From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, and most of all WYSIWYG GUI design software that worked exceptionally well. We had this on 80286 CPUs with 1MiB of RAM and similarly tiny machines.
Today's desktop UIs are a fucking disaster on both the developer side and the user side.
For developers you have a choice between a hypertext language hacked endlessly into a UI and native UI tooling that's far less intuitive and much uglier than what we had back then. Compare the UI designer (not the language) in Visual Basic in the 1990s to today. You could not only design but data bind a complex app that looked decent in 30 minutes.
For users you have no consistency, no keyboard shortcuts (or different ones for every app), no help or help that only works online, etc.
We are perfectly capable of writing native GUIs, and we have powerful tools for it as well. QTDesigner comes to mind as a well known example.
The problem is, about 12 years ago, application design went through a gameification and "toy-i-fication" phase, from which it has yet to recover, because suddenly, everything had to look like it was designed for tablets or gaming consoles. Then the "javascript for everythiiiing!" happened, and suddenly the tools and workflows behind all the bloated, inefficient, low-information-density apps were swept into the desktop world.
But, since the modern definition of an "App" is basically everything that is displayed on a phone ever, and devices got so powerful that no matter how badly devs f* it up it still kinda-ish works (if we ignore the battery screaming for dear life), and this situation has generally been accepted.
Even before that, application design was usually terrible. Apps were almost universally ugly. Developers just aren't very good at it; it's not in their skill sets. They're good at making apps fast and small, but not at making them usable.
Rare companies would hire separate designers, and the apps could be functional and attractive, but they were the exception. It was a lot of money for something generally considered ancillary.
Browser-based apps get to leverage the work done by browser makers, who put in the effort to make toolkits that looked nice by default. They're not small or fast -- though Moore's Law has made them usable anyway. They also favor the things that designers like -- including not overwhelming the user with dense information. You can still use them badly, but by default any programmer can make an app that isn't awful.
There never was a golden age when developers made good, small, fast apps. It was usually a "pick two" situation, except by spending a lot of money. I'm just as happy to let my battery scream and not cringe at every single app that comes up, and so cheaply that they can give it away or cost dollars rather than tens or hundreds. Others disagree, of course, but I think the market tends to show a heavy thumb on one side of that scale.
I don't know which apps you are talking about, but I use apps built and designed by developers every day, and they all work great.
My problems start when Apps are NOT designed by developers, but rather people who have seen 100 videos about color theory, and know all the latest fonts their social media du jour is excited about, but very little about hardware, programming, and the difference between localhost and accessing a server over cheap WiFi from somewhere else on the planet.
Because these are the "apps" which do something ridiculously simple, but somehow manage to eat up 2-3GiB of RAM and let the laptops fans spin out of control.
>They're not small or fast -- though Moore's Law has made them usable anyway.
Moores Law is over however, and there is no justification for an app that, say, plays locally stored mp3s to require 2GiB of RAM and 10% CPU. If an application thinks this is justified, it will get to know my good friend `rm -rf`, beacause I have vlc running in ncurses mode right now, playing my entire playlist, and its eating less memory than the terminal emulator it's running in ;-)
The answer to bad software, and overloaded/overused/oversold frameworks is not "built more powerful computers" but "make better software".
>There never was a golden age when developers made good, small, fast apps.
Good != Beautifully designed.
Good means small, fast, portable, reliable, easy to install, easy to learn, easy to remove, does its job.
The registers at B&H photo in NYC appear to be some DOS terminal system, but the employees know the keyboard shortcuts by muscle memory and the interface’s reaction time is instantaneous. If that’s not good software I don’t know what is.
From the people who make choices about where to put their money. You can get away with ugly software -- especially if you had something that worked 20 years ago and is still sufficient, and there is no alternative. But if users have the choice of something attractive, they'll pick it.
I have the choice of many many many text editors and IDEs to manage my source code.
What do I use? vim. In a terminal(-emulator).
Why? Because I like my editor to be ready the moment my finger leaves the ENTER key, I like direct interoperability with the terminal, I like that I can hack together even the most absurd things in .vimrc, and I like that I have the same editor with the same settings on all servers I take care of, even when I connect to them via ssh.
I also use vlc for playing audio and video. Are there players that have a more edge UX? Sure. Do they come with builtin-full support for almost all formats, have a tiny memory footprint, can be used to convert stuff, don't spy on me and can be controlled via a terminal (hello ncurses mode!)? Nope.
However, after compiling it and measuring it on an older machine (a Lenovo T430 running Arch) against the out-of-the-box vlc install, I can see no advantage in memory footprint or cpu usage, they are about the same. (I compared mvp running in terminal against vlc running with ncurses interface module)
Since mpv doesn't offer an ncurses interface, and is still in development, I will, for now, stick with vlc.
However, the scripting options definitely seem great, as I said i will keep it on my radar.
Maybe you compiled yours with all the bells&whistles which aren't needed for sufficient local playback?
Furthermore I didn't cover (re-)streaming to chromecasts, TVs, or such. Don't have it, don't want it.
This has next to zero impact on its performance, as the ncurses player talks exactly to the parts of libVLC it has to.
>Instantly. Sometimes on even older systems than yours. With probably less RAM. Say 8GB, with something booted from USB, running 'live', so only 7GB, no SWAP.
The system I tested this on has 4GiB of RAM. And I have used `VLC -I ncurses` from live systems-on-a-stick as well. It runs before my finger leaves the ENTER key, same as mpv.
> Maybe you compiled yours with all the bells&whistles which aren't needed for sufficient local playback?
I'd be happy to repeat the measurement with different settings.
Another viable option would be Visual Tcl [2] for Tcl/Tk [3]. Given the event-based nature of Tcl and Tk, I find it matches well for a methodology like VB provided.
And it's far from the only one I remember (although you'll need to do some research here [4]). For example, Komodo IDE used to have a Tk GUI builder that provided for the same kind of methodology, which has been split off in [5].
Enjoy!
[0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
[1] https://www.freepascal.org/
[2] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/
For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland Delphi.
The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down to low-level Windows API's, and handle pointer-based work if necessary.
Unfortunately - for my professional career, Delphi never captured the large-scale Enterprise market - that went to .NET or Java and the rest is history...
(Occasionally I noodle about with FreePascal for the nostalgia factor)
Granted we still had MFC, but then the COM lovers at Microsoft started pushing for ATL, and everything that followed from there.
On the other side we had (and still have) Delphi and C++ Builder, but Borland's management killed the indie culture around them.
Might depend how long it takes: because rust is porous and friable, rusting iron should eventually degrade to nothing, and the rust would be difficult to re-concentrate then reduce back to iron.
Possibly an analogous situation is the history of steel in Japan and their efforts to extract iron from sand, since they don't have significant iron ore to mine on their island.
A city decayed to rust is going to be a thin layer of iron spread out over miles with some hot spots like where a building once stood (but presumably without a map of the city in this distant future scenario), but there won't be a vein of concentrated ore. Distributed rust can definitely be turned back into pure iron but the energy requirements are going to be substantially higher to do so since you're going to have to sift through much more material to collect it, more material to separate and concentrate it, more material to smelt off, and your operations will have to be more mobile to retrieve it over a larger area. That's why I think retrieving iron from our society will be more like extracting iron from ironsands (2-20% iron), and it will have similar effects on that subsequent society that sits between us now and some future point where geology has re-supplied it to the surface millions of years from now.
FWIW those are the ratios for the oxides themselves but the formations are not necessarily huge piles of pure oxides, if you go a bit lower to the "sources" section the lowest-concentrated formations viable for exploitation are
> Banded iron formations (BIFs) are sedimentary rocks containing more than 15% iron composed predominantly of thinly bedded iron minerals and silica (as quartz).
However that's only for post-industrial societies, at least if you have alternatives, as it requires churning through ridiculous amounts of materials.
When you don't have alternatives the ironsand article (which would be used in places with no good or accessible ore deposits e.g. japan, famously) quotes
> Sand used for mining typically had anywhere from 19% magnetite to as low as 2%.
though much like gold panning the ironsand would be sluice-separated to a concentration of 30-50% before it was further processed.
Most ironsands deposits are not considered financially exploitable to this day though, with the exception of NZ's where the iconic "black sand" beaches of north island are extremely rich in magnetite (up to 40%).
They're concentrated rust mixed with rocks, otherwise it's not economically viable to extract.
Like, iron is ridiculously common, relatively speaking: on earth as a whole it's more common than oxygen, for the crust it ranks 4th at 5% by mass, meaning if you went at it randomly you'd need to sift through 20kg of materials to get 1kg of iron.
Currently, we exploit formations as low as 15% iron (banded iron formations / taconite), that's the lower limit of the economically feasible, and those results in absolutely enormous amounts of tailings (waste materials).
Pre-industrialisation, unless you had no other choice (e.g. only had ironsands to work with) you really wanted to exploit natural (or "direct-shipping") ores, in the 60~70% range, the extraction is way too much work otherwise.
Fortunately, despite millions of tons of production every year, we are nowhere near using up the ore.
Producing 1kg of charcoal requires 3-4kg of wood. (Producing the 900°C for the process is an exercise for the reader.) (https://www.fao.org/3/y4450e/y4450e11.htm)
Coal didn’t overtake charcoal for smelting iron in the US until the latter half of the 19th century, well after the first industrial revolution.
Melting down scrap iron is one of the main sources of steel in the US, and that is done straight with electricity in arc furnaces.
Coal accelerated the second industrial Revolution, but it was not essential. Far more important for enabling the first industrial Revolution was some of the early scientific knowledge about steam and pressure, such as the work of Robert Boyle, a lot of that based on a sort of reaction to the classics that had been revived in the Renaissance. The biggest argument for coal is indirectly in that it helped the viability of British society (after the island had most its tree cut down over the previous 500 years) which played an important role in the Scientific Revolution (Robert Boyle was Anglo-Irish)… although by the time Britain was playing an important role, the scientific Revolution was already underway on the mainland of Europe. As long as our books are not all destroyed, I think we’d have no problem bootstrapping from charcoal the second time around.
(I think a lot about long term data storage… writing in stone or fired clay still seems like one of the best methods for writing that needs to last 10,000 years… it was, after all, preserved Greco-Roman classics that enabled the renaissance and therefore the scientific Revolution.)
Finding out we've got a hard to replace left-pad module somewhere far up the tech tree wouldn't be fun.
And no, you don't need such sophistication for storing useful amounts of hydrogen. Storing large amounts of hydrogen (in this case, also mixed with poisonous CO) was solved in the beginning of the 19th Century (well, late 18th century) in Britain and Germany by using very large near-atmospheric storage vessels called Gas Holders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
Salt caverns can also be used for greater volumes, i.e. for seasonal storage, as are already used for hydrogen storage in a few places in the US and elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hydrogen_storage
https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-...
Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment, and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been converted to oil and coal discover uncanny hard-to-explain remnants of a past civilization of, get this, bipedal animals.
Oil forms when sea plankton and algae are buried and exposed to high pressures and heat. Coal forms when dead plant material protected somehow from biodegredation (say by mud) forms peat and is then buried, and exposed to high pressures and heat.
I was also surprised to learn that the inabality of fungus and bacteria to degrade lignin is unlikely to have been a key driver of coal formation during the Carboniferous period, instead it was "a unique combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea".
Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-fungal-evoluti...
(To redirect Chixculub would require a MUCH larger capability, probably on the order of 10 million tons in orbit, but that's possible with a fleet of large reusable rockets capable of getting the cost to orbit down to around $10/kg, or equivalent development of in-space resource utilization capacity.)
For greatest success I think there would need to be two but probably not many more than two major efforts going on simulatneously, in much the same way that CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN were independently looking for the Higgs. If one fails for some unforseen technical reason, the other might not if they took a different approach.
Well, yes. It's not fair to the dinosaurs, I admit. They hardly had a chance to develop language and mathematics. They were still too busy ripping each other's faces off. And not having opposable thumbs, of course, really put a damper on technological development. Maybe in a another million years things would have been different, but the asteroid had a different idea.
We, on the other hand, are at least on the precipice of the capability to divert asteroids. Hopefully we don't get an asteroid visit too soon.
Diverting an asteroid, however, is not evolution.
If they got further than us, tried to capture an asteroid and mine it, could they have wiped themselves out without leaving behind technosignatures that would still be visible?
Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there might not be much left for us to find.
The rate at which we're accumulating change compared to geological record is also a strong argument against, although they argue limitations in current dating methods reducing how much can be said with certainty about prior epochs.
While there is precious little reason and evidence to believe a priori in a previous advanced dino civ, there are studies that could be done on sediment data that'd lend more certainty (such as looking for unusually rapid metal production).
> Anthropocene layer in ocean sediment will be abrupt and multi-variate, consisting of seemingly concurrent-specific peaks in multiple geochemical proxies, biomarkers, elemental composition and mineralogy. It will likely demarcate a clear transition of faunal taxa prior to the event compared with afterwards. Most of the individual markers will not be unique in the context of Earth history as we demonstrate below, but the combination of tracers may be. However, we speculate that some specific tracers that would be unique, specifically persistent synthetic molecules, plastics and (potentially) very long-lived radioactive fallout in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Absent those markers, the uniqueness of the event may well be seen in the multitude of relatively independent fingerprints as opposed to a coherent set of changes associated with a single geophysical cause.
My opinion is this ultimately boils down to how hard human level intelligence is to evolve, which is why the hypothesis is interesting in the context of the Fermi Paradox. Intelligence might be extremely difficult to evolve, it might require an unusual background environment set of condition or just might not be that useful in general.
I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their geo-engineering marks.
There's no good way to read just those strips, but it starts here:
To make things worse for a hypothetical advanced dinosaur species, if they were at the point they could capture an asteroid, they would be roughly equivalent or better with us but we could survive an asteroid extinction event just fine. Society as we know it perhaps wouldn't survive but an event that could genuinely end us as a species would need to be exceedingly destructive or long term. Otherwise the remnants will rebuild, give or take a couple 10s of thousands of years, which is basically nothing on the timescales we're thinking about here.
Film-makers would use stop-motion techniques to depict battles between Fordusprefectops and Chevroletcamaro-Rex whilst their own early ancestors look on, clad in loincloths and bras made from footwell mats.
Industrialization without fossil fuels would scale much more slowly with wood being used at first and then probably crops being grown for energy (biofuel). Once we figured out electricity we'd have large scale hydropower and wind power. Then we'd figure out either photovoltaics or nuclear fission, at which point we'd be off to the races. My guess is we'd be almost 100% nuclear and hydro powered right now with use of photovoltaics growing.
Stable power grids would probably take longer to emerge, but we figured out simple rechargeable batteries (lead-acid) fairly early. People would probably have banks of these in their homes to power minimal lighting and things like radios, TVs, etc. at night and run their appliances at specified times when the grid was at high power. You'd probably see a food system less dependent on refrigeration until stable grids emerged.
On extremely long historical timescales I suppose depletion of other elements is possible, but things like iron are incredibly common in Earth's crust. I'd be concerned more about rare elements.
It’s odd to me that we don’t see this specific point discussed all that much. Sure, it comes up here and there now and then, but I think it deserves an extended discussion. My understanding, based on what I’ve read about this implication, is that we as a human species only get one chance to evolve beyond the gravity well of our planet. If we fuck this up, and by all accounts it looks like we are, we will be condemned to extinction on Earth.
We stop mining coal when it is no longer economical to do so, not when the mine is entirely depleted. There's a bunch of coal at or near the surface and will be for quite some time.
The same goes for Oil. We extract that which is easiest to extract and fraction into the products we desire, preferring to leave things like the energy intensive and more polluting "Tar Sands" behind.
Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.
Japan developed their hugely overdone turned-steel technique because the ore they had to work with was so bad: hammering the garbage out was the only way to get the quality of the steel itself into acceptable levels. As a result, Japanese smiths developed something very close to what we'd now call layered steel.
European swordsmiths (think: Toledo) had access to higher-grade ore, and as a result never needed to develop techniques to work around fundamental problems with their source material.
The world is (imho) a better place because Japan has bad iron ore. If that wasn't our reality, we would never have guessed it.
That's not to say that European swords were better than Japanese swords in every way. This is one of many, many factors. And I'm sure there were plenty of crappy longswords at the time (and crappy katans), so you kind of also have to decide if you're comparing the best examples, average examples, or low quality items as well. The skill of the wielder is also important. If you're throwing out a bunch of random soldiers without a ton of training and giving them a sword, you might want to give them something they're less likely to break. My understanding that is there was a period in Japan where only samurai were allowed to carry swords (if my reading is to be believed), who were generally very skilled. They would probably know how to avoid putting their blade in situations where it would be prone to breaking.
And Japanese traditional Japanese sword making techniques are extremely impressive and interesting to read about given the materials that were available at the time.
My understanding is that historically the best steels were made in India/Southern-India where wootz steel comes from and that for more than 2000 years the rest of the world was almost bargain tier in comparison. To the degree that samples of wootz steel were brought back to Europe even in the 18th century in an attempt to replicate the process.
I'm only an amateur metalworker though so I hope someone more knowledgeable can correct any errors.
All the new land and end of the swamps is apparently the result of hundreds of years of iron ore mining in the nearby mountains. So even with primitive means and shitty ore, if you need the material and go at it for centuries, you can achieve substantial results. Not to mention reclaim some land as a result. :)
Also in related (but much more recent development) there were coal mines in Japan mining from under the seabed via tiny islands!
Hashima is the most extreme example, basically a piece of barely dry rock that has been converted to a concrete city housing many thousands of workers and their families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island
But there were other such mines, some of the local ones even connected to Hashima via the underground works!
And the point isn't about that. The point is that the constraint (bad ore quality) forced the Japanese to get better at metalworking. Resource constraints aren't as bad as we think, because we're used to making things without those constraints. But our descendants, having always had those constraints, will find better ways of solving them than we can think of.
Even in Europe, a large part of the armies were peasants with whatever comes to hand. Their resource constraint on metals wasn't the ore, but the availability of the enormous quantities of wood required to process it.
Every Samurai had at least two swords. So at least a million swords. Let's say a sword weighs 1Kg, that's 1000 tonnes of steel. So probably not enough for a battleship, but maybe a small destroyer.
Experiment: <https://youtu.be/ev4lW0wbnX8?t=1245> (German audio track, machine translated subtitles in English available)
The question is whether this settles the argument or stokes its flames.
Anyone interested in 'rebooting' society after a major collapse can check out:
> The thirteen chapter book starts off explaining how humanity and civilization works and has come to be and how this could possibly be altered in the event of worldwide disaster — such as avian flu. Leaving us with the essential question of what knowledge would we need to rebuild civilization as we know it, which Dartnell answers by looking at the history of science and technology.
> Dartnell explains and realistically details a 'grace period' in which survivors can salvage food, materials and tools from the ruins of today's society. However, after a certain point this grace period would end, and humanity would have to produce their own food, make their own tools, practice hygiene and fight infection to maintain health, and develop energy stores for a new society to survive the aftermath.
> The book covers topics like agriculture, food and clothing, substances, medicine, and transport. Darnell points out that applying the scientific method to basic knowledge will enable an advanced technological society to reappear within several generations. Along with giving the history of scientific invention and how that applies to humans were they to recreate that, the book also offers anecdotal bits of information in the form of endnotes. Giving facts such as how carrots were originally white but grown orange in honour of the Dutch royal family, and how onions are the leaves of the onion plant.[3]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
Full bibliography available if anyone wants to dig into a particular topic:
They told me to be careful. These were the rejects from another project, but this project was legally required to use only US tech and the US no longer had the ability to manufacture bearings this large, since we had outsourced for some time and everyone who could do it got out of the business. So we needed these exact ones. (This was the late 70's.)
While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close.
It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today, instead of putting long-term strategic considerations first. Different incentives, different results, tragedy of the commons all over again.
A lot of these problems would go away if CEOs were paid a modest amount of cash to live (say, $1m/year) and then the rest of their compensation was in stock that was locked up for at least 20 years.
[1] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2019/ceo-...
"No plan survives the first shot of the battle".
So, sure, the plans will likely not survive in any detail even a decade from now.
But the fact that they are making plans, attempting to understand the considerations of those future generations, understand what strategic goals need to be worked on now to help that, and more — this is critical.
I contrast, western politics and decision making tends to focus on considerations that are at best hot for the next election cycle.
And notice that the US is not now trying to return manufacturing home because of long-term plans, but because the people noticed that the bargain of cheap goods from China doesn't mean much when you exported the job. The fact that China now makes and has access to key components in some key military systems and that needs to be reversed barely enters the mind of the electorate.
Most of those jobs outside of a few narrow categories were lost to automation. We make more steel, aircrafts, and cars than ever but with far fewer people.
China's history of planning has led to tons of misallocation of resources, and I'm not sure I'd want to emulate that.
Of course automation plays a part, but it is nothing like the whole story. China now has far greater capabilities to make critical components from chips to solar panels than is located here. Look what happens to our supply chain when supply is just reduced a bit. What do you think would happen to our economy in a conflict?
>>China's history of planning has led to tons of misallocation of resources, and I'm not sure I'd want to emulate that.
Of course we wouldn't want to emulate that; that's a strawman argument.
But to use that argument to avoid planning altogether is foolish. And yes, resources will APPEAR to be wasted. Keeping more than minimal capabilities immediately at hand is "inefficient".
This is the same as exercising and eating right to stay in good physical condition - no one needs to be able to lift weight and run fast for 99.99% of modern jobs. Yet it is a good idea for many reasons. By your argument, why bother to save for emergencies or tough times? That's inefficient - you should enjoy your full income right now - heck, go into debt too!. Also by your argument, we shouldn't plan to avoid technical debt - that's inefficient waste of programmer time - just write the first thing that comes to mind to deploy the feature.
Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.
They can go on fancifully pretending to plan for 500 years from now, and we'll continue to innovate, live well by comparison, and at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict.
The point is that the war wont go nuclear. It'll say conventional, and that's why we'll lose. We won't have the bottle to pull the trigger. Think you can bluff the Chinese? Lol. "Oh, we are really sorry that you aircraft carrier got sunk in an amazingly tragic accident involving our hypersonic missile test. That is terrible." "Ok, but this is the fifth time, if it happens again we'll nuke you, we swear."
Really the only conclusion I can form from the USA's willful inaction is that the politicians are already bought and paid for.
>and at the end of the day there's relatively little reason for us to have a major conflict
That's exactly what will be said in the USA. "Well, they've put missile bases on these man-made islands, but that's little reason to go to war." "Well, they've bought and paid for contracts that would previously go to US companies through bribery and corruption (or rather spending more on bribery and corruption than we did), but that's little reason to go to war." "Oh, they sunk a carrier and they're really sorry about it, but that's little reason to go to war".
One day the world will be China's, and the USA will have spent fifty years repeatedly, impotently, drawing lines in the sand.
Put another way: The Soviets had nukes, but by the 1980s we'd beaten them. Products all over the world had Made in USA written on them. US products, US money all over the world, protected by US military technology. Now swap Russia with USA, and USA with China, 1980 with 2040. 2030?
...at the end of today. <<FTFY
today, there is not, but autocratic regimes create their own reasons to have major conflicts. They are expansionist, and will keep at it until stopped. Moreover, the longer they are allowed to engage in bad behavior, the larger the conflict that will be required to fix the problem. CCP already has a long history with expansionist actions in Tibet, HK, Taiwan, the 9-dash line, is running concentration camps for Uyghurs, and working it's Belt and Road plan to capture poorer nations in debt traps. Yet their rhetoric is all about how the US is being the aggressor when it practices Freedom Of Navigation exercises in international waters, or is "interfering in internal affairs" by working w/Taiwan.
They will not let these topics go until they win, and they will always find new excuses to expand. Their excuses for current expansion are 100% bullsh*t, why would you expect them to not make new ones when convenient? It's their standard mode of operating.
If you think this will somehow end by itself, you make many wrong assumptions about how autocracies work, or you know something that no one else does about how to stop this, and should share it in the interest of world peace.
It's impossible to know what's coming in the distant future, but it doesn't feel like any of our problems are insurmountable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002WWII was won largely on American manufacturing prowess. As the war started in Europe, we had a grand total of 39 tanks. But American manufacturing might was focused on the war effort. Liberty ships launched at a rate of two every three days. 25-35K tanks rolled off the US assembly lines every year, while the Germans could produce only 3K, 5K, 11K, and 18K in 1941-44, respectively. Etc., etc, etc.
However, right now, the US produces barely any microchips, which are pretty much critical to every technology.
Worse yet, having a shortage of conventional technology, such as smart weapons shortens the time to the point where the choice becomes to escalate to nukes or lose.
But thank you for providing a fine example of the "it'll be fine" sort of myopia that brought us to this mess -- it always feels nice to look at our advantages and think everything else is a tail risk. But when the tail risk happens, it's over.
The only important thing where we seem to be at a serious disadvantage is in chip fab, but there are several companies looking to break ground on new facilities in the US in the next few years.
Trying to hand-wring over an unlikely war seems unproductive. There are two major powers today, and we have an extant model in living memory for how to keep tensions below a critical level. The Chinese plan to compete with the West via the Belt and Road initiative seems unlikely to lead to anything other than economic conflict.
Sure, continued appeasement can 'keep the peace'. But it will be at the cost of sacrificing Taiwan and everythign in the 9-dashed line to the fate of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. And then whatever else nearby that they will decide to fabricate a claim for. And so forth, and so forth, and so forth.
That is the bargain that authoritarians always strike - constantly cheating around the edges - what's mine is mine and what's yours is up for grabs.
So, people not thinking strongly or long term can argue that "it's unlikely", "it's not worth a conflict", etc. Meanwhile more territory and people fall under authoritarian control.
If it is unlikely, it is because people want to keep their heads in the sand and appease instead of make current conflict. It's a fools game
There's a tendency in the West to airbrush history, and pretend that the opening to China was just a result of business lobbies. There was an intentional policy decision based on 'liberalization through trade' theory, which managed to be one of the most disastrous theories out there (far more disastrous than 2000-era US WoT policies). This was pushed by politicians and academics, and up until the oughts businesses were more reacting to the policy as creating it.
From a BBC article yesterday [0]:
"Indeed the US trade representative responsible for negotiating China's WTO deal, Charlene Barshefsky, told a Washington International Trade Association panel this week that China's economic model "somewhat disproved" the Western view that "you can't have an innovative society, and political control""
I can sort of see how the idea took hold, as the previous large authoritarian states in USSR and CCP had so dramatically and consistently underperformed (to be polite) the democracies that it would seem that the converse would be true, that economic freedom would force democracy.
So, ya, it would seem like a good hypothesis, but I sure wouldn't bet a lot on it without solid testing.
Yet, the political leaders all turned out to be fools and bet the entire future of democracy itself on that notion.
Then, combine that with the MBA idea that the only thing important is the ideas and management and trifling things like manufacturing can be outsourced to their cheapest locale and that manufacturing know-how, innovation, and supply chain control don't matter, and we've come to the brink of destroying the free world.
Now, we have a historical fight on our hands to recover from these blunders.
And yet it was “lost” (for a variety of reasons) and was still killing people as late as 1911.
A related point: numerically there are far more low level developers now than there were in past he idealizes. No such knowledge is being forgotten, it is used and innovated upon regularly. It may be in less frequent use, but is still there if needed.
C and ASM are still some of the most popular languages in the world. But for a modern CPU, there are machines in the production process that only a single company in the world can make.
We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C.
And most of the hard trial-and-error discovery and experimentation has been done already, so it should not take 50 years to recover 50 years of historical progress. A process from 1970 can be done in the garage with 'just' a microscope and projector (and a lot of skill and hard work!): http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/
I agree with this. I want to add that I think if the knowledge of modern CPUs is somehow lost, it won't be catastrophic, merely crippling, since there are literally tens of thousands of CS students every year learning how to build a CPU from electronic circuits.
We will revert to slow and bulky CPUs, be able to run C on them, and in due time rediscover and reëngineer miniaturisation, superscalar multithreading, etc.
https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
If such a device was considered advanced or cutting edge or of note back then then wouldn't we expect some reference to the device?
"There are quite a few mentions of devices that sound a bit like the Antikythera mechanism"
https://youtu.be/Iv-zWbxm2lY?t=2695
Jo Marchant is an award-winning science journalist and author of several popular science books including Decoding the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world’s first computer and the New York Times bestseller Cure: A journey into the science of mind over body (both shortlisted for the Royal Society science books prize). She has a PhD in genetics, and has worked as a senior editor at New Scientist and at Nature.
I don't think there is any record of this device existing other than the device itself, and mention of it after its discovery in the early 1900s.
to some that will be proof that it is not truly an ancient device, and I think that is hogwash. most things just don't last that long, especially paper, which is where mention of the device would be found, if it ever is found.
Could be this mechanism was just an exquisite commission for a wealthy dude to keep on his boat.
the math used in the device is not complex, nor is its construction. it is only impressive to us because of what we assume about cultures of that time: that they are dumber than we are, less intelligent.
they were just as smart as us, but they were far fewer in number, and had many more limitations than we have when it comes to the library of technologies and skills they can call on to accomplish their goals.
The Space X Merlins have a much better thrust-to-weight ratio in the same gas generator cycle class, the Russian RD-180 powering the Atlas V is using oxygen rich staged combustion and is much more efficient.
And the current trend seems to be clearly liquid methane and liquid oxygen, covered by the phenomenal Raptor engine from Space X, the BE-4 from Blue origin and many smaller ones.
So hardly any regression on the chemical rocket engine front - pretty much the opposite, thankfully!
On the nuclear thermal rocket front on the other hand - yeah, we really did regress there. :P From almost flight ready NERVA examples in the 60s/70s to basically nothing even remotely flight ready today...
e: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life (https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...)
Math.pow(.99999, 1) - One dependency.
Math.pow(.99999, 2) - Two dependencies.
...
Math.pow(.99999, N) - N dependencies.
There's other factors, but that's the one I'd point out.
He compares this situation to the state of software development today. It's a sobering watch.
https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk