>What is the proof for that, especially considering events like Ariane 5?

Ariane 5 is a nice anti-ada catchphrase, but ada is probably the most used language for war machines in the United States.

now the argument can be whether or not the US military is superior to X; but the fact that the largest military in the world is filled to the brim with warmachines running ada code is testament itself to the effectiveness of the language/dod/grant structure around the language.

would it be better off in c++? I don't know about that one way or the other , but it's silly pretend ada isn't successful.

But Ada had for a number of years a mandate to require its usage [0]. That should have been an extreme competitive advantage. And even then, C++ is still used these days for some US military projects, like F-35. Though I don't know whether the F-35 is successful or not, if it is not, that could be an argument against C++.

Ada is almost non-existent outside its niche.

The main companies arguing for Ada appear to be the ones selling Ada services, meaning they have a horse in the race.

I barely have any experience at all with Ada. My main impression is that it, like C++, is very old.

[0]: https://www.militaryaerospace.com/communications/article/167...

> The Defense Department`s chief of computers, Emmett Paige Jr., is recommending a rescission of the DOD`s mandate to use the Ada programming language for real-time, mission-critical weapons and information systems.

Poking around it looks like ada is actually the minority now. Everything current is either transitioning to c++ or started that way. The really old but still used stuff is often written in weird languages like jovial or in assembly.

Essentially the story of DoD mandates goes down to everyone getting waivers all the time and nuking the mandate.

it's all whimsy and adventure -- but the reality is that you're not just risking your own lives but also the lives of potential rescuers.

just food for thought. I'm not about to say one should lead a safe and sterile life, but there is more to it than direct dependents.

Though rescuers did consciously choose that role and that they’d be saving ignorant people very often

Doesn’t mean you need to add more opportunities for people to get hurt or killed when you know better.

I wonder if, if you'd talk to a rescuer, they'd agree...

source: i worked on an ambulance

Heh well, that's a good source. Any idea if all your colleagues thought the same?

doctors choose their jobs too and they generally encourage people to stay out of the ER

That's completely irrelevant. Rescuers can encourage people to be safe, that's expected. they chose that job , despite it's dangers, because they care about those people being safe.

They know the danger and chose the job. That's the relevant bit.

I think you missed their point - just because you choose a job doesn’t mean people shouldn’t try to avoid needing to be rescued in the first place

>So many things in life require you to grind, and the only way to gain this is to practice.

getting a kid who doesn't deserve entry to pass a prestige university with as little effort as possible is an effort to short-circuit that concept.

many games to play in this world.

>I think by vibe coding he means taking these things at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the standard.

Yeah, exactly -- which is why it's a stupid phrase for what happened here.

Not every negligence is somehow equatable to an AI pitfall, it's just on parents' mind so it's the only metaphor that gets applied.

A poorly fit hammer in a world of nails.

I say this as an engineer/proprietor with years of additive manufacturing experience, it's insulting. A poorly chosen and wrongly used process conveys nothing about the underlying fundamentals of the process itself -- it conveys everything about the engineer and the business processes that birthed the problem.

Similarly if I came across a poorly vibe-coded project I wouldn't blame Anthropic/oAI directly -- I would blame the programmer who decided to release such garbage made with such powerful tools..

tl;dr : it's not vibe-coding itself that makes vibe-coding a poor fit to rocket science and brain surgery -- it's the braindead engineer that pushes the code to the THERAC-25 without reading.

I think the idea was that 3D printing made doing a thing accessible, previously required solid fundamental knowledge (and very expensive kit). Now you can just take some specs off the internet and press go.

The comparison does not seem as absurd to me as it does to you. vOv

The lesson here is that one should never attempt analogies on HN, because people can't just relax and try to see the point of the analogy. They are compelled to fixate on the fact that an analogy is different from the thing it is being compared to.

I see multiple examples of it in this thread.

I feel like Hacker News commenters love to make analogies more than average people in your average space, though. You can't come across a biology/health topic on here without someone chiming in with "it's like if X was code and it had this bug" or "it's like this body part is the Y of the computer."

Analogies can be useful sometimes, but people also shouldn't feel like they need to see everything through the lens of their primary domain, because it usually results in losing nuances.

On the other hand, if you are communicating with a bunch of people who share that primary domain, it can be a useful way of making a point.

(unless that primary domain tends to attract a lot of people who tend to the hyper-literal /s)

>It's funny your warning about QR codes goes onto warn about PDF exploits. Yet you clicked the link to this article, by your own definition opening you up to "a whole different world of possible exploitations via whatever file is being returned". It's the nature of the internet to follow links, but our updated browsers keep us safe from exploits.

you really don't know what they did.

In the time of containerized OSs and virtualized-everything it's silly to guess.

almost every distro that offers an i3/sway/awesome install option seems to do a really poor job of it.

I don't know why.

Last time I started an endeavoros install with a default i3 it borked the login manager and set no system handlers of any kind. When I went to fix the handlers the entire package that set them was gone. When I went to install that (on the advice of the accompanying forum) I had to install most of GNOME.

If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.

That used to be the case a few years ago as well, when Wayland/sway was still considered experimental.

I had tried Manjaro i3, and XFCE’s i3 variant but at the end it was actually more convenient to install the KDE version and then install i3 on top.

> If you're using something that isn't KDE or GNOME you're probably going to hit rough edges.

Anymore it's literally anything that isn't GNOME. Red Hat is basically keeping that project going.

Palahniuk and Bourdain both talk about the fringes of 'punk' topics, but they have a totally different voice and objectives for doing so.

To me it sounds something like pairing up Brian Cox and Neil Degrasse Tyson, I mean they both talk about black holes..

For what it's worth, and i've read just about everything from both of those authors, Palahniuk is usually trying to illicit a feeling from the reader, be it disgust, ennui and nostalgia for a different time, or anger towards whatever 'the system' is at the momnent. He uses relatable anecdote to do so. His writing, in that vain, is very similar to Phillip Dick (who wrote 'a Scanner Darkly' from a lot of first-hand experiences)

Bourdain had similar prose mannerisms and favorite topics, but his objective was to instill wanderlust and an interest in the human spirit. Camaraderie, and hope for future opportunities to experience far away lands. A desire to seek more experiences regardless of what lesser prices and inconveniences must be paid in order to do so.

as a guy who grew up as a punk rocker in so-cal Palahniuk strikes me as the friend that couldn't make the show because ,even though he loves the band and the venue , there is homework due tomorrow -- whereas Bourdain always struck me as one of the folks i'd have woken up next to in someone elses' car the morning after the show and gone out to get breakfast with and talk about the night.

There is more difference between those two types of personality than I can write about, even if they gravitate around the same stuff.

I miss Bourdain.

Agreed, to me they are very different takes on what is a punk attitude.

Palahniuk: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover everything is rotten and sycophantic but somehow tender and relatable.

Bourdain: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover an honest struggle for something far more respectable than what is typically venerated. Eat their food, dance to their music, and you will enjoy.

Later on Bourdain definitely moved past a lot of the initial style that gave him prominence (his breakout kitchen confidential was definitely of that moment in time like Palahniuk's) in terms of the shows he produced, but in the end, the thread of finding your own pleasurable interpretation of life- be it in the seedy kitchens, or on riverboats with wong-kar wai's filmographer trying to chase the "real hong kong"- that isn't beholden to anyone else, remained the defining trait of his work. His "authentic" style which wasn't a top 5 things to do in x city and more experiential and human didn't come from nowhere in terms of his personal ideology and life experiences/lifestyle.

I think it's the same mindset but in a different context. He was a well read guy with good creative sensitivities, and a fantastic conversationalist- but he's no analogue to your rick steins and rick steeves- just because he shows up on the same row on your streaming app. I think the desire to be free arrived for him long before he started frequently travelling.

And we're on our own for now- that world and those people get further and further away every year. We're seeing less and less people willing to or being allowed to contribute culturally, in the anti system humanist, mentally and socially free but financially trapped service worker, or anti sensationalist experiencer of human culture way.

You get it.

this is one of those HN style comments where business acumen and pertinent sarcasm are wholly indistinguishable .

Poe's Law notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that anyone would think I was making a good faith business acumen observation. If Optimus walks you to the kitchen to get a coke, what's Tesla's business model? Charge by the nanosecond for compute time?

Purchase/lease access to the hardware, subscription for the necessary online connectivity, and microtransactions for each actual use of it (ostensibly because of cloud compute, and that also means surveillance data is captured and monetized).

Sell you a $10,000 upgrade for Full Self Awareness capability then don’t deliver it an change the hardware requirements

Tesla doesn’t need a business model, they’re a meme stock.

Only on HN can you say something so obviously true and have a reply section full of uhm ackshuwllys.

Perhaps. I suppose the biggest in history then? $1.4T valuation and 60% of shares held by non-meme institutions (like pension funds, S&P tracking ETFs, etc) when you factor out insiders.

“The market can remain irrational longer than …” - John Maynard Keynes.

Here’s a similar quote from the great enemy of markets, Benjamin Graham:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

The robot suggested a coke zero because it was paid to by the Coca-Cola Company. Now you'll need to buy more coke zero to replace what you drank.

The business model for Tesla and xAI is actually very simple and superior to OpenAI and Google's. No, this is not satire:

The business model is that his companies are meme stocks, and controlling social media means controlling meme stocks. The business model is also that his companies require corporate socialism, and controlling social media means influencing government policy.

He can talk about AI driving cars, but that's yesterday's news. Today, his business model for AI is to put his finger on the scale and influence society to help him become richer. AI is threatening to replace search, but in a way it's also threatening part of what social media provides, namely the ability to guide discourse at scale.

What's easier: Getting his personal board to give him a trillion dollars, and shoring up public support for that with bias in his AI products and on X? Or building a trillion-dollar business?

Elon Musk's business model for AI is actually quite easy to understand.

And just like all meme stocks and so-called stablecoins, it'll work until it doesn't. The fall will be dramatic.

Stablecoins is a weird topic to randomly insert there. You want to elaborate on why all stablecoins will fail? This is a pretty ...novel take.

Stable coins fail when there's a run on the bank. Crypto is a wild west of unregulated banking. They have essentially become tools for money laundering and scam enablers, so it might take a while. But eventually the general public will say "no thanks" to a pain in the ass version of regular money. When the rush to the exits happen, the ~7 txn/s limit of Bitcoin will become painful.

What in the world are you talking about? What stablecoins are you talking about operating at 7tx/s? Why do stablecoins fail when there's a 'run on the bank'? You're mixing so many metaphors here that I'm not sure you know what you're talking about at all. This is a stablecoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_(cryptocurrency). If it isn't permissionless it's not a 'stablecoin' it's an IOU.

it won’t be. the same sane argument was that “robotaxi” fall will be dramatic but it wasn’t, Musk, like Trump, is a master at manipulating masses and when thing du jour inevitably fails he’ll just pivot on an earnings call (and on “X” along the way) how “thing du jour is yesterday’s news” and he’s onto “next big thing” - data center on Jupiter that will replace all earth’s data centers or something like that :)

“Master at manipulating masses” is something you have to tell yourself when people you don’t like are highly successful, I guess.

enron was highly successful and so was bernie maddof

So lets see a $60k robot, lets say the whole economy crashes and money means nothing so they just call it $30k for kicks and giggles. Super cheap power since elon owns all the land now, he can have a tiny nuclear reactor every few house lengths. So $1 a day for power : 30365 / 365 days a year is about $80 a day in the first year, or maybe $40 a day assuming the reactors dont melt down for 2 years. So that is about 2 forced cokes down your throat per hour, 4 if you are a "known criminal" who is being robo-babysat. And that is still zero profit for elon because he has to shuffle all his assets around to the next farce of a fucking company

This is hypothetical, in the spirit of your "economy crashes and money means nothing": if one has zero profit (in dollars) but somehow manages to own all the land and run the country, I'd say he profited a lot. Land and ruling are more tangible than money.

But the damned robot keeps drinking all my Coke Zero!

Users will get used to ensuring a stable supply of said sponsored products, otherwise Optimus may get mad if said product was not in the fridge.

I'm still unsure whether you're Musk's fanboy or making a joke.

Thank you for this comment, there is no way I could eloquently explain my read on the comment you're replying to the way you did.

I enjoy the implied threat of being escorted to get a branded drink, and then getting frog marched to the local store if you’re out of supply.

This is called a drop or anchor line, spiders use them often for climbing smooth or difficult surfaces slowly and for quick escapes.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Uses

> I've been wanting to have an AI play Kerbal Space Program because I think it would just be pretty hilarious.

people have been experimenting with this since early Opus days.

Check out kRPC. Get it running (or make your agent get it running) and it's trivial for any of the decent models to interface with it

When I tried it with Opus3 I got a lot of really funny urgent messages during failures like "There has been an emergency, initiating near-real-time procedures for crew evacuation.." and then it's just de-couple every stage and ram into the ground.

Makes for a fun ant-farm to watch though.

[0]: https://krpc.github.io/krpc/