"sammeln" can have multiple translations. "Collect" would be more like "einsammeln". In the context of "Pilze sammeln", you'd use "forage". You forage for food.
namely your high cost weapons take out air defense capability, so you can stop using them and use cheaper more numerous systems to hit the now undefended targets.
That makes no sense to me. Why would I spend millions times, dunno how many do you need for a guaranteed kill for an S-400, if you could spend hundreds of thousands on cheaper ways to kill the same S-400, while the S-400 still defends itself with millions worth of its own missiles?
That's precisely what Ukraine was/is doing and has developed. The West provided lots of military support, including the US of course, but way not enough as we can see now play out in even the US itself vs. Iran. They developed cheap drones that can shoot down cheaper Shaheds. Shaheds that are way too cheap to use regular interceptors for. But even cheaper drones tip the scales back.
Why would I want to waste Tomahawks 1:1 vs. S-400 interceptors, if I can kill it with a much cheaper drone swarm?
Not saying those precise conditions/weapons exist today. I have no idea. But if they did, why would I still waste my high cost weapons.
Agreed. Start with the low cost munitions in a zergling rush. Maybe it gets through, maybe it does not, but the defenders will still have to expend their interceptors. Only if the low cost stuff proves ineffective, follow-on with the better equipment.
Because your low cost weapons will be intercepted by their low cost weapons.
The enemy gets a say in your plans, and is much more likely to have low cost weapons available then high cost ones.
The interceptor for a SHAHED is a quadcopter which doesn't need to fly as far or carry as much payload. Anyone can build this.
The interceptor for an Iskander ballistic missile is a Patriot interceptor: literally nothing else can successfully stop it reliably. Only the US can build this.
If your attacking systems are cheap, then the enemy can field just as many: Russia has a lot of drones in Ukraine now too, they were just playing catch up.
"The next war" won't have surprise drones as a problem, it'll have highly developed and optimized drone and counter drone systems.
Not quite the scenario from my parent. They said "high cost weapons taking out air defenses". Whatever the US equivalent of an Iskander would be (I used a Tomahawk as an example), the S-400 (i.e. Patriot "equivalent") would be used to defend against it at first/in his scenario.
If you want to turn it around, sure. Let's see how you'd want to take out a Patriot: high cost weapons, like an Iskander might try it? Costs about as much as a Tomahawk? Would need multiple ones, because the Patriot would defend itself against even multiple ones? But the Patriots cost as much and you want multiple interceptors for each Iskander sent its way?
What if I could send, for less money/resources, a drone swarm that also takes out the Patriot or at least expends more money/resources in interceptors shot from it, than I had to spend on the drone swarm?
I totally agree, it's "just a race". If I build an offensive drone swarm for $x, which is less than your high cost interceptors, you better build an "anti drone whatever thingie" (which might be anti-drone drone swarms) that's even cheaper.
But, thanks, essentially you're agreeing with me: Don't use your high cost stuff to take out SAMs and then use cheap drones. Instead, use cheaper stuff to swarm it out of existence. Just gotta be faster at being cheaper. Doesn't matter if you're the attacker or defender.
"what if I just had a better system with no downsides or logistical costs that was also cheaper".
In reality: Ukraine reliably downs Shaheds using a mix of low cost technologies.
They mostly can't defend against ballistic missiles without high cost interceptors.
The Shaheds could do a lot of damage to the Patriot site if they could hit it...but they never get anywhere near it. That's the point: your low cost system does not have the capability to threaten the high cost one.
And in all this you've forgotten that attacking the SAM site is only being done to enable other operational objectives. The Patriot battery is defending targets many times it's value, including the logistics and launch sites of all those low cost defensive systems - or the logistics and launch sites of your own low cost offensive systems.
To the article: the Tomahawk missile costs about $2 million per shot. Assuming this article is true, the missile in question gives you maybe a 20:1 cost advantage...but can it do the same mission? Does it have the same range, or targeting, or precision? If you cannot fire these from the same range as a tomahawk, or they don't realiably hit targets, then they can be substantially worse for a much higher logistics cost to deploy (perhaps total: the truck blowing up because you had to drive it to the front line is rather a problem).
This so much. As a user, especially a private user, I want my apps I can install and run locally, no internet connection, nobody forces updates on me for an app that does exactly what I need and I'm used to it.
As a developer, SaaS all the way. I really really love not having to deal with versions, release branches galore, hotfixes on different releases and all that jazz. I'm so glad I could leave that behind and we have a single Cloud "version" i.e. whatever the latest commit on the main branch is. Sure we might be a few commits behind head in what's actually currently deployed to all the production envs but that's so much more manageable than thousands upon thousands of customers on different versions and with direct control over your database. We also have a non-SaaS version we still support and I'm so glad I don't have to deal with it any longer and someone else does. Very bad memories of customers telling you they didn't do something and when you get the logs/database excerpt (finally, after spending way too much times debugging and talking to them already) you can clearly see that they did fudge with the database ...
I'm normally firmly against piracy, because I believe it to be morally equivalent to theft and I want to fund the artists making stuff I enjoy. But if Valve shreds my purchases when Gabe dies or retires, I will hoist the black flag on those games and not feel an ounce of guilt. As the saying says: if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
But we'll see. I hope it doesn't come to that. That said, I'm trying to change my purchase habits over to GOG because even if Gabe's successor doesn't screw over the Steam customers, eventually someone will. With GOG there's no possibility of the games I pay for being taken away from me.
They have shown its a wildly successful model. They would be very crazy if they changed it, and it would make them vulnerable to Epic and the Windows store. It's more likely that your OS/ hardware will change in a way that isn't supported by an old game.
Unfortunately, "this is a wildly successful model that prints money for us with almost no upkeep required" has historically not been a bulletproof argument when new management comes in and wants to prove themselves. Human beings are not necessarily rational and the kinds of people that tend to rise to the top of large corporations don't necessarily have the best interests of customers or the business itself in mind.
That being said, I believe that Gabe is taking his "succession planning" seriously, so I'd be fairly optimistic for the next decade at least.
One thing to keep in mind is that Valve is fully private so Gabe can not just be replaced by some random person by a board of directors like in other companies.
He probably already has a will set up that details how ownership should be transferred.
It is, but I'm not sure why that's relevant? xdertz's point wasn't, "Valve is private and therefore it engages in ethical consumer practices"; the point was "Valve engages in relatively ethical practices and because it's private, the board can't replace Gabe with a CEO who would engage in more unethical practices".
Not sure if this is relevant, but I have read reports[1] that Tencent currently holds a 28% stake in Epic Games. So private, but with unknown levels of ownership.
That was literally the first thing I thought reading from OP comment down to your parent.
Then I thought: Sure but management made the devs promise these things. We don't do it of our own volition (exceptions prove the rule - some people are conditioned to do it of course).
I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best
Nyes. I think what we're doing is that these new guys are coming in and using AI and trying to tell us how super awesome and powerful they are because of AI and that nothing could ever go wrong.
It is quite insane to me to expect someone who just started to fully build google.com and all of it's infra,security,etc.
But it's not us expecting them to do it. It's them telling us they can do it coz they have AI.
Look, I've been using Claude and Codex agents for about 6 months now, full time for coding (when I code) essentially (coz I can't ask my people to use a tool I have no experience with myself, so I purposefully forced myself to use the agent and only the agents as much as I could bear, only resolving to manual changes in very very few instances. And there have been many many frustrations, believe me).
The amount of times that even Seniors have just verbatim pasted Claude analyses as truth to me, when it was apparent after the first read through of the output, that it wasn't true is amazing. How we expect juniors that have way less developed "spidey senses" to successfully navigate that is beyond me. Most people are trusting by default. They shouldn't be, but it's human nature for most of us. For some it isn't, like myself. I'm already the dude that asks too many questions of humans when they're not clear on what they assumed vs. have verified.
Like, example, I showed an analysis, full page in a slack thread recently to one of my Seniors (made by some other Senior) and tell me where they think it shows that it's BS and not true. He couldn't do it. He tried over and over and he was unable to. I read it and the second paragraph out of lots of them was BS and just not true. Easy to verify. Claude didn't have access to the actual information (because of various circumstances) but just made something up. Said the relevant code was deployed, thus XYZ was true. Listed lots of extra analysis after that, which sounded reasonable and probably was, if the premise was correct. Just it wasn't. The code had never been released at that point.
I've been doing the same kind of "spidey senses are tingling" comments and questions back to people for lots and lots of years. And others are usually not good with that sort of thing (exceptions prove the rule). Coz people do the same kind of "BS-ing" that Claude et. al. do. Claude is generally "better" about questioning his/her (yes, it works both ways) judgement actually than people, which in many cases have feelings attached to their investigations (even if they very blatantly didn't check something and just assumed it - pre AI - all by themselves).
Look, as a software dev myself, I really like that my company lets us use our computers the way we see fit. Pre- or post-AI with no restrictive lockdown. Been there, hated that.
But I totally get the freaking out over "normal devs". The amount of stuff most people think is reasonable, AI or not, is mind boggling. For myself of course I like to just be able to be responsible myself. But as a security team I'd also be freaking out.
Like, the amount of people that find our super boring, totally corporate "security training videos", helpful and insightful and "oh dang I'd never have thought of that!" is mind boggling all by itself. Never mind any actual security training that'd be useful to someone with half a brain. You can literally just click through the 8+ hours of stuff you're supposed to watch / answer / do in 30 minutes.
I use Claude. I use Codex. I've never heard of or used Meta AI. Nor do I have a Facebook account. Never have, never will.
I am also a software developer. So while the numbers of "people" that use one AI or another may be higher than either of these, it's not a useful metric for myself.
That's fine. I'm not making a value judgement about which LLMs you should use, if any.
I'm only pushing back against someone thinking "oh HN talks about Claude a lot, therefore Claude must be extremely popular". The information bubble is a real problem.
This. Same timeframe and I've lived through both lots of lightning storms and in areas with lots of power failures. Some of them intermittent and essentially caused by transformers blowing up. Like earlier this winter, we had multiple storms where you'd hear a transformer blow up, in many cases even seeing the sky light up as well from it, power going out, couple seconds, power coming back, next transformer blowing out, rinse, repeat.
On the other hand I've read about plenty of stories of the "cheap" UPSs you'd usually buy as a consumer (not to name any brands coz I've never had any) actually causing such issues in the first place. Without any actual surges from the grid.
That said, being totally not superstitious (for real, but someone's gonna "kill me" if they find out I wrote this and something dies from a surge...), now I guess I need to knock on wood like seventeen times ...
I do use surge protectors when we're on generator power temporarily.
The things people often call "transformers blowing up" are usually not transformers blowing up.
Instead, it's usually just overhead wires that are too close or literally touching, often from influences like wind and ice. The electricity arcs between the wires, creating bright blue-white flashes that can be seen from far away, sometimes with instantaneous heat that makes hunks of metal wire evaporate explosively. It can be violent and loud, and repetitious as different parts of even a single run fail.
Transformers can certainly blow up, but that's less common. They're (generally) filled with oil for cooling purposes, and they're massive things that tend to take time to get hot. A failed transformer can produce arcing and blue-white light, but if things are that hot then the oil is also ready to burn.
And when the oil burns it isn't blue-white -- it burns with about the same yellow-orange color we saw the last time we accidentally flambéed dinner on the kitchen stove, or a Hollywood fireball.
A bright flash without a fire is probably not a transformer.
Haha, I hear you. But yes, it really is transformers blowing up sometimes. Sometimes it really is just branches blowing up the line, sure.
A branch hitting a wire, happenes all the time here too. Lots of trees in this community. The video of a transformer you shared: that's not the transformer I'm talking about. That's at a transformer station.
And yes, I know it's transformers and not just wires (but also wires do happen definitely) coz I do walk the neighborhood regularly and I can tell when a transformer is new vs. old up there. Ours is old. The ones a few streets over sometimes are very new and I see the Hydro trucks go by the next day(s) to make them new ;)
Again, like seventeen times knock on wood but the ones next to us have not actually blown up. But three streets over, seen the new ones. Literally last weekend, we had an ice storm come through and while no blowouts we could see or hear, the outage map showed plenty of failure.
Residental-scale transformers can and do explode. Shorts happen not-infrequently with freezing rain and ice storms especially causing issues - the internal oil gets displaced by the water, and the dirty water causes an internal short. It wipes out power to a few blocks here when it happens, but we get an outage due to it every year or two.
But when the wind is whipping along on a warm day and there are bright flashes and audible bangs, that's (usually!) not signs of transformers blowing up... even though the popular vernacular often erroneously describes it that way.
It happens. The power company was very unhappy with my boss for destroying one of their transformers. The thing is while circuit breakers react very quickly to extreme overcurrent situations (shorts) they're much slower to react to loads which are only a bit over the limit, and if short enough won't react at all. Very common with heavy motors.
And that's exactly what the problem was--we had a whole bunch of really heavy motors. Getting ready to start for the day you flip on the switches and the big machines start to spin. The transformer on the pole was rated higher than the main breaker for the plant--but the transformer apparently was more sensitive to the temporary loads. Once the problem was identified it was resolved by staging it, instead of flipping them all on they were flipped on over 5 minutes.
It's not just cheap UPSes, it's cheap surge protectors as well. They exist because the vendor can throw in a MOV costing a few cents and increase the price of the power strip by 50%, not because they're any good. MOVs are sacrificial components which have either degraded to uselessness by the time they're actually needed or, if they're still working, can explode or catch fire from the energy dissipated. Even if they don't, all they're doing is converting an x-kV spike on active into an around-x-kV spike on neutral or ground. If you want to do it properly, use a series tracking filter, not a "surge protector".
One scenario: there's a short circuit somewhere, say rats chewing through insulation. This can cause a very high current through the short. A non-inverter 4500 watt 120 volt generator might have 0.2 ohms coil resistance, so the short circuit current can hit 170 volts / 0.2 ohm = 850 amps. When the shorted branch's circuit breaker trips, the inductance in the generating windings wants to keep that 850 amps flowing for at least a few microseconds, and it gets distributed across everything else that's still connected. Depending on what else is connected (hopefully including some surge protectors) the peak voltage can get into many kilovolts.
The circuit is something like this:
voltage source -- parasitic inductor --+- circuit breaker -- short
|
+- circuit breaker -- your PC
More generally, for the previous poster, look at what happens when a magnetic field collapses suddenly, you can get kilovolt spikes. There's probably a ton of YouTube videos demonstrating this in various ways, it sounds like the sort of thing that Electroboom would do. Normally this is handled via snubber circuits which dissipate the energy before it can do anything, but in exceptional cases it could end up going where it shouldn't.
Definitely use quality surge protectors on expensive equipment connected to generators.
PSA: UPSes and GFCI/GFI extension cords won't work properly when connected to a stand-alone generator with a bonded neutral. I've tried using enterprise UPSes on such generators, but they absolutely won't work. In such scenarios, debond the generator's ground from neutral, apply a very large warning label to it being debonded, and drive a massive ground rod electrode into the ground as close to the generator as possible and ground the neutral there. This does work and is much safer because there's a stable voltage reference source. It's more of a hassle but can be necessary for some off grid and temporary scenarios.
GFCI works correctly either way. Their operating mode doesn't care at all about ground: Whether bonded, not bonded, or not even present (look, ma! only two wires!), they still perform the same way.
They respond to an imbalance in current flow betwixt line and neutral. What goes out must return; if it doesn't, then switch off.
> In such scenarios, debond the generator's ground from neutral
eeeeep. Please for the love of all that is holy, CONTACT AN ELECTRICIAN before messing around with that - or before creating a ground bond where none should be (i.e. TT grid [1]). You may end up endangering yourself if you do not exactly know what you are doing - in the case of TT, you get ground potential difference current from other parts of the grid flowing to ground via your generator's bond. Best case you're getting problems with electrochemical corrosion (including in your foundation), worst case enough current flows to turn your bond wire into a thermal fuse.
Also, take great care if your grounding is provided via municipal water service, or if your original grounding rod has dried out to the point it's ineffective.
Let me repeat: LET ELECTRICIANS DEAL WITH GROUNDING AND SURGE PROTECTION. Floating grounds and improper ground connections CAN BE LETHAL OR POSE A SERIOUS FIRE RISK.
AND YES THAT INCLUDES "ISLAND" SCENARIOS OR EMERGENCY POWER INPUTS (e.g. via CEE plugs and transfer switches).
I'm not sure I'd leave something like this to an electrician. Or if so at least make that electrician be experienced in this field. I think you'd want an electrical engineer to be involved with the plan to some degree.
Electrical engineers don’t know code requirements and wiring guidelines for household electrical wiring. They’re absolutely not the correct default. Electricians with specialization in generator setups, sure, but an electrician engineer on average is likely going to be more uninformed on code requirements than an electrician.
Electrical engineers know the theory but lack the practical knowledge which grid form is used at your specific address (yes, here in Germany we have a few towns where one half side of a street runs TT and the other one is already migrated to TN-C or TN-C-S).
An electrician specializing in lightning protection, uninterruptible power installation or in radio installations can sort out all of that far better than an engineer can.
That's an extreme edge-case and a strawman. Anyone operating temporary equipment on a generator during a severe storm will obviously unplug sensitive stuff to not take unnecessary chances regardless of safety precautions already in place.
Ground rods are required in certain situations according to the NEC.
Ground rods are for lightning protection, transient surges (over voltage), and induced surges; not for short protection, ground faults, or making ordinary extension cord use of bonded generators "safer".
Typically, they're required whenever it's a system that powers a building on its own, i.e., off-grid setup or with a floating neutral generator connected via a switched neutral transfer switch.
You can unplug everything and open all the switches, but a nearby lightning strike will still fry your generator through that unbounded ground rod. Lightning ground potential is very eager to take the shortcut to your other ground rods through a few millimeters of insulation and open switches on the path through your generator and house wiring, when the alternative might be tens of meters of dirt :)
I don't care what the NEC doesn't say, NFPA 780 says you have to bond all ground rods.
You're over-selling the minimum level of intelligence in homo sapiens.
What you're stating is your wishful thinking. Don't get me wrong. I'd also like what you say to be true. It very much is not. Quite the opposite, which is why salespeople "work".
The amount of AI bullshit Senior+ level developers just paste to me as truth is astonishing.
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