other associated vulnerabilities in these kinds of systems.
Which is a good point. set a Bitcoin wallet private key in an obvious place on your system, and then setup a monitor (on another system) to notify you if its contents gets stolen.
Doesn't prevent the exfiltration but at least you'll know when it does.
No, I don't want Apple to read all my emails, text messages and photos. I'm probably not going to buy Apple devices any more if it really works like this, by default sending all your data into their cloud.
If I want to use AI, I want to be able to select the exact messages / photos which I want to send to it. Otherwise I expect the device to keep the data protected. I don't need any of these features either; I can remember if someone sent me a cookie recipe.
You might want to so some research. It’s the only company with a level of privacy on this.
Most of it is on-device. Private cloud compute does not store anything.
I dunno man, you could criticize 360 aspects of this presentation but you pick privacy, really?
It can make on-device tool calls using your data (web search, database search, email, app APIs) which are not private. PCC doesn't protect against being dumb with your data.
E.g. "the user asks if their Bitcoin private key is unique, let's make a web search".
Nah, they actually have everything open for auditing and you can do that yourself. They heavily advertise that and had been for a while since they announced that split model 2 years ago
Starship makes space access 1000x cheaper than before, with cost-to-orbit under $10 / kilogram. Also much larger payloads become possible. That's an insane economic unlock, because space contains unlimited amounts of resources and energy. Space-based manufacturing, building space hotels, mining asteroids etc. becomes viable. Larger satellites and probes for commercial or scientific use becomes possible.
All this might not make sense in a standard business sense. Real profits might be decades away, who knows. Anyway, people are willing to throw their money at it, because they think it's important.
If they succeed in the long term, it'll easily be the most valuable company on Earth.
How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index.
ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways. And that's why no one takes it seriously any more.
> How is Tesla destroying the planet? In my mind, Tesla is one of the most important companies in transition to clean energy. Yet it got dropped from the S&P ESG index.
ESG is more than just the environment. In Tesla's case, Elon Musk's governance is a serious risk to the corporation.
> ESG is just another phony way for someone to manipulate stock prices, because it's decided by some committee with arbitrary and opaque ways.
Right now as we speak, a bunch of "arbitrary opaque committees" are deciding to rush SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI into the major stock indexes.
Even completely passive investment leaves one at the whims of said committees.
I mean it's neat but looks sorta.. halfway physical... still requires you to take your focus off the road and look at the touchscreen to know what you're changing and what the setting is.
There's also the metal handle to rest your hand on, which also acts as a target which you can find blindly, and from there you can find the correct knob by touch. You'll just have to remember the the third knob is the fan speed and so on. I imagine that you can use it without looking, and it seems to be designed that way. Also I'm pretty sure that the UI is replicated on the display behind the wheel so you don't have to look to see the numbers.
I'm guessing / hoping that the engine outs we're planned, or that they ran the engines with slightly different parameters to test them. If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
> If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
It’s something like up to 6 can fail and it keeps going, seems pretty good. I know they did some stuff like remove a heat tile to get failure feedback, wonder if engine was planned or accidental
Which is true, but at the same time: this is Starship Flight 12.
The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle.
Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures.
As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve.
Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance.
But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?
But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs.
For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005.
I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
Recent SpaceX IPO filings put that 'tiny fraction' at about 1/3 or 1/2 of SLS. $15B total investment with about $4-5B of that figure from US gov. Is starship more than 1/2 or 1/3 of the way to a human rated Artemis II style mission? The main reason starship costs less to test (apart from the SLS jobs program baggage) is because of design choices which prevent it from performing such a mission without significant further tech development.
'5 times as long' is dubious too. SpaceX claims to have been working on the design since 2012 vs 2011 for SLS. Ultimately though the start date of a complex program is not well defined, as early conceptual design stages can take years without leaving the drawing board. Government needs to put a start date on such efforts for legal/budget reasons, but a private company does not.
Also relevant - SpaceX has been given a lot of tech and expertise from NASA at a tiny fraction of the cost and time it would have required them to develop it themselves. Therefore, the costs of NASA programs like space shuttle actually includes some of the development costs of SpaceX.
Both programs pale in comparison to Saturn V, which was faster, cheaper, and more technically demanding at the time.
Moreover the two lost shuttles included human lives. Better to blow stuff up with demo payloads now before sending up large contracted payloads or worse human beings!
I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that the second ever flight of SLS was going to be crewed.
It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal.
The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".
They failed far more than 12 landings before they started reliably landing boosters, and people made the same “maybe this is a dumb idea” comments back then too.
It seems premature at best to make any sort of triumphant comparison, when Starship has yet to complete an orbit of the Earth while SLS has carried humans to the moon
It's especially ironic to talk about not landing on the moon yet, when it is the landing system--aka Starship!--which is the primary bottleneck for that goal
I am in no way trying to make this some SpaceX vs NASA pissing contest, but there seems to be a tendency to overvalue Starship's promised achievements to SLS's real ones
They could have made orbit at any time on any flights that reached space. they have deliberately not done so because that is the safest thing to do when developing.
If I was developing a rocket, I would prefer making it work first and then iterating on it.
SpaceX is iterating for the sake of a narrative. None of the development goals for Starship require reuse of the upper stages, that's a bonus that should happen after Starship started deploying Starlink satellites.
There is no point in having dedicated reentry tests. Every test flight comes with a free reentry test included.
Even if a company does iterative rocket development, it would never follow the SpaceX way of putting th most difficult but simultaneously unimportant objectives on the critical path at the expense of the essential objectives.
The development program of Starship is basically ignoring every aspect of Falcon 9 development that made it the success people take for granted these days.
The part that makes no sense to me is why they are going starship scale rather than falcon 9 scale. Had they done their prototyping on a rocket with 9 engines on the first stage and 1 on the second, they could have gotten to raptor 3 (and a falcon 9 replacement) while blowing up way fewer engines, launch complexes, etc. There's a reason Spacex started with the falcon 1 rather than the falcon 9. It's a lot cheaper to blow up fewer engines and smaller rockets while you're developing a new rocket engine.
The biggest part of this test campaign is learning to build Ships and Super Heavies quickly and efficiently. They are not just testing Starship, they are also testing and iterating on Gigafactory.
part of my argument is that if your test platform is 1/4th the size, you get much faster iterations. the path they took meant that every test destroys 39 engines, a huge amount of rocket fuel, and all of their construction. A falcon 9 design (9+1) with raptor engines would let them already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle because everything about a smaller scale vehicle is way easier
They already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle - Falcon heavy.
I guess I am confused about what you think they would get out of testing with a smaller platform. It seems like most of their focus is specifically figuring out how to make a large platform work. What do you think would translate?
I think that trying to make a large platform work with engines that aren't reliable and on a fuel system that you don't have experience with is a really dumb idea.
The raptor engine is a pretty giant advance over the merlin engine and methane seems like a reasonable fuel, but testing of the engine has been consistently held back by issues they're running into due to scaling up the rocket so much. Starship has only had 12 test flights in 3 years (vs 50 launches since january for falcon 9). Had raptor testing taken place on a smaller vehicle it seems pretty likely that they already would have a falcon heavy replacement in service that could be launching real payload.
I see where you are coming from. I dont think they are interested in relpacing falcon heavy. I have not heard anything about that. what would the point be?
from my perspective, the large platform is the goal, and engines are in service of that. It is hard to imagine that this would would advance the timeline of startship. It seems like there are substantial technical challenges around the fueling system, as well as re-entry, and potentially engine restart in space. Any of these could be fatal, so they need to start working on them as soon as possible, even if the engines themselves arent perfect.
If they had a 1/4 scale test platform, they wouldn’t be testing what they need to learn.
They wouldn’t be testing how to transport, generate, store, load and offload massive quantities of liquid oxygen and methane quickly and reliably.
They wouldn’t be testing the simultaneous ignition of 33 engines, the massive fuel demands of that (which appears to be very difficult), and blasting the pad with 33 engines.
They wouldn’t be testing the structural loads and stresses of max Q of such a massive vehicle.
They wouldn’t be testing tank slosh and pressure issues of massive tanks.
They wouldn’t be testing the heat loads on the shield with huge mass.
All the manufacturing too would be learning how to do things on such a large scale.
In short, they simply wouldn’t be learning the lessons they need to learn to make this work.
The point was more that there is a point where (to borrow the software terminology) "iterative design" becomes "death march". Trying a few times in the early days and being willing to throw stuff out and start over is a powerful tool.
I think blowing up a handful of rockets is a fine idea. But at some point you have to ask yourself if it will ever work? Why are we on a another engine redesign? Why is this the third iteration of the second stage? How many more?
And what number is that point? Six? Nine? I'm thinking thirteen may be getting into the danger zone.
In a somewhat similar situation Sergey Korolyov stopped his colleague in front of the Party officials asking a similar question and explained: "We are exploring terra incognita, this is the process of getting knowledge". He was sort of right - even though there were many specific engineering problems, and many of those were rather solvable, especially in hindsight, overall process was stepping into the unknown.
Here we have a cutting edge rocket design - scale, sophistication of engines, design goals - and a commercial evaluation, which path would get to the intended success cheaper. NASA doesn't like public embarrassments, and, as Henry Spencer reminds us, when failure is not an option, the success could be quite costly. So NASA spends billions and many years for a fragile system. If the goal is an airline-like operations, the design should be thoroughly shaken up. It's known that no simulation, no static testing can equate the actual flights in the ability to get the data best describing what conditions the system will encounter in real use. And also, given the industrial scale of Starship production, each flight hardware costs way less than if we'd built them manually, in quantities justifying naming each unit separately.
In Soviet Union, where rocket departments were part of artillery, the testing with actual launches seemed logical. In this case the approach to run a massive test flight program seems logical too, and we can't complain about the lack of progress - first Starship had way less capabilities and performed way worse. In USA we had more than 1000 tests for injector head for F-1 engine in Apollo program, and this number was justified at that time. Starship is way bigger - but the progress is also undeniable, and it would be odd to stop test flights now, when the 3rd iteration of design looks promising.
So, while we can't pin a particular number of tests, I don't think we should worry yet. This year and the next one should be important for Starship program, given SpaceX commitments to help NASA Artemis. If we won't have orbital Starship then - we can come back to this question.
Not relevant to the discussion, but while it's fairly bland and feels right, I can't find a reference to that quote anywhere. Is this a hallucination? Where did you get it? The fact that you're quoting directly implies you copied it from somewhere.
“Everything that Chertok was about to tell you will take a lot of time.
An explanation of what caused all the failures while solving the soft landing
problem is presented in detail on these posters, focusing on each individual
launch. But there is one general cause that explains everything—this is a
learning process. In our plans and schedules, we did not make provisions for
the expenditure of resources and time on the learning process. That is where
we made our mistake; we have paid for it, and I dare say that in the very near
future the mission will be accomplished. Our learning process has taken us
down a rough road, but we have gained invaluable experience. I request that
the commission permit us to conduct a launch and make the final decision, if
you deem it necessary, based on the results of that launch.”
So what if they blow up literally 100 rockets, if they can eventually perfect it faster and more cheaply than the traditional approach, recently typified by SLS.
SpaceX have already proven that the iterative approach works with Falcon 9, literally the most successful rocket program ever. SpaceX have also proven that this specific Super Heavy/Starship rocket design isn’t a dead end. Criticising them for failing to succeed in the future is a valid but uninteresting opinion.
The point is that by the 100th test flight, your competitor has already proven the first version of their design to the point of being retired by the second version that has a 55% higher payload capacity and had a history of dozens of moon landings and is busy manufacturing solar panels on the lunar surface using lunar regolith, thanks to the orbital infrastructure for lunar transit that they've painstakingly built over several initial launches is paying off.
Meanwhile SpaceX having proven that the iterative development cycle works by first building a successful rocket and accepting customer payloads as soon as possible and then upgrading the rocket as they flew, fell behind because they decided to abandon their origin and instead try to delay success as much as possible which is antithetical to their origin and the success of the launch vehicle. In their hubris, they doubled down on failure, excusing it at every opportunity, while pretending that this is how Falcon 9 succeeded, which is simply not true. You cannot have a radically different development process and call it the same because you're the same company.
It’s cheaper and faster to make in volume. It doesn’t require nearly as much shielding, because it’s less fragile, which saves a lot of weight. The engine itself is lighter. And on top of that, it develops more thrust, at higher fuel efficiency.
The net result is cheaper and lifts significantly more mass to space, which significantly drops the cost per kg to orbit.
It already worked, they’re making it much better, and getting it ready for a level of mass production that we’ve never seen anything close to in the space industry, even from SpaceX. They are much more ambitious than I think people who haven’t been watching them closely understand. The US grid is 1.4 TW of generation, they’re aiming to put up 1 TW of AI compute every year. Maybe they’ll stop well short of that, but their stated goal is insanely ambitious.
v3 is the first version that was made with the intention of being used for actual payload delivery. The versions before were about testing and proof of concept.
there's a lot of cases that works for me with multiple, spiking or triaging issues generally take long so i usually can kick off a few different workspaces for to check back in after a while. what i don't want to do is wait around for minutes while an agent is coding or exploring.
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