His book amazed me when it was published because I never heard of anyone writing a non-textbook about our field. I thought how cool it would be to work for a company so interesting that someone would write a book about it. Subsequently I worked for two. (Actually four, but two of them at a time long after the books were written).
People posting claims about EV charging time should be required to also post the size of cable required. And the grid capacity needed to provide their fast charging at a typical 8-bay charging site.
The grid capacity depends only on the number of charged cars, not on their charging speeds.
The latest high-power chargers made in China that achieve the 5-minute charge times have their own batteries for providing the charge power, so they take from the grid only the average power, not the peak power.
Yes, but have you ever seen 8 queues of cars, about 8-10 cars in each, at Sams Club or Costco buying gas? You'd need a awful lot of battery buffer to keep up with that kind of demand. At some point you'd deplete the batteries and be stuck with charging at whatever rate the grid connection could deliver.
First, that exact situation simply doesn't have an equivalent in the EV world. Quite a lot of people should be able to charge elsewhere (at home, at work, on the street).
Second, wow, I live in Europe and I have never seen 64+ cars queueing at a single station. If I saw 15, I'd be wondering what the hell happened.
With EVs, most of your charging should be done at home, with fast charging mostly just existing for trips.
I know not everyone can charge at home (especially if you live in an apartment), but the solution to that is pretty straightforward and a lot more convenient compared with trying to scale up fast charging to match petrol stations.
There are several different levels of ballistic missiles.
ICBMs, for which the GBI is intended, are the most challenging to defend against and show the least interceptor success.
In contrast, we do have some pretty definitive evidence that theater and "lower" MRBM/IRMB ballistic missiles can be intercepted successfully. If you define "effective defense" as "most missiles that would cause damage are intercepted", then it is clearly possible with current technology. If you define "effective defense" as "all missiles are intercepted", then it remains beyond the current technology.
If you define "effective" in terms of cost ratios: R = (cost of defense system + cost from failed intercepts) / (cost of attack system)
then N < 100 is well beyond current technology, regardless of whether the defense system is perfect or non-existent.
There's no magic Pareto-optimal point where investing the right amount in missile defense means that starting a war against a medium-sized country makes economic sense. Russia figured this out in Ukraine, and the US figured it out in Iran.
Israel's genocide worked pretty well tactically, but is a long-term strategic disaster. If the US continues to be a democracy, polls say that it will cause us to withdraw support sometime this decade. Also, it only works if you have an incredibly asymmetric fight.
That's true. And while I disagree with the parent comment, ICBM interception remains enormously problematic and likely will remain so until directed energy weapons get really cheap.
Fundamentally the rocket equation and orbital dynamics really fight you on this.
It's a lot less "can't be done" versus "would be financially untenable to build and maintain even when the objective is nuclear defense".
Note that CRDT isn't "a thing". The CRDT paper provides a way to think about and analyze eventually consistent replication mechanisms. So CRDTs weren't "introduced", only the "CRDT way of discussing replication". Every concrete mechanism described in the CRDT paper is very old, widely used for decades beforehand.
This means that everything that implements eventual consistency (including Git) is using "a CRDT".
While this is technically correct, folks discussing CRDTs in the context of text editing are typically thinking of a fairly specific family of algorithms, in which each character (or line) is assigned an immutable ID drawn from some abstract total order. That is the sense in which the original post uses the term (without mentioning a specific total order).
If you stretch "CRDT" to mean any old eventually consistent thing, almost every Unix tool morphs into one under a loose enough definition. That makes the term much less useful, because practical CRDTs in 2024 usually mean opaque merge semantics, awkward failure modes, and operational complexity that has very little in common with the ancient algorithms people point at when they say "Git is a CRDT too". "Just Git" is doing a lot of work there.
Or empathy (Musk) or introspection (Andreessen). None of those things are necessary and could prove to be detriment when you are grinding in the bitmines.
But effectively, that means no empathy. Both Musk and you (explaining Musk) have set it up in such an extreme way that it makes it appear as if empathy is bad and there’s really nothing you should do.
Short of lighting yourself on fire, you could (1) invite them to use an unused space to sleep, (2) donate your time, money, food, water or other goods, (3) advocate for better solutions on a local, state or nation level, or (4) at least not foment hatred against them.
There is a wide variety of empathetic actions that one could do other than burning yourself or nothing. This directly applies to every social, political or economic issue that Musk has tangled with, but instead he sets it up to convince himself and others that actually there’s nothing he can do and empathy is for losers.
Quick note that at least since WW2 there has been a technique where you know that the enemy is recording the location of something. So you add an offset to the signal they receive. Then they know where the thing is, but actually they do not. This was done with V2 missiles where the navigation system had a tendency to drift slightly one way (forget if it was north or south). British reported V2 strikes as occurring where Germany would expect them to occur if that navigation drift hadn't happened. Result Germans never fixed their navigation system.
To be pedantic: I think the actual story is about V1 drones. They did not have a navigation system as such, they were just aimed in a certain direction and with the right amount of fuel to fall out of the sky over the target.
The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this.
So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.
Isn't this a different thing? I tend to assume when someone is talking about ballistic missile defense, they are thinking of ICBMs. A House of Dynamite is an example of that. But that seems substantially different from the regional missile defense that seems much more effective. Mach 5 is pretty fast, but Mach 25 is considerably faster.
The lay public is almost certainly unaware that perfect, nation scale ICBM defense is fucking impossible. At least in the US.
People in Israel are probably more accustomed to what a "High but not perfect" interception rate means.
But people in the US are just really dumb about things. They probably think it just needs "Enough money" or "A breakthrough" as if that's just a magic spell you can cast to get around physics.
However, modern anti-ballistic missile defense systems are effective enough that if you spend enough money you can defeat, with high probability, half to most of the incoming weapons. It involves firing many many interceptors against each incoming threat. It does not scale.
This is why it is generally deployed as a way to blunt, possibly not even defeat a North Korean nuclear attack. Nothing more.
Shorter range ballistic missiles suck. They still have the crazy high velocity terminal phase, but they are way cheaper to produce. I don't think it's possible to defend against them economically.
Cluster munitions that have between 1 and 10 kg of explosives are great against the infantry in the open field, not so much against population with proper level of shelters and an advanced warning to get there.
Generally agree. I live in a location that had (still has?) PSTN service, electricity, and natural gas services, but never got any kind of broadband besides the network I paid for and deployed myself, and subsequently of course StarLink.
I think the issue isn't so much that people are demanding internet service in
random places, more they're expecting internet service in the places you get all the other regular services.
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