The chances of a ballistic missile hitting a ship - a small, moving target in the middle of the sea - are negligible. And a 4kg bomblet wouldn't do much damage anyway.

Have you seen the 'no smoking' signs on those vessels?

I guess that the most important potential "secret sauce" for a coding agent would be its prompts, but that's also one of the easiest things to find out by simply intercepting its messages.

The only real secret sauce is the training methods and datasets used for refining harness usage. Claude Code is a lot better than gemini-cli/open-code/etc because Claude is specifically trained on how to run in that environment. It's been rlhf'd to use the provided tools correctly, and know the framework in which it operates, instead of relying solely on context.

For the morale of remaining employees?

And that includes them, the people doing the layoffs, who are employees as well. And what we often don't realize is that causing the pain to others most often causes pain to us as well. Human group output and productivity can rely a lot on trust, and if that trust is damaged, it can hinder all productivity.

I've seen layoffs with severance so good that the remaining employees felt bad themselves.

The last time my company did layoffs they offered the same generous severance package afterwards to anyone else who wanted it. We had three people take the offer.

Ha! So true. Our last layoff had severance so generous that I told my manager next time pick me.

Honest question, why would they care? The rancher does not care about the morale of the cattle as they're being led to slaughter.

Distributed systems are always more complex than equivalent monolithic ones. Luckily, it looks like most engineers now understand that microservices mostly make sense for big companies where the biggest issue is distributing work between lots and lots of developers in a sensible way.

I agree with you, that big companies just run so much stuff that it makes sense that there should be a control plane, and thats quite unlike how most microservices are supposed to be architected.

In fact this is not even an 'architecture' but a higher level of organizational layer.

Fascinating. The difference of the American style where you switch the fork between the left and right hands reminded me of a similar difference in fishing gear - where Americans (to my understanding) mostly cast with their right hand and then switch the rod to their left hand when retrieving, while in Europe (or at least in Italy) you usually just keep the rod in the right hand instead of switching.

More than the electronics, I would be curious about the performance of 3d-printed plastic parts on a rocket. Are they strong enough?

3d printed PLA and spiral wound cardboard is generally fine for hobby rockets, until they start going supersonic - then you need metal.

I'm not sure the launch tube could withstand the heat of the rocket exhaust though. Although that might depend what it is printed with.

People have been doing 3d printed model rockets for a while now. With no payload they experience higher acceleration than this will.

"Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones."

That feels like a bold and unsupported assertion. Ask a pilot how they'd feel about takeoffs or landings through airspace filled with adversarial drones.

A flock of unlucky geese can knock out a jet turbine, how is this a "for sure" conclusion?

> Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones.

Until they land then, due to their cost, they become a very juicy target to aim for.

maybe in the air, but I seem to recall the Ukrainians being successful at attacking Russian planes on the ground.

Except, they're not. And by the way, they are two completely different conflicts.

With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.

In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.

As a Spotify user, I often wonder how much they're constrained in their choices by their contracts with music publishers. As an example, the fact that you don't have an option to downvote a song - ie, signaling that you don't want to hear it - is such a feature gap that I can't believe it's there by choice.

I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.

IIRC you can tell Spotify to never play a certain track, but I think only as part of a playlist…and it’s buried in hidden options.

> Lobbies also moved Germany out of solar panel production, batteries

Was it lobbies, or costs which aren't competitive with China?

Afaik, It was lobbies and conservative goverents that chose to put the question up to the "free market", completely disregarding the fact that the competing geographies where heavily subsidizing those industries.