It’s not just about energy, but also industrial (think neon, helium) and agricultural inputs (nitrogen, urea). Even if energy was solved, there’s not really replacements for these. Well, regenerative agriculture but not sure that will feed as many people.
The nitrogen comes from the air - we're perfectly capable of capturing it using renewables.
It's probably one of the last things to be created that way because it's one of the places where methane is used more efficiently than burning it... But fundamentally there's no issue here except energy availability and a short term supply shock.
This is false, you can make many plastics without fossil sources (pla, bio-pet, bio-abs, etc). The only challenge is cost and scale - it's cheaper and easier to use existing processes.
But making plastics using renewable energy and fossil hydrocarbons for feedstock does not exacerbate the greenhouse effect, unless you burn them when you've finished with them.
Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.
The only way to get American auto manufacturers to step up their game is completion. Worked when the Japanese cars came, American car quality improved dramatically in response because it had to.
And the quality's back through the floor again. How many recalls have the domestic slovenly-built Big Three had to put up with in the last ~6 years? Ford alone is showing just how bad the UAW's building on the factory floor.
The amount of trim and garbage I've had to take our domestic-built Ford Escape back in for service and factory bodge fixes for is staggeringly high. Meanwhile, my Mexican-built Fusion? Rock solid.
Even Ford has fallen out heavily from just 20 years ago. It used to be much more common to see the Ford badge in Europe when the Ka, Fiesta, Focus line-up was around.
Thinking now the only times I see the Ford badge are on work vehicles like vans or the odd Mustang Mach-E (well, not literally the Ford badge but the Mustang one).
I haven't seen (or at least noticed) any of the new cars in the Ford line-up in Sweden: Puma, Capri, Kuga, Bronco, etc.
Well, survivorship bias means that Elixir is loudly populated by AI maximalists now. Just go look at the last several years worth of US/EU Elixirconf talks schedules, it's maybe a third of each cohort and included in keynote slots.
Because people who enjoyed working with Elixir otherwise but don't want to participate or support that kind of environment have mostly left when the trend became clear. So the folks who are sticking around are the ones who are neutral-to-positive on AI. This means explicitly or implicitly surveying that group for opinions on AI's place in development work, such as while designing a conference schedule, are going to be missing most of those voices who might once have objected. It will continue to skew harder towards favoring AI in the future with most of the possible sources of more-critical opinions leaving.
That to me seems to match the definition of survivorship bias quite well?
This is how I would deal with the problem if I maintained node: "Please, use your tokens and experimental energies to port to Rust and pass the following test suite. Let us know when you've got something that works."
The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could close this gap, that was needed already 4 years ago.
The war in itself? For sure, but if a million dollar rocket saves a billion dollar radar system against a 50.000 drone, it still seems working as intended.
That doesn't say 10+ radars have been destroyed. It says radar sites have been attacked 10 times across 7 locations in 6 countries, with some damaged and some destroyed.
Plus a couple videos of fixed radomes getting hit by drones
Defending against ballistic missiles is well known to not be perfect, even against Iran's lest sophisticated missiles it's very difficult. But the high end missile systems are worth trying. The main problem is the lack of cheap drone interceptors which has been a blaring siren since Ukraine war started that the US neglected by not treating it as an emergency.
C-RAM radars - at least one US embassy was hit with an elcheapo drone as well, rendering it useless. Thats a legit problem and was only possible because they took out most of the important ballistics radars first.
How would a THAAD in Jordan help stop drones in Iraq? That's not the only radar they operate.
The C-RAM was in Baghdad, the high end radars hit were in the other gulf states.
The CWIS is probably the best anti-drone tool the US has but they have far too little of them and can get overwhelmed. They should have listened to Ukraine.
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.
This is not mostly true: Israel's anti air defense works surprisingly well against Iran's attack, the issue has always been 2 things:
Who has more missiles to throw?
And the Patriot is still top class in it's designed goal: shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles.
The second big thing is that no one has designed air defense to take into account effectively slow moving artillery pieces that have the same maneuverability as a missile.
Because that is what drones are and what has been the biggest glaring problem for but the USA, Israel and Russia (the gulf states both use Russian and US anti air defense).
The aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics - they have basically no chance against hypersonic and other fast ballistics, especially ones with active measures (flares, maneuvering - there was a really wild one from a few weeks back). And there's a number out of this conflict as well. The are still great at shooting down jets, however. Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point. I think a lot of people are in denial about this due to a combo of Hollywood narrative and ideological reasons, but the Russians math very good - it's reality. But even so, those are not the right systems for fighting drone attacks - nobody really has it together with that. Both of these are solvable problems, it's just a lot of hard math + piles of money.
And that success rate comes after significant improvements to the Russian weapons and finesse. They were much less effective early in the war.
Cat and mouse is always a factor in war. The patriot wasn't very good when it was first introduced and took some refining to become the gold standard, which it still is.
It still works very well against planes too, reaching out and downing EWACS aircraft at the edge of it's range.
They were neither designed nor expected to have 100% defense rate, but 50% is lower than expected. 75% isn't great either.
> aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics
Decades-old Patriots shot down Russia's newest "hypersonic" missile.
> Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point
What? Source? You're describing the systems that have been getting floored the world over. Why do you think nobody is placing orders for these anymore?
There’s a number of videos of US and Israeli air defense quite literally failing at intercepts. You can see the entire trajectories and stuff. Some from US bases, other in Israel but they are trying to censor them.
"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."
Ballistics are much harder to shoot down period there is not a single system that has 100% success rate, Ukraine reports around 42-77% success rate[1].
Hence why army folks were so alarmed by Russia/China developing and having ready prototypes that can go hypersonic.
I never understood these engineered ultra processed meat imitation products, they are not healthy - period. There's already healthy and delicious cuisines that have developed over thousands of years (Indian, Nepalese, I'm sure many others). This desire to just recreate the SAD (standard American diet) with goo is beyond strange...
> I never understood these engineered ultra processed meat imitation products, they are not healthy - period.
People don't eat burgers for health reasons.
> There's already healthy and delicious cuisines that have developed over thousands of years (Indian, Nepalese, I'm sure many others).
Why eat ice cream when chicken is healthier?
You're comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there are plenty of delicious vegetarian foods, but you can't just substitute one for the other. If you're craving eggplants, replacing it with lentils will not satisfy you.
Then eat a burger if you want a burger, they are healthy if you skip the buns and sugar ketchup and use quality beef. Throw it on a veg salad for a balanced meal.
It’s not a disagreement, it’s science. You are conflating your views on animals rights with this ultra processed goop, which is a common logical fallacy. I respect and understand the animals rights perspective, but the fake meat is simply not healthy. Don’t believe me, just see what high level athletes eat and the diets of cultures who live long.
Conflating ultra processed food with health is the actual fallacy here. It's nothing more than a heuristic.
Reminds me of folks who said "Avoid gluten-free because it's less healthy."
And high level athletes don't eat a lot of burger patties. They eat chicken (likely breast). When you're consuming a lot of meat, you have to make sure it's of good quality.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that. I think for them they want something that has the "utility" of a burger, as in here is some easy protein plus some sundry stuff packaged into a hand holdable unit that is pretty filling on its own and cost like $12 at a restaurant.
The reason is for a lot of them is that they become repulsed by the smell of meat after not eating it for a long time. So they would very much not want something that tastes like meat. They just want the function of the burger really. And to be fair there isn't a lot of good options otherwise for vegetarians that are truly comperable to a burger in terms of it as a product. Veggie lunch meat is even sadder state of affairs than the burger meat so sandwiches are out. Then you have bean burritos I guess, falafel wrap. All stuff that tends to be found solely in ethnic specific restaurants than democratized across the entire globe like the burger is, which you can probably find anywhere you find reliable electricity in 2026.
I'm a vegetarian who likes burgers, but all the flavour in a burger comes from vegetables anyway: the sauces, garnishes, etc, plus cheese, of course. So I just go one step further and replace the patty with something made from veggies too. More delicious, and cruelty free.
You can make thousands of absolutely delicious vegetable dishes. You can adapt another few thousands by replacing the meat with veggies. Why the obsession about ultraprocessed "meat substitutes"?
Low-protein Indian diets are not healthy. The food certainly tastes good, but let's be real, there's a reason heart disease and diabetes in the subcontinent are stratospheric.
You’re getting downvoted but they do seem to have some of these issues, including the skinny fat problem. But their cuisine sure is tastier than the fake meat and other goop that is pushed, which is even worse for health.
Is animal meat healthy? In small amounts (10% less caloric intake) disease correlation does not increase, but higher then 10%, disease rates see a direct correlatory increase.
The plant meats are healthier than the animal meats.
There’s so such thing as “plant meats”, and yes, animal meat is healthy when balanced with a good diet. What’s killing everyone is the white carbs and sugar, not the meats and fats. Anyone telling you otherwise is ideologically motivated vs science-based.
this is very difficult to address with intellectual honesty.
It seems obvious to me that people of conscience and standing have built plenty of the most cutting edge tech of this age. Yet those people are structurally embedded within business and government. Far-reaching technology is one thing, but satellite networks are especially impactful in many ways for both real time intelligence gathering and also building a record of analytic data over time.
So, PlanetLabs.. without a doubt, completely sincere in Doves reading save-the-whales data over the entire Earth. And also, connected "at the hip" to the US Federal Government. Does the US Federal Government work diligently to save-the-whales? You be the judge.
PlanetLabs is business, with investors. That is the horse that brought the endeavor to its current state. Larry Ellison seems to run a very stable business, in the same locales, and that seems to be just fine with investors. Is there any way that PlanetLabs would not be subject to the same investor pressures and direction, lawsuits and governance letters, that Oracle is subject to? seems likely that lots of the same actors are close at hand, from the beginning.
SO there is tragedy and comedy, stock price and hiring practices, technical capacity and brilliance. The mission is the message ? feedback here seems likely to escalate, so let's set a tone of informed debate, and recall that after the typing, almost nothing will actually change in practice.. just an educated guess.
The current administration is openly extractive without the fig leaves of old.
I don’t think we can look forward to nature - whether it’s national parks or marine parks or just being a non polluting neighbor - getting any priority or protection from now onwards.
While Iran still has fire control, these ships can be hit by shore-launched anti-shipping missiles, one way drones of even old fashioned shelling. Their "navy" was never even a factor.
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