Unit cost for a lot of these seems to be under ~$5K USD, not counting the value of engineering time.
How do you counter a swarm of these things coming from all directions?
This kind of weapon has interesting consequences for public speaking events by leaders. Or large industrial projects on the coast of Texas that use large tanks of compressed methane and LOX.
This seems like the kind of thing that you can send in the mail to another country in a special box that can open up when it senses that it has arrived at a destination so the drone can fly off to get into position for an attack by hiding itself in some nook on the roof of some nearby industrial building.
Put a small solar panel on it so that it can sit indefinitely, waiting for the signal to strike a target.
Or put a dozen or so of them on an unmanned surface vehicle like the Ukrainians did and send them out to a juicy port target.
The biggest threat that a weapon like this poses isn't just from the initial destructive capacity, it comes from the possible difficulty in attributing the source of the attack.
How do you respond to this kind of weapon you don't know who used it against you?
I find it interesting how many people come out of the wood work to make disparaging comments about people who use cannabis whenever the subject of cannabis use comes up on HN.
Having lived in a country where cannabis has been legal for about a decade now it's quaint seeing this kind of casual disrespect levelled by a stranger.
I wonder if this kind of mindset is still common here and people just don't vocalize it anymore, or if it's the kind of mentality that continued criminalization perpetuates.
Most of us have worked at a place that was either bad enough that we knew and didn't say anything or that we should have known was that bad. That isn't anything new. You do what you gotta do and all that.
What we're splitting hairs over is whether or not Google (and others) were already "too bad to work for" 10-15 years ago. And whether or not some people correctly identified this and others didn't / did but say that they didn't.
You're totally right -- very few of us have careers entirely at places like UNICEF. That's just reality. What isn't reality is the image some people like to portray that they didn't know or couldn't have reasonably known that the entity that they were a part of for so many years was no UNICEF.
It's too convenient that so many of these stories go something like "It was okay when I joined but somewhere along the way things there got dirty, but I'm still clean!"
Why is it always that way?
Why is no one ever writing "It was always dirty there but I convinced myself that it wasn't until I couldn't do it anymore."
Because people don't want to admit "I made a mistake."
Was it different or are the people who voluntarily started working for Google around that period unable to admit to themselves and others that it was always questionable to work for a entity like Google?
To certain observers this was obviously the direction tech monopolies were going to go.
What have those people always seen that you're only now beginning to admit is an inherently defective aspect of these organizations?
Werent early versions of the Switch 1 jail broken pretty fast and people were dumping switch 1 roms online to play in emulators?
I don’t follow this stuff too closely but I thought that I saw people playing the sequel to Breath of the Wild on PCs to get acceptable frame rates when it came out.
But is there enough of a market for blu-rays of newer western releases in Japan to keep the entire production and distribution chain alive around the rest of the world?
If I buy a bag of white powder thinking that it’s cocaine and it turns out the person selling it to me actually gave me a bag of flour did I commit a crime? What crime?
If I’m angry at someone and I decide to kill them so I go over to their house late at night and see them sitting upright on their couch watching TV and I shoot them from the window and flee but it’s later discovered that they died of a heart attack two hours before I shot them did I commit a crime? What crime?
If someone decides to commit suicide and they jump from an apartment building and coincidentally I decide to fire my gun out my window and as they pass by my window the bullet hits them in the head killing them instantly before they hit the ground am I guilty of a crime? What crime?
These kind of Law & Order / first year law school type hypotheticals are useful ways to analyze the hypothetical that you’re raising.
If we hadn’t designed our economy around carbon emitting processes from the beginning there would be no incentive to continue to do this by exporting industrial capacity to authoritarian states.
But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Thats a good list of questions here’s another good thought provoking line of thinking:
As someone trading labour for a wage should I adjust my productivity to match the tools I’m using? That is to say if I’m using CAD should I bother using the tool to raise my productivity? Or should I just match my old hand drafting productivity rates? Should I attempt to raise my productivity rates with these new tools to meet or exceed the best rates from my coworkers?
What can we do to align my interests with those of my employer?
Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time?
It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government.
If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?
> The question is always: What specific regulation?
You're absolutely right that we can't solve this by regulating DRAM prices.
How we got to a situation where a handful of companies can spike the price of consumer electronics several times what it was only a few years ago and these same companies have become the centralized source for information is a journey decades in the making at this point. Decades of insufficient regulations, insufficient enforcement of existing regulations and the lack of any organized efforts to change it.
Microsoft should have been broken up in 2001. The American government should have taken that threat seriously. Governments around the world should have. The dependence of all levels of governments on one single American company for their desktop operating systems and productivity software as well as the spying opportunities that gave American companies and intelligence entities was a grave threat and regulated better to avoid entrenched foreign monopolies. But they didn't. 25 years later and Microsoft still dominates the home OS market and office environment, they have a sizable portion of the cloud, they recently took a huge chunk of the game industry and now the AI industry with their investment in OpenAI.
Even though there's a direct line between a historical lack of regulation on a monopoly like Microsoft and the rise of OpenAI leading to the spike in ram prices it isn't just about Microsoft. You can paint similar pictures about Google, Oracle, Facebook, or Amazon. But to me it isn't just about these companies and regulations/actions directed specifically them but the broader misregulations that have stifled market health and dysfunction that has allowed these criminal organizations to have so much influence.
There could have been real enforcement with criminal penalties and fines that exceed the profits and costs associated with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.[0] Not doing so has just allowed wealth to continue to accumulate in the hands of criminal people, who not surprisingly continue to do shitty things in their quest for profit. Why were there no personal consequences to Eric Schmidt[1] for these actions, let alone consequences that would have prevented him from attaining the position of influence that he currently has?
The notion of the right to repair should have superseded the DMCA and laws should have been adopted to punish noteworthy companies that lobbied for it and profited from it. There should be more of a focus on governmental standards mandated open interoperability to prevent walled garden business models. This would have kneecapped wealth accumulation among a few corruption groups and allowed a richer more competitive market to flourish. DMCA and copyright extension, WIPO harmonizing of trade law should all have been swept away.
Where's the fallout from Snowden? Were there any massive institutional reforms there? Any jail time for people in government and industry who were involved? How did the lack of regulations and and lasting reform around that debacle shape American society at large and the tech industry?
Everything that we're experiencing today is the result of decades of choices to not regulate the tech industry in any way that resembles other industries. It is a global collective choice to cede power to private individuals based out of the west coast of the US.
Surely there's more interesting conversation to be had here than just "your opinions about interacting with law enforcement are moot because I know people in my Chicago neighbourhood who disagree with them."
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.