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.

>>> 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.

I'm assuming that, on a cosmic time scale, the fragments will re-coalesce under their own gravity?

So a bunch of companies took a bunch of educational time to teach a bunch of children skills that were obsolete before the children even graduated from high school? And now they're pivoting to teaching this weeks new tech fad with no concept for whether or not it'll be obsolete in a decade also? Are there consequences for this kind of antisocial behavior?

Reading, writing, thinking, math, finance are basic skills that every child needs to have IMHO. They aren't made obsolete by a where the tech bros are investing their billions today.

It's been fairly well established over the years that anything electromechanical (phono cartridge, speaker, headphone) is by far the biggest variable in a high end setup.

Moderate and high-end preamps and amplifiers are all pretty similar at similar power levels. You're trying for a flat amplitude and low phase shift over a 3 decade low-frequency range - that's not rocket science. Moderate cost pre-amps/amps will tend to have a higher noise floor (more background hiss), but otherwise they'll be remarkably similar.

But the speakers/headphones - ah, those are magic. I went to a private engineering college with a number of people who had more money than sense, and got to demo speaker systems that varied in cost by a factor of 100. In general, the most expensive ones sounded much better than the cheapest, and a little better than the middle ones, but even so there were noticeable differences in reproduction amongst the highest end ones that didn't exist amongst the purely electronic components. I couldn't tell you which of the high-end systems were best, but I could tell you which of them I preferred.

Or until speaking out against the government gets you labelled a "domestic terrorist", and the Department of Homeland Security decides to crack down on Domestic Terrorists, because who isn't in favor of that?

>>> You need to be a pretty big fish for most of this to actually matter.
Ya know, two years ago I would have agreed with you. But today in the USA, it seems like all it requires is voicing an opinion that is contrary to the Government's "Truth":

https://newrepublic.com/post/2...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politi...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/polit...
https://www.reddit.com/r/polit...

AEB is mandatory in the USA also, but you're putting too much faith in the technology if you believe that it can and will prevent all collisions. Most manufacturers describe it in terms of "reduce the severity of impact". In this type of accident (merging into another vehicle), the AEB system would have very little information beforehand to cause it to activate.

I think the better solution to HFT is to "batch" trades - sells get posted blind over the space of a second, they're revealed and there's a second of quiescence to allow everyone everywhere to see the sells, blind buys get posted in the next second, in the fourth second buys and sells are matched and in the fifth second the results are posted. Naturally, one might parallelize this so there's always five sequences in flight.

Because the buys are "blind" (buyers don't have any visibility into what other buyers are bidding), there's no advantage to HFT - coming in at the last microsecond doesn't help you. A computer in San Francisco has the same access to the available market as a computer in the basement next door to the Exchange computer.

Can you be more clear in your writing? I'm still not sure what your position on Markdown is.

I received one as a "gag" gift. The lollipop part was eminently forgettable, other than being oversize even for my adult sized mouth, and requiring you to keep it pushed against the roof of your mouth in order to hear anything which was uncomfortable. I suppose if I'd sucked on it for ten minutes, I might have eroded it to fit, but I wasn't that interested. The sound was remarkably good, though quiet, considering it was a lollipop.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/02...

https://www.macrumors.com/2025...

It's disheartening that this is the best option....