It's a half-baked, rushed out, speculative attempt to capture developer mindshare and establish an ecosystem/moat early in a (perceived) market. It's a desperate "standard" muscled in by Amazon/Claude, similar to their overwrought "Smithy" IDL that basically nobody outside the Amazon SDK team chooses to use for API/Schema management. It will end up in that same niche in the long term, most likely... AWS/Amazon/Claude specific app integrations, buried underneath some other 3rd party framework that abstracts it away and makes the "spec" irrelevant.
As long as MCP "just works" (and it does) and is relatively simple enough, then simply by being first, rather than being best, is what made it successful.
It's already gone so viral it's practically entrenched already, permanently. Everyone has invested too much time saying how much they love MCP. If we do find something cleaner it will still be called MCP, and it will be considered a 'variation' (new streaming approach maybe) on MCP rather than some competitor protocol replacing it. Maybe it will be called 'MCP 2.0' but it will be mostly the same and retain the MCP name for decades to come, I think.
MCP and Smithy aren’t comparable. Smithy is an internal tool used by almost every single team (it is used far, far more widely than just the SDK teams) at Amazon to define APIs and generate API servers/clients. It was released publicly because “why not?”, but I assure you that Amazon doesn’t care if you use it or not.
I'm not sure about his reasoning why, but I also personally have arrived at the conclusion this new Product is kind of just another new Games/Sports/Entertainment type service rather than some sort of "serious" technology
The two terms imply "engineering" varies along only one dimension. I personally don't find these terms useful or constructive for anything apart from "talking smack" about engineering decisions outside of your control, influence, or understanding.
It might make more sense when you don't simply view it as demonstration of scientific achievement. Demonstrating dominance in the field of rapidly delivering large payloads, at the press of a button, to anywhere on the surface of the earth (even the damn moon!) likely played/still plays an outsized role in game-theoretic political/military calculations aiming to deter existential threats.
> we have not succeeded in replicating that milestone
it's hard to succeed at something you aren't even trying for in the first place. the moon landing was funded during the cold war where ICBM adjacent knowledge was required in the face of an existential threat. it wasn't solely for the benefit of shared global human knowledge/progress or whatever. for the US, there's a lot more to lose than gain in terms of "face" by attempting a victory lap against the rest of the world. executing any sort of manned moon or mars mission won't be taken seriously by the US until there's real political/economic pressure to do so (in the form of maybe China laying down a roadmap to land on mars or something).
Actually, I'm glad they didn't. There are finite resources available, and it may be a less popular opinion but I think it can be used in better ways than to explore Moon more.
If we'd put more efforts into settling space, the demand for photovoltaics would have been higher. That might have pushed us down the learning curve faster and PV might have started turning coal power plants into stranded assets in the aughts or even the 90's instead of the teens. It's a tough what-if to model.
I'm saying this as a former aerospace worker, but this logic was always lost on me. If something isn't worth doing for it's own sake, then I don't think it's worth doing. If we want better PV, we should prioritize developing PV irrespective of a space program. The idea of tangential benefits strikes me as just looking for a silver lining on otherwise indefensible reasoning.
No one embarks on enterprises of this scale for their own sake, they do it because it's profitable. Sometimes the R&D needed to bootstrap new technology isn't profitable, even if it would be once developed. The only way to force organizational structures (e.g. the government) to do this development is to tie it to another goal, like beating the USSR. This was the case with a lot of other technologies we got out of the space program.
The hardest part of any progress is the social engineering.
>The only way to force organizational structures (e.g. the government) to do this development is to tie it to another goal
I’m usually pretty much against the “The ends justify the means” philosophy. It’s just too easy to rationalize doing bad things as a way to a potentially good result.
I don’t think the profit motive needs to always be aligned, but the value system does. In this case, the US valued “beating” the USSR for existential reasons. Whether it was profitable or not didn’t factor into the equation much.
I think the point is there would probably be many positive side effects and discoveries on the way somewhere that we should be going anyway. Some consider space and becoming interplanetary not just worth doing but completely imperative.
Sadly it would be such a long way no politician is incentivized to get behind it. Also people can be jerks so while you're busy with this someone could just start a war with you.
>I think the point is there would probably be many positive side effects and discoveries on the way somewhere that we should be going anyway
“Doing it for side effects” misses the whole point. Like I already said, if you can state the desired side effects, it’s better just to focus on developing them directly. If you can’t specify the desired side effects, it’s not a good goal. It’s just wishful, optimistic thinking and a bad strategy in a resource constrained environment.
Would you take a medication, not for its prescribed goal, but rather for its “potential” (yet undefined) side effects? Wouldn’t you rather just take a different medication that targets the desired outcome directly?
If you’re alluding to the idea of becoming an interplanetary species, I think the counter argument is that any risk that would mitigate would be more easily mitigated by other means. E.g., it would be much, much easier to “fix” the earth climate than terraform Mars. Redirecting an asteroid is potentially a good case, but the nature of the space program is mostly focused on human rated programs which aren’t needed for that.
Its not for side effects it's for direct effects. Side effects are bonuses. If you disagree that direct effects are useful and think we should never leave the planet then that's a different discussion.
That's exactly the discussion, though. The OP was saying the photovoltaic industry wouldn't be at where's it is today without the space program and it could be even further along if we dedicated more resources to space. Their value of the space program was explicitly defined by it's side effects. They made no claim that the space program was implicitly good for it's own sake. They never claimed we "should be going to outer space anyway," they claimed if we had dedicated more effort to fiddling around in space we'd be closer to replacing coal plants with PV.
>"If we'd put more efforts into settling space, the demand for photovoltaics would have been higher. That might have pushed us down the learning curve faster and PV might have started turning coal power plants into stranded assets in the aughts or even the 90's instead of the teens."
They mentioned nothing of value inherent to exploring space but they certainly imply the real value is in "turning coal power plants into stranded assets." Space exploration is only a means to that end, not an end unto itself.
Can you point to anything in that statement that implies space exploration is (in your words) the intended direct effect? I think you're layering your own bias/values into their statement rather than taking their statement at face value.
I get where you’re coming from, but I think that’s wrong given the context. The OP was in response to someone saying they wish we didn’t spend so money on the space program. So we’re starting from a place where whether or not it is imperative is being questioned, and in response they pointed to its tangential effects.
Sure. But if those two groups can never see eye to eye it makes sense: one group feels good for moving towards an end goal, the other group gets positive side effects from relevant progress. Everyone wins.
To me there is no question about it, putting all eggs in one basket is always bad and diversification is good and the only reason not to explore space is short sighted thinking ("I personally don't get to reap the results in my lifetime so it is a waste to me"). Environmental issues on the planet also suffer from this.
It’s an argument about prioritization in a resource constrained environment. They’re saying there are bigger fish to fry. You can even be “pro-space exploration for its own sake” and still think it’s not a wise investment at a particular time. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive groups.
You're still stuck in the mindset that space is a means to an end. If your plan is to exploit space for resources, it’s proving my point. You’re implying space exploration is just a means for resources and not an end unto itself. The fact that you use "may" is implying you're stretching to look for a silver lining to justify the answer.
And at least with current tech, the ARM programs show its too resource intensive to make sense in that regard. In other words, if there are other short-to-medium term problems that are competing for that funding (ie reality), there isn’t really a good case to be made that it’s a good way to spend constrained resources
Nothing is generally an end in itself. You get somewhere and then you see more figurative places to go. But staying home is the best way to never know they exist.
This is a very SV, production-oriented mindset. Everything is a means to an end, to check a box, to move to the next. However, not everyone thinks that way. I'd argue it's not a particularly healthy point of view. If you extend it to its inevitable conclusion, every step in your life is only meaningful because it leads to the next...and ultimately everything culminates in one's death, meaning nothing except your death was of any meaning. I'd encourage you to read Oliver Burkeman's "Four Thousand Weeks" to get a different perspective on how some things are an end to themselves.
I think there's a case to be made that exploration is an end of itself (this is the case made in the movie Interstellar) but that seems to be different that the point the OP made and that you're arguing with resources etc.
Ah, yes, the old fallacious trope of "if they didn't spend the money on X they would have spent it on Y". It is, of course, true as long a Y is luxury yachts or maybe the enforcement of personal power such as weapons of mass destruction.
Even today there is very little effort to end poverty or cure cancer but trillions spent on massive manly flexes and the accumulation of every-increasing personal wealth by ever decreasing numbers of individuals. Since we haven't spent the money here on Earth to explore the moon in the last 50 years do we have any proof we have spent it on the better ways instead?
"there is very little effort to end poverty or cure cancer"
Social spending tends to be the most important budget item across most of the West and cancer is being attacked from all sides, with significant improvements. It is nevertheless a really complicated set of diseases (I recommend "The Emperor of All Maladies", an interesting book on cancer).
If this is "very little", I am not sure what would satisfy you.
Cancer treatment spending is astronomical, but cancer research spending is indeed low. It's less than $5 billion per year across the entire planet, and funding has been declining year-on-year [0]. That's less than Twitter's annual revenue (before recent events). Seems like "very little" to me.
> Even today there is very little effort to end poverty
Why would powers 'in power' ever even attempted that? Yes it looks nice on the paper (just before the elections), but if you do primary-school math there are few obvious benefits for the ones on the rich side, and many drawbacks. Drawbacks that electorate notices immediately.
Cheap chinese (or anywhere else) electronics, clothing, heck almost anything. Almost everybody wants that, even posh Swiss folks I interact daily with, which put a lot of emphasis on quality over quantity, save here and there and go for the cheapest stuff available, at cheapest store possible.
If you want to see real effects of cca equality go to places with strong middle class, ie Nordics or Switzerland (where I live). Very different than pyramid bubbles like ie Singapore, at least as per my colleagues feedback. You can afford significantly less than in cheaper neighbors, services cost a small fortune. Yes even Luigi fixing your drain will send you eye-watering bill, he still lives in same expensive society like rest of us and wants to send his kids to same university like you. The cost of stability and semi-equality is not small. I am still up for it due to overall positive effects on society and its future, but not everybody automatically is - focusing just on numbers can easily sway people towards different opinions.
I'd say best efforts I've seen are 'we help you to help yourself', with very variable success, ie large parts of Africa seems to be stuck in some form of vicious circle for decades.
Actually space is (probably) infinite, so there are potentially infinite ressources avaiable, if we choose to invest in the next step, even if that investment only will pay out in the long run.
I am not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light, the volume of space we will ever be able to access is finite, roughly that of the galactic supercluster we're in.
For all practical matters, I think it can be considered infinite. (And the theoretical limits might not be fixed either)
But the question is always, how much of that is within our reach.
Currently nothing out of earth on an economical base. So I also see the point we have to set priorities.
But currently there is a big focus on war, rather than climate change etc. and with more crisis, people tend to think even more short term. Space on the other hand can give that long term thinking effect, that can people make consider whether fighting for the limited ressources on earth is the only way. And maybe instead unite forces for benefit of all of mankind (and possibly life itself).
This isn't even close to true. In addition to what the other comment points out about eventually losing causal contact with all parts of the observable universe that aren't already gravitionally bound to the same supercluster as the Milky Way, even something like breadth-first search of the entire local supercluster at near the speed of light would take more time than the local supercluster will still exist. The universe will run out of hydrogen and stars won't exist any more long before you can cover all of even the tiniest portions of infinite space.
No. For all practical matters, accessible space is FINITE, and actually gets smaller all the time due to accelerating expansion of the universe. In about 150 billion years all galaxies outside the Local Supercluster will pass behind the cosmological horizon.
"For all practical matters, accessible space is FINITE"
I think, this is what I said:
"But the question is always, how much of that is within our reach."
Currently that is only earth. With some steps up, you can have all the other planets in this system plus the asteroid belt. Step further up and you have lots and lots of other star systems, the cosmological theoretical limits you are citing are not really an issue on the timeframe that matters to us - space tech is and the limits how fast we can make rockets, or find other ways to take a short path.
The particularly informed of humanity are very commonly wrong in their assessments, persistent underestimation, of the speed of change and what actually changes. It's because very few people know how to think effectively.
Failures of extrapolation are most often the cause; not understanding how to think properly, tripping into 2D thinking (extrapolating via some magic forward line, thinking that's how things actually work in reality) and bumping into ignorant logic failures over and over again (associating progress on one thing into broad assumptions that everything of course will progress just like that too, when the things and their potential for progress aren't so tightly bound).
Because X thing progressed rapidly, of course we'll have flying cars in 30 or 50 years. One of the classic failures of ignorant flat thinking of the 20th century. People should ask more questions.
Nobody has proven that they can predict the future reliably, and I doubt anyone can. They'd be golfing with Warren Buffett if they could. For one, predicting the future requires intimate knowledge of multiple disciplines. A space expert isn't going to understand computer chips well enough, for example.
In the 1970s it was also popular to fear grave resource shortages here on Earth. Turning to space was an easy low-imagination solution when you weren’t seriously considering the logistics of how to make it happen. It’s more a manifestation of the fears of the day than anything else.
This shortages haven’t really materialized. If anything we have far too much oil, not too little, and can keep on burning it for a long long time (and suffering consequences). Minerals for your car batteries? We can have lots by just seabed-mining right next to some sensitive ecosystems. Etc, etc.
The Space Shuttle was developed as a covert weapons program as well, for deploying nuclear warheads directly from orbit to give enemies a much shorter response window. This is why the Soviets quickly developed their own space shuttle program, because they recognized the military purpose behind it.
There's a radical school of thinking of which I don't agree 100%, which is that the Space Shuttle program was a Cold War remnant stuck in a sunk cost fallacy, and set back space exploration for decades since it was extremely expensive and completely limited to LEO and siphoned funds that could've been used for more efficient rockets and modular stations beyond LEO.
> The Space Shuttle was developed as a covert weapons program as well, for deploying nuclear warheads directly from orbit to give enemies a much shorter response window.
You need to cite this.
While NASA's own history ("The Space Shuttle Decision", pub. no. SP-4221) describes the way in which the STS design was rescued from cancellation through Air Force-requested modifications to support satellite-capture missions which after Challenger never materialized, I have never seen any reference in any source to support the idea that the Shuttle was designed to serve as an orbital bombardment system in direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Why do you think Outer Space Treaty will matter in event of a hot war between two nuclear superpowers? NPT was signed a year earlier and it has been continuously violated by signatory powers to this day.
Your own source describes the idea that this was a program design goal as a "myth," and clarifies that it was born of a Soviet capabilities analysis suggesting that this theoretically could be done with the Shuttle, not that there existed any evidence that it was intended.
On the latter point you have your causation backward. The intent of treaties like the Outer Space Treaty was to reduce the likelihood of a hot war by interdicting the use of technologies that would destabilize the strategic balance.
Treaties work until they don't, and what can cause an escalation is future knowledge beyond our abilities to predict. In event of a hot war, none of these treaties would've mattered.
What ignorance? That was sarcasm; I'm an American, but I like to hope I'm not a stupid American.
It's fair to say that a promise not to risk escalation isn't the same as not risking escalation. But having made the promise used to count for something, too. Now? Especially with all the reciprocal geopolitical damnfoolishness going on in Eastern Europe, who the hell knows?
That said, Russia has telescopes, and the X-37B by all reports isn't as stealthy as its designers would like it to be. While the absurdity of US (and Russian!) military planners is always hard to overestimate, I'd still be surprised to learn anyone seriously expected to successfully steal a march this way.
Huh? I've never read about the shuttle being developed to deploy nuclear weapons. The idea of launching a warhead with the shuttle, which itself requires an immense amount of resources to leave the launch pad, only to just send the warhead back down to earth instead of just... launching the warhead from a slim little ICBM that a submarine is carrying... doesn't make a lot of sense. Warheads aren't designed to sit orbiting in space waiting to launch either--their payloads are constantly decaying and only have a limited service life. I can't see it ever making sense to not launch them from subs under the ocean.
AFAIK the shuttle was intended to be a "tow truck" for satellites, able to launch and service them in low Earth orbit. Many of those satellites were for spying and espionage.
Why do you think shuttles can "tow" satellites but not warheads? Shuttles can stay in orbit for weeks so they are reserved for when tensions are high. Launching anything from the surface will be almost immediately detected, giving opponents far more time to respond than something that immediately begins re-entry the moment it is deployed from orbit.
If you're going full fantasy thinking (since launching weapons from space would violate every weapons treaty both the US and USSR signed) the shuttle would have been an enormous and obvious target as it orbited Earth. The shuttle could have easily been knocked out by an ICBM and sub orbital weapon detonation--it had no real way to avoid it even if it knew weapons were being launched at it.
If you're arguing there's some need for faster response than a nuclear sub launch, launching nuclear cruise missiles from B2 bombers makes far more sense than lugging warheads up to low orbit. We have more B2s than we ever had shuttles.
But it just does not make sense vs. submarines as a launch platform. Three or four shuttles worth of weapons is nothing compared to a single Ohio class nuclear sub (20 missiles alone, and there are 18 of those subs in the US Navy).
You are not getting it. You simply are not getting it. That's okay though, conventional thinking is overly predominant after all and it's okay that you can't escape from it.
Also, treaties mean jack shit. Both countries pledged ultimate elimination of nuclear armament in NPT and look at where we are now? Do you think any treaty will matter if a hot nuclear war breaks out between two nuclear powers? Pure naïveté is what you have.
This is ridiculous logic. Sure, the Shuttle was technically capable of carrying a nuclear weapon since well, it could carry payloads. But it wasn't specifically designed for that purpose, just as how the Falcon 9 isn't designed specifically to carry loitering nuclear weapons either, but is perfectly capable of doing so.
If the US wanted to station nukes in orbit, they wouldn't do something as dumb as putting them up using a crew. They'd do what any sane person would do and put them on an uncrewed nuclear rated vehicle (ie the Delta/Atlas rockets). It would be way cheaper, and most importantly, would get around the concern of risking the crew.
If the concern was only launching them when tensions are high, the US has a 'rapid launch availability' program for launch providers to be paid to be always available for emergency launches. The Shuttle was essentially incapable of a similar rapid availability due to how delicate it was.
On top of all that, what exactly do you think a ~30 minute early nuke launch (compared against ICBMs) would accomplish against the only two targets the US has been in any position of potentially going to nuclear war against? The number of nukes (optimistically ~14) that a Shuttle could carry can't take out Russia or China's retaliation framework on its own.
Also on the edge of my seat here, wondering what field it could be from. My ChatGPT-esque BS story is that this symbol was misplaced alongside more abstract math-y symbols and was actually briefly used in schematics to identify "lightning conductor" components shown here https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/wp-content/uploads... ... plausible, yes?
It’s a good theory, but shouldn’t it show up regularly in electrical schematics then? It doesn’t sound like anyone in any particular fields (other than possibly German mathematics or Dutch economics) has been able to point to historical common usage.
device or chip manufacturers won't spend the money to develop/support/maintain in-kernel linux drivers if they don't think it will ultimately net them enough of an ROI based on sales of the corresponding device or chip. the market for non-carrier branded, end user hackable, linux based home routers is pretty small and probably shrinking as a percent of the overall market for wifi chipped devices.
I think it's fine to assume the more likely interpretation that this company simply isn't interested in the format anymore, rather than whatever larger stretch you're describing here. "You don't want to keep dead code around." That's rich :) maybe if this was some one person hobby project or something.
I strongly disagree with "more likely interpretation". For several reasons:
- FireFox & Safari also don't fully support it. For your claim to be true, Google would need to be in control of them, too.
- I still get nag emails that I'm long overdue to remove dead test code from my Chromium tests. I'm being a bad person to other Chromium devs by being lazy and not getting around to it.
I think it is far more likely that they ran a test and know they're ready to support JPEG XL when the time comes. And that time (IMHO) is when there is already wide spread support outside of browsers. Browsers should be the last ones to add it. Not the first.
Chrome supports plenty of things that are unsupported by Firefox and Safari. E.g. you get set the audio sink id on individual media elements in Chrome. You can’t do that in Safari and Firefox.
Cleaning up code is something I get great pleasure. It not only makes navigating the code base easier for people new to the code base won't look at something that isn't ever actually run in production. It also prevents people from depending on something that we don't really want to be used anymore.
The current market/use-case for "Smart Grid" technologies is in replacing the various legacy control system interfaces within Plants with a single (IP-based) one for the immediate goal of reducing opex through synergies within the Plant and to the edges of that Plant operator's owned infrastructures. The next step, obviously the hardest part, is establishing and implementing IP-based standards that facilitate the realtime brokering of inputs/outputs between different, potentially competing operators. This is the same issue as the competing/proprietary residential IoT standards that have been holding back the "Smart Home". This stuff only makes economic sense for vertically-integrated players (like Duke Energy) that benefit from the opex reduction. Any sort of "value-added" capabilities are only a bonus to that opex reduction and aren't enough of an ROI by themselves.
