Every time I hear his name I have to think of "America needs to build more" but just not in my backyard.
> “I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.” [0]
Pointing out hypocrisy is easy and not necessarily damning. But looking at all the -100 for everyone but +2 for me fabric of society abusing startups he funds I can't help but think he is a pretty whack person. Let's stop listening to him.
I've been thinking about this for a bit and there are a variety of reasons why it can be appealing for PMs to push for apps over webpages:
- No search competition, when you search on duckduckgo or google for the page a competitor can bid to show up, won't happen with an app.
- Notifications, this is a big one. We live in the attention economy and apps are more likely to slide into push notifications - with ads - than webpages.
- Some users have a mental model that more easily maps to "this app is my go to for this task" and struggle with webpages. That's a psychological and incentive issue. Apple support PWAs but just barely and don't like them because they don't partake in the 100 billion dollar revenue 30% payment processing extortion.
- More intrusive access and "better" targeted advertisement.
- Once an icon is on the home screen somewhere, chances are some users are going to use it because they notice the icon and would not have done so if it were just a tab inside the browser. The attention economy strikes again.
- Companies _love_ to build a relationship with customers. It's usually a very one sided and jealous relationship where getting the user to install an app is perceived as a step in that direction.
- Users are more willing to create accounts for apps than webpages (citation needed, this is just a gut feeling)
- On mainstream iOS and Android it's much harder to block ads in apps than it is in the browser.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but those alone explain why we see them so often.
Lasers. No really, near-future laser systems with adaptive optics and good spotting - for example distributed SAR satellites - dramatically shift that balance [0].
I doubt a MW laser can reliably intercept a reentry vehicle. A lot of energy is lost through the atmosphere when intercepting a warhead in space, from a land based laser. Once it reenters the atmosphere there might not be enough time. You also need to burn through the heatshield that the warhead is equipped with for reentry.
Even if you can can deliver enough energy for long enough, there is no fuel to burn and it might not be easy to detonate or disable the warhead.
For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.
But that's very much not near-future.
Lasers might still be useful for rockets, drones and cruise missiles of course.
> For ICBMs, one idea was to use orbital, nuclear powered lasers to hit the missile on the boost phase.
Author here. Thank you for your insight.
I took some time to read about the recently proposed "Golden Dome" defense system, and what you laid out seems to be the end goal [0]. It's difficult to tell how realistic this actually is. The size of the constellation of satellites needed seems prohibitive, to say the least.
I get the impression you didn't read the linked post. It goes into the details, atmospheric absorption for different wavelength, weather conditions, tracking time, interception time based on warhead hardness ratings and many more details. It's paper based, so in practice it will be more complicated and there are things it will have missed, and things we don't even know yet as being operational challenges for such systems. At the same time, it does present a compelling narrative and I'd much rather discuss individual assumptions or sources than dismiss it entirely based on a gut feeling.
Maybe for subsonic, high end missiles I'm extremely skeptical. Need 5-10MW to get useful dwell power on high end hypersonic inherently shielded against reentry thermals. Speculative laser defense are infra size defense, not mobile trailer size. Factor in duty cycles (i.e. shots per minute) and it seems dead end. Half of economics of missile defense is mobility - building density relative to threats by moving platforms. Last 2 parts real constraints, high-end adversaries coordinate salvos to arrive in time. Interceptor magazine depth limited = still throw 100s of interceptors to engage multiple targets if required. Lasers = serial visual range engagement. Figure out dwell time + duty cycle to saturate. Hypersonic can go from over horizonal to hit target in 10 seconds, a laser couldn't engage more than 1-2 missiles in that time. Technically 1, because by the time you fried 1st target the 2nd is so close the shrapnel will hit on momentum.
The recently announced "Golden Dome" project intends to get around this issue by putting a vast constellation of satellites into orbit. Each satellite would likely need a serious source of power in order to use its laser. Assuming that's just an engineering problem, then the issue becomes coverage. That is, depending on the adversary's capabilities, you'd need an absolutely massive constellation in orbit [0].
This is such an insane plan, and I don't mean that in a good way.
For one thing, it can do little to nothing about low flying nuclear tipped cruise missiles, especially in less than ideal weather. These already exist, so the Golden Dome system is already inadequate on day one.
The linked article covers that in depth, it's not implausible to punch a hole through a storm with pulsed laser of that class. Honestly we don't know enough about these systems to know their operational limits but we know weather will play a role.
I find that writing good tests is my ticket to understanding the problem in depth, be careful about outsourcing that part. Plus from what I have seen LLM generated tests are often low quality.
Yep, I understand why let's release this one feature everywhere is a great lure and I do get annoyed when desktop vs mobile spotify gets features later or never. However, a phone is not a desktop capability wise and what we usually get is the power of the phone on a desktop, aka the lowest common denominator of capabilities.
This fetish we as an industry have to hide platform specifics makes us blind to the platform specific capabilities. Some software would be better off if it leaned into the differences instead of fighting them.
Framing man made climate change - aka the 6th mass extinction event - as a problem in search of a solution is by itself the very reason we won't "solve" it.
Trying to solve climate change in anything but a very narrow sense is like trying to perform humane torturing. One can either treat others humanely _or_ torture them. The two at the same time is impossible. The majority of conversations around climate change focus on doing the same things - modernity - but without the negative effects. Chasing a way to humanely torture children will not in fact stop the torturing of children. The goal is wrong! No amount of "solutions" will help you if they all aim to achieve the goal that itself is the root cause of the issues.
Science has a massive blind spot, one it can't fathom exists. For many today, especially on HN science is closer to a religion than what they themselves view it as. This is not a particularly popular believe since it contradicts a lot of nicely build up self-perceptions. Science can't figure out what is worthwhile pursuing and what isn't _without_ biased input at the very beginning of that chain. Science can't reason about the limits to it's power since it assumes that everything can be analyzed and broken into smaller problems. The fact that science is a tool, one profoundly incompatible with certain types of very real properties of our world does not fit into the religion of science. "Science can solve all problems and if it hasn't we just haven't tried hard enough". Science is a hammer that insists it is the right tool for every problem and if it doesn't work well you're just holding it wrong.
I was born into and shaped by a science and enlightenment religion world-view and lack proper words to describe the issues with it, but I feel them.
I sympathize with your feeling. All these questions are not going away, science can't do it, religion doesn't have those answers either. The religion of science offers the worst of both worlds. We are struggling to see something beyond these two options but I think there must be some other approach.
There was also Abiy Ahmed, who went on to commit a genocide [1] the following year in Ethopia, it's less talked about than the one Palestine. Imagine giving Benjamin Netanyahu the nobel peace price, what a joke of an institution.
To be fair in this case, they gave it to him for making peace and ending a long-running conflict. A peace which didn't last evidently and was overshadowed by his later actions. Not unlike Aung San Suu Kyi.
> I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.
Tell me you have bland taste without telling me you have bland taste. But if your customers eat it up and your slop manages to stand out in sea of slop, who am I to dislike slop.
> “I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” the two wrote in their email, signed by both, as reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.” [0]
Pointing out hypocrisy is easy and not necessarily damning. But looking at all the -100 for everyone but +2 for me fabric of society abusing startups he funds I can't help but think he is a pretty whack person. Let's stop listening to him.
[0] https://fortune.com/2022/08/06/marc-andreessen-billionaire-n...
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