bigyabai

> What conflicts of interest?

The famous one that the Senate grilled him over, during his confirmation hearing: https://rollcall.com/2025/12/03/nasa-nominee-denies-conflict...

  Sen. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., questioned Isaacman about whether Musk was present during Isaacman’s discussions with Trump about his nomination. Isaacman said there were “dozens of people moving in and out.”

  “You’re refusing to tell us whether or not Elon Musk was in the room that day,” Markey said. “That makes me think that Elon Musk actually was in the room that day, that you understand that’s a clear conflict of interest.”

> Why would installing someone with some flare for showmanship be a bad thing if the issue is funding?

Because the issue is still funding-related. You wouldn't be restoring a half-century old SR-71 if you had the money to make a cleansheet design. NASA is being sandbagged by their own contractors.

You can watch his confirmation hearings for free online. It's on YouTube.

During them, Issacman refuses to answer multiple questions that are intended to clarify his private relationship with NASA contractors.

The US Navy needs fewer Kirovs, Yamatos and Ticonderogas. When (not if) the US enters the Pacific theater, they will be going up against Chinese land-based strategic AShMs and potentially 50+ Type 052 destroyers. The moment the US enters any capital ship into this theater, it will be like a 21st-century Battle of Midway with hypersonics, SAR satellites and ballistic missiles.

The Trump-class is pretty clearly one of those interim study projects that only exists to fill a perceived gap in force composition. Unlike the USAF NGAD, I don't think the Trump-class will ever see the light of day, let alone a battle versus a peer-power.

Donald Trump has very clearly and explicitly threatened to attack civilian infrastructure in Iran: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Even the most charitable interpretation of this comment suggests that Trump is okay letting Iranians grow up in a country without electricity, clean water and denied any humanitarian aid. You'll note that many defense commentators called this a threat to commit war crimes, which the US has already supported through it's proxies like the IDF.

I'm going to have to see the statistics supporting this claim.

That is unironically more sovereign than using any US-developed AI. GLM 5.3 is cutting-edge for cybersecurity tasks, while the US frontier forces KYC/background checks for cyber capabilities.

I've seen those. Exoatmospheric interception vehicles like that rely on the inertia of a rocket booster stack and the thinness of the atmosphere/gravity when it is released. They cannot accelerate to supersonic speeds at ground-level, and have enough drag that it's probably impossible to break the sound barrier without a payload fairing. I don't think the spheres or tic-tacs are a hard-kill interceptor.

> But Syria et al would have have been the right kind of environment to test results of black projects, no?

Would it? Testing your billion-dollar taxpayer project in sparsely the populated Syrian countryside seems like a great way for ISIS to get their hands on it. Or the Druze, or the PKK, or the IRGC, or any number of other outfits that would sell a crashed interceptor to China in exchange for air defenses and RPGs.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that the US prefers to test it's billion-dollar black projects in places where they cannot be stolen, damaged or interrupted.

OP, can you please follow site guidelines by submitting things that aren't exclusively from your blog? https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=raynchad

The HN guidelines explicitly ask you not to, since it lowers the quality of content on the site and derails genuine curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. 

You've already had several of your sites completely banned from submissions. Continuing in this manner will get this blog banned as well.

Kash Patel might have experience hiding his alcohol abuse and taxpayer-funded vacationing, but that doesn't qualify him as an espionage expert fit to lead the FBI. NASA's problems are funding-related, nobody ever looked at JPL and said that they needed a airshow pilot or astronaut in order to stop the layoffs.

Issacman is another in a long line of blatantly political appointments that were installed to prevent actual national progress. He doesn't hide his conflict of interests, regardless of how seriously he might take the position.

Generations of aviation enthusiasts will look back on the legendary risk management of NASA and wonder how it was entrusted to a MiG-29 aerobatics pilot.

Again; they don't need to. Chinese open-weight LLMs are free and better than US models for security-focused work.

As an American, I wish our country had fewer "frontier" labs. They are not profitable and will destroy the economy when (not if) they fail to achieve gross ROI.

If those tic-tac videos were actually a classified aircraft, those airmen would have signed an NDA before they left the carrier. The fact that we know about it (and see the FLIR videos, regularly, released by the government) suggests that they are exactly what they claim to be; UFOs. It could be phenomena, it could be noumenon.

We've seen a lot of the stuff that used to be classified from Skunk Works, none of them are supersonic orb prototypes or flying tic-tacs. I'm not saying they can't develop that technology and hide it from the public, but it's unclear how all of the puzzle pieces we have fit together to support "Lockheed sends flying orb to Syria without telling CENTCOM" in any way.

They don't need to. Frontier labs are all unprofitable, it's better value to redistribute China's open-weights models.

All good. I'm just frustrated at Apple for letting macOS fall behind Asahi on features like FEX and Vulkan support.

Mac users deserve to have a platform where games and software work forever once you buy it. It doesn't take much work on Apple's behalf to support it, so it's worrying to see them shift away from well-maintained software stacks and industry-spanning standards to focus on their own fragile runtimes.

Ah, good catch. Gotta keep Tomb Raider around for a few more keynotes, I suppose.

Apple is still against games. Next year they'll remove Rosetta 2, and all the games that require it will stop working. There's no upcoming Vulkan drivers, or upstream support for Proton. CrossOver is expensive and incomplete.

The best gaming hardware will always be the hardware you keep on you; be it a phone, GameBoy, or a Mac. macOS is basically last-place in supporting PC gaming though, and Apple has no qualms letting it die again.

The new Steam Machine is a horse of a different color. Unlike AppleTV, the hardware supports the same Proton compatibility layer that people know and love on Steam Deck. The majority of Windows-only titles on Steam run without issue, making the Linux experience quite tolerable.

Apple's policy on macOS, iOS and tvOS is to prioritize native ports at all cost. The difference in compatibility is thousandfold; even games that have native ARM/Mac builds like Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding and No Man's Sky only work on macOS and not iOS/tvOS.

The Steam Machine will probably still flop, but Apple's failure vis-a-vis making gaming work is self-inflicted.

> People who shame AI (most of them) can't do things themselves

The same could be said of people that need AI, though. I don't really take any side here, but that seems like a weak rationale for undermining their authority.

It's like if the Mariner from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner shot the albatross, hung it on his own neck, then asked the crew to blame him for everything. When they ignore his madness, he starts shooting arrows into the sky to see if anyone will ask him to stop endangering other people on the deck of the ship.

If the rime stands to reason, OpenAI and Anthropic are now awaiting a ghost ship from The Pentagon to suck out the souls of their low-headcount businesses and make the whole "AGI" fiction a federal honeypot like they did with red mercury. But I don't think supernatural salvation is in the cards for Sam or Dario.

> Restore your account?

> Your account was deleted. You can now restore it and claim your welcome back bonus.

I get this in a private window. Is this really how bad dark patterns have gotten in 2026?

It's not AMD's responsibility to dethrone Nvidia any more than it is Apple's. AMD sells CDNA, but the momentum is with CUDA and Khronos can't get anyone to sit at the same table anymore.

We're talking about GPGPU products, not raster GPUs. I cleared that up pretty well in my last comment.

It panned out great. 3DFX filed for bankruptcy less than 18 months later, and Nvidia could pivot from designing raster chips to considering CUDA's architecture.

It's not like 3DFX was the first GPU vendor. Nvidia saw the opportunity to be the first true GPGPU vendor, and they beat their competitors.

I think Nvidia has demonstrated that shipping first is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity if you don't shy away from a challenge.

Nah. Sweden has much better places for bunkers than the forest, many of them pre-built into the mountains or on private property.

Given the current turmoil, building a bunker in the Swedish forest would be like building your porch underneath a tree with 50 beehives.

BeRT and FLAN-T5 were used as classifiers 5-7 years ago, they were technically "frontier" for their time.

Nvidia can take those odds. Air gapping is not a realistic goal for the majority of these companies, and Nvidia isn't wrong for offering a turnkey mitigation option. People can do both, and whichever philosophy wins will win.

It's also a hedged bet against Nvidia's interest in fullstack robotics. AMD missed the datacenter train, but it's not too late to start building out an edge robotics hardware stack, maybe derived from CDNA.

You're right, but a fair accounting would probably find that Google is even worse. US misinformation and deception is paralleled only by the Mossad/IDF, who also has Google contracts.

It's entirely worth boycotting all of these companies, if only to protect yourself from their manipulation.

It's long overdue. Sonnet 5 was terrible API value for agentic coding, there were open models like GLM-5.3 Flash that blew it out of the water at 1/20th of the price.

OpenAI and Anthropic's lead is vanishingly small at this point.