“BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole echoed “strong momentum” from international government customers, saying these governments want to move faster with commercial capabilities.
[…]
Motoyuki Arai, CEO of Japanese synthetic aperture radar (SAR) company Synspective said that he sees “huge demand” from the Japan Ministry of Defense
[…]
Speaking to commercial imagery’s role in Ukraine, Capella Space CEO Frank Backes said Ukraine showed the value of Earth Observation (EO) data from a military tactical perspective and not just an intelligence perspective — driven by speed of access.”
I phrased that badly, what I meant is two things in one and I mashed them together:
- do you think nation-states have the same commercial relationship with the ultimate sources of their satellite imagery as the general public? To me that makes about as much sense as thinking that Facebook won't reveal your private messages to specific governments because they won't reveal them to some third-party advertiser.
- do you think nation-states that are your opponents would be getting their services from commercial image providers that are loyal to you? The American companies you list are far from the only ones on the planet that provide satellite imagery as a service.
...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.
It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships.
The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.
Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.
Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at.
The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.
I think you are sim-interpreting what I was saying (and if you see what I've posted elsewhere in the discussion thread I'm very much in agreement with you).
I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.
Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.
But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.
I would in fact expect any human that's as good at writing code as various state-of-the-art LLMs (if you take the breathless proclamations of their hype bros at face value) to be able to solve the rather simple problems in the benchmark given the relevant esolang spec and some time to figure it out.
It's not as if the models here were asked to write a kernel in Brainfuck; the medium tier of problems here contains such apparently insurmountable tasks as "calculate the nth prime".
I'm not sure how you missed that the user you were responding to was poking a little bit of fun at you claiming that "over 900 BILLION" people play games on Windows.
That aside, it is also a bit funny that the Hacker News crowd's grand indictment of Mac gaming always uses the same examples of first person shooters that gained ascendancy when they were young. Meanwhile a teenager in 2026 is more likely to be upset that they can't play Fortnite on it - and that's besides the fact that many of the games that today's teenagers are excited to play (from Roblox to the Hollow Knight series to Baldur's Gate 3 to the recently released Slay the Spire 2 and more) are available on macOS. But one wouldn't know that from listening to people whose impression of both gaming and Macs is stuck firmly in ~2015.
What on earth are you talking about? In the US (which seems to be the context in question), Actual Registered Nurses™ are not by any means "scarce" and in fact make up the clear majority of all nurses. Nor do they get "paid a lot" compared to the demands of their jobs, especially considering this is a country that throws the same salaries at people for the mighty skill of writing JavaScript for a SaaS.
Political organizing around unions, state regulations of the labour market, and agitational political parties did nothing to prevent the severe decline of clothing quality that was the Luddites were advocating against. But of course, propaganda has very successfully reduced their entire platform to "worker's pay" alone, which is an even easier line to feed to people that over the decades have become accustomed to literal slop as apparel. And I mean that very literally - clothes that straight-up lose their structural integrity after a handful of laundry cycles.
Of course, there's definitely absolutely nothing about the state of the garment industry that's applicable to the current discussions about AI re: software quality and worker compensation. It's not as if this industry has not already seen its fair share of quality going to the dogs with only a small handful of people still knowing and caring enough to call it out while most others cheer for the Productivity™.
not to be flippant, i am answering your question with the seriousness it deserves:
it is because any government regulation over user identifiers in an operating system (and left to grow and fester according to political wont) will chill free speech (code, data) and assembly (the ability to share code and data with others unsupervised).
That's nice but doesn't actually answer the question that I asked, which is how this (i.e. requiring local user accounts to specify an age range on creation) is bad for a free society.
Simply stating something you apparently see as self-evidently true in the abstract doesn't really make much of a point. Especially when said something is unironically just "but the slippery slope!"
since you’re lost (now I’m being flippant to match your tone):
age is an identifier as part of a ‘digital fingerprint’. a fingerprint is used to track you. your fingerprints are attached to the things you criticize online. you must temper your criticisms. end of story.
your ‘o noes another slippery slope arg’ falls flat on its ass when you look outside at what your government is patently and evidently doing. you paying any attention to the anthropic ‘mass surveillance’ canary? how about the ice app? threats to legally prosecute protesters of ice? no? god, you really need to be led to water huh.
maybe look up how the persona company aggregates data for the government and get back to me as to whether you think that has a chilling effect on speech and assembly (when droves of people are leaving discord)
ah maybe too “abstract” for you. How about this:
a/s/l? :3 don’t worry, im just a dev, i won’t bite. unless of course, you disagree with me o3o
There is nothing "insane" about it, it is in fact quite simple and straightforward.
It is far more honest to just say "I don't have the stomach for it/I don't want to die" (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that! most humans feel that way) than to pretend that the very well established precedent across history of violence being the only thing that can oust certain forms of tyranny/injustice is somehow beyond your understanding.
Yeah, I felt kind of bad that he gave me such an earnest, thought-out reply to what was essentially a stupid morg/borg joke. But his final sentence suggests that he at least got my joke.
(I don't entirely agree with him, but I upvoted for at least trying to get us back on topic!)
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