The whole thing is buggered. My latest, in car, on 26.6.2 with phone connected via bluetooth. I hold the voice button on my steering wheel down to activate Siri:
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"OK, calling Fred."
Phone is locked in my pocket the entire time. Like, make your damn mind up. Every time I try to call from the car now I have to ask it at least twice, usually three times.
And a completely baffling one recently, not even anonymizing names, also in car:
"Call George."
"OK adding L.S.D. by Hallucinogen to your Liked Songs playlist."
I've switched to Home Assistant and the same devices on the same network work instantly, as they should.
Apple is so terrible at this. They have nobody to blame: it's their system, their protocol (I have pre-Matter devices), their home hub, their certified devices.
Home Assistant with a pile of community-maintained python hacks runs circles around Apple.
> For reference, it used to turn off the lights as I complete my sentence and put my wrist down.
What probably happened is that it used to be one of the preset instructions it pattern-matched your request to, but now they inserted an LLM in between all of that, so you have to wait for it to return some tokens and then eventually call the internal method for triggering the scene.
I mean, they moved it from a deterministic set of actions to an AI-pilled LLM nightmare with probably a paucity of all test cases covered given the near-infinite permutations and actions available.
A smarter release would have been extremely limited in scope, heavily tested, and aimed simply for feature parity. Or even scoping it to just one section, like editing/adding/updating calendar events and all associated functionality. Or even exploring routing to much-less hallucinatory, more performant models like CNN for certain tasks instead of just throwing everything at probabilistic model and hoping for the best.
But that's not the way of AI-pilled middle manager thinking now.
That's also what drives me absolutely insane - I want a guide from Apple that gives me a regular syntax I can use to get predictable results with Siri. The fuzzy, natural language stuff in Siri is so bad that it's completely unpredictable what will work.
Super frustrating. It's the best thing about LLMs, that you can be so imprecise and human with your discussion, with context maintained from input to input. Siri doesn't have the predictability of an old-school fixed syntax voice agent (like Wildfire from the '90s - remember that? It worked!) and doesn't have the flexibility of a proper natural language interaction with an LLM. It lacks any sort of working memory - "Create an appointment on Tuesday at 3pm." "OK." "Name it 'Mechanic visit'" "Now playing songs by Mike and the Mechanics."
Yeah, the lack of memory is a huge problem - makes it impossible to conversationally correct a mistake. Instead, you have to start the interaction from the top and hope that this time it works out.
Huh interesting idea and quite easy to test by putting the phone in a blanket in the trunk. It's definitely using the car speakers, and when I do eventually get a call through I am heard clearly, but perhaps that initial interaction is using the phone mic.
If it’s misunderstanding the command and thinking it needs an unlock twice, but then finally gets it correctly and does it without an unlock.. that actually could be explained by the microphone
I need a new ATV to replace the ancient HD one that's dying in our living room. I've been putting it off because of laziness and now I can't get one directly from Apple if I don't want this too expensive, Siri-infested thing with all its microphones that I'll never use. Dammit!
> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
I did not know that. But almost everybody in the working classes suffered from awful work-related health problems in Victorian Britain. Some vitamin D deficiency for a scullery maid compares to a miner's black lung or that ghastly phossy jaw that afflicted match girls.
I think the best form of this work was probably to be staff on an absentee landlord's estate. While the master or mistress was away, you would have little work to do except cleaning or maintenance, and probably could get away with having a life of leiaure.
None of that should be affected when the switch is flipped, that's the bit I'm struggling with. Sure, connecting a wire somewhere could act as an antenna but attaching a switch to the unconnected end of the antenna can't do anything. It's very weird.
> The switch could be connecting ground trace to the casing
This seems most likely - that there's actually a conductive path on one side of the switch from the switch body to the metal frame it's bolted to, so flipping it does take the frame in and out of circuit (doing something like changing capacitance or introducing RF noise on the ground plane which something in the PDP is sensitive to.)
Yes it's quite bad what that muppet is up to but it's not Stalin level yet.
Decades ago I wrote a paper, lost to time now, on the effect of his military purges on the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army during the back half of WW2. He purged not just senior commanders but mid ranks and up, think like down as far as their equivalent of majors. A vast amount of battle-relevant experience was swept away, much more damaging in the day-to-day grind than simply disappearing a few field marshals.
My point is, hope is not lost for the US military. Yes lots of irreplaceable senior experience is being tossed aside for unforgivably stupid and pointless reasons, but there's a lot of recent, hard-won, actual shooting war experience in the officer corps which, if they don't all bugger off in disgust, will serve us well in future. Today's captains and majors are well aware of how drones in Ukraine have changed battle[1], to give one example, and the career-minded among them will be in doctrine-influencing and development positions before too long.
I'm aware this is to some degree wishful thinking.
[1]I chose this example because it's going to be one of that drunken fool's more consequential errors: re-tasking the Army unit charged with developing drone capabilities for the US.
Russia won not because of tactical brilliance, but because they simply threw biomass at the problem.
Just throw enough barely armored tanks and bodies at the problem, and the germans eventually run out of resources. It only took about 9M soldiers. Glorious sacrifices for the benefit of Stalin.
Consider how many lives would have been saved with a shred of tactical brilliance.
The general tone here seems to be against the effort, but separate the circus from the ringmaster and there is a lot to like here.
Having a manned, very high altitude, very fast research plane is undoubtedly useful for all sorts of development purposes.
But more than that, we are as a civilization doing a bad job of preserving cutting edge expertise from the past. We keep letting entire areas of engineering and technology die out without really trying to preserve them even though we know at some point they will come in useful. The skills, processes, even institutional confidence developed in just trying to get an SR-71 flying again will teach us a lot about resurrecting other such dead ends. Aerospace in particular is full of them. That will, for sure, get us out of trouble or speed up something we need at some unknown point in the future. I'd think of it more as developing a general capability than the world's most expensive vintage aircraft hobby.
Look, I'm certified as the world's biggest SR-71 fan. As a kid, I saw it fly a number of times, got to see it up close, and had a family member who worked as an engineer on the program. I believe it may have even been this Blackbird, 844. It impacted me so much that I later went on to work on my own black and other military aircraft.
I'm assuming that, if this rumor is true, somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia. My hope is that if they're going to resurrect the Blackbird, they'll at least retrofit modern engines into the thing.
But there are much more modern, cost-effective ways to build very-high-altitude, very-fast aircraft. I'm doubtful that going manned is the right approach. It takes a lot of weight and space to carry a person and the required life support systems. That capacity could be better utilized for more fuel and sensors.
There's better technology that's far cheaper to maintain and operate. And you could potentially get hypersonic, or at least near-hypersonic, performance.
> My hope is that if they're going to resurrect the Blackbird, they'll at least retrofit modern engines into the thing.
Question for people who actually make the engines: is this idea feasible? Like, at all?
I always imagined a plane's engines to be very tightly coupled to its electrics. In my mind, even if the wire harnesses somehow lined up right, the signals inside would be talking totally different languages.
The control "computer" for the engines of the SR-71 is hydraulic, not electronic. Some of the parts of this aircraft reach temperatures beyond what current semiconductors can cope with.
If you watch a YouTube on the J-58 engines that go into this plane, you will find out that it behaves like a jet at "low" speed (like Mach 1 or below) while at Mach 3 it behaves like a ramjet. There's no other aircraft engine that does this.
Some quick wikipedia surfing suggests the SR-71 was built at least 7 years before MIL-STD-1553 was introduced. Wikipedia says 1966 for the Blackbird, and 1973 for MIL-STD-1553.
Granted, plenty of de facto standards exist long before they're codified into a formal document. So maybe the Blackbird actually does use it, or something close enough for a dinky little converter box to do the job.
According to that Wikipedia page, out of the first 6 jets to officially use MIL-STD-1553, only one of them was a Lockheed product. That single Lockheed product was the P-3C, which was a retrofitted version of a plane Lockheed started making more than a decade earlier. To me, that suggests that, even if MIL-STD-1553 existed as a de facto standard at the time of the SR-71's contstruction, Lockheed probably wasn't using it yet.
All speculation, obviously. But the timeline leaves me with doubts.
The aforementioned P-3C being an example - a Lockheed-built example, no less.
There's still part of me that can't quite believe that the SR-71 wouldn't be an exception. You don't just make a turbojet out of 1965 technology, without something being so wackadoodle batshit crazy as to make comparions to all other planes pointless. Another commenter mentioned something about a "hydraulic computer?"
I'd love to be wrong. It'd be hilarious if some madmen from the 1960s built a Mach 3 jet out of mostly-normal parts, and then that mostly-normal jet turned into American patriotic folklore. And yeah, I'd feel a bit of patriotic euphoria to see a Blackbird in the sky! I'm not above that.
The two things that make or break an airplane are the engines and airframe. Everything else can be swapped out. As long as the airframe can support the engine, structurally and aerodynamically speaking, there are no issues. Wiring and avionics can all be easily replaced. The control systems for the plane can be reworked too.
GP is correct, this is a plane designed almost pre CFD, a clean sheet design would go much further than this. They are missing out on half a century of material science advances.
You pose an interesting theory related to "if star wars was real they would have robots fly all the planes". In that, something our own nostalgia and hubris will ultimately lead us to always mostly demand manned aircraft.
> somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia.
Trump is a huge fan of Top Gun, there is an article he is nitpicking current aicraft carrier design and pushing them to revert to old tech steam powered hydrolic liftoffs because he thinks it looks cooler.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-navy-st...
Bringing back the SR-71 for nostalgia/cool factor tracks reverting to steam hydraulics liftoffs and overhauling the aesthetics and tower location to look like old warships.
He really should read less Hitler books, who constantly knew everything better and hampered their russian campaign by insisting in big tanks, instead of smaller, faster ones.
The F-14 got sent to the boneyard because it was so much more expensive to operate than comparable aircraft. The F-14 had only one real mission: carry the Phoenix to defend the carrier from the Russian bombers. And it was a suicide mission--the sprint to launch position would not leave enough fuel to get back to the carrier.
Do you have a source on these being suicide missions without enough fuel to get back? The F-14 has drop tanks, and after firing all missiles, that sheds another 4,000+ lb of payload.
I think they planned with proper return. Which can also be at slower speed.
"Make America Great Again" leans a lot into restorative nostalgia so it's unsurprising that ideas from the past are going to be presented as an idealized goal.
The current administration is so thoroughly enmired in nostalgia for the 20th century that I won’t be surprised when they restart production of the P-51.
perceived nostalgia, because a lot of that supposed nostalgia can't be defined or isn't actually true.
I would appreciate a solid explanation of which periods and aspects "Make America Great Again" refers to. I can think of a couple ones off the top of my head regarding technical progress, but I'm unsure whether MAGA helps or hinders that progress.
>perceived nostalgia, because a lot of that supposed nostalgia can't be defined or isn't actually true.
That's how populism and fascism (or whatever kind of neo-fascism this is) work. They all catalyze a yearning for a return to a mythological "golden age" which never really existed, and whose inheritance has been denied to the people by the perfidious enemy within.
>I would appreciate a solid explanation of which periods and aspects "Make America Great Again" refers to.
The 1940s and 1950s. A return to American wartime aggression and postwar economy, coal and fossil fuels, Conservative Christian values, white men getting the respect and dignity they deserve, a lifetime of steady employment at the assembly line and a gold watch and a pension, and women knowing their place.
> But there are much more modern, cost-effective ways to build very-high-altitude, very-fast aircraft. I'm doubtful that going manned is the right approach. It takes a lot of weight and space to carry a person and the required life support systems. That capacity could be better utilized for more fuel and sensors.
Is there? High speed turbofans are still exotic technologies. Or are we doing the research with drone rockets now? I have to imagine that building a modern SR-71 replacement would be an expensive development project with little commercial prospects. The sort of thing that is extremely hard to complete in the modern political environment.
Turbofans are not exotic technologies. They are well understood, and their limitations are well understood.
Presumably, an SR-71 successor would use a mix of turbofans and ramjet/scramjet to meet their performance (speed/altitude) goals, depending on whether it would be self-sufficient or use takeoff assist from another aircraft.
Despite them being complex, high-bypass turbofan engines ARE exotic technology. There are vanishingly few countries/companies that have the expertise necessary to produce the single crystal fan blades used in the engines of these aircraft.
As far as the SR-71, its engines were turbojets that transitioned to ramjets above Mach 2ish. They required a special grade of jet fuel and a dedicated fleet of refueling aircraft.
I rather doubt an SR-71 successor would use a turbofan. The mission profile really doesn't require it. I would expect it to be a turbojet that transitions (as you said) to a ramjet and eventually a scramjet.
I would love to see the SR-71 fly again, if only from a nostalgia standpoint, but I really doubt this effort will be successful. I doubt even more that much of value can be accomplished by getting one to be flyable again that couldn't be achieved in a much more cost-effective manner via unmanned aircraft.
The whole of the SR-71 was built around what kind of cameras was needed to perform the mission. Modern electronics and cameras are much smaller. I would presume an unmanned plane launched from a bomber could perform the mission today.
Most modern spy satellites are low observability. Combine that with overlapping coverage and the only thing you can predict is that there’s probably a satellite capable of looking at you right now.
> Despite them being complex, high-bypass turbofan engines ARE exotic technology.
Sure, I'll concede here. I think of "exotic" as "few people/nations understand it well enough" but including the manufacture and tooling seems like a no brainer inclusion.
I never saw extraterrestrial technology or any indication of extraterrestrials existing, other than gag stuff in hangars.
All the aerospace technology I've ever worked with or heard of has a pretty clear (human) engineering lineage. None of the planes you've seen or heard of, or parts thereof, are based on extraterrestrial technology.
> I'm assuming that, if this rumor is true, somebody in the Trump campaign forced somebody at NASA to do this out of some misguided nostalgia.
Came here to say this is exactly my guess.
FWIW I think it's almost always a good idea to keep at least one example of any plane flying, just out of simple cultural principle (I feel this way about the Avro Vulcan and I think it's really sad that none can do more than taxi anymore) so I am not sure it's stupid for them to ask, but I can see why keeping an SR-71 in any kind of functional condition might be implausible.
I would guess this is not a serious project to get it flying, but more a recognition that it will take more than two years to do it, could be cancelled at the two year mark without really wasting vast amounts of money, and ensures some very easy, regularly replenishable goodwill from the man who thinks the USA has planes that are literally invisible.
There is precedent, after all: his insistence on a return to steam launchers on carriers.
I like the idea of keeping an example of everything flying from the perspective of my inner child, but it would be such a colossal waste of resources in reality.
This plane had its own special blend of fuel, meaning it had its own special tankers too since it needed to refuel immediately after takeoff, and custom rubber blends for the tires.
So we would need to have a refinery that can make the fuel, a tire manufacturer to make the rubber and tires, and a tanker program to fuel the thing.
All this for a plane that is incredibly dangerous to fly (37% of them were destroyed in crashes, none due to enemy action), and that adds no capability.
Yeah. This one just does not seem plausible, and the reasons why are as you say.
I'd be really surprised if this was not Trump-nostalgia-driven, and in that sense it deserves a bit of cynicism.
However, it doesn't seem particularly wasteful to have people in a room whose job is to see how far that could go in principle, even if the real value in that project is that it would keep historical technology decisions about that plane in people's active working knowledge, passing institutional and personal recollections down to a custodian etc.
The past is prologue, really — and not all history is nostalgia. Sometimes things that weren't practical because of cost become practical, but are almost forgotten; exercises like this are possibly worth doing for almost every legacy project when the original team are nearing the end of their lives.
IIRC the fuel leaks on the ground were because the sheet metal was all fit rather loosely to allow for expansion in flight. At the speeds it would fly, the skin got quite hot.
But it is the fuselage gaps which was leaking, not the engines. After the elastomer filler broke down due to heat cycling. They needed the elastomer because the fuselage was heating up during flight which made it expand.
I'm sure we could "fix" it. But changing the engines doesn't seem to be the right way to achieve that.
IIRC it had something to do with the type of fuel that was in use. There are aircrafts that reach pretty high temperatures during flight and they usually don’t leak fuel that much on the ground. Do correct me if I’m wrong.
You'd probably be using some mix of better turbofan/turbojet engines along with ramjets/scramjets and 50-60 years of materials sciences advances. So, yes.
I respect the J58's place in history, but it has no place in modern aviation. The ideas behind it still remain relevant, but the implementation is long, long outdated. I think it could be redesigned and reimplemented for cheaper that it would cost to resurrect and maintain the original J58.
It would be shocking if it wasn’t what was happening - resurrecting the SR71 makes no sense, just like resurrecting the idea of a battleship. Tech has far eclipsed their usefulness.
It’s the military budget being prioritized based on boomer nostalgia, not any actual plausible fit to reality.
The naval terminology reflects a displacement class and use case, not a specific design.
The now-cancelled DDG(X) next-generation destroyer already had a larger displacement than a heavy cruiser. And it was cancelled for not being large enough to support its mission load-out as a modern destroyer.
The name “battleship” may be archaic but the displacement requirements for the next-generation destroyers (or whatever they are eventually called) are roughly in “light battleship” territory.
To put it another way, we were calling battleship-class ships “destroyers” for historical continuity reasons. Over time, ships in a class have become much larger but we kept the old names. Even the older Arleigh-Burke destroyers would be traditionally classified as heavy cruisers if they were commanded by a flag officer.
"Battleship" is based around big guns. What he wishes he had in his pants. In a modern situation there's simply no use case for a big gun. How do you propose to get within range?
On one side we have a battleship. $2B in current dollars for a WWII ship.
On the other side we have 10% of that value in harpoonskis.
The battleship never reaches gun range.
Naval gunfire has use against targets not worthy of a missile. But anything you're going to be shooting it at doesn't have armor to speak of.
OK, but the proposed battleship is what the GP described: a souped-up Arleigh Burke with hundreds of missile launchers, which are described as the primary battery.
The guns are described as secondary and, other than the proposed single railgun, are basically the same as a cruiser.
The Navy has been pushing for a large cruiser for literally decades now. The Trump-class is that under a different name. We're at the end of what we can cram in a hull that's nominally called a destroyer, especially if you want to host larger hypersonic strike weapons and ABM interceptors, plus the radars to manage the ABM battle.
That's the same kind of silliness as calling the Russian Kirov class 'battlecruisers' in my opinion. It's not going to stand in the line of battle and exchange shells with other battleships is it?
Kirovs are the size of WWI battleships and exchange the heaviest AShM missiles made with other battlegroups, so yes?
At the end of the day the Navy is seeing Orange Man offer a them a check to build the cruiser they've wanted for decades. They'll finally have the space and power to do all kinds of things they can't pull off on a destroyer hull (even if said "destroyer" is really a cruiser in other clothing). If they have to call it a BBN or whatever to make Trump happy they'll do it.
The US Navy needs fewer Kirovs, Yamatos and Ticonderogas. When (not if) the US enters the Pacific theater, they will be going up against Chinese land-based strategic AShMs and potentially 50+ Type 052 destroyers. The moment the US enters any capital ship into this theater, it will be like a 21st-century Battle of Midway with hypersonics, SAR satellites and ballistic missiles.
The Trump-class is pretty clearly one of those interim study projects that only exists to fill a perceived gap in force composition. Unlike the USAF NGAD, I don't think the Trump-class will ever see the light of day, let alone a battle versus a peer-power.
a single hit from enemy anti shipping missles would likely blow the whole thing up.
I agree with the manipulating the nostalgia angle, the real plan just isn’t anything like an actual battleship, and the approval is also because they’re using ‘battleship’ to manipulate the nostalgia.
The SR-71A was a reconnaissance or spy plane that flew at high altitude where it avoid anti-air weapons of the era by flying at high altitude and at Mach ~3.
We simply don't need that capability anymore. Recon of this sort is now done by satellites (at much higher resolution) and it's unclear if designated enemy states don't have or couldn't have an effective defensive system.
Now you cold have a program to develop hypersonic airframes and engines (eg scramjets) but it's way more likely that this kind of technology will be applied to cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles and so on.
Some things we don't need to maintain just to maintain them.
> Some things we don't need to maintain just to maintain them.
The point of my note was less about SR-71 and more about developing the capability to resurrect old technology in general, a skill we do not often practice at institutional scale. The SR-71 is a visible and cool way for NASA and contractors to teach themselves how to do something we'll probably have to do again in future. Making a documentary series out of it would be a smart move too, if we are attempting to inspire the future of American engineering by fetishizing the past as seems to be this administration's intent.
Then:
> We simply don't need that capability anymore. Recon of this sort is now done by satellites (at much higher resolution) and it's unclear if designated enemy states don't have or couldn't have an effective defensive system.
Isn't really true. The A12/SR-71's predecessor, the U2, is still flown operationally today because satellites are only a 90% solution. They can't be tasked to overfly a particular site on demand or on an arbitrary schedule, can't have their sensors switched out on demand, and can't loiter. The air defense evasion aspects of the Blackbird aren't as important now which is why the U2, being much cheaper to operate, is still flown and the SR-71 isn't. Of course that is not an argument to spend billions returning Blackbird to flight, since we already have the U2. But high altitude reconnaissance aircraft are still useful.
I would be willing to wager that the US already has at least one high altitude, very fast research plane that incorporates all sorts of modern materials and technology, and therefore has no particular need for an obsolete aircraft from the 1960s that was primarily designed to solve 1950s problems.
At several points in time, the Pentagon proposed mothballing the SR-71 and relying on sat-recon. And each time, the aircraft-recon imagery people screamed bloody murder and insisted they needed the aircraft imagery. And then one day the Pentagon announced that they were shutting down the SR-71 ... ... and there was a thundering silence from the aircraft-recon intel people. Almost as though there was already a replacement for the SR-71 but nobody could talk about it.
And then NASA kept operating it as a research platform for another decade, until they also stopped. Almost as though it had lived out its useful life for that purpose.
There's a bit in the Skunkworks book that talks about added weight costing significant altitude. I don't have my copy in front of me but it's quite a severe tradeoff: some fairly small amount (100kg perhaps, might even have been less) reduces ceiling by 1,000'.
Hers is quite a story. I think my favorite part of it was when she refused to marry her future husband until he had also won an award for lapping Brooklands at over 100mph on a motorbike, something she had already achieved. (Another lovely detail is that she used her racing motorbike to cross the country from airbase to airbase installing her orifices on Spitfires.)
Well chief designer was a Brit but yes that is a fair point. I went with Concorde, rationalizing that the flag is more an evolutionary agglomeration than a conscious piece of design. It's a weak argument I know.
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"OK, calling Fred."
Phone is locked in my pocket the entire time. Like, make your damn mind up. Every time I try to call from the car now I have to ask it at least twice, usually three times.
And a completely baffling one recently, not even anonymizing names, also in car:
"Call George."
"OK adding L.S.D. by Hallucinogen to your Liked Songs playlist."
WTAF.
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