So you think there's a commercial market for missiles that fail in flight 90% of the time? You believe that they would engineer missiles with a GPS that couldn't handle the speed? You don't think that China, who boasts their own GPS-like network of satellites and builds their own receivers, can't build a receiver that works at Mach 5? You don't think that they're capable of building a dead-reckoning system that can land within 50m of target in the face of GPS jamming? You don't think that the country that's likely to land on the moon in the next 5-10 years can build a rocket body that can manage to stay in one piece?
If they're gonna sell them, they're gonna have test results showing that they work as expected in a benign environment. Whether it's 99.9% success, 99%, or 90%, there'll be real numbers based on real test launches. The people that they're selling to ain't gonna buy a 10% success rate missile, but they might buy a 90% success rate missile if the price is low enough, and everybody would be happy with a 99% success rate missile. And remember that their initial customer is likely to be mainland China, who has ways of dealing with disappointing suppliers.
Well, any refractory ceramic would probably work fine. The difference between an "aerospace grade" refractory ceramic and a "commercial grade" refractory ceramic is probably a 1% difference in missile failure rate at a 100x increase in cost.
Let's do the math:
Using aerospace grade parts, you launch 100 missles, 90% of them get intercepted before reaching your target, so you get 10 strikes.
Using commercial grade parts, you launch 100 missles, 10 of them fail during launch/flight, 90% of the remainder get intercepted, so you get 9 strikes. But, because the missles are 10% of the cost of the aerospace parts, you're able to launch 10x as many, so you get 90 strikes.
Where this leads is terrifying.
I say take the cash and open a new company under different management and build more offshore wind turbines, now that you have a billion.
you know, living is harmful to your life, every day is getting you closer to death. Eating many foods is harmful, drinking many things, breathing the air in many parts of the world and during different weather conditions. Having sex may be harmful, it can degrade your quality of life in the long term.
There are millions of harmful things, you will die and everyone else as well. I am not proposing for everyone to do everything, I am saying - if you enjoy it, don't allow people to dictate to you, do it.
you do understand we live only once, what's wrong with porn, gambling and drugs? Enjoy it if you want it.
>>> this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.
And that's different from the current state of Software Engineering how, exactly?
ehh, I've had the opposite experience. I've got way too many years writing C for embedded systems, but needed an Android app. So I asked ChatGPT to create an Android app for me that would do MDNS and Bluetooth discovery, pop up a dialog to let me choose from the discovered devices, and then connect over WiFi or Bluetooth as appropriate. And, after spending an hour downloading and installing the Android toolset, the program compiled first time and did what I asked. I did my normal step-through-line-by-line verification, and it was fine for prototype code.
As someone who'd never written an Android app in his life, this was eye-opening. It would have taken me weeks to get there pre-Google, and several days to get there with Google, but about 10 minutes with an LLM. Now, would I trust it to write production embedded code? Ya know, with the appropriate LLM-generated tests and human validation, I think so.
My son recently graduated with a degree in Software Engineering; I try to tell him that the future for that is going to be what we today would call a software architect or designer. The Software Engineer will be judged on how well they can write the specs and requirements fed into an AI to generate code, not how well they remember the details of how the C++ Lambda function works, or be able to generate a complex regular expression -- and be able to read it six months later. We're not there yet, but there's so much money being poured into the problem, and it's such an easy-to-see evolution, that in 10 years the concept of actually paying attention to spaces and semicolons will be quaint.
is that a serious comment?
ever heard of team drivers? they exist to avoid sitting idle for half a day due to regulations.
Yep.
Scanning down the comments -
Nope. They missed it.
I'm assuming that, on a cosmic time scale, the fragments will re-coalesce under their own gravity?
We build many professional Android and iOS apps for the trucking, logistics, shipping and related industries. It is a complete disaster, what Android app store has become over the 11 years we have been dealing with them. Things are only getting worse, more complicated, longer, more expensive. I don't know what they have achieved with this but they haven't made it safer.
obviously. It was clear as day to me decade and a half ago.
The West is really really really shortsighted. Like seriously shortsighted, arrogant, incapable of learning or making any smart strategic choices. This is in regards to everything, wars, weapons, power generation, allowing Islam to penetrate its borders, now even cheering FOR Islam and against Israel, not taking out putin and all of his little helpers all around the world judiciously, printing money like it's out of style, getting rid of manufacturing and declaring that now its economy is something else, but not manufacturing and production. In fact declaring that its economy is 'consumption based'. Getting off the gold standard. There are many stupid things the 'collective West' engaged in, will it be able to correct course? I don't see it, not yet.
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. -- R. A. Heinlein
