gantron

Agreed. You can really tell commenters' ages based on whether they recall this. The Gates you describe is the one I remember from the '90s.

I have to assume that anyone who thinks of Gates as a rich old man who just wants to cure Malaria is quite a bit younger (or their memory is easily overwritten).

To what purpose?

Steel-manning: Gates has run a deliberate PR campaign for decades to rehabilitate his reputation. In the 80s & 90s (before the Gates Foundation) he was known as a ruthless corporate tactician who crushed competitors like ants and earned a federal antitrust suit against Microsoft. Prior to his divorce he had a widely-publicized affair with a subordinate. He befriended Jeffrey Epstein and appeared in his flight logs after Epstein had already been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. (Gates has worked very hard to distance himself from Epstein since then - another example of the PR machine at work).

Someone who wants to paint the least charitable picture possible of Gates could factually describe him as a cutthroat businessman and a philanderer who associated with a pedophile on at least a few documented occasions. And that's ignoring the nuttier Gates conspiracy theories (e.g., Covid microchips).

Sure, everyone knows him. But he'd rather be known as a voracious reader who fought polio & malaria and provided drinkable water to millions. Not a bad use of his billions - what else could he spend those on that would materially affect his life?

I really enjoyed American Prometheus. Might be a bit too focused on Oppenheimer for the original request, but it covers the Manhattan Project more broadly too.

No.

That September morning, Krebs didn’t take up Waifu’s chess challenge. “What am I going to do, play him at chess?” he said. “He would have just screenshot what I said and send it to his friends.”

I'd argue that working on the right projects reduces the likelihood of collateral damage.

Take for example the R9X [0]. Instead of an explosive warhead it has a set of blades on the tip. The US has used it to assassinate single people in the passenger seat of a car while leaving the driver untouched. I'd rather this than dropping bombs on terrorists that come with a blast radius that takes out everyone else nearby.

This seems net-good to me. There are certainly people alive today because of the R9X team's work.

It's actually exactly correct. That comment is referring to 1993's "last supper" in which the SECDEF gathered the defense CEOs at the time and literally did tell them to consolidate/merge.

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-...

Even this is almost certainly an underestimate. Open source intelligence that just the bill of materials for a Shahed is more than the tens of thousands previously estimated. These are probably more on the order of ~$400k [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/02/07/375000the...

You're mostly correct that the older tech is the bulk of what's been sent, but there have been lots of batches of newer tech that the US has delivered. [0]

These newer companies (Anduril, Skydio, etc.) do it for a few reasons. Some are obvious: they get paid and their systems have a chance at influencing real-world events that the leadership & rank-and-file employees might care about personally.

But from a pure product development perspective, fielding these systems is a valuable test opportunity. You've built a great drone but you're not sure how it'll perform in a GPS-denied environment with S-band radio completely unusable? Russian Electronic Warfare teams are happy to curate that environment for you.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2024-01-08...

Optionality, even for a monopsony like the Defense industry, is good for the consumer (Pentagon). They still want suppliers to compete.

What incentive is there for a company to innovate if the DoD allows their competitors to die out? When it's time to buy a new fighter jet (or whatever else) those acquisitions chiefs want several options, same as any consumer.

The OUSD for Acquisition & Sustainment publishes lengthy analyses on competition within the industry and how to stoke it. [0]

[0] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...

Seems fun to me.

Same folks, everyone.

Fewer than 5% of Anduril employees are former Palantir employees.

I fail to see how a country maintaining awareness of passages across its borders is a bad thing.

This really isn’t to sell any Roadrunners. Anduril has surely been talking to the right program offices and relevant government entities for some time now.

This is more to establish the company’s general credibility & draw in new talent.

Scattering sensors in the desert is militarizing the border? That’s an awfully dramatic characterization, no?

A reasonable guess is that this is in response to the proliferation of group 3 UAS in the Ukraine conflict [0]. Personally, I am all for the US producing robotic systems designed to kill robotic systems that are designed to kill humans.

[0]https://www.eurasiantimes.com/deliveries-of-russias-deadly-o...

Sounds like an interesting story! How big was a pallet? How does one come to know the specific truck driver?

Thank you, the hn title character limit wouldn't allow the flag.

Actual title of the document is "Moneyball Military: An Affordable, Achievable, and Capable Alternative to Deter China".

A poorly-written, self-posted advertisement for a morally bankrupt service that offers zero novel engineering or business approaches and is still carpeted with the same slimy low-res banner ads as its competitors. Why is this here? Go shill it via some other mechanism designed for the losers who would use it.

But what’s driving people listening to white noise sometimes isn’t enjoyment, right? There have been cases of clear abuse [0] that Spotify is correct to crack down on.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si...

How is this relevant? Subsidies are a fundamentally different model. I understand that dumping on Elon is popular now but c’mon.

I don’t think calling Palmer a run-of-the-mill enthusiast does justice to his passion/obsession. Last I checked he had the largest HMD collection in the world. His passion (more than anduril) has been to bring VR/AR to the masses, and if he feels like the Apple headset is a step towards that then I’m inclined to accept his interpretation.

I’m biased, I work with Palmer and have always 1) found him to be genuine, 2) reasonably impartial in how he judges these sorts of things, and 3) been blown away by his passion for head-mounted display tech.

Some of the early Apple leaks scared me off from early adoption — external battery/compute, talk of only producing 300k units to satisfy enthusiasts only, etc. I’m excited that Apple is taking the leap but it seems like the headset is unlike the iPad/watch/iPhone in that it’s not intended for mass adoption. I was content to be part of the second wave.

If some credible folks attest to this being excellent, why not? Strong initial reviews would swing me towards buying a first unit.

How does an article like this get published without summarizing the specific results or quantifying the drop?

Does it dictate that you have to or that there’s an opportunity to do so without standing out?

This is one of the more bizarre layoff announcements I’ve read. Vague title, spends most of the intro celebrating the success of different franchises and overall strength of the business, buries the lede in the third paragraph… if you skimmed it you could miss the layoff news entirely.

I understand there’s no great way to deliver a message like this but it strikes me as so tone deaf for the CEO to not even acknowledge that it sucks. The last paragraph mentions love, appreciation, joy — where’s the apology for the leadership decisions that led to these peoples’ unemployment?

I use your ADS-B feeds quite often! Keep up the good work :)

Recent example (last ~6 months): Anduril acquired a 30-person company, Dive, that built autonomous submarines with some novel low-cost process. They had built a small number of vessels for internal testing and maaaaybe had started to generate a little revenue, but nothing serious.

Then, four months post-acquisition, Anduril’s influence earned them a $100M contract to build prototype submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. Dive benefitted from Anduril’s political savvy and connectedness in a new part of the world; Anduril benefitted from Dive’s tech of course.

It's a little late to be brainstorming low-cost platforms for sea-based logistics (read: Pacific-based).

First flight of a full-scale prototype by 2027? Not any of the legacy defense prime (Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, etc.). They probably stopped reading at "low-cost design" anyway.

Of the defense tech companies that CAN move fast enough and have the technical expertise (Anduril, Kratos, anyone else?), this is so far out of their wheelhouse and the $15M incentive is simply not worth it for the substantial chunk of their resources that they would need to stake on a large-scale program with no obvious path to operational relevance & Program of Record status.

It's a cool idea, and the history of similar platforms is fun, but it's tough to see how this becomes real.