HN user
Many of the “no” comments here are very focused on the current state. The author seems to be looking at a longer time horizon of computing paradigms, for example invoking ENIAC. On that scale I tend to agree. Vibe coding has only been around a year or two and look how big of an impact it already has. Imagine what another 10 years of progress will look like.
Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.
As someone who trained in chemical engineering in the 2000's, we never really discussed the fact that reactor waste streams were pollution, just another effluent to put somewhere. I'm pointing this out since I don't think that the relative performance profiles of petrochemical plants is going to be common knowledge.
Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.
There are more than two remaining refineries in California. According to this there are 15 active in the state (with some certainly slated to close). https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
I don't disagree that the regulation in California is burdensome, but these refineries seem to have a really poor track record. I live in the bay area and it's a repeating story about excessive flaring or a gas leak from the east bay refineries and that communities should shelter in place. There was even a big fire at Chevron El Segundo this month that took several of their units offline. In the last 5 years that facility has had 46 air quality violations, and in the last 10 years 17 OSHA violations. https://calmatters.org/environment/2025/10/refinery-explosio...
Then let's not forget the Aliso Canyon gas leak in LA in 2015.
It was widely reported to have been the worst single natural gas leak in U.S. history in terms of its environmental impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak
I don't see a reason why we should linger on petrochemical technology if we don't have to. This isn't stuff you want in your backyard.
In hard sci-if settings like The Expanse, would we expect that all of the electronics in space to be a few generations behind the state-of-the-art planetside to account for radiation hardening? Would the electronics be more likely to be installed inside of ships where presumably there is already radiation shielding for people (thinking sensor packages and hard points)?
I’m not sure how effective signal jamming would be against COTS quadcopters. It’s relatively easy to provide on-loss-of-signal instructions to the navigation microcontroller. Perhaps it could be a return to set location command or a home in on signal jammer and explode command.
With the release of GitHub’s Copilot, I wonder how far we are from ML identification of malicious repositories.
You may way to look into biotech incubators such as IndioBio[1] to get an idea of what it takes.
I think you have an interesting product, but I'm having serious issues with your marketing.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. How many of your estimated treatment effects have been supported by experiments? Do you have experiments demonstrating that your model generalizes? How accurate are your estimates compared to experimental results?
It's ironic that you're marketing a causal + analytics product without any data. Generating a narrative and basing it off of observational data is the typical trap that many causal claims fall into. Portraying yourselves as statistical experts and pushing unsubstantiated claims is misleading bordering on unethical.
I'm less confident that a mass migration wouldn't result in millions of deaths. An example might be the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Only 14 million displaced, yet an estimated 200k-2 million deaths and another 2 million people missing[1]. In many ways, this planned displacement was a more favorable scenario than a chaotic climate refugee situation.
If we don't have a good answer to the relatively simple refugee migrations now (eg. Central America, Syria), then I have extreme pessimism that we will be able to manage a larger-scale, persistent event. Whereas with economic + political refugee situations we can always hope to resolve the root cause, with climate change it is simply the new normal.
This reminds of the abandoned practice of women being prescribed Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for menopause. Essentially the reasoning was "why not, it seems to improve patient health and we don't see any ill effects". It was such common sense at the time that it took over 30 years before a clinical trial was performed. That trial demonstrated a much higher rate of breast cancer and heart disease in HRT patients.
The NY Times has a good write-up on it and more generally the challenges with epidemiology and causal analysis in medicine. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t...
Perhaps, ahem... "buildment"?
But no, apparently "build" has been screwed up since the 1660s[1].
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/build#etymonline_v_18047
How would you use the new definition to calibrate instruments? My current understanding is that there is a lineage of artifacts calibrated against another artifact until one of those was calibrated against the one true artifact. So how would NIST or another certifying source say that my 1kg standard is 1kg +/- tolerance?
Is it anyone with a kibble balance can now certify calibrations? How do you know your kibble balance is as accurate as the next guy's kibble balance?
https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram-kibble-balance
Edit: Found some information explaining this from NIST: https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/kilogram-disseminating-...
This is the premise of the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Among other things, he explains System 1 in terms of popular cognitive biases. It's a good read.
This is 2005, not 2015.
I think that this definition of terroir is romanticized.
inextricably -> in a way that is impossible to disentangle or separate
Science seeks to disentangle the complexities of nature. Engineering is the application of those disentangled complexities to yield controlled results. Maybe one day we can engineer high-fidelity replicas of terroir-bound products.