HNisCIS

I'm being a bit obtuse here to make the point, it's more complicated than that. The reality is if you create a defense startup you end up hiring defense employees which comes with its own set of issues.

That said, go look at salaries right now in the defense space.

Whenever you look at supersonic or hypersonic commercial aircraft plans you should assume one of two things.

A. It's a bait and switch by a founder who wants to pivot to weapons/military aircraft but wants to be able to hire high grade talent without paying the "we're gonna kill people" premium, can pivot once a good chunk of the workforce is complacent with a paycheck. You laugh but this happens SO FUCKING MUCH.

B. It's for business jet scale operations for billionaires. There are >3000 billionaires and however many corporate aviation departments and if you can build a super/hypersonic private jet that's not horribly expensive to operate the "time savings"* for that class of person will demand they buy one.

* when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest

The parts were considering are available under their free tier IIRC

This x10000

I can get parts, they're part of a BOM that gets approved, but getting POs approved for software is a pain in the ass. Been considering switching next gen stuff to microchip.

Why the fuck are they doing this

I routinely add/remove many of those things so I'm not sure how reliable they are.

Like I alternate between hitch/no hitch/bike rack, add/remove roof rack (it hurts mileage and is easy to swap), swap between my summer and winter rims+tires, and rotating through a set of magnetic bumper stickers would be trivial.

The gov will have that database though and it's a simple query to get all the displayed IDs and then search them in Flock's database. It makes it slightly harder for Flock to do things of it's own accord but that's not the problem here.

The G model hornets are extensively modified with different electrical harnesses and electronics for their role, they're not interchangeable at all in practice. The 20mm cannon is fully removed as well as the wing tip rails to make room for permanently mounted antennas and additional internal equipment. They aren't modular systems, apart from the AN/ALQ-99 or AN/ALQ-249 jamming pods.

Historically there were a few F models pre wired for G systems but the F models in USN inventory don't have this feature and the harnessing work required for the conversation is prohibitive.

I'm in a company going through this. Everyone outsources their thinking to LLMs and the results are painfully mediocre. The smart ones will use it to get their bearings on the topic then go to primary sources, the not so bright just ctrl-c ctrl-v.

Have you ever been in an HN thread where you're an SME on the thread topic and just been horrified by the confidently incorrect nonsense 90% of the thread is throwing around? Welcome to the training set motherfuckers.

LLMs do the same thing for what should be obvious reasons. If you search things that have some depth and you know the answer you'll be flooded by how often the models will just vomit confident half truths and misrepresented facts. They're better than they used to be, not just lying whole cloth most of the time, but truth is an asymptotic thing, not an exponential one.

Feed it the current location of the ISS and see what happens to your insurance rates.

Simplex is run by borderline grifters and Tor isn't a messenger.

I don't understand why this is so controversial. If you follow the news on the slightest the game right now is feds raiding journalists, taking their devices and then trying to unmask their sources. It doesn't matter what XYZ is "for", when the stakes are this high we need to be protecting people full stop.

That's all nice but it's also the defacto option for non technical people who need state actor resistant security and if they can just be subpoenaed to get the verified ID of the account holder that defeats the entire use case

Will this finally get Signal to stop demanding phone numbers to register accounts?

Lots of services you'd rather have an anonymous account with (Google, Meta, Discord) are partially/fully mandating phone numbers as a spam mitigation strategy. Also this paves the way to internet connections/mobile internet requiring ID

I'm not sure I grasp the hype here. It's a few dynamixels screwed together. They're not even particularly good servos.

This assumes any inside information is distributed across the set of jet owners relatively uniformly. In reality most of the private get guys run dealership chains or well services companies. Nobody is going to bother tipping them all off.

The reality is, much like American wealth, the distribution is super-exponential. If you actually wanted this to be kind of useful, you'd only look at the tail numbers known to belong to people who are associates of US senators, high ranking congressmen, and senior defense officials (Raytheon/LM/NG/Boeing execs).

That said, the *actual* reality is you'll just fucking know because it'll be obvious things are escalating out of control. The government is not mystically competent, they're morons like us just figuring it out as they go along. If things were to somehow pop off unexpectedly you only have somewhere between 3 and 30 minutes which is not enough time to get an aircraft in the air with no notice.

TLDR this doesn't do anything. It's cool though

The airframe isn't the main cost driver for these things and cardboard is aerodynamically inefficient. You could blow mould or a million other techniques and get a better, possibly cheaper airframe.

Refusing to participate WORKS.

I've had the unfortunate experience of working at a startup that started courting some autonomous weapons companies and HOLY SHIT were they the bottom of the barrel. Levels of incompetence you wouldn't believe, just good ol' boys who wanted to play with energetics. Then the company I was working for also hemorrhaged all their top engineers because they found the work unsettling.

The takeaway is that your refusal to assist these shitheads does have an impact, they have to pay more for talent and they have a much harder time courting good talent.

These interactive tutorials used to be better when they were made by hand to demonstrate the concept accurately. This Claude stuff just feels like an attention grab.

He's not wrong...

From an information theory perspective, LLMs are just regurgitating content from a loss-ily compressed training set.

It just turns out that like 95% of software we write is extremely repetitive rehashed shit globbed together. We just haven't found ways to abstract a lot of the redundant code well enough yet so here we are, stuck with the stupid robot.

That remaining 5% is stuff that's fully never been done before. If you ask an LLM to come up with a fully new sorting algorithm it's going to give you worthless garbage, maybe it'll get lucky if you burn a nuclear power plant worth of tokens in an infinite-keyboard-monkeys way.

All this is to say, if we want the field to actually progress we still need somebody with some knowledge about how a computer actually works.

Eh, I've played with 802.11ah and it's very long range for the power, but way too stateful for the use case that these mesh protocols serve. If you go out of range it's several seconds to re-establish a connection. I've worked with proper mesh radios (Silvus, etc) and they work very differently.

So the goal is to get rid of the people who have all the internal knowledge?

I feel this. I've been looking at ADV bikes and everything on the market has a cellular modem for always on cloud connectivity, and multiple vendors, including Zero (the electric internet darling) are offering paid feature unlocks via apps.

On top of this, I looked at Zero's job postings and they're desperately trying to hire a firmware lead to get the team to use Claude Code (precisely what I want managing a 100hp motor under my ass).

Not only are we in a world where everything is locked down with software, the software is about to get way worse and there's nothing you can do about it.

Something to be aware of, the laser safety goggles used by lab workers, pilots, soldiers etc are based on the premise that lasers only occupy extremely specific and narrow parts of the spectrum so by just blocking those little bits, you can get a very effective pair of glasses that doesn't significantly effect visibility. Arbitrary waveform lasers cause problems here.

Why not just disable touchID if the Bluetooth modem hears advertising packets from the 00:25:DF OUI?

Not in the US, am on a burner under a random name right now lol

It's like explaining to IT that you can't, in fact, install global protect/UEM on a satellite just because it runs a Linux operating system.

Listen to the flock CEO talk and then tell me he isn't trying to build a counter-revolutionary dragnet. Just because cities are doing it doesn't mean it's not deliberate, that's just a step in the plan. Not everything the ultra wealthy do is a single step, they're lobbying and schmoozing their way to their goals in every way possible.

What would you suggest? Vibe coding a react app that runs on a Mac mini to control trajectory? What happens when that Mac mini gets hit with an SEU or even a SEGR? Guess everyone just dies?

I used to work radar systems. The point being that the hardware is fully capable. The software side is quite well understood at this point. There will be plenty of repos floating around in a year to turn this into an airborne drone SAR or whatever. Functional range resolution will be around 4m but that's plenty for most shenanigans.

EIRP. There's some gain involved.