Brandon Haber
@malderi.bsky.social
340 followers 530 following 570 posts
Space, software, occasional politics, and bird photos! Software engineer, working on rockets, spacecraft, and things that make fire and loud noises. Currently: Flight software at Stoke Space. Formerly: APL/Dragonfly, Blue Origin/New Shepard+BE-3, Shuttle
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Reposted by Brandon Haber
What The Hell Is Going On, a thread:

I’ve seen some thinkpieces and posts about Portland protests that fail to understand the long-term hyperspecificity of Portland culture/humor, and frame it as a sort of shitposting meme-pilled ironic thing. Which is wrong.

So I’m gonna give you my breakdown.
They can get off my lawn lol
That is a hell of an upgrade.
Will be fun to visit, take a few pictures, fly around a bit.
Saturn's giant moon Titan.

By Cassini.
Seattle fans getting their money's worth.
Reposted by Brandon Haber
Remember that there are righteous people among us, always.

Left: Netherlands, 1942

Right: Illinois, 2025
One day in the summer of 1942, after the onset of the deportations of the Jews from Holland to “the East”, a student, who was a courier for the ASG student underground group in Amsterdam, approached the de Vries family, asking them to hide a Jewish child. The de Vrieses, who had two children of their own, decided to accept the offer despite the risk that was involved in hiding Jews, and soon four year-old Louise Pinto was brought to their home. Amid the smoke bombs and screams that ricocheted throughout a South Shore building last month during a massive military-style immigration raid, one man heard a knock on his door.

On the other side was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for his help.

“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.

“I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.

“I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.
Reposted by Brandon Haber
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
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Stoke Space, one of the Seattle area's brightest space startups, says $510 million in fresh funding brings total capital raised to nearly a billion dollars - and should clear the way for the first launches of its fully reusable Nova rocket next year. www.geekwire.com/2025/stoke-s...
Stoke Space raises a whopping $510M to accelerate work on its fully reusable Nova launch system
Stoke Space reveals that it has raised $510 million in fresh funding to accelerate development of its fully reusable Nova rocket.
www.geekwire.com
Reposted by Brandon Haber
Leaving the Kennedy Space Center today, got a nice view of a New Glenn first stage heading to the pad…
One noticeable difference that seems much more LLM-like is the replicator and holodeck controls. One sentence commands get immensely extrapolated, and often the characters say "no no no what I meant was..."
Watched a UHD Bluray for the first time on my new OLED TV, instead of the last 3 months of streaming. Yeah... Might have to pick a few more up. Noticeable difference on a good screen, particularly for movies with such good visuals.
Hah. We went too. Tons of fun and we didn't eat the fish!
I think we're going to find out.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need
Trump: "We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers."
The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for “negotiating” reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers. I WILL NEVER LET OUR FARMERS DOWN! Sleepy Joe Biden didn’t enforce our Agreement with China, where they were going to purchase Billions of Dollars of our Farm Product, but Soybeans, in particular. It’s all going to work out very well. I LOVE OUR PATRIOTS, AND EVERY FARMER IS EXACTLY THAT! I’ll be meeting with President Xi, of China, in four weeks, and Soybeans will be a major topic of discussion. MAKE SOYBEANS, AND OTHER ROW CROPS, GREAT AGAIN!
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We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.
Okay, so the very funniest of part of this article is that I bought Eisenhower's biography at Powell's.
National Guard Already Lost at Powell’s Books: tinyurl.com/4mw4n9h2
Upgraded to iOS 26 last night. So far... I actually kind of like it. Good software UX used to have personality. The flat design trend of the last few years killed that everywhere. Apple Aero is at least kinda bringing back some personality and I like it.
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"Let's see what's out there..." It was 38 years ago today (Sept 28, 1987) that "Encounter at Farpoint" had its premiere broadcast, introducing Capt Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D. I'm proud to have been a member of the team who made the show at Paramount.
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Blue cities should tear up the roads in front of ICE facilities and then start decades of community engagement and input sessions to rebuild them. Let's harness our core competencies.
Guessing the atlas didn't go up from pad 40, heh.
Reposted by Brandon Haber
NASA's IMAP mission lifts off on its million mile journey to study our sun's heliosphere.
A Falcon 9 rocket crossing paths with the sun. The sound from the rocket engines is visible around the sun as the rocket passes by.