tomohelix

Interesting how this is not yet flagged while Paul Graham's piece a few days ago was flagged almost instantly and required manual approval to stay up.

Imo, both are heavily opinionated albeit in opposite direction. And both having little to do with HN/tech in general. Graham's article/blog is more informative though, i.e. have more evidences to support his points, compared to this. Also at least PG is much more relevant to HN than whoever wrote this article. Yet the treatments were very different. I guess there is a strong bias to those who like to hit that flag button.

I will get flak for this but just too funny to not say it.

This looks to me the equivalent of: "software engineer is a real engineering discipline" argument. Some practitioners of one field consider themselves to be equivalent to another related field because of similarities. Opponents cite some "key differences" and requirements to deny the claim. Fights ensue.

They are still building but none of these are at the scale China is doing. Most US projects are less than 10B, majority are around 1-2B. Meanwhile this article shows the dam China is building is over 100B.

That is why I mentioned that nothing the west is doing is that exciting, relatively. Sure, they are still large projects, but not the exciting, innovative type of "large" like Saturn V or moon landing. Just rehash and even scaled down versions of what has been achieved before.

I guess military is the only place we still see serious cutting edge advancement in US engineering. Shame that the public won't be able to benefit directly from that unlike infrastructure projects. Almost like China is taking better care of its people than the US.

Even before clicking, I already knew it would be in China.

It has been a while since the US or other western countries have done a major public infrastructure project (compared to what have been done before). The US especially is lagging behind. How long has it been since the high speed rail system was proposed? China built a national network in less time than the US took to argue about how to build just one line between its two hub cities...

There were definitely a lack of funding justification as the previous wars dragged on. Iraq and Afghanistan cost trillions of dollar each, against tiny forces. The US could hang on for as long as it did simply because of the massive budget discrepancy to their enemies. But eventually had to withdraw/surrender when it was obvious they couldn't win.

Where did this massive budget go to? There is one tank factory, 7 major shipyards, and about 250 aircrafts made per year. Except aircraft, China military production dwarfs the US in everything else.

Even Russia is producing more ammunition than the US can. Just to be clear, Ukraine is receiving aid from the entire Western hemisphere, not just the US. At the start of Ukraine conflict, the US made 28K artillery shells per month, and is really struggling to ramp up to 50K in the next few years. Meanwhile, Russia is making over 200K. Just that alone should raise alarms about how pathetic the US manufacturing base has become compared to its adversaries.

Call it my opinion but when an army become overreliant on high tech but with precious few numbers that they can't replace easily, against a new paradigm in war where disposable mass strikes, i.e. drones, is becoming dominant, it is clear who is losing. Japan lost exactly this way in the Pacific to the US.

The US military is now optimized for cost and profit, like everything else here. Lawyers and businessmen are taking charge, not engineers and scientists. Worse, they are considered a cost to be cut.

Yes, very likely. The US has no means to rapidly switch into wartime production. It is woefully inadequate when you realize that there is only one factory making tanks and it almost got shutdown. Even Russia is out producing the US. China would absolutely embarrass the US if it comes to sustained conflict and supply chain.

And the US military is still stuck in the past in term of strategy for all out conflicts. A bunch of drones scared the entire nation the last few days and the army literally has no effective means to immediately response or track them. Meanwhile, billions are poured into aircraft carriers, all of which are easy targets for mass drone strikes or an ICBM attack. The US has no way to recover even a single carrier loss. There is simply no time or material to build them faster. Yet they are still the backbone of the US force. A bone that is getting more and more vulnerable every day.

I think training and experienced crews are in the same boat as equipment. It takes too much time and effort to train someone to do things like flying the F35 or crew an aircraft carrier. By the time a new pilot is certified, in a real conflict, probably 10 already died. It is simply unsustainable if the enemy can fighting back on equal ground.

The history example with Japan also demonstrated this point. Japan had highly trained and effective sailors and pilots. But they all died and by the end of the war, Japan had to scrape the barrel and forced untrained young boys into the fights, who did not received any advice or training from the experienced veterans because those had all died. And so they lost.

The US may walk the exact same path on both equipment and personnel.

The US's main strategy is to dominate the battlefield and achieve the objective as fast as possible using technology and overwhelming firepower. So yes, they could and did win the "hot" stages where they were able to deploy all they have.

But when the fight dragged out, as it has always done and absolutely will be in a peer or near peer conflict, the effectiveness of the US military drops like a rock. It is here that I question what is the point of all the expensive toys and the trillion dollars budget.

A bit on the tangent, but seeing how the US often struggles to fight clearly inferior forces, I have to question how effective the US military really is.

The US has the most advance tech and the largest budget, nobody can deny that. But how useful are these when something like the B2 cost billions and there is only one tank factory in the entire country? Also, many critical parts for these expensive war machines are difficult to source and easily disrupted by an adversary.

One example is the artillery ammunition being supplied to Ukraine. The US can barely break 50K/month. Meanwhile, Russia is producing them by the hundreds of thousands. China is even higher.

The US has the fanciest toys but those can barely be made and are only good for strategic, precision attacks; and their supply chain cannot sustain a prolonged conflict. In a peer conflict, these are fatal. If China started a war, their manufacturing base can potentially pump out more weapons than the US can destroy. And in the long term, the US may not be able to keep up in both weapons and personnel.

Just like how Japan got the largest and most advance battleships with the more experienced crews at the beginning of WW2 but still lost to the US. Japan could not match the production and rapid replacement rate the US had. Now, the US is in Japan position compared to China.

Well, a century or so ago, we were still arguing about whether skin color is a reliable indicator of sentience and intelligence...

Right now, we are still arguing whether elephant or great apes are intelligent.

Human as a whole is too egoistic to accept that our intelligence is nothing unique and we are not a special creation destined to stand above all others.

As long as we have power and dominance over "it", we will never concede that "it" could be our equal.

A PI test is quite controversial. Personally, I consider it pseudoscience at best and trash from incompetent MBA managers at worst. At its core, the test tries to force complex human behaviors into predefined categories and doesn't care about nuances or reasons or any temporary influences behind these behaviors. That alone already disqualified this test as anything reliable or scientific.

And then when looking at who is publishing all the "science" behind the PI tests, I mostly found the company that is selling it. That literally made the entire thing worthless in my opinion. If we believe the salemen from big corpo, then sugar is good for your health, cigarette doesn't cause cancer, lead in gas is safe, etc.

And the fact that anyone with a brain can easily manipulate their own answer by not being honest with what they think is the final nail for me. Others said this doesn't happen, but I took a look at the test once and with some self suggestion effort, I could completely change how the test ranked me. So to me, whoever say they need to run this test to evaluate their candidate is an absolute incompetent buffoon to me.

I don't like that description very much. The cell being "alive" is literally the top reason the cellular machineries work so well. By being "alive" it is keeping the environment optimal and perfect for the enzymes to run and being productive. Taking this away and then seeing problems about efficiency is like taking off the wheels and then asking why the car is not running well.

They are trying to fix it by maintaining the same cytoplasmic conditions using all the machines and sensors in a bioreactor. But that can scale is a different question. The narrow ranges of conditions biological processes require is already hard to maintain while the cells itself is still whole and using more than half of its enzymes to do this.

I have strong doubt it will work. On paper we are just removing an arbitrary boundary that is the cell membrane/wall and combine trillions of cells together to form a giant cell. So it sounds very reasonable and attractive in engineering terms. But these are biological systems inherently designed/evolved to work in one special condition that is the cytoplasm of the host...

Any engineer would know the kind of troubles that can occur if we remove a critical principle of the original design that was there since the system's inception and is literally hardcoded on an operational/abstract level into the system's functions. Trying to fix that mess is unlikely to yield anything close to the original and requires manipulating techniques and knowledge highly intimate within the system.

And we know barely anything about the intimate and detail operation of the molecular structures inside a cell. We know the broad strokes. But ask any biochemist if they are confident of the entire reaction pathway of any enzymes down to the thermodynamics calculations associated with all conformational changes. Maybe you will find a dozen enzymes that we can describe at this detail.

And to optimize cell free synthesis, we would need to know of tens of thousands more. It is possible, but it isn't something I would expect to see soon unless there are major breakthroughs.

Bacteria is supposed to be really low on the complexity scale of life. Just above viruses and some other controversial "lifeforms". Yet, when put into the analogy of human technology, I realize just how enormously sophisticated these tiny, underappreciated, bugs are.

If an atom is a brick. Then a single protein has the complexity of a standard house (~10,000 bricks). A single bacteria contains millions of these proteins in a dense, interconnected network that communicate with each others. By this standard, one cell is the equivalent of a well run metropolis with its own waste disposal, work sites, government, residential, recreation, police, etc.

And this huge city can be run at near peak efficiency allowed by physics. A feat of engineering we cannot match despite all of our technological achievements.

All contained in a tiny droplet of oil so small nobody noticed it until a few centuries ago. Yet so numerous and ubiquitous it shapes every aspect of life on Earth. It amazes me everytime.

To be fair, this kind of spying is quite outdated and inefficient.

What is easier is a Chinese company establishes a branch in the US that barely has any operation. But they then try to poach experienced Chinese-born workers in other US companies with high salary, good perks (paid travel to the Chinese HQ for example, who doesn't want to visit home and have the entire trip expensed?), generous PTO, etc.

They easily get the talents and industry knowledge from these hires. One person does not need to know or say everything, but a little piece from dozens of experienced employees coming from multiple industry leaders paint quite a comprehensive picture eventually.

And it is legal, and the participants can easily or unwillingly share critical information without raising any security flags since they are "protected" by the Chinese company. Any legal proceeding or investigations has to go through the corporation first so it is much more difficult for the US to handle these cases.

It is incredibly entertaining. It is the closest thing to full dive VR we can get right now and I doubt we would ever get the "realness" as close as lucid dreaming without some physical hijacking in the brain.

The world is your oyster when you are dreaming and in control. That alone is enough of a draw for many people.

Indeed, if you are pragmatic and want actual, certain results, violence and force are the surefire methods.

That is why the GP put the "evolved" in quotes. It takes something more than the basest human instincts and the animal sides of us to take this approach. Some may consider it naive. I personally think Gandhi was smart enough to deduce this on his own yet still chose the nonviolent approach regardless. That alone shows he was a greater "man" than most, in my opinion.

Get it a bit better in term of precision and we have a killer lab automation tool. Labs around the world would be willing to pay 1M for a robot that can handle manual lab works and it is not like they are very difficult. Lots of labwork is based on established protocols with well defined steps. A robot that can grab things and go to town on those tubes without any programming needed is a blockbuster product to me.

Well having to soak the rice overnight and reboil it multiple times doesn't seem like an easy method to me.

Also saying rice is filled with arsenic and warn against eating it multiple times a day is not that different from saying it is unhealthy. It almost sounds like fear mongering to me considering how the Asians seem to be doing fine so far and it is the cultures that don't eat enough rice or carbs that struggle with being healthy.

It is funny to me that any time an article or claims regarding rice being unhealthy appear, it would be from some far West country whose diet barely contains any rice. Meanwhile, Asian countries whose populace exclusively eat rice every day, multiple times, in humongous amounts, consistently rank higher in life expectancy than a Western country with the same level of development.

I am not saying rice is the only reason. My point is if rice is so bad, we would not see Japan or Korea or Singapore dominate the life expectancy charts. Compared to the extremely greasy and highly processed food being sold widely in the US for example, rice is extremely healthy.

> previewed “as early as December,” ... After that, Jarvis might be made available to early testers, so a launch does not seem imminent.

Google is trying to show they are not behind in the AI race by advertising something probably barely out of alpha testing. It just reinforce the idea that Gemini is still inferior to Claude and ChatGPT.

I tried Gemini once and then tried Claude. It was such a huge difference I can't imagine Google, who created the transformer architecture, can be so behind a tiny startup a fraction of their size.

One only need to look at the current depictions of sex in popular shows to see why people don't like them. These are incredible gratuitous and basic and exist for shock value without a shred of passion nor artistry. Worse, they can detract from the actual story of the show and reduce overall enjoyment. For example, look at The Boys extremely detailed and crude rape scenes for absolutely zero reason.

Sex sells, but it can also diminish overall entertainment value if not done right. Too bad sale is the only thing most producers care about.

I guess by using the word "fair" I may have caused the discussion to focus on the wrong idea.

It is about what is acceptable to both the employer and the employee. The employee would like the freedom to WFH but the employer consider it a benefit that come at their cost and thus do not want to grant it. As shown by other professions, the idea of WFH is entirely new and rarely if ever granted or expected to most professionals. Software devs are in a unique position to demand and potentially getting it does not make it any less exceptional and a huge ask for the other side of the negotiation.

Whether it is really good or bad is not the point I am making.

The comparisons are to show how other professions have a common level of benefit. On the overall market, RTO is not exceptional and it is understandable why employers for a particular field would be hesitant to grant WFH as an added benefit on top of already provided ones. As it turns out, even for the software field, this is not something easily granted.

I know this is HN and most people here heavily support WFH. But as this article shows, people will support whatever benefits they can get, even if it is very likely come at the cost of productivity. With WFH, it is a mixed bag of whether that would affect productivity or not but from a risk averse management perspective, it is understandable that they don't want to risk it and go back to the traditional mode.

In my (likely very controversial to HN) opinion, software devs are already heavily compensated compared to other professions and adding more benefits on top of that in the form of WFH just make it even more unfair. What is fair? It is what the employers are willing to pay and if most are demanding RTO then that is just what the market is willing to bear.

Most jobs do not have the luxury of WFH. Not for a doctor, a biologist, a chemist, a civil engineer, a lawyer, etc. They are required to come to office to work and they are often paid less than a software dev.

The Kinect was revolutionary and had interesting applications beyond consumer uses. Same with Hololens. Same with Google Glass. Same with 3D TVs. Same with others tech ahead of its time.

IMO, Apple's most successful approach is perfecting an already marketed product and turn it into a global phenomenon. As this article pointed out, the AVP (not aliens vs predator) has some advantages and definitely an improvement. But this first version is still not improved enough to reach mass appeal. Perhaps the next one?

We use synthetic biology to modify what is already available in nature and then call it "synthetic lifeforms" but it is like a cheap knockoff of the original with barely functional system.

All of these "synthetic lifeforms" I have seen are usually very gimped and nowhere as robust as a normal bacteria. It is still an ongoing effort to make a real, designed from scratch, comparable bacteria that can match the original. But speaking as someone who worked on these things, I would not expect any major breakthrough soon.

From an engineering perspective, a single bacterium is a state of the art self contained factory. It has thousands or even ten of thousands of feeback circuits each with multiple interweaving depdendencies that somehow works perfectly to adjust inputs/outputs on the fly at extreme efficiency.

Even with all of our technological achievements, we can barely build something at this level of complexity. And to make it so cheaply and quickly? Pure science fiction. Yet scoop up a handful of dirt or pour a glass of water and you can get billions of these sophisticated machines in your hand.

Earth and its biosphere is a marvel of technology. Shame we don't seem to appreciate it enough.

He was from Vietnam. Suing someone there for copyright infringement is like suing a chinese company for stealing an IP. It is not easy and it is not likely to go anywhere.

Also, he probably got enough money to retire. If it did get $50k a day, he probably got more than a million before he pulled it. In 2014 Vietnam, that amount is probably more than most can make their whole life.

Heck, even in the US now, most people probably still can't make more than a milllion...

First of all, I doubt TSA agents are "well trained". They are incompetent at their main task, which is screening for weapons in luggages and they are assisted by state of the art technologies.

Second, I also doubt people waiting in lines at the airport will be anything but rational the moment someone take out a gun and or a bomb. At least on a plane, nobody can run anywhere. In the airport check in, there will be shoving and yelling and stepping on each other to get out faster.

Also, it is harder to smuggle a rifle onto a plane. It isn't difficult to bring something extremely destructive to the check in gate.