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Cake day: March 24th, 2026

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  • My Mint laptop audio stopped working for a couple months and then miraculously fixed itself this week. I made various attempts to fix it with no luck. It’s either a hardware issue or some obscure software issue.

    In the past, I had plugged in a HDMI cable to mirror the screen and couldn’t get the audio working again until I plugged it back into HDMI and switched it back to the internal speakers before unplugging HDMI. Before the audio broke this time, I had connected a USB microphone, so it’s possible that’s what did it.









  • I had assumed the propellant would be a single additional launch, but this Wikipedia article says 10. $1B+ to leave LEO definitely makes the narrative that Starship is going to revolutionize space travel sound like a load of bullshit, unless there are realistic plans I am not aware of to reduce the number of launches significantly.

    Edit:

    This article has more details. It takes 7.5 tanker launches to fill a Starship, but Elon insists 4 should be enough for the Moon, whereas NASA estimates up to 16 due to boil off.

    It really sounds like Elon has been overselling the value of Starship, but the saddest part is that other reusable rockets in development will likely have the same problem.

    Edit 2:

    Even if starship just becomes a heavy launch to LEO vehicles

    This seems plausible, whereas Starship shuttling between Earth and Mars to “build a colony” does not. More like Starship is a shuttle to LEO and then something like the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian that remains in space and uses ion drive would be what actually transfers humans to Mars orbit, with perhaps Starship also doing the shuttling between the surface and low orbit. It seems we are a really long way off from what The Martian depicts, though it’s possible the first human may step foot on Mars in the next couple decades.