Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
The ENIAC press demo, essentially the first public demo of an “electromechanical brain”, just ran parabolas to estimate artillery trajectory. (It also involved the genius addition of ping pong balls secured to each lamp on the machine, so as to be more legible to the reporters and photographers)
At very large $companyIUsedToWorkFor, the accessibility features got a lot better once we hired a blind developer. Once it went from "we have to pass this test" as our only feedback to "Bob did this because it confused his text-to-speech program when he was looking for another bug" we got such a great success flywheel going. Very quick feedback cycles really is required for successful software development.
Flock is Planet Labs name for the mega-constellation of imaging satellites made up of 3U cubesats known as Doves- hence the name for the full constellation. It has nothing to do with the automated license plate reader company.
Is it going to be streaming? On which platform? With the "HBO canceled it, wouldn't even release it to streaming" already in its history I am very unsure that it will even end up on streaming, and so decided to see it in the theater.
And I hit a Sunday matinee with my 9 year-old so it was $10.75/person, which felt worth it to me.
My kid (9yo) had seen a couple of Roadrunner cartoons on Youtube, no more than that. e.g. I don't think he's ever seen a Sylvester-Tweety cartoon. It didn't matter, he enjoyed the movie a lot. Beyond the very basics of Coyote and Roadrunner, which everyone picks up very quickly- and if you don't they do a great modern version in the opening minutes to bring you up to speed- the movie doesn't need deep knowledge of the WB cartoon universe. It's not like the MCU that way.
And the fact that it reinforced a message his mom and I have been trying to teach him (about the importance of not letting failure keep you from trying again) was a bonus for us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac... is almost a straight copy of the infamous Iranian Shahed for ~$35,000 USD. (Perhaps the US sourced their Shahed from Ukraine, though that, like many things about this program, has not been officially discussed.)
I wonder, at the point of such a simple thing as the Saheed (there are videos online of some of its electronics, not saying it's bad, indeed it's cheap and effective, but it's dirt simple), does the USA really need to reverse engineer it? Is it just a way to prevent project management turning the thing into a million dollar per unit thing?
People calling it "reverse engineered" are not entirely correct.
The "Low accuracy, low speed, drone" concept has not changed since the V1 was invented by the Germans. Who then went ahead and built a more modern one back in the 80s. It should look very familiar:
It has all the bells and whistles you can recognize: GPS guidance, shitty small piston engine, lumbering speed, launched from a box truck using a small booster rocket.
See, the funny part is that the project was considered a failure because they were designed as anti-radar munitions, to just hang around until a radar transmitted and home in and destroy it. But that part of the project never figured out a good seeker.
It's just convergent evolution. That's what the design requirements imply.
Makes sense, I presume any defense corporation (even small ones of the drone manufacturer style) could get one of these running in a few months if needs arise.
Now, for the defense model of "western" nations (once again, not saying this is a bad thing nor wrong), a dumb warhead that just lands wherever and explodes makes no sense, no tactic would be enabled by it, so I guess the natural course of actions is you get heavier guidance requirements (case in point, radar homing), then you get operation in GPS-denied environment, then some other part of the army decides it needs to be carried on fighter jets, and another team wants it carried on frigates, and suddenly you have developed a million-€ loitering munition instead of a 10k€ V1 tactical-analogue!
Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.
Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.
1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.
Everyone agreed that this (what the court ruled) was the plain meaning of the law up until Kalshi just decided to go for it. They basically did an Uber on the law, completely ignoring how it had long been interpreted and demanding someone stop them. And only once Kalshi wanted to make money on sports gambling did there start to be parsing like this, to try to argue that sports gambling was legal on a CFTC-regulated exchange. If Kalshi had gotten the law thrown out for vagueness then basically there was a road map for making any law that got in the way of a company making money thrown out for vagueness.
The key is that up until a few years ago basically the universal consensus was that sports gambling was not possible on a CFTC regulated exchange, then all of a sudden Kalshi did it and now they are trying to pay enough lawyers to get them to justify it. This ruling is not judicial legislation, this is demanding that companies actually follow the law.
Since when has vagueness been considered a bad thing for statutes? It's the foundation of the US (and anglo) legal system and why courts exist, to fill in. And vague statutes that can be interpreted by courts has long been preferred to precise legislated meaning that you seem to prefer.
You could live in Germany or France if you prefer a legal system more ruled by clear statute?
The idea is to provide overarching guidance, but when there is devil in the details, leave that up to courts to consider when there is a real actual issue at play, rather than legislators in the ivory tower theorizing about how things might play out.
The statute gives the general intent, but with an understanding that until the shit hits the fan in an actual court case, noone will have truly considered the detailed ramifications, so leave some intentional ambiguity there for the courts to resolve on real, actual, grounded cases rather than theorizing.
And if the legislature disagrees with a courts opinion about the ambiguity it left, it is very free to clarify in statute, which will override the court! (Unless the issue is constitutional, in which case the legislature is very free to draft a constitutional amendment!)
Counterpoint: most human CEO's are doing trendslop as well. At least in the worlds I live in (US technology industry, so either megacap public companies or SV-funded startups). It often seems like all of the VCs, CEOs, and large investors in public software companies are all on the same group-chats and sharing the same ideas with each other, driving lots of this trendslop.
From observation of having worked at 7-8 companies as a software dev, it sure seems to me that most CEO decisions could be replaced by AI easier than software dev work can.
Because companies can choose their customers, and can choose not to serve some customers because they are too difficult/expensive, while a government can't ethically make the same choice. A government (at least a liberal democratic and republican government of, by, and for The People) serves all their citizens, it's kinda the point, whereas a company definitely maintains types of customers they are not interested in.
This is a fundamental problem with "running government like a business," one of several that point to the fundamental flaws of the entire idea (profit motive, unitary unit of execution, etc.).
> while a government can't ethically make the same choice
I'm glad you said "ethically" because the current US administration is openly admitting that they're making decisions on things like school funding, disaster relief based on whether that state went for Trump or not.
Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
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