Never really understood why people like Tom Clancy, it's not as if it's enjoyable to read about a bunch of mililtary hardware. At least with Dan Brown you've got a load of interesting mysteries and locations to get off on.
(more seriously: I think both authors understand their markets and are savvy about delivering what they want, critics be damned)
Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.
It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.
I don't like the false dilemma of "either a directed-energy weapon, or mass hysteria".
I think we should at least consider hydrogen cyanide, especially given that a known adversary (Iran / IRGC) has claimed that Mahsa Amini killed herself with cyanide, whereas the video imagery show 2 government employees simultaneously turning their back before she faints and starts collapsing, indicating prior knowledge of what would happen. They also like to take a step or 2 away of any diluting plume they seem to know to be poisonous (presumably hydrogen cyanide).
It looks like either dosage testing, or training for possibly foreign operations.
Directed energy weapons already exist, they are called guns and rifles. Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense. If you want to secretly kill someone, just get them drunk and have them have a car crash. This is spy stuff 101.
Havana Syndrome always struck me like they had people working too close to a secret transmitter by accident.
> Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense.
We all have fairly compact devices in our kitchens which, if you were to put your head in them and press the start button, would literally cook your brain.
Why wouldn’t a directed version of that make practical sense? Just because it’d be bulky compared to a gun? But that would depend on what you were trying to achieve. Killing people with polonium or ricin isn’t the most efficient approach either, but it’s been done.
Note that I’m not saying that’s what happened in the Havana case. Just questioning the statement I quoted.
It's weird to me to think that you could beam hundreds to thousands of watts of some sort of energy at an American embassy and not be detected. That's what has always made it seem rather outlandish. My suspicion has always been some sort of burnout/anxiety as the actual explanation, but certainly there could be another possibility.
Again, I wasn’t proposing this is what happened in the Havana case. It’s not clear to me that what happened in Havana wasn’t just a panic of some sort, much like the recent drone panic. If it were some sort of attack, it raises a lot of questions about what the purpose was, why Cuba, why we haven’t seen anything like it since, why all the victims of the attack are still walking around attending meetings in Washington DC, etc.
That all said, I still don’t see why a microwave beam weapon is implausible in principle. It might not be the most practical thing ever - that’s why I compared it to polonium and ricin. But for example, using a parabolic reflector you can focus microwaves over the kind of distance between two buildings perhaps across the street from each other. If the beam only has a diameter of a few feet at the target, and only used for a short period, how is that going to be detected? You’d aim it at someone’s head visible through a window, for example, and the source of the beam could be behind a closed window with a curtain.
Btw this subthread seems to have been removed from the OP page at this point, apparently because the comment I replied to was flagged.
You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.
The point is that matter is by far the most concentrated form of energy we’re able to manipulate. The original comment seemed to be saying something along those lines, although it seems to have been flagged and I can’t check it now.
Countries with functional and affordable healthcare got there by making a policy judgment that healthcare ought to cost less. In the US, any cost reduction that might reduce payments to providers is a political non-starter, so we end up nibbling around the edges and staring at the most abusive insurers.
Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.
I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.
Yeah, the Australian Government was never going to structurally separate Telstra because it would have trashed the share price, which would have made them look bad because they were the ones that sold it off to create the Future Fund (public sector pension fund, sort-of).
Telstra's behaviour post-privatisation somewhat precipitated the creation of NBNco.
"structurally separate Telstra because it would have trashed the share price,"
I've whinged for years about the fact that Australia is the world's expert in fucking up communications services and it has done so for nearly a century, and it's cost the Australian public many billions of dollars (for some reason Oz people are like sheep, unfortunately they let governments and Big Business walk all over them and don't complain).
I even challenged HN readers to come up with a country that made a worse mess of its communications and I've had no takers!
It's not only the sale of Telstra that governments of both persuasions have fucked up, one only needs to see a litany of disasters with the NBN, and just wait until it's divided up among unscrupulous money-grubbing telcos, the Telstra sale will begin to look benign in comparison.
What are my reasons you may well ask. I've said them all previously on HN and elsewhere, the latest only a week or so ago, it's here if you're interested:
And I agree, but it's also complex socioeconomic problem. That's not to say they're not interrelated because they are. Of course, the devil's in the detail—coupling factor(s), etc. (See my rather late reply to protocolture. Often by the time I bother to check replies the story is long dead). :-)
A very similar thing happened here in New Zealand where we tracked right with fairly dire and predictable consequences, from a left-wing government that was shouldering the blame for a whole lot of macroeconomic issues they had little control over.
It doesn't really matter if they did the right thing or not - enough people were looking to punish them regardless.
To get an inert object through the atmostphere and do real damage it has to be very large. That's a very inefficient way to use mass that you've boosted to orbit, even if it's relatively cheap to get there. So any weaponary they put up there will likely look fairly conventional. The speed of deployment and difficult of intercept would be the game-changer.
Well you answered it yourself, anyone competent can dodge that. It's useful for attacking existing installations, but well, you can do that with any weapon.
Plus it's easier to intercept orbital bombardment since you know where it is ahead of time and have plenty of time to intercept.
it takes few minutes for it to reach target so no it's not easy to intercept also what exactly are you planing to use to intercept a solid tungsten rod with exactly?
But it’s true for any orbital-based weapon that needs to de-orbit for striking. Once it starts retro burn you know it’s going for strike and know where it’s going to strike.
It needs to re-enter, i.e. have the thermal shield, etc. This is what this Starship thing is all about - re-entry is really hard. Regular guide bomb is just going to burn or re-entry into atmosphere.
I've wondered about that. In a series of sci-fi books (the lost fleet series, starting with Dauntless), our intrepid heroes bombard military bases with BFRs. Big fucking rocks. Which are tungsten slugs coated with ceramic I think.
These are fired from light hours away at approximately 0.2 to 0.3 c. I had assumed that something going so fast would just disintegrate if it hit an atmosphere head on? The projectiles are described as "increasing velocity" as they approach, and they strike with gigaton effects. I remember reading an xkcd that showed something traveling so fast in atmosphere would cause huge explosions from air turned into plasma.
Depends on the mass of the object, of course, but at at this speed (i.e. energy) it will become a stream of particles going through atmosphere and vaporizing anything in it’s way.
> The source seems to be at the linked repo, and the license is MIT. How’s that a stretch?
Speaking for myself, I clicked on this thinking it might be open source in the sense of something I can run fully locally, like with a small grammar-only model.
Imagine writing a shell script that cuts and converts video by calling ffmpeg, would you say it was “a video converter written in bash”? No, the important part would not be in bash, that’s just the thin wrapper used to call the tool and could be in any language. Meaning it would be useless to anyone who e.g. worked on a constrained system where they are not allowed to install any binaries.
Same thing here. If you only run open-source software for privacy reasons, sending all your program data to some closed server you don’t control doesn’t address your issue. There’s no meaningful difference between making an open-source plugin that calls an OpenAI API and one that calls a Grammarly API.
I use to say please/thank you to gpt4 in 2023 all the time but it was because I was completely anthropomorphizing the model in various ways.
I suspect it would be just as easy to write a paper that saying please has absolutely no effect on the output. I feel like gpt4 is/was stochastically better on some days and at some hours than others. That might even be wrong though too. The idea that it is provable that "please" has a positive effect on the output is most likely a ridiculous idea.
As a joke, that doesn't feel quite so far-fetched these days. (https://xkcd.com/353/)