Wait; you're criticizing someone's argument from authority and your rebuttal is effectively that you thought the movie was boring?

I am not saying the Oscar committee is incredible or anything but I don't see how your opinion is any more valid. You can't just beat argument from authority with argument from non-authority

For what it's worth: All ballistic missiles are hypersonic. They've fit into shipping containers for yonks; Iran publicly launched some from a container back in 2024. Some of them have some limited maneuverability at the terminal phase to improve targeting / defeat defense. It looks like this one does.

I mean the real answer is that Lockheed Martin's missiles are for a different purpose than these are. The US cares (well cared, at least; God knows how much the current leadership cares) very very much about reliability and accuracy, because our goals have been to hit small, tactically important targets while avoiding civilians. Hitting a school full of kids is bad, actually! Like, really, really bad! We try very hard not to do that! So we pay $3.5M for a Precision Strike Missile or $1.7M for an ATACMS, because they can accurately, reliably hit a targeted building from hundreds of km away. Paying less for the missile also doesn't help you as much as you might hope; getting good intelligence and targeting data (again: hitting schools is bad) is also fantastically expensive.

Accuracy and reliability may not be the primary goals for a $100k missile. If this weapon is intended, instead, to provide a credible deterrent, you don't need accuracy or reliability. You need numbers large enough to make defending against the missiles impractical, and make the cost of fighting intolerable to potential adversaries. You also can't defend with cheap interceptors. Incoming missiles can be (almost) anywhere in 3D space. Defenses need to detect, acquire, and intercept targets with incredible precision on ridiculously short time scales.

And while $100k is cheap, it's not _that_ cheap -- retail for a Scud might be $500k-$1M. Cutting production cost by a factor of ten isn't so unreasonable with a ground-up design and modern materials and tooling.

I am also not at all convinced that this missile, in actual practice, will be particularly inaccurate or unreliable. Chinese companies are extremely good at mass-producing precision devices out of challenging materials at absurdly low cost. Time will tell, unfortunately.

The USG and allies have traditionally been very willing to pay top dollar for missiles. Lockheed has no reason at all to make a cheaper variant of the PSM; we're happy to pay the full rate. For many reasons, I do think the US should develop the capability to build precision stuff in larger quantity at lower cost. The military isn't likely to drive that, though.

But: We're never going to try to acquire the cheapest possible means to deliver bombs to general areas. There just aren't many (any?) situations where the ability to blanket an adversary's city with missiles actually helps us achieve our goals.

Anyhow, I am hopeful that maybe, someday, folk will decide that missile defense is a fool's game and that maybe leaning on diplomacy a bit harder is more effective at solving conflicts.

Yep: The fundamental problem here is that the US has spent a long time with the values "housing is a luxury good; home ownership is an investment." In my opinion, a more appropriate set of values is "housing is an absolute necessity; home ownership is a luxury good."

The funny thing is that even with current very owner-friendly policy, home ownership is not actually a particularly good investment.

The funniest thing is that I don't think I have ever read a "coffee is bad for you" article. I've read some "coffee, with or without caffeine, is associated with lower liver disease" articles and some more recent "coffee and tea with caffeine is associated with a lower chance of dementia" ones. I guess large amounts of caffeine can cause health problems, as my gastric ulcer a few decades ago can attest to. But... yeah. That doesn't strike me as inconsistent.

I guess there's also the "coffee drinks with sugar have the same negative health effects as other sources of sugar" but that's all "lots of sugar is at least kind of bad for you" which has been pretty consistent advice for a very long time.

Don't get me wrong: Nutritional science is generally a tire fire. Getting people to change their diet is extremely difficult, retrospective reporting on food intake (content and quantity) is very unreliable, effects may take years to be apparent, and dietary changes tend to be correlated with other things that we also expect to affect health.

But coffee itself? Pretty consistently somewhere between "not harmful" and "moderately good for some aspects of health" as far as I have read. Maybe GP was thinking about the "1-2 glasses of red wine is good for you" thing from a few decades ago?

And yes: Science communication could do better, and also... for whatever reason, society seems to periodically glom on to random weakly-supported nutrition fads and grifters publicize the crap out of them to make a buck before fading into the background.

I think the problems Tailwind is facing are a perfect confluence of factors. CSS in general has gotten a lot better over the last several years; you need way less detailed knowledge to implement a visual design than you used to. The CSS spec is also very well-documented, and there's basically infinity CSS out there for models to train on.

Tailwind's value proposition is that they make it easier to implement a consistent-looking visual style without writing a bunch of CSS; in particular, they handle the tricky parts of layout and save you a lot of typing.

But if CSS is good enough that the tricky parts of layout aren't really that tricky, and AI agents will handle the typing for you... the role Tailwind fills is just way less important in the web development ecosystem. Tailwind is great! It's also a big dependency!

Similarly: I think AI will also potentially make a huge difference in the javascript ecosystem. If the AI can implement a bunch of the libraries you've been importing, your dependency tree gets less complex.

On one hand, this is terrible for a lot of open-source projects. Who's going to support all these little projects that see declining use?

On the other hand... business needs and models change. The need for people who can do visual and UX design, taking platform and actual use into account, and turning that into a good, maintainable implementation, won't go away. The CSS programming there isn't the hard part; the challenge is understanding the larger context and managing the project and delivering the technical parts of the project quickly, and adapting it quickly, are.

Can you provide a great open-source CSS library that you use in your projects, essentially as an advertisement for your design services, and insurance for if your design firm goes away? I would guess yes!

Can you provide paid access to templates that use your framework? I... I'm not so sure about that. Maybe a little? But I think that knowing what design choices you want to make for a particular project and having the judgment to find potential good fits and take feedback usefully and iterate are much more valuable skills.

It's a different business model. Maybe not a fun one to pursue. But you have to adapt.

China is perfectly capable of making products with excellent quality control and safety; they're as good or better than anyone else. They manufacture iPhones for Pete's sake.

Yes, China makes a bunch of the cheapest, most terrible products out there, because a lot of people want to buy cheap stuff and Chinese manufacturers want to sell cheap stuff. Sometimes, that means they're buying something unsafe. Going to the bargain bin for batteries is not a great plan.

Would I buy a BYD on the first year of import and park it in my garage? Probably not. But I'd read the reviews and watch a few teardown videos and if they're competently manufactured, I don't know why I'd be any more worried about one than a car by Ford, Nissan, or VW.

That's the thermal battery. The reactor core itself is cooled by liquid sodium metal. Sodium is a nice reactor coolant because it only produces one short-lived isotope (which in turn decays to a stable isotope) but it is still literally liquid sodium metal so keeping it dry is essential. Designs that run the sodium metal loop through a water loop to drive a turbine are inherently pretty spicy.

The Natrium design puts a sodium salt as an intermediary -- the sodium metal dumps heat to sodium nitrate, sodium nitrate dumps heat to water, spins the generator.

This is nice because it means you can run the reactor at its highest efficiency all the time and use the salt as a buffer to vary electrical output. It also means you don't have water and sodium adjacent to each other -- you can actually put them quite far from each other.

Yes, corrosion of the reactor coolant system in particular seems like it might be a major challenge. Material science has gotten better, so maybe it's okay now? Anyhow, it's hard to test without building the thing.

This is one reason they make flexible adapter cables instead of just rigid dongles.

At one point I read an analysis (I can't find it now, alas) that figured the biocharring process releases enough heat that it's approximately break-even with sewage, even once you account for water evaporation. I'm not sure if that was purely for biosolids (even after separation, they're pretty wet solids), or if it included liquid processing as well.

Another place these plants could make a lot of sense at is livestock farms. I know that at dairies, "where can we put all this cow poop?" is a fairly major ongoing concern. There is just a huge amount of it. Waste lagoons (yes this is a real thing) are... not super great solutions to these problems. Not every farm location has great siting for them, and things like "oops there was a flash flood and the waste just dumped into whatever was nearby" and "oops the liner had a leak and now the ground water is full of poo" are not particularly uncommon.

Also, the problems with livestock-related antibiotic resistance are probably substantially larger if we take the waste (bacteria and all!) from the livestock, mix it with other bacteria, and spread it all over our environment.

Making this stuff somewhat less problematic (as well as smaller!) would be really excellent.

When you're making biochar, you try to avoid belching much exhaust into the environment; you want to convert your input into charcoal, not turn it into CO2. So things like plastics and pharmaceuticals get charred and rearranged more than turned into smoke. And in any case, coal has taught us to be very good at cleaning particulates out of smoke.

As other people have mentioned, heavy metals can be a problem when biocharring landfill waste; they're not likely to occur much in sewage, though.

Finally! What do you think happens to human waste now? As of 2013, in the US, more than half was treated and used as fertilizer; most of the rest was landfilled. (For some reason, we have mostly decided "just dump it in a nearby body of water" is a bad plan.) Both of these methods happily release microplastics and pharmaceuticals into the environment. Plus, if processors are... less-than-scrupulous... about treatment, it can be a source of disease outbreaks.

Anyhow: We need to do something with all the human waste we create. Turning it into biochar is, on balance, probably better than anything else we can do with it. It's non-infectious, not smelly, gives us a useful end product, and greatly reduces the amount of undesirable other stuff in the mix.

Why is it poorly understood? Sounds like a phenomenon itchin' to be studied.

Studying it would be expensive and the "don't put electronics in extreme radiation environments" solution to the problem nearly always works.

Not saying as it isn't cool; it sounds cool as hell to figure out. But there are only so many people to figure things out...

"Professor" means very different things at different universities. There are universities (often what people refer to as "small liberal-arts schools") where professors teach most of the courses, and getting tenure is much more of a "can you teach students?" decision. At research-focused universities (usually larger institutions), professors often don't teach many of the courses, and getting grants and being able to successfully manage a lab and coach graduate students are weighted more heavily in the tenure decision. In any case, where you get your PhD (and postdoc) are huge factors in whether you'll get a tenure-track position -- about 20% of schools produce about 80% of professors:

https://www.nature.com/article...

Either way, there are many more PhDs awarded than there are professor positions available; most people with a doctorate will wind up in industry just by the law of averages. The less-realistic amongst them may spend a long time as adjunct faculty, teaching heavy course loads for punishingly low wages, before going into industry. I know this is not, like, 100%, but I generally hear "I'm taking a job as an adjunct" as "I will never get tenure but I have not admitted it to myself yet."

If you're in a PhD program or postdoc and want to get a tenure-track job, it is worth having a frank conversation with someone you trust about your prospects and what you can to to improve them.

People have thought about this; lunar lava tubes are a theoretically viable space for long-term lunar habitation. We probably could do it at today's technology levels, though of course we haven't tried it.

Still: Maybe show me a self-contained habitat with multiple humans living for multiple years on Earth before getting all excited about that prospect on another planet. This should be super easy and cheap in comparison (everything we need is right here!) but we have yet to manage it.

Measuring expected and actual thrust from firings, and then running through a root cause analysis when those numbers started not matching up.

Sigh, GPGP. Why does my brain do the typo over and over again