- chip design - modern processors are not fundamentally different from 8086, which also belongs in a museum. Sure, there's much higher transistor density and advances like pipelining, branch prediction, multiple cores etc. but fundamentally it's still the same physics and design.

- machine learning - aren't modern deep networks just scaled up versions (with some new architectural components although one can argue that even these were discovered in the 80s and 90s) of old ideas that still use gradient descent and backpropagation. this too sounds like incremental progress.

- commercial aircraft - aren't modern planes just incremental advances of 50-year old planes (the 747 is from the 60s). sure, they are more efficient, use lighter composites etc.

I guess my point is that either (a) technology as a whole has been making incremental progress when viewed from a certain lens, or (b) that while, superficially, a lot of technology still follows designs discovered decades ago, there have been substantial and deep improvements at various lower levels of the "stack".

Maybe a concrete way of looking at this particular issue would be to compare metrics like efficiency of the engines (is amount of thrust * time thrust was produced for / amount of fuel used = change in momentum / amount of fuel used, a useful metric?) or just raw amount of thrust produced? Then one could argue that an engine is essentially still the same as ones from a few decades ago.

I’m not sure your comparison makes sense. The ability to develop chips is what i’m pointing out. That does not exist everywhere and developing that today is a monumental task. This is why chip design is limited to a few countries and fabrication to even fewer ones.

None of this stuff was designed in house.

In fact Indian rockets use computers fully made in India, and I think none of its software is taken from anywhere.

There were several attempts to derail its space program like mysterious deaths of Homi Baba, Vikram Sarabhai, arrests of Nambi Narayanan and defaming Madhava Nair, but Indian space program like a tortoise has put one foot forward every time.

The limiting factor for ISRO is not design and R&D, but it's the capacity of Indian industry to deliver. I think its rocket development is open source, any Indian industry can take its blueprints and volunteer to supply parts.

How they [ISRO] stir up such a passion amongst their employees is a mystery.

/s

Just fuck you bigots!

Shameful.

Because I'm tired of seeing these bigots come crawling out of the woodwork any time India does something nice.