We don't descend from winners, we descend from whoever survived and it's not an individual competition.
If the only place a particularly beneficial mutation appears is wiped out by chance volcanic eruption, that's just how it is - the survivors who weren't near the volcano go on to reproduce.
There's an alternate hypothesis about that which is that a lot of adolescent level risky behavior may actually be a way to weed out psychopaths.
The argument is essentially: how come daring people to do something gross or embarrassing is so common? There's a weird social dynamic in being the one who goes through with it, and it frequently promotes group cohesion.
So maybe the point of it isn't the act or social dominance, but to get people to display normal emotional responses - safe people will be embarrassed, or hesitant or display social support queues or disgust if they have normal emotional processing. The psychopaths? They'll struggle - particularly at that age where the opportunity to learn to blend hasn't had time to develop.
Basically a group of guys egging each other on to do the riskier dive into the pool or something aren't trying to impress a mate, they're actually filtering for people who don't emotionally react correctly to whatever the dare is.
The scenario being unlikely doesn't make the OP's point irrelevant: the situation you see today is because that scenario doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen because countries are relatively circumspect about the way in which their military aid is deployed for exactly this reason.
No they're exactly right: drones need cheap, powerful parts which have only become possible due to highly concentrated mass production in places like China. You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs in a shed in Ukraine, and the cheapness of the parts depends on large unfettered supply chains. They're not "with some skill, you can build a lathe and then machine a pipe gun" simple.
In a direct conflict, no one is going to sit back and be destroyed by drone swarms: they'll bomb the industrial districts.
In war, the enemy gets a say in your plans: Iran can't beat the US directly, but it can hit energy infrastructure around the Gulf which is politically untenable for the US.
But it works the other way too: if your enemies plan is "you won't bomb the big industrial facilities so we'll just win" then you break out the fancy expensive missiles and bomb the industrial facilities. Or the power plants.
> You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs
All the basic sensors you need for flight exist in the literal billions of Android phones produced in the last 15 years.
I'm trying to be evasive about how you'd build such a thing because I don't want a visit over a comment online, but if you understand aerodynamics you can make almost anything fly.
I think the disconnect here is people reading "drone" and thinking something super high tech and precise, whereas I'm thinking of the minimum thing viable thing to create chaos/fear for you enemy.
> I think the disconnect here is people reading "drone" and thinking something super high tech and precise, whereas I'm thinking of the minimum thing viable thing to create chaos/fear for you enemy.
Even something like a ball bearing is super high tech and precise. Any kind of modern (post WWI) technology is super high tech and precise. Giant efforts were made to destroy ball bearing manufacturing in WWII, not to mention the rest of the war machine. Including German drones.
In a total war scenario, all enemy war factories and infrastructure will be attacked, and even civilian residential areas providing workers to the enemy war effort. This is how the allies mainly fought WWII against Germany.
When you start assembling drones from spare parts from other machines, and making custom drones, then you are at small scale and drones aren't anymore the cheap, mass produced weapon.
Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.
Trump may be a violent moron, but this goes back further. US sanctions and intimidation of Iran and Venezuela has been supported by both parties when in power. It's a US regime thing, not a party/administration thing (that stuff is for the mugs who believe they have a democracy).
In a world of extremely cheap solar electricity pushing grid prices negative, a lot of things might be a lot more economical then conventionally thought though - particularly when you factor in the desire to get a full return on industrial manufacturing of panels.
For me personally, this is one of the most promising aspects of solar that I hope to see in the future. There are many, many things we could do but currently do not because the energy cost is not worth it. Push the energy cost to zero, or even below, and it will be interesting to see what new things become abundant.
Honestly as wide spread as it is, managing group policy sanely is still a challenge I've found - it's very resistant to configuration as code.
Linux has a lot of the pieces but is principally lacking a solid distribution system - in particular a big missing component is the network-based SELinux policy distribution system which you can see some hooks in for the concept of a "policy server" which never eventuated.
SELinux would be a lot more viable if it had a solid way to federate and distribute policy and has some nice features in that regard (i.e. the notion that networked systems can exchange policy tags to preserve tagging across network connections).
> managing group policy sanely is still a challenge I've found - it's very resistant to configuration as code
Imho, this was historically (and continues to be) Microsoft's Achilles heel.
Large parts of the company reflexively wrote features / tooling as manual-first, code-second (or never).
In hindsight, what was missing was a Gates-level memo circa 2000 similar to Amazon's API one: all teams are required to build their configurators to be programmatically exposed.
Unfortunately, I don't think Ballmer was enough of a technologist (and was likely too distracted) to intuit that path not taken.
I've been trying to use Exchange support at work but there's an ongoing problem that the OAuth login screen can't display PIN prompts for things like Yubikeys.
So I'd love to use the feature, but modern corporate auth defeats it currently.
This is basically "just don't use things you don't enjoy" and the trouble of our time seems to be the number of people who can't or won't do that.
It's somewhat an age thing but also definitely a lot of people in all generations never learn it: you can just stop using things. Walk away and suddenly find you never want to look back, and if you do it's entirely unappealing.
If the only place a particularly beneficial mutation appears is wiped out by chance volcanic eruption, that's just how it is - the survivors who weren't near the volcano go on to reproduce.
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