4
points
nindalf
Joined 17,479 karma
website - nindalf.com
- It’s interesting to see both kinds of drones in Ukraine as well. Ukrainian drones are built for €300 or so and they’re staggeringly effective. “Western” drones as made by Helsing and other companies cost several thousand. While they may have more features, it’s not clear that they’re doing 10x more damage than the Ukrainian ones.
Ukraine plans to buy 4.5 drones in 2025. They’re definitely going with volume over software features. Further they’re allowing frontline drone regiments to earn “points” based on kills and using the points to buy their own drones instead of allocating them top down. The regiments appear to be favouring the cheap drones over expensive ones like the Helsing HF-1.
What’s interesting is that European governments are probably going to end up buying tens of thousands of the expensive drones because the laundry list of features, rather than investing in true mass production like the Ukrainians have. Going the Protoss way, rather than Zerg.
- > There was no real standing Army until WW2 since it's against the Constitution.
This isn’t true. Firstly it isn’t against the Constitution to maintain a standing Army. What the Constitution says in Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 is “The Congress shall have Power To ...raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...”
The people drafting the Constitution knew that a standing army could be abused by a tyrant, but having served in the Continental Army also knew how vital a standing Army was to maintain peace. That’s why they designed it so Congress controls the purse strings and authorises military spending only for 2 years at a time. The executive may give the orders, but there’s a time limit on the Army he can give orders to.
And the second part - the US has had a standing Army since 1796. You remember Robert E Lee resigning from the Army to join the Confederacy? If there was no standing Army, what did he resign from?
But even leaving aside these two historical facts, think about it logically. Throughout history military advantage has always been with the better trained, more experienced troops. Even if you rely on conscripts in a war, they need to be trained and led by professionals. Saying a standing army shouldn’t exist is like firing all your firefighters and saying you’ll start hiring when someone reports a fire.
- Controlled in the sense that most of the maintainers are Google employees. But how does that make a difference? The tool chain is available as FOSS, there’s no possibility of a rug pull.
- Could you give some examples?
- These guys are fine, but they can’t drive broader societal change if the words “sexual assault” or “rape” is scrubbed from mainstream discourse. Imagine if HN autodeleted any comment with these words, we couldn’t even have this conversation.
- Who is going to join a forum dedicated to discussing rape? Absolute weirdos, that's who. But you're not going to enact any kind of broad societal change by talking only to those weirdos. You need to reach a broad audience and convince them this is a problem worth tackling.
- This is why I like the Economist. They don't assume the reader has background knowledge.
- Economist for me. I don't know of any other sources that can reach the same level.
- Even today YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. These are terrible things which we'd like to see less of, but we can't discuss how to make things better without discussing them at all.
If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhere, we're not going to be able to discuss very much at all.
- I think it’s easy to implement this, but the flip side of making platforms responsible is that they become much more restrictive in what’s allowed to be discussed. They start banning topics preemptively, just to limit their exposure. And if you’re thinking “good”, it will make the public discourse sterile.
Then the same companies will be penalised in other jurisdictions for being overly censorious. There’s no way to simultaneously follow all the rules.
And if you’re thinking “good, I just want to see those companies fined”, that’s fine too. But then that’s just about feeling good, rather than setting good rules for discourse.
- Pro tip from an absolute rando: don’t bother with any source of breaking news. Read a weekly paper that summarises the important stuff.
If something is truly pressing, you’ll hear about it from friends or coworkers.
- That's the kind of optimistic attitude I'd expect from Emperor Vespasian, builder of the Colosseum. You're role-playing your persona really well!
- Let’s not pretend he was hosting the software. Npm was.
No software developer or organisation will use a software repository that allows deletion of packages. That’s why it’s not a thing anymore.
If you think this “right” should exist, that’s a market niche for you to exploit. But you won’t, will you? Because like I said, no user wants this.
- He had already given everyone a license to use his software. That’s what FOSS software is - the users are granted a license to use the software and it can’t be revoked, even if the author is throwing a tantrum.
Far fetched and not cool.