V_Terranova_Jr

Sure, in a pure mass vs. mass scenario where the adversary's systems are no more advanced than yours, more mass likely wins. But this is really the only scenario in which aircraft like the F-16 or F-18 give you "air dominance".

The fighter mafia tended to overextrapolate from Vietnam that systems/technology were never going to be the force multiplier originally thought, and you needed to equip lots of smart men with incredible knife-fighting ability.

The maybe underappreciated lesson from the F-15 (air-to-air variants anyway) is that the systems did indeed catch up to airframe capabilities and proved their mettle. Not just in combat with lesser-trained adversaries but also in western military exercises. Moreover the F-15 doesn't give up very much in the WVR dogfight situation either, despite a lack of fly-by-wire (until F-15SA) or lack of relaxed static longitudinal stability. I'm sure you can setup a WVR fighter maneuvers set where the F-16's characteristics give it an advantage but that is likely to be a small window in the envelope of potential engagements. The F-15's size actually ends up being a pretty sweet spot and is (ironically?) a better airframe for getting within the adversary's OODA loop.

That all being said, John Boyd is credited with keeping the F-X program from foolishly pursuing a more complex and less maneuverable design - design direction which deserves immense praise.

Cold war Russia and today's Russia are two different beasts. Also, Russia's strategy of deliberate large-scale brutality against civilians to win military conflicts still motivates the drive to nullify their military capabilities as quickly as possible.

This is a very underappreciated aspect. The systems (i.e., avionics and portions attached to the avionics) would have also needed significant updates ($$$) to keep the aircraft relevant into the 21st century. It's not just the engines that needed modernizing.

> The F-16 actually had a carrier demonstrator, the Vought 1600, for VFAX.

To be clear, the Vought 1600 (a partnership with GD where Vought took on the prime role and GD became a sub, similar to the what happened with Northrop and McDonnell-Douglas with the YF-17 and F-18) never left the conceptual design phase. You won't find a Vought 1600 airframe in any museum.

> Not just because of the LWF program, but because that was its designers’ ethos inside General Dynamics.

And also on the part of the USAF instigators of the LWF program (the so-called "fighter mafia"). The interesting thing is that if you look at the combat & military exercise record of the F-15C, it contradicts a lot of what the fighter mafia took and preached as gospel, at least as far as the air-to-air theater goes. The F-16 did/does enjoy a great deal of success as a multirole fighter with a non-trivial emphasis on the ground attack role.

It's a bug. Nowhere in any of the rationale you lay out is there anything about competence and active involvement/oversight on the part of the government. Neither major political party in the U.S. focuses on this, though the Republican mentality is largely that the government can never be competent. However, at a minimum, the government is the buying agent of the people in procuring infrastructure or infrastructure improvements. It sets the requirements, oversees execution, and signs off on the delivered products. Companies perform work, but their interests are not aligned with the interests of the taxpayers. Incompetent or unempowered government employees cannot prevent the abuse of the taxpayer by companies, nor can they establish boundary conditions for successful project completion. The checks you indicate, e.g., environmental review, are procedural devices that can have radically different outcomes depending on the competence of government employees.

The U.S. system will not get appreciably better until we focus on government competence. The layperson's go-to explanation for these outcomes is something in the tree of corruption but the truth is likely closer to Hanlon's razor.

Neither aeronautics nor material science have stagnated. I doubt computer science has either.

Extraordinary claims ought to be supported by extraordinary evidence. Those are some serious accusations you make.

It's a false dichotomy to say you either have to be "all-inclusive to the entire world of developers" or you should applaud project leaders throwing out useless condescending rants with no real technical content like:

  And the *reality* is that there are no absolute guarantees.  Ever. The "Rust is safe" is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety. Never has been. Anybody who believes that should probably re-take their kindergarten year, and stop believing in the Easter bunny and Santa Claus.

What's going on here is not "woke people" trying to protect every little snowflake's feelings, rather it's noting the ranter is making himself feel good at others' expense with no other value added. His rants are completely superfluous to the substantive technical dialogue.

Sounds like he's calling them out on an internet forum that they are also free to ignore. Doesn't sound like he's the problem.

It's really more about rigor and the actual practice of engineering (e.g., tracking requirements and verification of implementation against these requirements, verifying systems & subsystems meet correctness invariants, etc.) moreso than regulation. Most software development is craftsmanship, including the Linux kernel. It's certainly possible to practice software development as engineering, but it's not common.

Source: aerospace engineer with a flight sciences background, and also software reviewer for flight systems.

Not sure how mysterious it can be when he opens with a rant like:

  And the *reality* is that there are no absolute guarantees.  Ever. The "Rust is safe" is not some kind of absolute guarantee of code safety. Never has been. Anybody who believes that should probably re-take their kindergarten year, and stop believing in the Easter bunny and Santa Claus.

This is needlessly talking down to competent developers as if they are deluded children. It's also not the only instance of it in the linked message. He would be far better off just going straight into the technical differences between what he is willing to permit in his kernel vs. what the Rust-oriented developers seek.

There are a number of non-starters here:

1. Efficiency counts for a lot in these aircraft, and it's absolutely possible to do better than the Olympus. In particular, high-temperature materials and engineering, along with combustor efficiency have evolved significantly since the Olympus era. Tenths of a percent are a big deal in subsonics, let alone supersonics.

2. Emissions are also a huge deal. Significant work would need to be done to clean up Olympus emissions.

3. Is the Olympus sized properly for the Boom design? Probably not.

4. We don't necessarily publicly know if Rolls offered to refurb and support these engines, but if they didn't, there are some very good reasons. Re-establishing a supply chain for these would be a really big deal, and in some cases not cost-competitive with a from-new design based on present-day supportability.

5. Supersonic boom noise being a non-issue is an absurd premise. It drastically affects your addressable market, period.

6. Time savings for a few critical needs as you cited are not going to be enough economic motivation to develop this system.

7. It's not that "China, Russia bad", it's that Chinese and Russian materials and manufacturing will not currently support the durability requirements for commercial viability of these hypothetical supersonic cruise engines you propose. You would have a lot of off-wing refurb time on such engines. Chinese engines don't have the performance, either.

The case for anything Boom is developing is not really there.

I'm not sure how accessible this is for the layperson, but I thought this report was pretty well done: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20150015837

Also, I didn't really answer your question directly before, but SpaceX-style iteration in this arena is unlikely. Unlike launch, which has high margins, commercial supersonics would be competing by trying to "build a better mousetrap" where "better" means "faster, but more expensive to develop, operate, and has a smaller addressable market". Iteration could build design team competence, but iterating the design itself would be extremely expensive and wouldn't have enough potential payoff to merit the necessary $Billions of pre-production investment.

Everything about Boom has been dumb-shit from Day 1. From their name to their design concept. It's the kind of thing one expects when VCs are seduced by people in fields they don't understand. My view is that if large-scale commercial supersonics has a future, it will be in low-boom types, assuming X-59 does well and overland low-boom supersonic flight is permitted. Renewable or synfuels at acceptable cost will also likely be needed to avoid political suicide.

It is a much more expensive proposition for supersonic cruise engines than subsonic so even more critical you get an engine OEM onboard, figure out your market, and get a solid design point nailed down quickly. If you're off even a little bit in efficiency, it will very significantly affect the aircraft's market viability. If I were an engine company, I wouldn't put my own R&D funds into this area yet, and especially not toward Boom's design point.

Even more stupid things than Boom: commercial endoatmospheric hypersonics, and SpinLaunch. I can't believe SpinLaunch has funding.

The one "science fiction becomes reality" concept that could one day (not today) be viable is sub-orbital (exoatmospheric) point-to-point transport. But there's a long way to go to make that more routine and it's hard to see a path to safety better than subsonics. Subsonic/transonic commercial transport is a real sweet spot.

Claimer: I'm a practicing aerospace engineer, and do not work for Boom or their competitors.

@throwawaylol_ is correct. I'm afraid you're mistaken.

It's maybe possible I2O didn't require clearances when Mudge was a PM. Certainly at least since they moved to their current location everyone who works in the building or for the organization is cleared*.

Most programs themselves are unclass, and there are lots of collaborations in fundamental research where it's completely open, not even controlled unclass (CUI). That doesn't imply anything about the PM's clearance status. Not sure why a PM would go out of their way to talk about clearance status unless they were specifically planning for classified discussions. Your point about having a clearance not being some huge deal is certainly true though.

*Some support service people like janitorial may not be - I don't know, but then those people are escorted by people who are.

Have you ever worked in or alongside the U.S. Federal Government? I have. It's pretty easy to pin all these unprincipled actions/inactions on deliberate lies and manipulation in service of power grabs. As several replies to you suggest, the reality is likely a lot less scurrilous.

There are very few truly principled people in Government. By this, I mean people willing to make big changes to hew to some "objectively right" principle even if it raises perceived risk, or causes any sort of new economic harm to some group, regardless of how short-term any of these may be[^]. On the other hand, if there is ongoing harm to some group, that doesn't typically generate enough support for change until you hit some inflection point in the zeitgeist, like what led to the "justice reforms" passed in the last administration.

Big changes that cause any kind of harm or perceived harm to a group need overwhelming levels of support, especially in political circles, to overcome the media seeding and political grandstanding that exact an inevitable toll. Obama was a profound disappointment to anyone hoping for any kind of structural reforms out of him, but the fantasy-driven ferociousness of the political headwinds he faced in office shouldn't be ignored. He was damned if he did or didn't.

Imagine you're in Obama's shoes and some Serious Intel Community Leader swears in classified briefings that if you undo any of what they're currently doing, there's high risk of "the next 9/11". Do you make a principled stand about the sanctity of the 4th Amendment despite their near-assurances that "Americans will likely be harmed on your watch if you do"? Probably not, because in the moment, you feel the ends are so overwhelming they justify the means. In the current Republican-leaning political environment, you don't want to risk feeding the claims that "by weakening the Intelligence Community, Democrats undermined America's safety, as they always do!".

It's easy to talk about principles until you have to pay the costs of being true to them.

[^] If you counterargue this using radical Trump administration actions, most of them cannot be categorized as "principled" or without ultimately fatal-to-the-administration consequences.

You can imagine how sad some of us were when the last remaining flyable SR-71s, maintained in flyable storage by NASA Dryden for flight experiments, were finally retired for good. Here's a NASA page on them, but I haven't seen anything explicitly published on when in the early 2000s the decision was made to pull the plug: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-03... One year they were still doing J58 runs, another they were on static display out of the hangars. @jhugo's comment is right.

The lack of any accountability for the actions taken by the IC both prior to and in the wake of September 11, or any real accountability stemming from the Snowden revelations, should be taken as proof that the statement/sentiment "they are keeping us safe" sufficiently moderates public outcry. Again, not to mention Snowden-level stuff is typically signed-off at the White House level, so not just overzealous IC people operating autonomously.

If you get caught in one of these scandals, you just have to wait out the news cycles in the shadows where you typically are anyway. Or you "take one for the team" like Clapper did - no doubt with a lot of legal advice from civil servant lawyers. It doesn't really matter whether or not the public tells intelligence officers/operatives "Thank you for your service!" You can also see the retroactive immunity congress granted these organizations and impassioned defenses they offered.

There is no stomach (or understanding) to demand better of the IC in any way reminiscent of the Church or Pike committee times.

I can't really fathom the magnitude of wrongdoing that would now be needed to change how these organizations think and work, or have key staff actually slapped with enduring punishments.

Who would do the charging? The executive branch for whom it was most convenient for him to <pick euphemism for lie>? The legislative branch, many of who see taking on the "intelligence community" as something for which they would get branded as non-patriotic? You need a critical mass to pursue any form of actual accountability - lone brave senators or congresspersons won't have enough momentum to get past the activation energy barrier.

Prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28098290

Well, that's an interesting strawman...

If you want to willingly give over your personal information and privacy, which in fact Microsoft does take from you (no need to speak of supposition), that's certainly your decision to make and it's not my place to tell you if that's what's best for you or not. I also think you are imputing motive to Linux advocates that's not real - I don't think any of us are trying to tell you shouldn't be allowed to do what you want with your personal info. We are saying that if you use those systems, the only way you get a choice in the matter is if you go to significant lengths that defy how the vendor tries to force you their system. You are free to embrace those terms as much you like.

The "in exchange for working software" is also a needless swipe. Maybe there's some contingent of Linux users that use it just because they love tinkering, but most Linux users do real work with our systems. Personally, I'm more interested in the work I do with my system than I am with working on my system.

I totally agree that we are well past the point where data security and privacy need strong regulation or legislation. At least Europe has GDPR.

However, I hard disagree with drawing a false equivalence between the open source community, particularly in the operating system space (which this article is about), and the closed-source commercial vendors. Also disagree that adopting open source "gets us nowhere" in this battle.

Sure, there is some telemetry in the open source world, as we see in the Firefox discussion. We also see reactions such as LibreWolf, or community outrage at the likes of GitLab when this happens. It's just not part of the open source community's ethos to look the other way at hidden telemetry. In the open source realm it is a) it is the exception rather than the rule, and b) the fact they are doing it is clearly knowable and neuterable[1]. That's a far cry from Apple validating every executable you run, or Microsoft not even allowing you to opt-out of telemetry, and god knows what other vendors of core closed source software do now.

I'm not an open source zealot, but the race to the bottom over the past 10 years just hardens my resolve to own my devices and not the other way around.

[1] Again, talking about client-side software or servers you run/control. You will always have to figure out how much you trust SaaS providers regardless of what software is part of their offering.

They're not merely culture wars, they're also value wars. Both Windows and MacOS are headed toward continuous behind-your-back communication with their respective motherships. In the case of Windows, they have the audacity to shamelessly advertise on your personal computer.

I've no doubt that significant proprietary software and games tie people to Windows. However, if a) those are not core to your desktop OS use, b) you care about privacy and your OS not doing a lot of external communication behind your back, and c) you're a member of this community, it's hard to understand why you wouldn't take something like Linux seriously as a daily driver.

Step one is admitting that all desktop operating systems suck - none of them are actually engineered, they've just been crafted over decades. Second is realizing that unless you don't give a damn about what is going behind your back on your own system, you will have to embrace some form of suck. Maybe the Windows and MacOS fans don't mind having to do things like trick Windows into not sending "telemetry" or using Little Snitch to block whatever daemons Apple wants communicating to their servers for every executable you run.

As much as I swear JWZ was right about the CADT development model, more often than not, if I learn the incantations I can deterministically make Linux do what I need it to do. And I'm no software development badass like many here. I hate that I have to know so much about something so clearly not well-engineered, but am glad that it's deterministic and there's no vendor hellbent on trying to keep me from configuring my system in the way I see fit. In the worst case if I can't figure it out from documentation, forums, whatever, I can look at source code. I'm not going to tell you "Linux is awesome!", but I will say that I think it's the least bad option.

Also, of the common choices out there, I find today's KDE to be quite usable and pleasant.

Which one(s) of these would you want me to explain?

> An undergrad degree is no longer a good investment.

In any field, or just for people that want to develop software?

As much as I wish you were wrong, from what I see in avionics, I suspect you will be right. Many of the companies developing these products simply do not pay enough or have a suitable company culture to attract top-quality software developer talent. These companies will ride out legacy practices and mindsets for as long as they can get away with it.

The current batch of commercial supersonic aircraft companies will fail (commercial hypersonic aircraft even less credible).

There is a big bubble in commercial launch.

"Urban Air Mobility" is another bubble.

The problems we have in developing and acquiring military technology have nothing to do with "innovation" or a lack thereof.

Random tidbit: Robert Williams, the DARPA PM for (at least some of) this, was also DARPA's PM for NASP.

It's definitely a bubble, not sure of the "mother of all aerospace bubbles". Small launch might be the "mother of all aerospace bubbles". Another aerospace sector that is not credible is the current batch of commercial supersonic companies.