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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Lights using a 18650 seem to be the rage these days, at crazy cheap prices, but they all use some UI with clicks, holds, etc.

    I have an Olight Seeker Pro 4 and it’s pretty simple to use. The on/off button rotates and controls the intensity. You do have to either hold it for a few seconds to turn it on or rotate the button 90º and then click but that’s unavoidable with these kinds of flashlights.

    These lights are very small and yet very powerful. That means you can easily pocket them, but because they are so powerful they also get very hot. You don’t want a flashlight like this to accidentally turn on while in your pocket. If you look at these lights, the head is almost always ribbed, it’s basically a heatsink. Even then when you run them at full strength they usually throttle themselves down after a few minutes to prevent overheating.


  • They are also very different organizations with very different goals.

    NASA is focussed on science, they are trying to learn as much as possible about our solar system and the universe.

    SpaceX by contrast is focussed on engineering. They aren’t trying to find life on Mars, they are trying to build the ferry service to it.

    When NASA built rockets back in the 60’s, space flight was a science problem. We needed to figure out if it was even possible to do so. Can we even get a capsule into space? Can humans survive in zero gravity? Nowadays space flight is an engineering problem. We know it’s possible, we know the math, but can we actually build those things?