- We're using a vibe coded app on an iPhone that does terrain matching and target finding.
The thing is that OK, Anthropic may block it, but nothing says they can't use an open model hosted in a friendly country that has access to GPUs. And yes, this will most likely happen pretty soon to be able to create whatever you want without the AI provider blocking you.
> - We're using a vibe coded app on an iPhone that does terrain matching and target finding.
And that part seems entirely reasonable. It looks like the Tomahawk cruise missile did it with an 84 lb package with a 16-bit computer with 64K of memory [1] [2] and sensors. That's similar computing performance to an original IBM PC, which weighed 30 lb. The only bit of hardware an iPhone doesn't seem to have for TERCOM is a radar altimeter, but it looks like those are available for civil aviation.
We can't do it with any rocket-like propulsive technology. By the time you get anywhere close to c the front of your spacecraft is being abraded into nothing by interstellar gas, larger particles of dust will kill you, and colliding with anything bigger creates an explosion that can be seen for light years. You need to be flying a large asteroid to even think about surviving it - you still won't for long, but you will have time to think about it - and the energy requirements are wildly impractical.
Magic warp bubble tech is the bare minimum, and we're nowhere close to inventing that.
Sadly there is no realistic approach to get there (even assuming fantasy-levels of technology).
Chemical rockets are currently the only thing that allow sustaining such accelerations briefly for human-size payloads, but the low exhaust velocity and exponential reaction mass requirement make sustaining it for days/months/years completely impossible.
You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.
> You'd have to supply the energy externally (i.e. some sort of beam propulsion), but getting any significant fraction of g out of such a system (with human-sized payloads) seems unlikely within the next centuries, especially as the distance increases.
Or some form of ram scope, plenty of H everywhere, but those also have the issue of you collecting things while going at relativistic speeds.
We can easily accelerate past 1g... 1g is just chosen for human comfort, but running any rocket engine continuously for a year requires an impossible amount of fuel.
Not with current technology. That was kind of the physics “trick” in the book ‘Project Hail Mary’, where the astrophage provided enough energy and propulsion to be able to sustain 1G of acceleration.
We need a massive rocket to escape the earths gravity (1g). That takes us minutes and a crap ton of fuel. The issue is to keep doing that with fuel and oxidiser constantly for 1, 2 or 10 or 25 years is a monumental amount of energy, which is a monumental amount of weight, which is a monumental amount of volume... Also you also need the exact same amount of fuel to stop again.... So yeah ... We don't got it yet
It's hard to accelerate at or beyond 1G for very long with current technology. Roughly speaking, the rocket runs out of fuel soon. Packing more fuel makes the rocket heavier, meaning diminishing returns when using the fuel. The mass required grows exponentially. See "The tyranny of the rocket equation"
The "phone network" nowadays offer high quality sound. Things improved drastically with VoLTE and other technologies which allows much more bandwidth for calls than the old networks could support.
EVS is typically not horrendous, I just wouldn't describe it as the usual VoLTE quality yet. That's still most commonly AMR-WB at 16 kHz, though it'd depend largely on who you're dialing from what where I suppose. One person who dials local cell users on a 5G network will probably tend to get EVS, one who doesn't probably won't.
> I recommend ripping your car apart and putting sound insulation panels everywhere you can! Also replacing your sound system...
Ripping the car apart to install sound insulation might void your warranty.
I have a Bose sound system in my car with 11 or 13 speakers (they're everywhere), but the car is so poorly insulated that I have to turn up the volume quite a lot at highway speeds, or even after about ~ 35-40MPH.
Apples to oranges. Sure, there are ANPR systems in other countries, but they have to operate under very different regulations, and cannot collect information haphazardly like Flock.
Using your exact suggested query for Germany will quickly tell you that mass retention of ANPR data is illegal, and only matching against "targeted suspect databases" is acceptable. Even usages of the technology in private areas have to comply with data protection rules.
That's funny because ANPR systems are much looser in other countries including much longer retention. It helps that you don't have national newspapers printing negative articles around the technology every day!
There’s no way a single datacenter costing a couple of billion dollars can store “all Internet traffic the NSA can access”, unless the traffic the NSA can access is a microscopic fraction of the total Internet traffic.
Think about it. The Internet runs on tens of thousands of massive datacenters. Thousands are being built as we speak. Obviously a single datacenter cannot hold an appreciable fraction of that.
BTW, the total budget of the NSA is less than the R&D budget of a FAANG company, so if you find yourself believing that they might have alien-level technology far beyond Google and AWS, you’re watching too much TV.
People said/wrote in the past that what NSA and other intelligence agencies did was to gather data and store the meta data. The actually traffic got processed for the meta data, and small amount of the traffic got sorted out and also stored.
I would suspect that today they also process the traffic for llms and thus store a bit more of the traffic as weight and biases. All that can be done distributed and to different degrees based on how much access they got and under what operational conditions.
Regarding storage, a single data center using only slow but dense storage (magnetic tapes) can store far more data than a data center providing regular web services.
“They’re not as good at violating your civil liberties as you think they are”
isn’t very comforting. They are still doing it at scale and i’m not too keen on opening the back door for them myself.
> The Internet runs on tens of thousands of massive datacenters.
"The Internet" would require 1000 times less servers if it wasn't running off Python scripts in Docker containers in VMs in a virtual overlay network. (I'm exaggerating these numbers only slightly.)
Sure. But a government agency has secretly rebuilt all the same infrastructure without Python, on a shoestring budget compared to what Big Tech is spending, yet it’s a lot more efficient than what they use, right?
Caveat: I have zero experience with USA government agencies. The spying tech from other countries I'm familiar with are beige box routers made by network engineering types with embedded firmware written in C inside.
I think spying on traffic is just a massively simpler task than generating content.
It doesn't need to store the payloads itself. It stores the metadata of connections and probably the fingerprints of the content passing through the Internet. "The headers of the whole Internet" could be physically stored in a single datacenter.
I agree it doesn't matter for most smaller entities, but it's relevant for larger entities and as the US does not anymore intend to be allied with Europe, the Western world, or anybody really, there's now actual incentive to move away from such systemic risks.
They also certainly have many heuristics running. Your corporate website is interesting because it reveals who your suppliers and customers are, and all of your passwords. They don't have the manpower to scrape this manually so they scrape it automatically
Because it is made of a lot of open source components glued together in different weird ways. Sure, I would trust KVM over Hyper-V any day, but the management sucks for Proxmox.
If they build their new Datacenter Manager offering into what vCenter offered and abstract away all the ugliness (imagine creating a "distributed" switch on Proxmox with two clicks) I think they will make a killing.
I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc.
VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.
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