At this moment, the best way to put kinetic energy into an enemy is sticking some quantity of explosive on them.

You have a few ways of going about this. Two we consider today: 1) a chemical charge launches a block of explosive ballistically at a closing range of mach 2-5, 2) a complex assembly of plastic/rare earths/silicon/PCBAs flies over to the enemy at somewhere around "fast bicycle" or "leisurely highway" speeds.

By weight, 1 is cheaper, and all you lose is the explosive. 2 is more accurate, but that whole flying assembly is a loss.

Now, when you do something cute like take one little chunk of electronics and stick it on your block of explosive, and then orbit your doodad at a nice safe distance so it beams a homing dot on the target - your ballistic explosive sees the dot and steers toward it. See what I'm getting at? Cheap as 1, accurate as 2.

This is a really, really winning combo when you can pull it off, but lately, UAS ops has gotten a universe more difficult with the dirty dirty EW and now with all sorts of countermeasures.

Even better reason for our little flying widgets to keep their frickin' distance. Even if they get swatted down, they can cue in shot after shot after shot, with much more bang.

Drones have dramatically changed this equation. The current drone "kill zone", which used to be several km from the front line, is now 15-25km deep, and Ukraine is pushing this to 50-100km. That means artillery cannot operate without being targeted by FPV drones. It is also becoming logistically difficult to supply the large number of artillery shells needed without getting struck.

Once the kill-zone reaches 30km, which it will by 2027, artillery will be completely useless.

So you'd need serious anti-drone capabilities to get the artillery close enough, and good luck if you have it sitting around deployed for any lenghth of time.

Both shooting and moving is very detrimental to staying hidden. And with FPV drones moving doesn't do you much good unless you move out of drone range, which as mentioned is or very nearly is 2x the effective range of such artillery systems.

The attack drones don't have to be big, just big enough to score a mobility kill and the artillery is pretty much f'd in the a...

* Abstracting one layer from pages - i.e. tiddles - is pretty dope. This gives you some oddball functionality that's pretty flexible[0]. Nothing you don't get in lots of other things, but see above.

* Before I made my own Asciidoc graph VSC plugin[1], the community TD plugin was the only way to see graphs of Asciidoc content.

* A TiddlyWiki from 2010 is still viewable today, a decade and a half later.

[0] kind of like `include` and conditionals in Asciidoc.

[1] graph of Asciidoc xref, include, partial include, conditionals, as a Typescript graphviz thingy. It works for the whole repo or just the currently active tab.

Ours are not the Masters of Industry from the Industrial Age[1], or the fission-missile-kings of the Nuclear Age. They're not ready to teach a Physics unit at a community college.

The tippity top of the uber-wealthy today are remarkably short on actual formal knowledge. This makes sense in their ideological system: scientific acumen as more of a commodity than a value.

In this view, everything should look like the stock market. But this is a profoundly stupid view. It requires not just ideology, but willfully not looking at the universe.

I'm probably steering afoul of about 90% of ycombinator here, so I'll just pull the throttles back and stop there.

[1] "Isambard Kingdom Brunel . . But Got-DAMN did men used to have some proper-ass names" - Achewood

After a while the compounding energy input of the negentropic tax overwhelms the control mechanisms that feed it into the "preserved" system, and it blows up.

It's a common feature across disciplines: content management, biology, programming, maintainability engineering, neural networks, chemical engineering . . I imagine the list is pretty close to boundless. Ha, turns out human knowledge is also a complex natural system.

So I guess what I'm saying is only dead things live forever. Which should say a lot about the internal life of the standard tech/finbro. "I want to be just like I am right this second for all time!"

Speaking personally, I'm always amused by the Eternal Life pitch whether I hear it in church or on the internet. Everyone gets eternal life. We're surrounded by it, we eat it, we poop it out every day. Our grandfathers are in our lungs, old friends in the leaves of trees, giant parts of your brain die every morning as you wake. Eternal Life is not for the selfish. Something that the Bible thumpers could read for themselves, if they bothered to read the thing.

A mint we will then need to spend on bribes to ALPA. DoT is almost entirely captured now, so that's less of a problem.

In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people. The Ubermaker. Why dig a gold mine when you can sell the shovels.

How about a less cynical alternative: Use it to find ways to defeat regulatory capture so that you can enter a large market which is currently locked up by incumbents, or make more in an ancillary market from doing "commoditize your complement" on the one which is currently captured.

"Good" is optional in the land of the ERP. Or even "not-gut-rippingly awful"

I suspect we're about to see some interesting days in the alphabet soup of PDM, PLM, ERP, MBSE, PIM, DMS, FMEA, CRM, SRM, ILS, IPS, QMS, LSA, TDM . .

The moment when that age of technology turned - the wiki/blogger/RSS era giving way to the Facebook/Twitter one - seems to have marked some sort of dark horizon in technology and in intellectual discourse and culture.

The version it puts down into documents is not the thing it was actually doing. It's a little anxiety-inducing. I go back to review the code with big microscopes.

"Reproducibility" is still pretty important for those trapped in the basements of aerospace and defense companies. No one wants the Lying Machine to jump into the cockpit quite yet. Soon, though.

We have managed to convince the Overlords that some teensy non-agentic local models - sourced in good old America and running local - aren't going to All Your Base their Internets. So, baby steps.

The Westphalian system of armed states had its legs chopped out from under it after 1945, but it's taking a while for a new way to materialize.

This is one of the reasons why the Absolute Worst Thing is a nuclear-armed state with uncertain borders. Look around the world and you'll see that the "trouble spots" we spend a lot of time looking at in the news, are those places where nuke powers get to feeling itchy and twitchy about where exactly their countries end.

My main resistance to that is much the same as yours: the differences are so small, that re-architecting society around them is not going to be enough juice for the squeeze.

But one could also argue that the juice is not even the point: by re-architecting society in this way, you "pre-brutalize" your population so that their threshold for violence against "others" is lowered. Thus your population is closer to being wholly militarized, and theoretically is more effective in war, and is less captured by "weak" or "unmanly" moral ideals, such as empathy.

While this might seem a virtue to someone of an expansionist mindset, in application this principle never, ever works well - again, thanks to those tiny differences. If a citizen is pre-brutalized to have a lowered resistance to killing those with curly hair, how long is it before they kill their next door neighbor with wavy hair, over something like lawn furniture?

Pre-brutalizing your populace to killing any sapiens is enough to brutalize them towards harming anyone else. This is the core of the "imperial boomerang", or the colonial boomerang theory, as to why the great wars of the 20th century took on such a nasty character. The ease with which we dehumanized subject populations was - all too easily - redirected against the neighbors, most memorably with Germany trying to re-create the American West to their East.