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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • I’m prefacing this by saying my background is playing KSP and inadvertantly making my own Kessler syndrome when running out of fuel braking during a station rendezvous 😅

    Yeah you’re fundamentally trading energy. It depends on how the impact happens but orbital scientists think in terms of the average velocity of a collision event and their likely angle. 30⁰ head on at 7km/s is roughly normal I think?

    A head on collision means that you have the full kinetic energy of both satellites to work with. Some parts get thrown up into massive orbits even up into medium earth orbit. Others deorbit due to hitting at the right angle to lose enough kinetic energy that their orbit drops.

    Overall your debris ends up in a plume heading in the direction of both satellites, shaped like a flat cone. In the case of starlink they might have to deorbit the entire constellation while they still have control over them since that cone is invariably going to shotgun blast one or more satellites on the next orbital string


  • The only good news is any debris you generate has some part of its orbit extremely low due to starlink satellites being so low themselves. That’ll stop being true once debris finds something else to hit higher up but it’s easier to deorbit stuff this low since there’s really quite a bit of atmospheric drag at periapse.

    Edit: I should clarify that even after a collision debris has to have an orbit that crosses through the altitude the impact happened at unless some more energy is added higher up in its new elliptical orbit






  • Revanced is dying because OSumAtrix, the lead dev, is so toxic every other developer decided to hard fork revanced and make Morphe.

    What’s really sad is Osum is copying code religiously from Morphe, including typos. They also forget to change function names or comments to go from Morphe to Revanced. As a result, Morphe DMCA’d him for not complying with the attribution clause of their GPL license.

    It’s a whole mess but basically it’s one guy trying to replace dozens of contributors by copying code. He’s never going to sustain it like this, so just use Morphe honestly…

    It’s updated daily (sometimes multiple times a day) and it seems like they can’t stop adding new QoL features to the patcher. Their patches work great, I highly recommend it.





  • Monsanto and friends know that if you make $500/acre they can charge $490/acre. It’s really that bad for input costs because there’s zero competition, and if there technically is more than one company in a space they just refuse to compete, but technically aren’t a cartel…

    Then you have China not buying soybeans from US farmers over politics (justified imo) and those leopards ate a lot of faces

    Also the rescue programs that were meant to help prevent farmers from folding were frozen under DOGE so a whole bunch of farmers made the necessary investments and expenses to qualify for programs that don’t exist currently, costing them even more money while they’re deep in the red.

    A drought and bad harvests have been hitting the US. Last year’s harvest was already not good and this year’s was weird due to the weather and lack of rain or snowpack.

    The Midwest US is only farmable at its current intensity due to the Ogallala aquifer which is like a gigantic underground fresh water ocean. It’s been pumped dry in many places, and will run out in a few decades.

    I heard of a town hall deciding what to do about pumping that aquifer. The choices were

    A) stop all pumping

    B) reduce pumping to steady state levels. It doesn’t recharge and it doesn’t empty more

    C) depletion in 100 years

    D) depletion in 50 years

    Guess which option was chosen…

    It’s also not because they’re dumb they just can’t be responsible. You go bankrupt if you pump less since you grow less, or would need to grow crops that use less water but net lower yields, lower pay, and it doesn’t pay for your giant 16 row corn header or combine.




  • One point of correction:

    That isn’t how the 5 eyes actually works. It’s illegal for most countries to invade the privacy of their own citizens without a warrant since they have the equivalent to the bill of rights or a constitution or something similar.

    But… it’s not illegal for Canada to spy on the citizens of the other 5 eyes technically speaking (especially if nobody ever finds out…) you just blame discovering stuff on other legitimate surveillance methods, or you “get lucky” one day and catch a person you’re interested in by pure happenstance. Wow, would you look at that? They were criminaling while I was watching them.

    You scratch my back spy on my citizens I scratch spy on yours?