demosito666

Lightning is just better overall.

Yes, in principle, this (limited ground invasion to protect the straight) can be done. The cost - both in lives, money and political capital - will be enormous.

One comment though.

The small dones can't get very far and the US is exceptional at electronic warfare.

There is currently one county in the world which is exceptional in electronic warfare against drones - Ukraine. Then there is Russia. Everybody else is leagues behind, including US. Without real combat experience and proven technologies ready for deployment all your money and fancy equipment are worth nothing. THAADs have the most advanced radars, did it help them in UAE recently?

In Ukraine they basically had to build a network of mini-factories with 3d printers and ad-hoc repurpose of old weapons right behind the front lines. This is to be able to counter Russian drones by enabling fast iteration on EW. US has nothing like that in current doctrine and it’s not clear if this can even be deployed in an expeditionary corps model.

I’m not saying of course that it’s impossible for US to open the straight by military means or to defeat IRGC otherwise, it’s just that it’s a very hard task which got even harder after advancement in drones.

In other words, betting on wind (or sun) where there is little wind (and sun) is not an optimal choice. But folks on HN were telling otherwise. Who might’ve known…

IRGC is also 10x more advanced than whatever forces were in Afganistan.

This is all fine and well, but misses one little detail: drones. In the past conflicts US troops were more or less unreachable for the enemy unless they were advancing on the ground in a challenging terrain like dense jungles or mountains, where an enemy could ambush them. Other then that, US had air superiority, overwhelming firepower and excellent reconnaissance.

After the war in Ukraine things are very different. US troops are not safe as long as they are reachable by an FPV done, i.e., the enemy has to only make it ~20km to US positions. Given the area and terrain in Iran this will be happening all the time. So any troops positioned on Iran's territory will be under constant attacks by FPV drones. This means heavy casualties.

But even if the US forces will manage to clear the FPVs, this is still not enough, because there are dozens of other types of winged long range drones, the most famous being of course Shahed. They are less precise and not so deadly for the troops. They are also much easier to intercept. But that means that you effectively can't set up a safe stationary base, because it will be attacked by hundreds of drones from hundreds of miles away 24x7. There is not enough interceptors to stop that.

This means that a new approach will have to be used by US armed forces which they never tried before. This guarantees heavy losses on the initial stage which will raise a real political shitstorm back home. It looks like the current administration doesn't particularly care about that, but chances are they will not be able to contain the consequences.

And it is more than likely. US and Iran probably can’t defeat each other militarily (us obviously can, but it requires full scale ground invasion which is not even contemplated at the moment). And both can’t back out of the conflict. So the likely outcome is that the conflict escalates until one of the regimes snaps and it becomes to somehow politically possible to back out.

Collapse of the regime in Iran seems unlikely at the moment because it’s hard and zealous dictatorship with unlimited power and will for violence within the country. In the US OTOH the elections are coming. An administration that started a stupid and absolutely preventable war and then effectively lost faces quite a challenge there despite everything else. This seems like a perfect moment for Iran to create a deterrent for US: attacking us ends your presidency.

Which is fine by me

The issue with car industry at least in Europe is not price. This is the last branch that is more or less alive, employs a lot of people and generates added value domestically. If it’s ceded to China, that means that you are at the next stage of deindustrialisation. From where we stand, it looks like that would mean economy collapse and crisis that we haven’t seen since… ever? If this is the way, we’ll have to figure how to live without relying on jobs as the way to survive (ubi, resource-based economy, etc). Since this is not even on the horizon, keep the tariffs for now, thank you.

EV cars is not a mature industry.

Really? Cost of extraction in Russia is about $30/barrel, sanctions introduced discount of about $20/barrel in 2025 which means 70% profit drop at market price of $60. Sounds pretty game changing to me.

Even if everyone has been 10x’ed, the math still strongly favours not making mistakes in the first place

The math depends on importance of the software. A mistake in a typical CRUD enterprise app with 100 users has zero impact on anything. You will fix it when you have time, the important thing is that the app was delivered in a week a year ago and was solving some problem ever since. It has already made enormous profit if you compare it with today’s (yesterday’s ?) manual development that would take half a year and cost millions.

A mistake in a nuclear reactor control code would be a total different thing. Whatever time savings you made on coding are irrelevant if it allowed for a critical bug to slip through.

Between the two extremes you thus have a whole spectrum of tasks that either benefit or lose from applying coding with LLMs. And there are also more axes than this low to high failure cost, which also affect the math. For example, even non-important but large app will likely soon degrade into unmanageable state if developed with too little human intervention and you will be forced to start from scratch loosing a lot of time.

Oh yeah. Bug 12309 was reported now what, 20 years ago? It’s fair to say that at this point arrival of GNU Mach will happen sooner than Linux will be able to properly work under memory pressure.

Or not living in US?

In countries with functional democracy it actually is happening. In Sweden anti-immigration sentiments allowed for right party to gain significant share in the parliament and now immigration rules are changing and immigration rates are lowering. One may argue that this is 20 years too late, but in the past the majority of the population public actually didn’t actively oppose the policies. They do now, the situation is changing. No swexit required.

V 1.02: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won, because they believe that the others believe that you have enough power to crush the dissent. The moment this belief fades, you fall.

Robot vacuum with a mop, washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher reduce housework to like an hour per week, ie 30 min/person/week. This can be higher if you live in a big house, but if your marriage can’t tolerate 30 mins of house work a robot will not solve it.

Euro?

And yet the battery in your Linux laptop dies 2x faster...

Does my uncle having an argument with his doctor over needing more painkillers, combine with an anecdote about my sister disagreeing with a midwife over how big her baby would be, combined with my friend outliving their stage 4 cancer prognosis all add up to "therefore I'm going to disregard nutrition recommendations"?

Not sure about your sister and uncle, but from my observations the anecdotes combine into “doctor does not have time and/or doesn’t care”. People rightfully give exactly zero fucks about Bayes theorem, national health policy, insurance companies, social dynamics or whatever when the doctor prescribes Alvedon after 5 minutes of listening to indistinct story of a patient with a complicated condition which would likely be solved with additional tests and dedicated time. ChatGPT is at least not in a hurry.

Best path forward is to let in competition

To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:

- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing

- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require

- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require

- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance

- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)

- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).

China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.

But politicians are - in general - neither evil, nor do they have any real incentive to ”control citizens’ thoughts”.

As someone coming from authoritarian state, this is such an alien line of reasoning to me. By definition, those in power want more power. The more control over the people you have, the more power you get. Ergo, you always want more control.

It's easy to overlook this if you've spent your entire life in a democratic country, as democracies have power dynamics that obscure this goal, making it less of a priority for politicians. For instance, attempting to seize too much power can backfire, giving political opponents leverage against you. However, the closer a system drifts toward autocracy and the fewer constraints on power there are, the more achievable this goal becomes and the more likely politicians are to pursue it.

Oh, and also politics selects for psychopaths who are known for their desire for control.

The only valid argument

Really? The only one?

What exactly did those people taste that it got them upset so much and who exactly those "people" are? Last time I checked these laws are pushed through as covertly and sneaky as possible and no "people" asked for them. I can't recall any demonstrations with protesters asking to violate their privacy to keep them safe for those evil internet trolls that want to have a sexual intercourse with their relatives.

You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab and desire to fully control the plebs as push from the society. This doesn't sound convincing.

Can someone explain me this: the article is basically about the dedicated employees who now feel betrayed by the company. But why would anyone be emotionally involved with a for-profit private company that appropriates user-generated data? Outside of specific cases and normal employer-employee relationship, I can understand being dedicated to something if it contributes to a "greater good" in some form. Condition for this in this case is that user data is open (at least for private use) or the app is open.

This is not "hot" take, this is correct take in itself. The problem is the execution: how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency? How do you ensure that the funds are not stolen? How do you make sure that the product is actually used and you don't fund a thing that no one uses? And so on.

Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.

One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.

The issue in the real world is that's not how the software industry actually works, 99% of the time.

What would be a more appropriate model from accounting perspective?

Which is trivial to ensure when people effectively can’t deposit cash to their bank accounts and businesses don’t accept cash - nobody wants the headache. Which is exactly what happened here.

Aesthetics is objective as long as we’re talking from casual perspective, which is always the case for infrastructure and buildings unless we’re at architecture summit. 90% of people would agree that Amsterdam or Paris city center is more beautiful and pleasant to be in than modernist hellscape at outskirts of Soviet cities. And therefore 90% of the buildings should be built with this in mind, when feasible, because it directly affects wellbeing of humans. Weathered concrete finish is nice in art house movies and in hipster bars, in everyday life it’s ugly and depressing on large scale objects for most people. The rest 10% would be perfect for modernism/functionalism/brutalism, but unfortunately proportions are reversed today. This is of course more subtle for pure infrastructure like bridges or highway interchanges, but the general principle still applies.

It is enforceable, it’s just that not all countries are there yet. It’s practically impossible to buy anything worth more than 1000 eur with cash in Scandinavia, ironically with the exception of drugs. Humanity is on a steady track to a world where authorities are controlling every penny, at which point non-sanctioned opposition is impossible.

We’re talking about about 3-4x difference in net income here. No amount of accounting for public transport, heathcare, clean air, smiling faces, lqbtq rights and nice architecture will offset this difference unless we assume that those things are almost all that matters and money is for greedy capitalists. Yes, on the fringes you are probably better off in Europe on average, but this discussion is about highly qualified relatively young people, not about first generation refugees from Eritrea.

The word “engineering” in SWE is just plain wrong. Present day software development has nothing to do with engineering outside of some very niche markets (aviation, mission-critical systems, embedded controllers). The term vibe coding came up really handy because it describes how 99% of software is developed much better than “software engineering“, with or without LLMs. That’s why it’s always fun to read such discussions of hardware vs software people.