skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Square peg in a round hole: airpower against mobile targets and missiles in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Unsurprisingly, the broad public reaction is to read this as a massive failure: too few sorties, the wrong munitions, faulty intelligence, and the entire campaign costing $29 Billion (so far). The more uncomfortable conclusion is that air forces have been here before, and that the problem of finding and killing mobile launchers and missiles from the air may be less a tactical shortcoming than a structural feature. Two campaigns separated by 50 years—the Anglo-American CROSSBOW campaign against German V-weapons in 1943–1945 and the “Great Scud Chase” of Desert Storm in 1991—suggest that what is happening over Iran today is not a deviation from the norm but simply a repeat of it. As Colonel Mark Kipphut argued in his 1996 study comparing the two campaigns, the failure to internalize CROSSBOW’s lessons was itself one of the reasons those same failures were repeated in 1991; the present campaign against Iran suggests we might still not have learned them.

    [...]

    The first lesson of CROSSBOW is that fixed infrastructure is easy to destroy and that adversaries do not stay fixed for long. British intelligence had received “reliable and relatively full information” on German long-range weapons as early as November 1939 two months into the war. It wasn’t till four years later, in 1943, that Allied photo-reconnaissance first identified the German “ski-sites” in northwestern France, named for the curious shape of one of the buildings on each launcher complex. Within weeks, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would later report, ninety-six sites had been cataloged, and a sustained bombing offensive against them had begun. Of these ninety-six sites, no more than two were ever used operationally. On its face, this was a complete victory. Allied airpower had, by direct attack, denied the Luftwaffe permanent launching infrastructure before the V-1 campaign could begin.

    The Germans drew the obvious conclusion. The Survey noted that during the period of the Allied counterattack, the Germans developed methods for launching V-1s and V-2s from small, inconspicuous sites that required minimal engineering work and freed firing operations from the elaborate sites originally planned. These were the “modified sites,” first photographed on April 26, 1944, which were well camouflaged, dependent largely on prefabricated buildings, of which more than sixty had been identified before the first V-1 was launched in England in mid-June. The “modified sites,” the Survey concluded plainly, were “heavily bombed without marked effect on the scale of effort.”

    Kipphut, working from the same primary documents, formalizes the consequence as a two-phase division of the campaign. CROSSBOW I, running from April 1943 to early June 1944, was a qualified success: it delayed the start of V-weapon attacks by an estimated three to six months and so allowed OVERLORD to proceed before the full weight of Hitler’s missile arsenal could be brought to bear. Eisenhower himself wrote that had the Germans perfected the weapons six months earlier, the invasion of Europe would have been “exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible,” and that a sustained V-weapons attack on the Portsmouth-Southampton embarkation area could have caused OVERLORD to be written off entirely. CROSSBOW II, however, the campaign to suppress launches once they had begun, was in Kipphut’s assessment a “dismal failure”; despite thousands of sorties against more than 250 targets in the critical summer of 1944, the Germans averaged just over 80 launches per day, and German sources contend they never failed to launch on account of either Allied air attack or weapons shortages.

    [...]

    Half a century later, in a campaign in which Coalition air forces enjoyed advantages of intelligence, precision, and surveillance technology that the Eighth Air Force could scarcely have imagined, the same problem reappeared in nearly identical form in what became known as “The Great Scud Chase.” The Iraqi air force had been swept from the sky within days. Yet from January 18, 1991, when Iraq launched its first ballistic missiles against Israel, until the close of the war, the suppression of Saddam Hussein’s mobile Scud launchers became, in the words of the Gulf War Air Power Survey, “undoubtedly the most frustrating and least satisfactory aspect of the air campaign.” The Survey’s statistical volume, taking stock after the fact, recorded a total of eighty-eight Iraqi Scud launches over the course of Desert Storm and concluded, in its summary line, that the launchers proved “particularly difficult to detect and were never fully suppressed.”

    [...]

    The corroboration came in Kosovo eight years later. Press, writing while the dust was still settling, observed that the same problems that frustrated Coalition airpower in 1991 had hamstrung NATO efforts against Serbian ground forces in 1999. After eleven weeks and thousands of sorties, NATO had publicly claimed roughly a third of Serbian armor destroyed; postwar inspection by NATO’s own analysts found fewer than twenty Serbian tanks, a similar number of artillery pieces, and fewer than ten armored personnel carriers actually knocked out. Serb forces had used concealment and decoys that, from 10,000 feet, looked very much like the real thing. The technology had advanced considerably between 1991 and 1999; the gap between claimed and confirmed kills had not closed at all.

    [...]

    What the present Iranian campaign appears to have demonstrated is not a new problem but the durability of a very old one. There is, on the available evidence, no reason to believe that another two months of bombing would produce a fundamentally different result. The CIA’s assessment that Iran can sustain the blockade for three to four months, combined with its findings on the surviving missile arsenal, points to the same conclusion that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reached in January 1947, that Williamson Murray reached in 1993, that Mark Kipphut reached in 1996, and that Daryl Press reached in 2001: airpower can do many things to a missile force, but reliably destroying its mobile launchers from the air is not among them. The instruments have gotten better, but the targets have gotten better faster.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Cool. I wish there were a microcontroller board with a USB-C connector at both ends so you could connect other devices easily. It could pass through the power and you could do things like...

    Cool. I wish there were a microcontroller board with a USB-C connector at both ends so you could connect other devices easily. It could pass through the power and you could do things like modifying USB audio by flashing the firmware.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on ‘Monster Wolf’ robots deployed in Japan amid spike in bear attacks in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Japanese officials contending with an increasingly aggressive bear population are leaning heavily on a creative solution to stop attacks before they begin. No, it's not a seasonal Spirit Halloween prop; it's a Monster Wolf.

    You could be forgiven for mistaking the two. Like the robocharacters that populate showroom floors each fall, "Monster Wolf" is a pretty intimidating-looking animatronic with a metal frame draped in shaggy fur, glowing red eyes, a rotating head and something akin to a roar that plays through a set of accompanying speakers.

    Described by Hokkaido-based manufacturer Ohta Seiki as an "eco-friendly wildlife repellent device," Monster Wolf is a solar-powered robot scarecrow that looks more like a werewolf. Using a combination of motion sensors, flashing LED lights and more than 50 "threatening sounds," the robot has become a boon to Japanese farmers, landowners and anti-bear crusaders looking to scare off wildlife since it hit the market seven years ago.

    [...]

    Ohta Seiki has received 50 orders and counting in 2026, it told the news agency, an abnormally high number for this time of year. Monster Wolf robots generally cost around 514,000 yen, or approximately $4,000 to $4,840 USD per unit, the BBC reported.

    [...]

    Lethal bear attacks became a headline-making issue in Japan in 2025, when 13 people were killed nationwide across 100 attacks. This was more than twice the previously reported high, according to AFP. In total, approximately 50,000 bear sightings were reported, more than double the highest number recorded over the previous two years, per the outlet.

    [...]

    Scientists speculated that the uptick in attacks has been driven by a growing bear population, coupled with the year's bad acorn harvest, USA TODAY previously reported. These conditions created an area "overcrowded with hungry bears," driving the large animals to populated areas in search of food.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on A fast and accurate tuberculosis test that doesn't need phlegm in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    The most common test to determine if someone has tuberculosis hasn't really changed since the late 1800s. The process relies on phlegm.

    "It's a nasty substance," says Adithya Cattamanchi, a pulmonologist at UC Irvine. "No one likes it, right? You don't like to cough it up. Health workers don't like to work with it. It's difficult to work with in the lab because it's so viscous." In addition, not everyone can produce phlegm easily, including children, the elderly and those weakened by disease.

    The phlegm is then examined under a microscope for the telltale tuberculosis bacteria. But the test is imperfect and imprecise. Sometimes patients are told they have TB when they don't. And about half the time, the test misses actual TB cases.

    "So for a long time, we have been trying to make the diagnosis of tuberculosis easier, cheaper, and quicker," says Alfred Andama, a microbiologist at Makerere University College of Health Sciences in Uganda.

    That desire was fulfilled last year when the Chinese company Pluslife announced a new tuberculosis test called the MiniDock MTB. It works by taking a sample of someone's phlegm or — if the patient is unable to produce phlegm — a mere tongue swab, heating and spinning it down, and then machine scanning it for DNA from the TB bacteria. It's faster than conventional tests and is portable, allowing health workers to use it in a wider variety of settings.

    [...]

    The new test followed from a burst of innovation during the pandemic, a period when swab-based testing for COVID-19 improved dramatically due to an infusion of effort and cash from researchers and industry.

    9 votes

  9. Comment on All the Eurovision songs are out. Let's talk about them! in ~music

    skybrian
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    The Morander Brothers did an accordion cover of the song for Finland.

    The Morander Brothers did an accordion cover of the song for Finland.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    skybrian
    Link
    OpenAI Brings Its Ass to Court (Wired)

    OpenAI Brings Its Ass to Court (Wired)

    A lawyer for Sam Altman’s AI behemoth, Bradley Wilson, approached US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and handed her a small gold statue with a white stone base. It depicted the rear end of a donkey—with two legs, a butt, and a tail—and was inscribed with the message, “Joshua Achiam, never stop being a jackass for safety.”

    OpenAI employees at the time, Dario Amodei and David Luan, presented the gift to chief futurist Achiam, who started at the company as an intern in 2017 and now leads its work studying how society is changing in response to AI. Achiam testified on Wednesday that he interrupted Elon Musk’s parting speech from OpenAI in 2018 to warn that the billionaire’s desire to develop AGI at Tesla could come at the expense of safety. Wilson added that the trophy commemorates some “strong language” that Musk used toward Achiam in response—allegedly, calling him a jackass.

    “He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam said, describing the remark as tense and unfriendly.

    OpenAI initially requested to present the physical object during Achiam’s testimony, arguing that it adds to their case. While Musk’s team said the statue was irrelevant, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said she would consider allowing it when it’s referenced to corroborate the story. However, she seemed less than thrilled about accepting it as official evidence, which would put it in the court’s possession. “I don’t want it,” she said.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

    skybrian
    Link
    Diet Coke parties are all the rage in India as aluminum can shortage bubbles up

    Diet Coke parties are all the rage in India as aluminum can shortage bubbles up

    Suppliers told the Reuters news agency that some orders were not being fulfilled due to a can shortage caused by the situation in the Gulf, which accounts for around 9% of global aluminum production. Diet Coke is not sold in plastic bottles in India, unlike most other countries, leaving fans of the drink at risk of losing out.

    For Gupta, a 25-year-old marketing and design consultant based in New Delhi, it was an opportunity for fun, so she decided to throw a party celebrating the drink.

    “It was a joke,” said Gupta, describing herself as an “avid drinker” of Diet Coke. “I thought only me and two of my friends would show up.”

    The party was a hit with Gen Zers, who she says are craving more alcohol-free experiences. Tickets were sold out, and attendees showed up wearing Coke-themed outfits, danced to house and pop music, and made their own Diet Coke “concoctions” inspired by Dua Lipa’s recipes. The pop star has posted videos on TikTok in which she adds pickle juice and pickled jalapeños to the drink.

    8 votes

  12. Comment on Bun has been rewritten in Rust in ~comp

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The tests I'm seeing it write for my projects aren't all that rigorous but I haven't seen it write complete crap either. I think it's okay but you have to keep an eye on it. Back when I was...

    The tests I'm seeing it write for my projects aren't all that rigorous but I haven't seen it write complete crap either. I think it's okay but you have to keep an eye on it.

    Back when I was working I would see tests that don't actually do anything written by people, too. Usually due to heavy use of mocks.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on Public backlash after Utah county approves 62 sq miles of development sites for data center in ~tech

    skybrian
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    I don't believe the headline numbers. I imagine they asked for approval for a much larger project than they're going to build any time soon. Maybe they'll get there in a decade, maybe not, but...

    I don't believe the headline numbers. I imagine they asked for approval for a much larger project than they're going to build any time soon. Maybe they'll get there in a decade, maybe not, but they won't need to worry about approvals for room to expand.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Investment, animal spirits and algae in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Joseph Schumpeter compared the function of banks under modern capitalism to Gosplan, the central planning agency of the old Soviet Union. Banks, through a conscious, deliberate decision, dedicate some fraction of society’s resources to some project that they have decided is worthwhile. “The issue to the entrepreneurs of new means of payments created ad hoc” by the banks, he writes, is “what corresponds in capitalist society to the order issued by the central bureau in the socialist state.”

    [...]

    This is not some weird quirk of venture capital. This is a central purpose of finance – to direct society’s resources to one activity that has not yet been successful in the market, but that somebody think could be. The defining characteristic of an entrepreneur is that they undertake some new activity, something that is not already being done, with funding provided by someone else. An entrepreneur in this sense definitionally faces a soft budget constraint.

    This is not, again, an anomaly, it is not a breakdown of the normal operation of capitalism. It is essential to what makes capital such a powerful force for transforming our material existence. And it needs to be central to our theoretical accounts of capital and of the investment process.

    [...]

    Now, some people might say: This planning is based on the hope of future profit, it will eventually have to be validated by markets. But it is not incidental that the market outcome and the pursuit of profit are mediated by conscious planning.. They do not happen automatically. The judgement of the market can be deferred, in principle indefinitely.

    We must also reject the idea that the assessment of future profitability is rational or objective. This is one reason the Levine story is useful – it focuses our attention on the ways that financing decisions are made in practice. Making energy from algae is cool! As he says, this an important part of the investment process. That should not be abstracted from.

    [...]

    Nor is it clear that future profit always is the motivation, certainly not the only one, and certainly in the early stages. It’s not incidental that Levine emphasis that algae energy could get funding in part because it is cool. It’s not, perhaps, incidental that OpenAI started its existence as nonprofit. The pursuit of profit is not always what motivates investment, especially when it involves fundamental departures from existing forms of production.

    [...]

    There is an idea — Anwar Shaikh offers a contemporary example — that the rate of profit is determined first, and then the rate of interest is secondary, a special case of profit, governed by it, or a deduction from it. But we can’t say what the profitability of the algae business even is, prior to the question of what terms it is financed. At one rate of interest it may be very profitable, at another less so or not worthier pursuing at all.

    Now maybe you will say: sure, anyone can make a profit if they get that free Fed money. But it’s not just that. The relative profitability of different projects depends on the term on which they can be financed.

    [...]

    Partly this is just a simple matter of discount rates. In these narrow terms, the algae project is more profitable if the interest rate is 5 percent; the fossil-fuel project is more profitable if the interest rate is 10 percent.

    More broadly we have to consider, for instance, whether the financing will have to be rolled over, if, say, the project takes longer than expected. What are financing conditions are likely to be at that point? If the loan is due and can’t be rolled over and the project has not generated sufficient returns to repay it, then the return on whatever capital the undertaker put in themselves will be negative 100 percent. The chance of this happening — which, again, depends as much on future financial conditions as on the income generated by the project itself — has to be factored in to the expected returns.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Against money in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It's a nice rhetorical florish, but I don't think he's proven that. He pointed out there is a quite a lot of non-market coordination in a market economy (for example, within businesses). But if...

    It's a nice rhetorical florish, but I don't think he's proven that. He pointed out there is a quite a lot of non-market coordination in a market economy (for example, within businesses). But if there aren't customers paying the businesses and businesses can't pay their workers then it falls apart.

    As it should; unpaid labor is usually unethical.

    Still, it's nice to read something by a socialist that's not nutty.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on A Dialogue on Freedom in ~humanities

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Previous generations were presumably happier living in rust belt cities though, which I think goes to show how subjective land value is and how much its value is not in the land itself, but its...

    Abandoned areas are the only thing left, and that's a small consolation given how that land is only available due to both poor quality and a poor future.

    Previous generations were presumably happier living in rust belt cities though, which I think goes to show how subjective land value is and how much its value is not in the land itself, but its surroundings, due to things like neighbors and available jobs.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Gemini 3.2 Flash rumored to hit 92% of GPT-5.5 performance at lower cost in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, using aggregators is fine, but try to get back to wherever they got the data from and see if there's anything to them.

    Yeah, using aggregators is fine, but try to get back to wherever they got the data from and see if there's anything to them.

    8 votes

  19. Comment on Gemini 3.2 Flash rumored to hit 92% of GPT-5.5 performance at lower cost in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't see much evidence that performance is plateauing, except in the sense that for a lot of simpler questions, the answers we get now are good enough and hard to improve much on. But you can...

    I don't see much evidence that performance is plateauing, except in the sense that for a lot of simpler questions, the answers we get now are good enough and hard to improve much on. But you can ask harder questions.

    They're working on both efficiency and performance gains and they go together. For example, cheaper tokens means you can spend more of them to get better results.

  20. Comment on Against money in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link
    From the blog post, which is a transcript from a speech with ideas from their book, also called Against Money: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the blog post, which is a transcript from a speech with ideas from their book, also called Against Money:

    Interestingly, one suggestion that Hamilton made for increasing the supply of “monied Capital” was for the federal government to permanently maintain a large debt. Anticipating contemporary heterodox economists, he argued that rather than crowding out private investment, federal borrowing would in effect crowd it in, because government debt was a close substitute for money — a source rather than a use of liquidity, as we might say.

    [...]

    From our point of view, first, they all see money not as a distinct object existing in a definite quantity, but as one end of a continuum of financial instruments or arrangements. They see money as a subset of credit. Schumpeter says that when thinking about money we “should not start from the coin,” we should not start from the discrete object that we call money. Rather we should, as all of these thinkers did to one degree or another, imagine a whole system of credit arrangements, some of which can be classified for various purposes as money. He distinguishes a “money theory of credit,” which most economists hold, from a “credit theory of money,” which is what he prefers. The starting point, the atomic unit, is the promise, not the exchange.

    Second, and this is a central theme of our book, these thinkers all saw the interest rate as the price of money, rather than the price of savings. An important part of John Law’s argument for his financial reforms was that it would allow a lower rate of interest by making money more abundant. Walter Bagehot insisted that interest was the price of money, not of saving as orthodoxy has it.

    [...]

    In this monetary-production paradigm, the fundamental constraint is not scarcity; the economic problem is not allocation. The fundamental constraint is coordination. When we stop imagining the world in terms of discrete commodities being combined in different ways, and start imagining it in terms of human beings cooperating (or not) to do things together, the problem becomes: How do we coordinate the activity of all these different people? What does it take to allow cooperation on a larger scale, between people who don’t have pre-existing relationships?

    [...]

    In general, when people talk about rising household debt they attribute it to rising household borrowing. Much of the time, people don’t even realize that those are two different things. There are articles where the title of the article is something like “explaining the rise in U.S. household debt” and then the first sentence of the article is, “why are U.S. households borrowing more than before?” Or even, “why are households saving less than before?” But these are different questions!

    [...]

    The difference is that the interest rates facing households were much lower in the 1960s and 1970s than they were after the Volcker shock. The Volcker shock raised interest rates for households, and they stayed high for longer than the policy rate did. And during the 60s and 70s compared with the 1980 to 2007 period as a whole, inflation was significantly higher. (Real income growth was also a bit higher in the earlier period but that plays a smaller role.)

    So what we have here is not a story about real behavior. It’s not a story about borrowing, about income and expenditure. All of these stories that we heard from both the left and the right about why household debt had risen — it’s because people have grown impatient, their time preferences shifted or they are competing over status or it’s inequality — none of this is relevant, because people were not in fact borrowing more.

    [...]

    Of course anybody can write an IOU. You and I could sit down and write promises to each other, just as you and the bank do when you get a loan. The key thing about the bank, here, is that its promise is more credible than yours. If I ask for your bicycle and promise to give you something of equal value down the road, you probably won’t agree. But I can make that same promise to bank, and the bank can then make that promise to you. And that’s fine.

    This is why Hyman Minsky, the great theorist of finance, said that the defining function of banks is not intermediation, but acceptance. You can’t get a claim on labor, on real resources, simply by promising you’ll do something useful with them. But a bank might accept your promise, and then the promise that it makes to you in return can can be transferred on to other people in return for a claim on real resources, which you can use to create new forms of production that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And this is the other side of the Keynesian vision — the fact that banks can create money by lending allows for the reorganization of productive activity in new ways that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

    [...]

    We can find this same principle down through the history of the corporation. When in the beginning of the 20th century we see the generalization of the corporate form, it’s not a process where large-scale investment required raising more funds. The problem that the corporation is solving is that you have large-scale enterprises with long-lived specialized fixed assets, on the one hand, and wealth owners, on the other hand, with claims on those enterprises — often the owners of smaller enterprises that merge into one larger one, or the heirs of the founder — who don’t want an interest in this particular company. They want money. And so the function of the corporate form is to allow the conversion of ownership rights into money — to enable payments that will satisfy these claimants, so that their authority over the production process can be pooled, their smaller interests can be assembled into a larger whole.

    This is not a system for raising funds for investment. It’s a system for consolidating authority. It’s a system for reconciling the need for large-scale, long-lived organizational production, on the one hand, with the desire of the wealthy to hold their wealth in a more money-like form, on the other. As William Lazonick says, the corporation is not a vehicle for raising funds for investment, it’s a vehicle for distributing money to the wealthy. The origin of the corporation as we know it is as a vehicle for moving funds out of productive enterprises to asset-owners.

    [...]

    Where money is necessary — this is important — is where something new is being done, where there’s a need to organize production in some new way, for coordination between strangers who don’t have a relationship with each other. Money is genuinely productive insofar as the development of our productive capacity requires breaking up existing ways of organizing production, dissolving existing relationships, extinguishing obligations, and starting from square one.

    Money should be seen as a specific kind of technology of social coordination. It’s a way of organizing human activity in new ways that it hasn’t been organized before.

    6 votes