181–190 of 215 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are P&W and Rolls Royce the only companies in the world capable of manufacturing high-end jet engines end-to-end?
They don't make them end to end either. Their jet engines are made up of parts supplied by thousands of suppliers.
Industrial espionage has to be totally insane to defend against these days.
I frequently wonder what steps SpaceX security has to take, given the insane geopolitical significance of reusable rockets and cheap access to orbit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked on an ITAR-controlled camera once and it was drilled into me than even allowing a non-US person to view the output images of the camera constituted an ITAR violation.
Right, which is all well and good if you're a benevolent actor, but ITAR really doesn't do anything at all to stop you from intentionally committing (corporate or actual) espionage if you want to. There should still be controls to prevent you from violating ITAR either accidentally or on purpose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The product I oversee at my job is something that can only be built by people who are intimately aware of the process and have a strong understanding of the underlying engineering. We could hand the full project file to a competitor and they almost certainly would not be able to build functional units. The failure points are fractal, so you need a strong intuition about what part you are installing, what qualities an…
This is a bigger issue than most people appreciate, and a huge problem for the USA. There is a specialised trade known as tool and die maker, or just die maker ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_and_die_maker ) that is fundamental to a country’s ability to create industrial capacity. So far, no automation tool has been able to replace their expertise. Without die makers, you can’t build tools that make things, yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a bigger issue than most people appreciate, and a huge problem for the USA. There is a specialised trade known as tool and die maker, or just die maker ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_and_die_maker ) that is fundamental to a country’s ability to create industrial capacity. So far, no automation tool has been able to replace their expertise. Without die makers, you can’t build tools that make things, yo…
If the average age is 73 that's the issue right there. People are refusing to retire at 62 and make room for juniors. Then when they finally do retire (73 average seems like "dies in office" levels) there are 2 decades of missing juniors who haven't been trained in the pipeline. This is the shortcoming with most technical fields. No one is incentivized to see the big picture of the training pipeline that exists well…
SmarterEveryDay attempted to make a grill scrubber in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
tl;dr He did it, but it went very poorly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
while I don't doubt that such situations also exist, that wasn't the reason for any of the many "Excel abusers" I've encountered in different positions. Quite to the contrary, these people all had access to the appropriate tools, but their whole thinking was totally formatted and fixated on Excel as their go-to tool for everything: be it things better done with a database, a word processor, a diagramming program, a l…
The VBA hammer is real... it can force any screw, nail, staple into any hole you desire. Until the web version takes over, and you can no longer connect to anything real.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? Why not just a state or a country? USA is not a nation-state, or UK, or India, or Russia, etc. Does your question imply that none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do it?
Hard to know what OP meant, but I took it as an oblique reference to China.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harder to pretend when speaking with colleagues that are the real deal. Also very likely to "step out of line" accidentally over time as lot of time is spent with colleagues. It's not hard to pretend to be anything for 5 minutes to someone who doesn't know anything about what you're doing.
Naively, I was assuming TSMC would still operate like TSMC, not the Taliban, and that they'd focus on doing their work, not religious performance, but I guess anything is possible! Suggesting TSMC start operating like the Taliban to protect their trade secrets seems like an obviously bad idea, though. But we don't live in a vacuum, so I guess it's all just opinion pieces.
Gee, I wonder which nation-state actor was orchestrating this...
I always wondered - why people use a nation-state notion? Why not just a state or a country? USA is not a nation-state, or UK, or India, or Russia, etc. Does your question imply that none of these countries are capable of orchestrating this and only nation-states can do it?
It's a shibboleth, similar to HN favorites: "orders of magnitude" and "orthogonal". Shibboleths are often social signifiers, sociology has lots of research on why people use them