> Then you see the likes of Twitter a decade or more ago who dedicated possibly hundreds of engineers to make Cassandra work. That's doing Google shit. But they aren't Google. And eventually those chickens come home to roost.
Isn't it the other way around? Using off-the-shelf solutions like Cassandra didn't work, so they had to resort to doing actual Google shit, a custom solution, to meet their needs.
Look at Facebook/Meta. They use MySQL (plus some other stuff on top). Twitter was at the peak of being trendy and trying to make NoSQL work. It was quite literally an idoelogical vanity project.
Now imagine for the same $10k cost making a cruise missile, instead. This is close to what a Shahed is -- the estimate is $20k-$50k / unit, so close enough.
This is bonkers. Countries can now afford for the same cost * to make not a 10-20 mile range artillery shell, but a 1500 mile effective range cruise missile.
* Defense costs are "fake" to a large degree. A lot of that is really corruption with money flowing from the taxpayers to the arms manufacturers, but still if we go by the numbers...
> Adam Smith pointed out the first pencil costs thousands of dollars, but the second is mostly free. Same dynamic here, but multipled by a thousand.
The shells are already made by the 10 and 100s of thousands, Shaheds are also not a research project, so either one is in amortized serial production now.
What I meant is that a $10k shell doesn't cost that much. Russians are making the equivalent artillery shells for an _order_ of magnitude less for around $1k. A lot of defense costs are just overinflated simply because they can be. The government is spending taxpayer money, it's not really coming from the politicians' pockets. If the kickbacks are just right, they may in fact flow back into the politicians pockets.
A lot of defense spending revolves around overall manufacturing capacity. Deals contain options that won't be executed unless it's war time. These options increase the cost of the deal as the manufacturer needs to keep capacity.
It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20. So drones are effective at destroying big stationary civilian infrastructure and much less at long distance strikes at military targets. Russia's inability to destroy Ukrainian aviation is a good example.
But then with solar and batteries civilian infrastructure becomes much more resilient against drone strikes.
At a certain distance, I'd contend all infrastructure is big and static. Our energy comes from large facilities, without these facilities continent scale infrastructure will grind to a halt at 1500 miles. Rail, power lines, warehouses, factories and trucks are all relatively static. It's not unreasonable to expend a Shahed type drone on a simple semi-truck parked overnight from nearly a continent away. There are only 3 million semi-trucks in the entire US, and I'd be shocked if the country could run without them.
Ukraine tried to come up with drones that can fly over 1000 miles. But drones the size of Shaheds just cannot fly that distance without significantly reducing the warhead. To attack things beyond that range Ukraine have used essentially Cessna. Which is much more expensive and visible on radars.
Instead Ukraine came up with an idea of mass producing extremely simple cruise missiles that could fly 2000 miles and deliver up to a ton of explosives with a cost of 100K and make 1000 of them per month. But then it seems Russia was able to discover the production sites and destroy them.
> It is vastly more complicated to find targets at 1500 miles than at 20.
It's true but they are so cheap that launching a whole bunch and/or improving them incrementally is possible. Yeah they are for stationary targets mostly, for sure. And of course their sounds and relatively low speed does make them somewhat easier to shoot down with short range AA guns and can have automated acoustic early warning system (it's like a flying lawnmower or chainsaw).
1500 mile range is questionable in practice I've read - drones require remote control for maximal value and that's a capability that may not extend nearly as far as the paper range of the drones
They can’t be used for moving targets but for infrastructure they can be effective. At the cost of only a few artillery shells send 10 and maybe 3 will hit.
Another advantage is because of simplicity and cost it allows quick iteration and adaptability. Use honeycomb patterns to lower radar signatures, use specialized antijamming gps/glonass antennas. Engine is too slow? Add a small turbojet. Color too light and visible at night? Paint it gray, etc. That can happen at the speed of weeks and months. Try doing that with Tomahawks, artillery pieces or HIMARS.
Sure, but you're just choosing hobbies for people. TVs are just one example here. If your hobby is 3D printing, you might've gotten screwed by Autodesk's subscription changes.
TV can be a hobby, but hobbies typically have actual engagement from the hobbyist. There are a lot of people whom watching television/movies is a real hobby, and for those people you can tell that's the case.
In my experience for most people it's strictly a time wasting/filling/background noise activity. If you are spending a considerable amount of time watching television to time waste then you probably should try and find more fulfilling activities. This is not prescriptive of what those would be.
When I was in my 20s I used to hold this belief as well. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised those opinions weren’t because TV viewers were wasting their lives, it was because there was so much I wanted to do with my time that I was scared of wasting my life. I was actually getting angry because I couldn’t pack everything I wanted to do in a day.
Needless to say, I now focus on my own free time rather than thinking about how others should spend theirs.
Also, now I’m in my 40s, I treasure the couple of hours I spend a week watching TV with my kids. We play games, sports and such like too. But sometimes it’s nice to cuddle on the sofa and share an experience in comfort.
John Draper and his fellow hackers were EXPLOITING coin-operated payphones and switchboards in the 60s, so I'm not sure how far back you have to go to reach the noble vocation you describe.
I don't miss it. I also found Satisfactory's old fluid system (with concepts like sloshing) wildly unintuitive. I'll go so far as to say that accurate fluid dynamics is detrimental to any game that's not about beavers and water table management.
> “Given the cost the company will incur to install the capacity for dynamic pricing in its stores, it would be corporate malfeasance if they did not believe doing so would not only recoup the cost, but add profit as well,”
Am I misreading this passage? I don't think that's what corporate malfeasance means. "Install the capacity for dynamic pricing" is also rather loaded, there are plenty of other reasons to install those tags (as another poster mentioned, tagging is time-consuming and error prone).
Having been near the epicenter, I recall that Vin Diesel jokes (same format) pre-dated Chuck Norris ones. I always found it a shame that the Chuck Norris ones caught on; Vin Diesel is, imo, a better role model.
Actually, I'd want to see that. All the AI companies keep saying it will take our jobs, human developers won't be necessary.
Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create. See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to desktop environment.
Me too, the problem is that it's hard to come up with tools that are needed but not made yet, and we don't want to end up with https://malus.sh/index.html
Ackshually the Palantir were made by the Elves of Valinor, and weren't made as a tool for evil.
In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.
If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.
Are you aware that every YT Short can also be viewed with the normal player? If you do, do you prefer the Shorts interface and thus posted that URL rather then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd90rFPYVnc ?
Isn't it the other way around? Using off-the-shelf solutions like Cassandra didn't work, so they had to resort to doing actual Google shit, a custom solution, to meet their needs.
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