251–260 of 365 posts
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> When I read we spent $1B, I think about how I'm responsible for $3 of that. I like to think about how providing 4-week paid parental leave would cost $2 billion annually and actually help US families. Meanwhile we have spent over $100 billion on this war.
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Hopefully making the real horrors of war visible to the public/world will make war less frequent. Alas...
Has seeing the horrors of the Ukraine war made you want the west to stop it and force a surrender? More horrors don't make people want less war. If anything, it may be the opposite. People pretend to be anti-war right up until there's a war and then suddenly it turns out they're actually anti-losing-the-war.
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An MQ-9 has roughly the same wingspan as an A-10 - they're not small birds. An MQ-9 needs to have a good sensor ball, ideally with both color and IR, gps jamming resistance, weapons integration with multiple types of missiles (ideally large enough to take out something larger than a motorcycle), good on-target time INCLUDING transit time (if it can only stare for one hour on target it'd be pointless), good uplink and…
The modern (UA) take is to strap the warhead directly on the thing, make it just as big as needed and directly fly everything into the target. If you insist on firing guided missiles at ground targets from a drone that returns to base you're never gonna be able to compete on cost.
If the cheap solution involves having troops only a dozen miles away from the enemy, then you're going to take casualties, and funeral costs are FAR more expensive then the cost to buy a large bird and fly it from a 100+ miles away.
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Hopefully making the real horrors of war visible to the public/world will make war less frequent. Alas...
Has seeing the horrors of the Ukraine war made you want the west to stop it and force a surrender? More horrors don't make people want less war. If anything, it may be the opposite. People pretend to be anti-war right up until there's a war and then suddenly it turns out they're actually anti-losing-the-war.
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I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.
That applies everywhere. You’re commenting on a forum for startups that compete against established players. David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.
Every Goliath may, in the long run, meet a David that beats it, but this premise ignores all the thousands of Davids that don't win.
I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…
In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory. The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough. I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation. I'm not sure if "AI for re…
In Ukraine the military will take any drone they can get their hands on, so all you have to do is build a drone, give a bunch of them to the army to try out on the Russians, and within a week they will tell you if it works or not. So your design iteration loop is probably weeks. If you are successful, the time between hearing the general say "give me 1 million" and when the bulldozers start clearing the factory site is probably measured in days.
The Defense Innovation Unit was founded in 2015 and is full of SV interest groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Innovation_Unit They could obviously have foreseen the current failures in 2015. It is irrelevant, since the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Generals who routinely give theatrical performances for the cameras want the big toys for their districts. The goal in Iran is also not to win but to…
Eh... The US can not survive an economical war against the entire world.
But anyway, somebody forgot to warn whoever created this strategy that the US society is constructed in a way that doesn't allow barriers against they exporting all their oil. They will either run out, or they will see some societal changes.
I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…
cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work . If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family. By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effe…
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Yes, save the asset holders, damn the peasants. even Trump said he wants to see housing prices go higher. These people do not care about you. You need to hate them more.
Do you think the common person benefits from high interest rates? Pray tell, how?
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But what about Graham Platner? /s
Sexual assault allegations and literal Nazi symbolism tattooed on his body. Those things are acceptable now? These were the exact things that Democrats went after Hegseth for (who, for the record, is also a doofus like Platner). The left's hypocrisy knows no bounds.