> 3) What do you think ASML had to pay Lego to design and create this model? Or maybe Lego has a small division that does custom models like this? Do we know the employee cost for the Lego set?
I've done my own small scale version of this where I made models for internal distribution of the specialty equipment my employer uses. I doubt they paid Lego anything.
There is software to design your own lego set. Bricklink Studio is what I used. It's essentially Lego CAD software with a component library of Lego pieces. You can do high quality renderings, generate instruction sheets and BOMs.
Lego has a Pick-a-brick service where you can get new parts from a very limited selection at great expense. At third party marketplaces like Bricklink you can upload BOMs and they will assemble shopping carts from different seller's inventories of used pieces. Price and selection is better than Pick-a-brick but shipping / order fees / minimum lot size drive up the cost. I've tried many times but even the smallest 200 piece build ends up needing orders from 3 sellers across the world. There's always some part that was only ever sold in one rare set from 30 years ago and is unobtanium (the CAD program makes it easy to include a piece regardless of actual availability).
There are also businesses that will give you a turn key product that looks very retail-like with parts bagged by step, printed instructions, real Legos, box art, etc.
If you're willing to go with "lego compatible" third party bricks like GoBricks there are many sites that can source your entire build at once with new non-lego pieces. Part quality ranges from "good enough" to "indistinguishable" and the price and ease of ordering is loads better. You get a box of unsorted parts and spend lots of time grouping the pieces into kits.
Everyone is talking about the Playdate but I have a related Duke story about undergrad classes incorporating new hardware. My Digital Signal Processing course (ECE major) made a big deal about using these new things called iPods for class. Everyone got an iPod... for the semester. Even at Duke tuition prices you only got to borrow it. My recollection of the class work part was using a little piezo sensor that plugged into the microphone/headphone jack and recording your heart beat as a voice memo while doing a couple different activities. Maybe ten minutes for the semester. Then back at the computer doing a FFT to determine your heart rate. The lazy kids just got a copy of someone else's recording. This would have been 2004 or 2005. I think it was the third generation with clickwheel and monochrome screen.
They were about $3 billion in the hole when they went through bankruptcy in 2002 and the new owners bought it for $43 million (from Wikipedia). In 2025 they earned a return of $-8 million on that investment (plus any other money raised since then, such as $1 billion from Apple). So even the second incarnation doesn't seem to be a good business model even with free satellites.
The business model that works seems to be spectrum gambling. Do the minimum amount of satellite investment for decades until someone with a real business plan comes along and has to go through you to get it.
How did you make the "missing" corner? I'm assuming it wasn't chiseled out. In the last picture is the to-be-removed section made of plaster and then concrete poured around it?
Maybe average cost of next-size-up SSD price divided by a SWAG of a gaming PC lifetime? So if I had to buy a 2 TB NVMe stick instead of a 1 TB stick it's an extra $70 and I upgrade after 5 years that's only about $1 per TB-Month. I don't game I have no idea if those are good numbers.
The cheapest storage tier on s3 with instant retrieval is $.004 per GB-Month which implies AWS can still make money at $4 per TB-Month so $2.50 for consumer hardware sounds reasonable to me.
The incremental improvements to the engine thrust is par for the course. The exciting thing in this announcement is the new 9x4 configuration (9 and 4 engines in the first and second stages vs the current 7x2). They don't mention whether the tanks will get stretched to allow for more fuel, or if this just burns the fuel faster. Starship generations keep getting both more engines and longer.
Yup, the thrust improvements were expected. The BE-4 engines have quite a low chamber pressure for their engine class, so they can gain significant performance just by increasing chamber pressure.
Additionally, the New Glenn fairings are very large for their weight capacity. New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass. So many expected that BO designed it this way because they expected to increase performance of their engines in the future, making the weight/volume ratio of their fairing more balanced.
New Glenn has 45t of capacity now. Increasing thrust by 15% should increase that to 51t, thus making New Glenn 7x2 also just barely a Super Heavy booster. Perhaps they didn't call that out because that would overshadow the 9x4 announcement.
Falcon Heavy is a huge outlier, and has never actually demonstrated the capability to lift close to its nameplate capacity to LEO. Falcon 9 is already volume constrained to LEO outside of Starlink or Dragon launches, and Starlink is packed incredibly densely to get to that point. When I ran the numbers some time back, New Glenn was similar to Falcon 9.
Increasing thrust by 15% doesn't just increase payload by 15%. I don't know a simpler way to estimate this than to run a simulation, and I don't have one with numbers I can toggle.
The really big change will be launch thrust to weight ratio. Going from ~1.2 to ~1.35 gives you 75% more thrust at launch which means you spend less time fighting gravity, less time in the thick parts of the atmosphere, and less time to get past the trans-sonic region.
There are other constraints on how quick the vehicle should be, even when engine performance allows: you probably won't want to hit maximum dynamic pressure in too-thick air.
> New Glenn has 3x the fairing volume compared to the Falcon Heavy, but can throw less mass.
To be fair, the Falcon Heavy has way too little fairing volume for it's lift capacity (and apparently it is in the process of getting an extra 50% or so?)
I believe that a larger fairing and vertical integration capability for Falcon is in the works as a result of the last round of the National Security Launch Contracts that SpaceX won.
The fairings aren't constrained to the diameter of the booster, they already have a larger diameter than the booster.
The small size of the Falcon Heavy fairing is probably due to the fact that they are the same size as the Falcon fairing, and it was designed when Falcon could throw < 1/2 the mass it can currently throw, let alone the Falcon Heavy.
I'm sure there's a limit, but it's not really that big an effect as you'd think. The fairing is lifted almost entirely by the first stage, and as SpaceX increased confidence in the landings they were able to reduce to fuel margins, leaving move for a heavier fairing. The aerodynamic effects are secondary to the added weight, and are only a really a bother for a few seconds at max q. In fact, the larger volume to surface area makes designing for max q easier in some respects, such as audio energy.
BE-4 is 140 bar chamber pressure vs SpaceX Raptor 2 at 350 bar. Thrust to weight of BE-4 is 80:1 vs Raptor2 at 140:1.
I don't think the capabilities are as different as those numbers imply. I believe that it's due to the conservativeness of Blue Origin and SpaceX's willingness to blow up hundreds of engines on the test stand to iteratively push the margins.
I believe Raptor 2 operates at a lower chamber pressure. According to Wikipedia, Raptor 3 is 350 bar, and its thrust to weight ratio is 183.6:1.
BE-4's chamber pressure is low for its design, but it would be very difficult to increase it to Raptor's levels. Full-flow staged combustion causes the propellants to be gasses when they enter the combustion chamber, and chemical reactions in gasses happen more quickly, allowing for efficient combustion in a smaller combustion chamber. The smaller volume makes it easier to contain higher pressures.
Based on the photo posted by the Blue Origin CEO the tanks are definitely getting stretched (also looks like a slightly different fin, landing leg, and fairing config)
> Thing that doesn’t exist yet will, ideally, have 6% better specs than thing that’s been in use for over 7 years!
FYP as it's rather worse than you framed. I'm happy to see more competition in space, because I think it's the single most important domain for humanity. And Blue Origin is making some rapid improvements, but people are dramatically overstating both this and their history/role in space quite significantly.
Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX, back in 2000, and only managed to send a rocket into orbit this year, 25 years later. They remain a complete nonplayer that exists only through the good fortune of endless and clearly unconditional Bezos bucks.
Now if they can keep putting out some good results, ideally start producing some hardware that can compete in terms of price and capability, and generally scaling things up - then I'll be the first to sing their praises. But we're still quite a ways away from that point for now.
Is there a way in Obsidian to have a virtual file separator like `---` in yaml documents?
For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in with one recommendation each.
How many files do you have? At what scale did you see this being a problem?
I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.
The Obsidian Sync (official) plugin isn't very clever with its syncing, it does one file at a time, seemingly new requests for each file.
I recently had to sync a new Obsidian vault from scratch, a vault with thousands of files, and it took minutes to complete because of this, even though most files are a couple of KB at most.
Easy to fix and low hanging fruit, but still an issue for us with many files in our vaults.
Same here, but the problem is bigger than that. Having to manage a ton of tiny files makes it easier to lose tiny bits of data. What happens if a file changes, gets overwritten and you don't notice? It's much easier to 'version' a single larger file than many hundreds (thousands?) of tiny files containing 4-5 lines at most.
I want to join in with a Garmin rant. I also made the switch to a Coros after owning 3 Garmin watches. Each Garmin seemed to last almost exactly 3 years before abruptly dying. Each time I wanted to buy essentially the same watch only to find the new watches had more features and a higher price. The last round the "upgrade" more smart watch features, fewer sport watch features, and less battery life. The lower priced watches were always carefully missing select features that I wanted. I was doing triathlons which I guess Garmin thought they could coerce me into buying separate bike/run/swimming devices or paying 3-4X to get that extra 4mm of screen to show an extra data field. Garmin priced and segmented themselves out of a customer.
The new Pebble is very similar to the Coros Pace but without the GPS but with hackability and that makes me very interested.
From the bottom of the post I know what they are hoping users will do:
> Suppose your deployed Helm chart is failing to pull images from docker.io/bitnami. In that case, you can resolve this by subscribing to Bitnami Secure Images, ensuring that the Helm charts receive continued support and security updates.
They don't want to give instructions that are too helpful. They want your company CC to be the easiest way to fix the problem they created.
The health insurance companies are paid as a percentage of the amount of care that flows through them. So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER.
> So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER.
I don't think this is completely true right? Rather, it's more accurate to say that customers that are seen as healthier get to pay less premiums, but customers that are seen as unhealthy have to pay more.
In both scenarios, you, as the insurance company, still want to be minimizing the amount of care you actually pay for.
In other words, to maximize profits, it seems like the best customer is one that's high risk (high premiums), but less likely to require a catastrophic payout. In which case, it feels like an obese high risk patient on ozempic seems like a pretty solid deal.
My understanding is that under ACA their profit is capped and if they don't pay out they have to issue rebates:
> In the simplest terms, the 80/20 rule requires that insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they collect on medical claims, effectively capping their profit margins. If insurers fall under this threshold, they must rebate the difference to policyholders.
So that would mean that the only way to increase the profit is to reduce over head and keep more of the 20% or increase the amount of claims. Paying out less in claims would mean they have to give rebates back to the customers.
As with everything health care related I'm sure it's more complicated than that and I'm missing something. For instance my health care plan is through my employer so everyone pays the same premium and the provider doesn't get to set it based on how healthy each employee is (although certainly the whole group is negotiated when the contract comes up for renewal).
I've done my own small scale version of this where I made models for internal distribution of the specialty equipment my employer uses. I doubt they paid Lego anything.
There is software to design your own lego set. Bricklink Studio is what I used. It's essentially Lego CAD software with a component library of Lego pieces. You can do high quality renderings, generate instruction sheets and BOMs.
Lego has a Pick-a-brick service where you can get new parts from a very limited selection at great expense. At third party marketplaces like Bricklink you can upload BOMs and they will assemble shopping carts from different seller's inventories of used pieces. Price and selection is better than Pick-a-brick but shipping / order fees / minimum lot size drive up the cost. I've tried many times but even the smallest 200 piece build ends up needing orders from 3 sellers across the world. There's always some part that was only ever sold in one rare set from 30 years ago and is unobtanium (the CAD program makes it easy to include a piece regardless of actual availability).
There are also businesses that will give you a turn key product that looks very retail-like with parts bagged by step, printed instructions, real Legos, box art, etc.
If you're willing to go with "lego compatible" third party bricks like GoBricks there are many sites that can source your entire build at once with new non-lego pieces. Part quality ranges from "good enough" to "indistinguishable" and the price and ease of ordering is loads better. You get a box of unsorted parts and spend lots of time grouping the pieces into kits.
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