> Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though;
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
>and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years
Can you share your sources for that valuable intelligence? Military analysts would really be interested to learn that. Or is that form the same manufactured scaremongering genre as "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons" and "Iraq has WMDs" to justify endless defense spending, military interventions and warmongering.
> at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production
You can't just commandeer semi fabs like you're carjacking a Hyundai for a joyride. Semi fabs need constant parts and on-prem staff and always-on telemetry from ASML & friends to run. If that's gone, you're left with a very expensive warehouse that can't do shit.
The fabs will not survive a ground invasion. If they're not hit accidentally someone will blow them up to deny them to the enemy, whether that's a Taiwanese nationalist or the US.
It feels like MAD is eroding, because at one point the reaction to China invading Taiwan would obviously have been a nuclear exchange.
>because at one point the reaction to China invading Taiwan would obviously have been a nuclear exchange.
There is no way anyone would nuke China if/when they invade Taiwan the same way nobody nuked Russia when they invaded Ukraine. And Russia is a lot less relevant globally than China.
It'll be another conventional war like the current Russo-Ukrainian one where the west will sanction China and support Taiwan.
You don't build out a massive fleet of amphibious landing craft, mobile piers, and other similar Navy ships that can only be used for invading another country via the sea... for self-defense. These have one purpose, and China is mass-producing them.
> "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons"
It is the breakout time, not the schedule.
It is incredible to me how pervasive the misunderstanding of this statement is!
I've had real-life conversations with project managers just like this:
PM: "How long would this project take?"
Me: "One month."
... two weeks later ...
PM: "How long would the project take to finish?"
Me: "One month."
PM: "You said that two weeks ago! It should only take two weeks to finish!"
Me: "Why would you think that? We never started the project! It wasn't approved. You didn't approve it, personally. The effort is four weeks. If you approve and we start today, it will still take that long to complete."
... two more weeks later ...
PM: "Why isn't the project finished!? You said one month a month ago!"
They obviously want to be able to invade Taiwan, yes, nobody serious would assert that they're developing amphibious capacity for self defence.
That's not the same thing as planning to invade in 2027, though. Militaries can need a capability without an imminent specific plan to actually use it. See the US's amphibious capacity. See nukes.
> nobody serious would assert that they're developing amphibious capacity for self defence
And why wouldn't they build that type of stuff for self defense? Which country doesn't do self defense? Have you seen how huge China's coast is and how many islands they have to defend?
>You don't build out a massive fleet of amphibious landing craft, mobile piers, and other similar Navy ships that can only be used for invading another country via the sea... for self-defense.
Firstly, this take is poorly thought out from a facts perspective, needlessly alarmist and mostly just FUD.
The fact is that China has thousands of islands in its territory already. So how else would their military be able to DEFEND those islands WITHOUT "a massive fleet of amphibious landing craft" capable of landing troops and material on islands that they own? It doesn't mean they 100% WILL invade Taiwan just because they have them, like you claim.
Secondly, the three news sources you then quoted are just your typical clickbaity mainstream media with nothing to lose if they are wrong in their alarmist predictions or just blatantly lie like they often do to manipulate people and financial markets, especially given their incentives and ties to politics and the wealthy elite.
So telling people on HN with 100% certainty China will invade Taiwan in the near future just because you read something about China's drills of Taiwan invasion in the MSM, just gets you more egg on your face that nobody can take your takes on this seriously. I'm 100% sure that the US Navy also regularly has drills on nuking China and Russia from their submarines, that doesn't mean they're actually planning to do it anytime soon with no provocation. So please, stop turning what is bland vanilla news into alarmist FUD.
Chinas has hundreds (not thousands) of islands in its territory, which has increased from 287 in 2019 to 431 in 2026. This is not "defense".
> nobody can take your takes on this seriously.
Russia moved mobile crematoriums up to the Ukraine border in February 2022, and people still dismissed the chances of their invasion as vanishingly unlikely.
Dismissing an obvious military buildup from a country that has plainly stated their intentions is an error.
But the solar panels we already have don't suddenly stop working, which is an important difference between sourcing solar panels from a potential enemy and sourcing raw fossil fuels from one. There's also nothing stopping the US or other trading partners from making solar panels, China is just the most convenient and cheapest source as it is for many other things. And to that point, the end of trade between the US and China would be incredibly damaging to both countries whether or not we buy solar panels from them now.
I asked Claude, and now I know that there are nice, basically undetectable, plausibly deniable ways to render solar panels useless within months, or, with some preparation, days. It seems that open-source, carefully scrutinized panel controller firmware may be critically important.
Your Claude may have been hallucinating - solar panels have no microcontrollers or microprocessors, and hence have no need for firmware. Battery Charge controllers -- that are downstream of panels do have firmware, but even if a booby-trapped firmware were to short-circuit the panels, they'd be undamaged.
Solar panels are usually connected to inverters or other power circuits that make the variable voltage they provide usable as a stable source downstream.
During operation a string of solar cells is under a pretty high voltage. It makes sodium ions from the covering glass infiltrate slowly into the silicon, potentially ruining the p-n junction ("potential-induced degradation", PID). Usually an industry-grade panel controller applies a reverse voltage during night time, to drive the sodium ions back from the silicon. A rogue controller might instead apply the same voltage, accelerating PID instead of reverting it (and kill it in several months). A really insidious producer might add a strip of extra sodium-rich material near the normal electric conductors, which would be triggered by voltage higher than normal operation to flood the silicon with sodium (and kill it in several days).
Taiwan cannot make chips without western inputs and spare parts, so China taking over Taiwan or Korea or Japan doesn’t really give them access to making those chips.
No, everybody else is talking about short identifiers in general which is what the GP asked about. For car and cdr specifically you’re right, of course.
I also love how the register names don’t even have ANY mnemonic relation to what the contents mean in Lisp. Address and Decrement? Totally arbitrary. It’s like having a high-level language where function parameters are always names rsi, rdi, and so on. Because obviously "destination index" means "first argument"!
Something I tell junior developers: There is one way to correctly spell out a word in full, but many different ways of abbreviating it. Don't make me guess or memorise which one you chose, completely arbitrarily.
UNIX and languages "born from it" are especially prone to a ludicrous level of abbreviation because of its start in the earliest days of computing when serious machines had mere kilobytes of memory, and so every byte was precious. Compounding that were the use of teletypewriters, which did not generally allow edits and were glacially slow. Tab complete was impossible.
This has become so ingrained in the early generation of computing science pioneers that they passed on these behaviours almost like religious doctrine, like dogma or rituals that must be preserved. Perhaps it was mostly subconsciously done, but I have seen programmers in the 90s and early 2000s still instructing others to do these things, to shave bits and bytes off identifiers to 'save space'.
There's a theory that when everyone can access some "good", then the rich and powerful will automatically differentiate themselves by switching to a different good that has a visible contrast to the common one. So for example, if the common people can afford only wool, the rich will wear cotton. Once the price of cotton drops, they'll switch to cashmere, which is... a kind of wool. It's not about the specific material or category of thing, it never was, it's just the contrast that matters.
So if everyone has "too busy" AI slop art, then the rich will switch to very plain art, even downright minimalist.
I'm betting that up-market stores will soon have hand-carved wood signs out the front just like in the 1800s to show off that a Real Human(tm) made their signage.
It's not that plain wood is better, it's just that it's not commonly available.
Very interesting idea. And I see some historical support for such actions and trends.
I think modern day life has had two major paradigm shifts that will make this potebtisl "real human(TM)" marketing not emerge among corporate, though. Definitely among smaller business (I'm already seeing it in my field), but not larger onesexcept that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
1. Despite the legal insistence, corporations are not people, and they do not have "taste" to adjust to. Nor do the ways the leaders act and behave make it seem like they feel the company's actions and reputation reflects onto them. This is surprisingly a huge contrast from characters like Trump who traditionally place much importance on legacy and image and use that to shape their mannerisms and actions, aiming for a positive reaction (at least among his audience).
So there's no point in a new marketing scheme that will likely cost a lot more to not receive a lot more. Serving as cheaply as possible is too big a draw, and there's little human(TM) factors to divert from that. Which leads directly into the 2jd point
2. The modern hundred-millionaire/billionaire no longer "participates" in society. There's a decent video that gives an overview of this phenomenon, but I don't think it's a huge revelation to suggest that a billionaire who can be anywhere in the world within a day will truly feel like they are a part of their community the way, say, a Hollywood star would have personal ties to keep LA functional for them. And their social circles are so tiny that they are willing to travel a lot in order find such people.
In this lens, why would such people care about the taste and culture of the common citizen, Unless it's PR to get them more money? They don't go to the same stores (or go to stores at all themselves), they aren't participating nor hosting community events in town, they aren't (usually) performing the same kinds of recreation as their non–rich neighbors. They've already managed to completely divide themselves out from such people, so why care about standing out among them?
But doesn’t apply to MCAS because the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct.
The MCAS system wasn’t documented, pilots weren’t trained on it, it didn’t indicate anything distinct in the cockpit, and it could rapidly put the plane into an unrecoverable attitude where pilots no longer had the physical strength to overcome the forces involved.
I know how the stab trim system works. I worked on it (for the 757) for three years.
Yes, it applies to MCAS.
> the symptoms and recovery procedures are distinct
Nope. MCAS failure manifests itself as runaway trim, and the emergency procedures for it are exactly what is needed to recover from it.
1. the stab trim switches override the MCAS signals. Override. That means the pilot can trim to normal using the column mounted trim switches. The column switches will power the trim back to normal. No physical strength is required.
2. there's a "stab trim cutoff" switch on the console. That turns off the trim system. MCAS cannot bypass it.
The proof is the 3rd MCAS incident. The pilots trimmed it back to normal, and turned the stab trim system off.
That's all they had to do.
This is supposed to be a "memory item". The other two crews did not remember the memory item. Boeing even sent out an Emergency Airworthiness Directive reiterating this information. It was ignored by the EA pilots, who did everything wrong (including overspeeding the airplane at full thrust).
The narrative you wrote is the typical one in the mass media, which is utterly wrong. The proof of that is they ignore the 3rd incident which didn't fit the narrative.
I've talked with two 737 pilots about this. They agree with me, though I knew I was right anyway.
Food for thought: ever wonder why the stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent place on the center console in easy reach?
You just took Boeing adding a secret system that can cause a plane to crash and then blamed the pilots who were unfortunate to be a victim of malfunctioning sensors and then put all the blame on them because pilots who didn't want to die inside a deathtrap aircraft figured out how to avoid their own death the moment they realized that the MCAS crashes were not an isolated incident?
What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of? That they had some perverse incentive to die?
Nope. I wrote: "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"
> What exactly are you accusing the pilots involved with the accident of?
Not following the runaway stabilizer trim procedure. This is supposed to be a "memory item", meaning a checklist is not required.
There were 3 MCAS incidents:
1. crew trimmed to normal with the thumb switches, then turned off the trim system. Flew the rest of the flight, landed safely.
2. crew trimmed it back to normal at least 11 times (if I recall correctly) and never turned off the trim system. Crashed.
3. Boeing Emergency Airworthiness directive was sent to all MAX pilots. In a nutshell, it says to restore normal trim using the thumb switches then turn off the trim system. EA pilots instead turned off the trim system while the airplane was pointed down at full throttle. Crashed.
The two 737 pilots I talked to about this both asserted pilot incompetence.
Personally, I assign half the blame on Boeing and the other half on the pilots. Flying is not a joke. Not paying attention to an Emergency Airworthiness Directive is not acceptable.
> "The implementation of it, however, wasn't very good"
It was purposefully deceptive -- Boeing management actively decided to hide its existence from pilots.
The narrative that the pilots were at fault was Boeing leadership covering their ass.
The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.
MCAS would also re-activate with a five second delay, just long enough to confuse pilots.
More importantly, deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.
This is a Catch-22 scenario: Activate the electrics and be killed by MCAS, or deactivate the electrics and be killed by physics.
I could go through each of your comments in this thread and point out how NTSB crash investigators proved that Boeing was directly or indirectly at fault in almost every aspect, but I don't want to write out ten pages. Others have done so already, more eloquently, and often with more colourful language. Most professional pilots were rightly furious with Boeing.
Boeing's arguments have been mutually exclusive with each other: "Just remember how to operate MCAS... which we hid from you!" and "Just disable the electric trim... which will pit you against forces you can't overcome"... "Which is not a problem because you can turn electric trim back one... but then MCAS will try to kill you again"... "It won't do that because it is dual redundant... an option... that nobody purchased... and we didn't even tell most customers about."
I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths -- I know one of each and I'm now intimately familiar with the self serving arguments that make no sense, especially in combination.
> The MCAS symptoms did not match runaway trim. It's not continuous. It stops and starts.
I'll pick this one. I've heard it before. Runaway trim is uncommanded movement. It does not have to be continuous, it can stop and start. That behavior can certainly happen with a short circuit or faulty wiring. It's like the speaker connections on my home stereo - the connectors corrode over time, and the sound cuts in an out randomly.
The MCAS behavior absolutely presents as runaway trim behavior. Remember I worked for 3 years on the 757 stab trim system. I know what runaway trim is.
> deactivating the electrical trim system would make it all too easy to enter a regime where the pilots couldn't physically recover the plane.
That's why the instructions provided to the pilots said to use the thumb switches first to restore normal trim. All three crews had managed to do just that to restore normal trim. The second instance the pilots restored it ELEVEN TIMES and it never occurred to them to then turn off the trim system.
You might want to review the first incident. The MCAS system came on 2 or 3 times, and each time the crew used the thumb switches to restore normal trim. Then they turned off the trim system. The flight continued and they landed safely. They knew nothing about MCAS - they just followed the runaway stab trim procedure.
> I expect this kind of self-contradictory "logic" from narcissists and sociopaths
Being nasty doesn't lend credibility to your arguments.
Next: replace whole-file hashes with a Merkle Patricia tree hash and enable BitTorrent-like distribution protocols on top, not to mention the deduplication advantages!
It would be sufficient to destroy just the Asaluyeh gas infrastructure near the South Pars field. It's easily approached over the open sea where Iran has negligible air defences, and it is rather... flammable. It provides something like 75% of Iran's domestic gas supply and in turn fuels most of their power stations.
Their economy would implode within days.
Of course, this would be a horrific crime against humanity, comparable in impact on civilians to dropping a nuke on a capital city.
Speaking of which: my partner knows next to nothing about warfare and while watching the news I had to explain that the US Navy submarine mentioned by the presenter isn't just for taking out enemy ships, it is a nuclear-armed "world ending" weapon that could simply... erase... a country. Or two. Probably three. In under an hour.
I saw the talk version of that and it has lodged in my memory. The point he made was that "health.gov" was made by a bunch of teams that made sure that their part worked, but nobody was in charge of making the whole thing work.
This is sadly "normal" for large bureaucracies.
Every time I see a giant, multi-million dollar catastrophe, it's always "proper", "documented", "enterprise", "by the book", and... "a total failure". The reason is always that nobody actually cares about the final outcome, only the paperwork in front of them that they need fill out, the checkbox that needs to be ticked, or the compliance requirement that needs to be met.
This, in my opinion, is some part of how we are schooling people - do as you are told and follow the rules and some part of not having stakes in the outcome.
There's a brief period when you join any company where you really want to improve things, and then about a year in the system has asserted towards the mean.
Nothing to do with schooling, every thing to do with business structures.
Definitely not on purpose! I keep forgetting that ChatGPT does that now, which is rather irritating because I don’t use it to write comments but the tracker makes it look like I do.
I do use ChatGPT to resolve vague memories of articles read long ago into concrete URLs I can share, which is one of the best uses of the accursed things right now!
I assure you that I am an organic meat human like yourself and the article dates itself to the “before times” and can also be trusted to be free of contamination.
It was not a double, triple or whatever number "tap". That's literal IRGC propaganda commonly parroted by all of their proxies in the region, irrespective of what actually happened. By now, nobody believes this narrative because of how over-used a lie it has become. (It's their equivalent of the westerners calling every freedom fighter a "terrorist".)
There are two scenarios, one of which is a "double tap" and one which is not:
1) There are 'n' targets. The targets get hit in rapid succession, one bomb each. <- normal bombing
2) There is 1 target. It is hit once. There is a long delay, long enough for first responders to show up. The same 1 target is hit again. <- THIS is a double tap.
The IRGC base had multiple buildings. Each building was hit once. That's not what most people would call a double-tap.
Some people ran from one building to another and were hit twice. That's just... bad luck.
The real crime committed by US forces is that they didn't care to update and review their targeting information, resulting in totally unnecessary civilian deaths. Their hubris, their pride, their unfounded confidence in their own superiority resulted in a shameful atrocity.
I had the same discussion with a manager about the backups of financial contracts for cleaning school facilities.
He just couldn't get past the notion that if the six copies in four buildings across two states were all simultaneously physically destroyed, then most likely there are also no more schools left standing, and hence the contracts to clean them are null and void. Also, payment is now in booze and ammunition, not dollars.
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
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