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Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

anduril.com

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Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#251

Post by dang »

Wytwwww wrote: post #120
zmgsabst wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

You can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid posting in the flamewar style.

I'm going to post the same reply to the users breaking the site guidelines on the opposite side of this fight. We don't want this kind of battle here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#252

Post by koonsolo »

dang wrote: post #250
koonsolo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can't attack another user like this here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid posting in the flamewar style. I'm going to post the same reply to the users breaking the site guidelines on the opposite side of this fight. We don't want this kind of battle here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.yco…

Ok I'll avoid personal attacks next time.

But to be fair, maybe you should include a topic about spreading Russian propaganda there, because it's a huge problem in EU: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/documents-publications/li...

A discussion about the involvement of NATO is fair game, but "Ukraine bombing the Donbas" is a 100% Russian propaganda lie. I own my own platform, and such a statement would be an instant ban of that account.

I'm all for free speech, but like I showed, Russian propaganda poses a real threat for us here in the EU.

So in my defense, "Russian mouthpiece" was a factual statement ;), but I understand it's also a personal attack.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#253

Post by mcphage »

danbruc wrote: post #192
mcphage wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can debate all day long […] whether Russia should have any say in which alliances Ukraine enters What the fuck? How can you debate on that at all, let alone all day? Does Russia own Ukraine? No. So does Russia have any say in which alliances Ukraine enters? Absolutely not.

The US government has warned Solomon Islands it will “respond accordingly” if its security agreement with China leads to a Chinese military presence in the Pacific island nation. Does the USA own Solomon Islands? It is just a reality that powerful nations try to exert influence over other states, whether you like it or not. We can discuss how good or bad that is but it certainly not only Russia that thinks it has som…

I’m pretty sure we all (or most of us) agree that the US bossing around the Solomon Islands is a bad thing, right? But since we don’t own Solomon Islands, they can go right ahead and do it anyway. And think we’re also all of us in agreement that it would not give the US license to invade. This all seems really obvious and not requiring any debate. Am I wrong about that? Do you feel a US invasion would be justified at that point?

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#254

Post by throwfurther232 »

throwaway234a wrote: post #146
Roritharr wrote: post #25

Anduril is one of these companies I would leave my own startup for to work for. I love what they are doing.

It's not that great. I would know, I work there. The marketing is the shit though. It makes all the tech look like it's the greatest thing ever. The mentality here at this company is hack hack hack and the quality of the product reflect this. Don't expect German engineered precision. Expect products with poor quality, poor reliability and a failure rate that is very very high. What is good about this company is that…

You can speak for your own department. Some of us are shipping products and know what we're doing.

It's insane to think it would make sense to build on anything other than the best existing commercial technology and expect it to be reliable, affordable and maintainable. The military would not and should not change everything from Windows/Linux and Chrome to some completely custom OS and UI. (In the places we do provide products with the latter, we are more than state-of-the-art.)

Avionics have been piggybacking off of commercial electronics due to the sheer scale since at least the 1980's because it just makes sense, while the primes have been slow to do the same in software, partly due to mindsets like yours.

And the fact is, when creating software, everything starts out buggy, because nothing exists. That's why you develop, test and fix it. Normally we of course wouldn't ship anything that's not perfect, but our customers have begged us for products, saying they have nothing that can deal with some of the threats they face and so are okay with having to restart an app every now and then until it's ironed out.

Plus, if you can see through Anduril's marketing, how can you not see through China's marketing?

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#255

Post by throwfurther232 »

throwaway234a wrote: post #237
kanwisher wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI for spacex rockets in the ship is html and JavaScript. There is zero issue having a front end be in something easy to hack on

That's for internal use. For military customer use, usually it's expected that the UI be similar to a UI you get in an air plane cockpit. What happens when you go fly a passenger plane and you see chrome with some front end UI? Come on man. Anyway, a front end UI can still work even though it's not ideal, but there's huge performance issues with what we have. Huge. The thing doesn't even run webgl for rendering, it's…

SpaceX does use web-based UI's on the capsule. But we're not shipping UI's for passenger planes. And the guys using our products really don't care about whether or not the UI is caching some element. They care that they can perform maintenance, updates and C2 with their tablet in the field rather than air freight some magic 200lb box with a dozen custom cannon connectors from rural Connecticut.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#256

Post by throwfurther232 »

throwaway234a wrote: post #236
mlindner wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China dominates anduril by a landslide I mean, obviously. Anduril is one company, and still a relatively small company at that. > And if you want quality, anduril is not at the forefront of this at all. The US, as you mention, already has quality. We need speed and things that are "good enough" right now, not quality. Anduril seems to be heading pretty good in that direction.

They are heading in that direction slowly. Overall the products are pretty unreliable Probably two decades before it gets really good and by then there'll be so much red tape the company will have lost all the speed they have now. I can assure you our products are nowhere near good enough as of right now. That's why there isn't a single video of a live demonstration against enemies. It's not that good. Palmer "sugges…

If you're convinced about the things you're talking about (and acting out like this) then you should just go to another company. I have seen the videos you say you haven't, and they aren't shared because of operational security. (They're also grainy and low-res so have little marketing value.)

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#257

Post by skjoldr »

StockHuman wrote: post #244
skjoldr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That loss of life is not enormous if you look at the overall graph of civilian and military war-related deaths throughout 20th and 21st century. It very obviously trended downwards, especially after the Cold War, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused a spike. Then again, communism resulted in millions more civilian deaths in the same time period. The US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overst…

> US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia…

Well, if you start taking into account the second-order socioeconomic effects of shooting millions of people who could have led productive lives and could have had children, or the effects of putting millions more through the Gulag system... I get the point, however I suppose the full extent of the tragedy of communism is just way too depressing to really think about compared to thinking about the US' global influence, especially now when similar ideas in Moscow led to another goddamn war. The existence of communism and its history poses a strong moral dilemma, either let it spread and watch the inevitable ensuing devastation, or intervene, but with a chance of your actions backfiring and, formally speaking, "causing" something bad. It's an open question which choice would have been better in which situation, and I don't think it's productive to just look at mistakes while ignoring the overall intent. How do you even count how many lives the US foreign policy managed to save?

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#258

Post by inemesitaffia »

mschuster91 wrote: post #159
fastball wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already spending money on this type of problem. Realistically, this looks like a more cost-effective solution. So you have it completely backwards – this being a thing might actually unlock more funds for domestic issues. Of course it probably won't work out this way because the DoD doesn't just say "We bought a bunch of Anduril Roadrunner's instead of $4m Patriot missiles [or whatever] this year, so we don't…

> Just look at SpaceX – before SpaceX, NASA had the ability to send stuff to space. But post-SpaceX, they can send more payloads at a cheaper cost. Isn't that better? They're now at the whim of an exceedingly eccentric billionaire for their space flight stuff. If Musk one day says he doesn't want to put up satellites that can be used to threaten Russia, NASA can't do anything about it, at least immediately (as they c…

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. When you refuse to pay you end up getting what you paid for.
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