lopsotronic

Yeah, I was going to point out there's a few "big bombs" out there that aren't useless at all . .

Someone will break the First Use taboo, but I wouldn't put money on it being Russia, at the moment, not for Ukraine, as odd as it sounds to say that.

There are more important concerns keeping Putin from breaking First Use, but one interesting one is a genuine anxiety that the stupid thing just wouldn't work. Just lay an egg of fissionable material in Zelensky's bedroom.

I think that the problem might be even more fundamental than that. Ownership of a strategic nuclear deterrent seems to short circuit some of the internals of the modern Westphalian state apparatus. Possible mechanisms include 1) centralizing the threat of force into one singular technical system, and 2) making any condition of peer conflict necessarily existential.

With such technical systems under state control, the state is able to focus on little other than its own powers of destruction. It becomes a zombie state, a tottering shell around an ever-growing national security apparatus. Looking around at the world, this seems to be a common morphological stage in the development of nuclear powers. There is no "collapse of commmunism" nor "collapse of financier capitalism", but different shadings on the same depressing chrysalis.

One aspect of being stuck in such a chrysalis is the utter inability to solve non-existential conflicts. There is an overwhelming tendency to make all conflict existential so the full power of the state may be brought to bear, but it's a tendency offset - so far - by the presence of deterrence. The zombies can smell each other.

The most dangerous scenario, by far, is when a nuclear power has uncertain territorial borders. Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea, Kashmir, a fair hunk of Israel - there is a reason we focus on these places in the news.

This also transforms non-nuclear states into "half sovereign" states, something which we have been seeing play out especially with the end of the SU-US Cold War.

What I'm seeing here, reading this thread, is that "intelligence" isn't a thing.

"Thing" in terms of a quantifiable that you can measure with tools and reason about, reproducibly. Everyone's got some idea what it is, so you get lots of different angles, but no one has an Intelligence Ruler we can hold up to a text output and say, yep, this one's got an INT of 14.

Seems to be the crux of the disagreement.

I can't believe I had to scroll down to see this. Victory always flows down; you can have the most badass of technical equipment or cunning tactical victories in the field, then still quite enthusiastically lose the war, due to bad strategy or even the original political goals of conflict.

Or because the political goals were impossible or - almost breathtaking that this state can even exist - because the goals are entirely absent. Incidentally, having a "rotating roster" of different political goals probably counts as something worse than "absent", due to the illusory impression that it gives of "someone deciding something".

I have heard it confidently stated, repeatedly, by extremely technical coder types, that "once we have enough data, we don't need Statistics"

It's a pretty funny sentiment.

It's also, unfortunately, reflective of how even talented individuals pass through advanced accreditation programs without locking blades with - or at least entering a general understanding of - fundamentals. Old timey British boarding schools would have called it "Logic" back in the day.

I am reminded once more of the differences in MSFS and Xplane: one uses a statistical table based model based on existing aircraft, and the other uses laminar flow analysis, fluid dynamics, and physics. One of them tells you something about unknown aircraft, and the other most definitely does not.

My first decent *NIX computer was an SGI Indigo that I rescued from a dumpster at a military-adjacent subcontractor that was also my first tech job.

Hmmm. Probably it wasn't sterilized by the book.

I took that beast home and loved it. It was actually reasonably beefy even into 2001, and IRIX was very slick *NIX by 2000 standards. When you turned it on you could see my electric meter spin faster.

Came with a huge-for-the-time monitor, probably a 19", which caused some envy among friends.*

One of my favorite horror films of the 1980s, Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 Possession.

One quote I heard about it, is that some movies are about madness, and other movies seem to be themselves mad, and Possession is one of those movies. It has this immediacy to it, and an unease that only grows in quantity and tenor. And you genuinely do not know where it is going. Believe me when I say this.

It might be Sam's most memorable performance, for me. The movie seemed to drive its entire cast and crew to exhaustion or worse.

Do not under any circumstances watch the old American cut, the initial release. It was re-edited with scenes out of order and has this bizarro solarization effect at random intervals. It's really really bad. The modern blu-ray and others have the actual movie.

The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the stuff that they do catch.

Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.

DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.

[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"

You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that dance card.

Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex.

That's not just a "Ukraine Problem" either.

Refrigeration and freezer cars completely inverted a lot of prices in the late 19th through the early 20th century.

Coming home from the Appalachian Trail I stayed at the Inn at St. John's in Portland ME, waiting for my flight home. The Inn had an antique framed menu from Delmonico's Restaurant in New York, from 1834. The price inversion was occasionally quite shocking- on that menu I noted roast chicken was twice as much as roast mutton, for example.

Let's see if I can dig up my old trail journal . . .

    Delmonico's Restaurant
    494 Pearl St
    
    Cup of Tea or Coffee-.01
    Bowl of Same- .02
    Crullers-.11
    Soup- .02
    Fried or stewed Liver- .02
    Hash- .03
    Pies- .04
    Beef or Mutton Stew- .04
    Corned Beef & Cabbage- .04
    Pig's Head & Cabbage- .04
    Sausage & Cabbage -.04
    Knuckle & Cabbage- .04
    Fried Fish- .04
    Beef Steak- .04
    Pork Chops- .04
    Pork & Beans -.04 (What the hell? I mean, pork and beans?)
    Sausages- .04
    Puddings- .04 (The pudding of this time was probably more like a rindless sausage than anything we think of as pudding, and could be made from blood, innards, brains,     what-have-you)
    Liver & Bacon - .05
    Roast Beef or Veal- .05
    Roast Mutton- .05
    Veal Cutlet- .05
    Chicken Stew- .05
    Fried Eggs- .05 (I have no idea where this price comes from, although I think the lack of refrigeration in 1834 might have made eggs a bit more of a luxury then than now, and     it's also probable that a fried egg in 1834 was more something like a Scotch Egg than sunnyside up)
    Ham & Eggs- .10
    Hamburger Steak- .10 (Big spender! Again, a hamburger must have been something different in 1834)
    Roast Chicken- .10

Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others.

And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.

For all the editorial hay to be made from the "The Victory of Capital" or the purported "Inevitable Self-Destruction of Communism (with Russians In It)", the process of nations transforming into "security state zombies" is probably less a model of economics/ideology and more a normal lifecycle stage for nuclear powers. It's mistaking metabolic stage for victory.

Once a major power has credible nuclear deterrent, the functions of the Westphalian state focuses on that singular threat of destruction - it's a cannon that ends the state. Having it be a single cannon is antithetical to an open society or democratic patterns in government. Hence, Security State Zombie, unable to perform anything other than its duties of destruction.

Russia started the game in a depleted state and hit the lifecycle stage first - less open society to burn down. We teetered for a long time, but the 9/11 attacks, combined with a reactionary wing that no longer had to run a moral race with the Communists, sent the balance over the edge.

I suspect, right now, we are seeing the "Yeltsin Era", where people finally lose their last patience with the established system, and during which the nomenklatura/technocrats/security state solidify their holdings in communications and media. Terminating this period in an orderly fashion will require some organizational energy and talent. Increased direct cooperation between national security "black" assets and local law enforcement like Texas Marshalls (hey like in Sicario, except not in Mexico), or between black assets and federal groups not operating under legislative or judicial oversight (which I leave to you to name). It will not be a modest effort - the local assets will need to be linked up with aggressively, as they are less numerous than the law enforcement under direct local jurisdiction. I do wonder who our Putin will be, or if we will even see his face without a thermonuclear bonfire.

Ah, I love CircuitiTikZ. Only way to do simple text-based circuit diagrams.

https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en

https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz

Some years ago I wired it up with `asciidoctor-diagram` so we could have simple circuits in our Asciidoc maintenance manuals. The techs loved the hell out of it, and we could collaborate on the things in a git versioned ecosystem vs whatever fresh hell the PDM/ERP had for us.

A very nice complement to the already awesome WireViz (https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz)

Oh, this gold rush has breathed new life into the old school Semantic guys.

Lord knows the DITA priesthood has been running low on rubes, so this new era is a godsend.

Re-coding all of your org's content into a verbose granular schema, that's what will fix these AI things. It's going to give your LLM superpowers! Semantic superpowers!

While everyone completely ignores the utter lack of coupling between the actual language and whatever nonsense is in the element / structure naming. Or the fact that every single thing has to go through some horrible 1990s era parser, which breaks constantly, and now everyone's shovelling the full markup into the very tiny confused mouth of the AI. Or that now everyone needs specialized software to display anything. Or the everything.

My dudes, the thing you're trying to do with this stuff is already done in the vectorizations. You can use math for a lot of it now, instead of someone hand coding "poplar" as "tree" in a totally flat tree structure.

Much more informative than I thought. So it's not Pluto, it's something like variant 2 of the NB-36's engine, a direct air cycle nuclear turbojet. A bit less insane than Pluto, but it raises a whole other herd of questions.

I'm a huge booster of nuclear propulsion in aviation. Although the "floor mass" of a nuclear system is high, the power density of the system as a whole is so high it might as well be aliens. For subsonic heavy lift - and I do mean heavy - a nuclear-electric system is probably the ideal propulsion system. And with dozens or hundreds of ducted fans that you can stick in any damn place, you get to play with a lot of aerodynamic tricks that are just plain tiresome when you are dealing with ducts and ducts of hot gases blasted from a centralized reaction engine: active laminar flow controls; blown flaps; entirely solid-state control actuation via differential power; all kinds of tricks with lifting surface geometries; the sky's the limit.

That said: the Direct Air Cycle as envisioned by variant 2 of the XB-36 was, admittedly, insane, and Project Pluto on the SLAM was in a whole other league - an engine that could never, ever, be flight tested. Reminiscent of the Rocketdyne Arbit/Clapp tripropellant engine of the same era . . although I think I would rather stand next to a Pluto engine running full bore than get anywhere near a reaction engine blown full of liquid fluorine and molten lithium. The Russki bird is (probably) a DAC nuke turbojet, dialing down the crazy just a touch.

But then the question: it's a giant non-stealth subsonic thing. I realize it has endurance to fly at any altitude for any length of time - at least until salt spray eats the inside of the core - but subsonic, it will get intercepted, and since it's a nuke, it's going to be no-holds-barred when it comes to what you use to knock the thing down. Sprint missiles had nuke payloads for essentially the same reason. So I'm not sure what the mission profile of this thing looks like. At least with Pluto, terrain hugging Mach 3+, you were going to have a very hard time catching up with it before it zoomed off below the horizon again, and by that time in this kind of fight AWACS is having the very worst of days.

"just for adopting . ."

OK, I'm really sorry, but "just for adopting" is doing some heavy lifting here.

Watson's other greatest hits: worries about Big Black Dicks; melanin injections as boner pill; what I call "The Cunning Chinaman"; and a whole bucket of others.

Taken in sum: it turns out you can be asked to leave a private club if you are being an asshole.

To clear the air, as a card carrying liberal (even a !gasp! Socialist) I don't necessarily reject empirical racial differences based on genetics. Maybe even for "intelligence", for whatever good that does ya, since "intelligence" lacks anything like a quantitative definition.

But I also think that - if they're even present, which is by no means certain - these are not significant differences. Structuring your entire society around quantitative racial differences, from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, is not enough juice for the squeeze.

But, well, the juice isn't the point, is it?

It's the squeezing - the ability to brutalize your citizenry, to purge Unmanly Virtues like "empathy" or "introspection", to be always prepared for violence - the squeezing, being able to squeeze, is what is important. And the fastest way to do that is convince a bunch of people that other people aren't people. Europe tried that, a few years ago. You might remember that it did not go well. A lesson America never really got. Maybe someday we'll need to learn the same damn thing the same way, except instead of B-17s and Red Army Sex Crime we get to enjoy thermonuclear weapons. Come back Ivan. All is forgiven.

The retrogression perception is correct; but the specific timeframe is so incorrect that the back of my head blew out like a pinata.

The goal is - and I am not picking on the reactionary wing alone, this impulse has broad support across our ideologies - de-industrialization. The complexity of post-Enlightenment civilization is being rejected, in favor of some hypothetical state. This puts the past timeframe as far back as the 17th century.

But not a "real" past. No one can recreate the past. Only their idea of the past.

And of course, when you "create" anything, too much and too quickly, you risk systemic collapse. Not a problem if you imagine you will be Immortan Joeing around in your Death Wagon, but odds are, I'm sorry to say, against it.

I've been a very vocal advocate of Asciidoc as replacement for thick granular XML-based CCS (component content system) specifications, but Typst is the first one that gives it a run for its money. And then some.

If Asciidoc beats up DITA and takes its lunch money, then Typst carjacks it. The CCS capability gap - already vanished with Asciidoc and ReStructuredText - completely reverses with Typst. Typst can do stuff with print that XSL is fundamentally incapable of doing, without plopping the whole thing inside a bespoke Python/JS/TS/etc framework.

For new adopters, unless you have an XML regulatory requirement[1] or an almost fetishistic attachment to Robert Horn's Information Mapping, there is now negative infinity reasons to spool up a DITA instance.

For MIL-STD stuff, the only correct answer is, as always, "Whatever the Program Office Wants", even if that changes weekly. Hey, it's their money.

One downside[2] of Typst, vs Asciidoc, is no published spec. Asciidoc builds out from the DocBook layer, which has more legacy support than most things. The Typst spec is . . . the Typst compiler. But if it gets Pandoc support, who cares?

[1] Which almost always turn out to not be real - read your contracts, people!

[2] There are others. Runtime attributes/variables, better graphing support, tools ecosystem. But those are workable.

As long as the "learning" part is more pleasure than the sensation of not caring about other human beings, I think you're solid, man.

The problem with the nerd-kings-tycoons of today, is that the idea of being feudal lords makes them think about electronic slave collars, rather than about good governance, complex systems, or even just being a badass king. The apartness becomes the goal, rather than being merely a by-product of academic focus living through a regressing world that apparently wants to be lit only by fire.

Where the self-identifier of "nerd" as "I don't care that I don't know how to make people like me" is given precedence over "I care more about esoteric knowledge than about how to make people like me"

"Stay 'til 2300 codepounding or watch your child die of a medieval disease" seems to work really well for productivity, though.

Oh, no, people stopped having children. Whatever could be the reason.

Maus is a great work, and a breakthrough for its genre, but I've always found the animal metaphor troubling for reasons I could never quite pin down.

It was only recently that I realized the problem I have with it: it's a tacit nod towards the broad thesis of secular colonialism (and later of Nazism): h. sap is naturally separated into different scientific kinds. Each acting according to its nature, and of course some of which should never be mingled.

I'm enough of an adult to separate metaphor in a work of art from actual reality, but not everyone is, and that metaphor - if you take it seriously - will have a lot of nasty and all-too-familiar second-order effects. Many of which we would recognize in the harsh lessons of the last century.

Hitler's not a cat, and Spiegelmann's not a mouse. They're humans, making human decisions. Tomorrow I could be Hitler, or you could be Spiegelmann. It can happen to anyone.

Even with open weights, there's a legit reason to be careful when making stuff for defense.

Let's say I am making sensor software, and I say, huh, let's bring in a tiny little vision model for my EO sensor - then it can identify "boat shapes" even if it doesn't have a database of all boats. Pretty neat, right? Well, the point could be made, that the weights might be hiding behavior that will make my vision model . . not see specific boats very well.

"Landing craft? I see no landing craft."

Some decent testing would expose this in a couple shakes, but, well, now you know how much software testing happens in Defense, especially in the unmanned world. Not a whole bunch.

Block 4 is the only version they'd dare put up against a peer air defense, and Block 4 is delayed, delayed, delayed, and . . nowhere in sight, at the moment.

There has been two and a half decades of FUD billowing around the entire program, like the world's most expensive fart, so don't expect to know the truth until they fly the thing past Zamami Island in anger. But I personally will be mentally prepared for disappointment, with some bitter despair as digestif.

It's the deep desire for a sort of restorative authoritarianism: someone who can reduce the complex state of the world into "the way it should be".

The resentment is not versus fate or calamity but against those people who study and give voice to complexity. If someone can just shut those people up and make them go away, we will be restored to a simpler and more moral world. Where tragedy can rightly live in the realms of Gods and Mystery.

I would gently remind those that prefer such simplicity that not all nations do. We are not alone in the world. The nation that better understands the complexities of the natural world will, all else being equal, utterly trounce the nation that persists in fictionalizing existence. Unless you want to re-write your national anthem in Mandarin, you will someday need to (re-?)grapple with the complexities of the universe.

There's a parallel in Maus, where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls his pa out on it, but for his pa the schwarzers aren't people, so there's no "there" there.

If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.

Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.

[1] the "Bloodlands" of Tim Snyder

Scuttlebutt I've heard is that the revenue mechanism of the whole complex is essentially a gigantic depreciation machine. Starlink sats de-orbiting all by themselves get considered "depreciation". That one mechanism basically gives you a Saturn V sized firehose of tax holidays, because satellites aren't cheap, yo, and you can make all sorts of deals to essentially spread that around.

Is it true? I got no idea.

Supposedly, Tesla had some unique money games that vastly blew up their cash flow early on, less a car company and more a sort of tax arbitrage. So maybe it's in character.

Is there an actual quantitative check that says "AI or not AI"? I'm genuinely curious.

So far as I can tell, AI prose checking - at least vs the frontier models - has been little better than vibe-based. Which, well, that's just another way of saying Red doesn't like Blue. And we got enough of that.

First off, say a private prayer of thanks that the core of the current reactionary movement is operating as a scaled up dropship scam. Intellectually and organizationally focused, the end product would rival or even dwarf the great autocracies of the 20th century[1].

As we stand now, the disassembly and selloff of the state (or direct destruction of same) is probably overtaking our ability to act in an expansionist capacity, or even to assemble and coordinate the considerable overhead required of an actual autocracy, that's purely internally.

More pertinent to this subject, the diminishment of the USD is going hand in hand with the oligarch's exchange of assets for slices of the state, which the current executive enjoys quite unabashedly. And obviously the oligarchs feel they are getting fantastic deals, exchanging dissolving assets for monopolies on force, land, and access to state economic resources. But like the liquidation of the USSR by the Soviet security apparatus, tycoon and grifter alike will be more than a little dismayed to see how rapidly both dollars and "state power" lose their sheen when the underlying national context is destroyed.

Particularly since the vaporization of national context is by no means a universal or global phenomenon. I do wonder how well the balkanized techno-feudal dream works when confronted with the reality of, say, China, or even a monolithic domestic block, like the Mormons.

[1] Except today is today, and not the early 20th century. Rather than learning the West's harsh lessons at the hands of B-17s and the Red Army, the United States (and a lot of the northern hemisphere) would learn the same by way of thermonuclear bonfire.

I wanted to say, I probably disagree with you on more or less everything that plagues this nation, but thanks for dipping your toe in strange waters both here and in your judgement of leaders.

The fact you're even willing to talk puts you in a different bracket from the reactionary forces that have co-opted the levers of the conservative party. I live and work in a very conservative area, and the only sentiment I can read is the desire for more actual blood, more paralegal cadres, more shootings, "cleansing" the lawless cities. No conversation extends further than fifteen seconds before a luckless leftist-adjacent strawman is strung up as the prime mover of the ills under discussion, whether it be optics standards or the disintegration of local roads. "We never had any [[redacted]] before they made us do DEI" because of course avionics are, like bears, sensitive to melanin or the presence of menses.

Luckily I have a white face, a cop haircut, and encyclopedic knowledge of war and firearms. I am too much of a coward to whisper anything to arouse suspicion regarding my true politics. Good way to get on the pink slip list.