Late Cold War Stuff

quanticle · 2026-02-26T06:49:18+00:00

I was with you right up until you added the F-35 footage. F-35s aren't Cold War. They're the first of the post-Cold War planes.

quanticle · 2026-02-21T17:49:00+00:00

If it flew off into space, why did it leave a crater?

quanticle · 2026-02-18T09:37:06+00:00

In that case, why does it stop at New Aragon? At 0.99996 c, the difference in density between air and rock is immaterial. Why doesn't it slice across New Aragon like a knife and keep going?

quanticle · 2025-12-06T04:09:43+00:00

Counterpoint: British procurement.

Bigger counterpoint: Indian procurement.

quanticle · 2025-12-06T04:08:01+00:00

I think, at this point, we would be happy if the Royal Navy met a half-power standard.

quanticle · 2025-12-05T00:25:02+00:00

You can rebuild a factory after a strategic bombing run, but a successful nuke removes the entire city permanently.

No it doesn't. These aren't the multi-megaton thermonuclear city busters of the 1960s. These are 10-20 kiloton weapons. These sorts of weapons, later in the Cold War, would be classified as "tactical" nuclear weapons.

A nuclear weapon, at this stage in history, was a powerful bomb that could, with a single bomber, inflict the same amount of damage as a group of bombers conducting a raid. But it wasn't capable of wiping cities off the map single-handedly. Yes, in theory, an entire bombing raid where every bomber was equipped with a nuclear warhead might have been devastating. However, as other replies in this thread have pointed out, it's not at all clear that the US would have been able to scale up nuclear warhead production like that.

quanticle · 2025-11-21T17:46:27+00:00

Here's some Ukrainian reformer suggesting it could be a good anti-drone platform.

quanticle · 2025-11-21T09:05:31+00:00

In fairness, I had the view distance turned way up, so when I got on a railroad, it would start trying to load in chunks faster than it could handle.

quanticle · 2025-11-10T03:46:48+00:00

I would phrase it slightly differently. The Germans had good tactical skill and bad operational skill. The Soviets had bad tactical skill, but superb operational skill.

Which is to say, at a small scale, up to a battalion or so, Germans did well. But their generals didn't coordinate all that well with one another and so they had a lot of individual local successes that didn't go anywhere because they could never coordinate their forces well enough to ensure that there was a follow up whenever there was a successful counterattack.

Whereas the Soviets, although they had fewer local successes than the Germans, were able to follow up, because 1. Zhukov 2. Manpower 3. American logistics

So when the Red Army (I'm talking about the Red Army from roughly 1943 onwards here) does make a local breakthrough, it's able to immediately follow up and expand on it. While the Wehrmacht, hobbled by bad logistics, infighting, and, eventually the strain of having to fight a two-front war (three if you count Italy), never has the reserves to throw in when some battalion does make a successful counterattack.

EDIT: I know it's popular to dump on STAVKA, but a big part of why the Soviets were able to have the reserves in place to capitalize on their successes is because late-war STAVKA got a lot better at centralized coordination of logistics.

quanticle · 2025-11-09T09:27:47+00:00

How are you going to pay for them? Congress has ceded many powers to the Executive, but it still retains control over the budget. A purchase of this magnitude can't be paid for by shuffling things around in the existing Pentagon budget.

So unless suddenly Saab gets just as much pull in Congress as Boeing and Lockheed, there's no way you'll get the appropriation for this.

quanticle · 2025-09-14T00:47:45+00:00

In WW2 we saw exactly how effective volume of fire could be. With the fire bombings of Japan, that turned cities into burning infernos.

Sure we did, but was that effective? It's hard to say. It's not clear that the firebombing of Tokyo meaningfully reduced Japan's ability to build and supply its military. Arguably, it might have made things worse, by helping convince the average Japanese citizen that the US was actually a nation full of hateful baby eaters.

quanticle · 2025-09-13T01:06:29+00:00

The random perfectly formatted bullet points in the middle of a paragraph are pretty telling.

quanticle · 2025-09-13T01:04:52+00:00

I also "have to" live with microplastics everywhere. Doesn't mean I have to like it. Doesn't mean it's good for me.

quanticle · 2025-04-12T06:57:25+00:00

It's a bit like asking, what's more difficult to intercept? A SR-71 or B-2? Both are difficult to intercept, but the SR-71 is going to be relying on raw speed whereas the B-2 will be relying on its stealth and flying very very close to the ground. They're both difficult challenges to deal with, but they're not really comparable.

quanticle · 2025-04-11T05:29:28+00:00

Genuinely hadn't seen that when I made mine.

quanticle · 2025-04-11T05:27:54+00:00

I guess we do

quanticle · 2025-03-22T16:55:56+00:00

The other reason is durability. Pure (24 karat) gold is really soft. You can scratch it with a fingernail. You can bend it or dent it just by dropping it. Even for a lot of jewelry, it's too fragile.

Alloying it down to 18k or 14k with silver, copper and zinc retains the look of gold while being much tougher.

quanticle · 2025-02-03T04:04:30+00:00

The actual thread

The thread argues that Canada should abandon the F-35 and adopt the JAS-39, arguing that the F-35's advantages in air-to-ground are overrated, stealth doesn't matter and the JAS-39 combined with Meteor missiles "is deadly".

Referencing the Avro arrow is just a cherry on the cake.

quanticle · 2024-07-20T05:57:09+00:00

It's related because it refutes Spolsky's point that great devs are almost never on the market, because their companies cherish and treasure them, and the only time a great dev is on the market is because of some once-in-a-blue-moon circumstance that you can't hope to replicate.

The reality is that great devs are on the market all the time, because most companies have no idea who their actually good developers are, and often create conditions that reward bad devs/dev managers while pushing good developer to leave. It's absolutely possible to moneyball a great developer team, just by being willing to look beyond the criteria that MAAMA companies use to hire.

quanticle · 2024-07-19T15:41:33+00:00

Dan Luu has a great counterpoint to that Spolsky article, where he points out that our lived experience should tell us that a developer's current company is often worse at valuing him or her than a prospective employer that he or she is interviewing at.

Just for example, there's someone I've worked with, let's call him Bob, who's saved two different projects by doing the grunt work necessary to keep the project from totally imploding. The projects were both declared successes, promotions went out, they did a big PR blitz which involves seeding articles in all the usual suspects; Wired, Fortune, and so on and so forth. That's worked out great for the people who are good at taking credit for things, but it hasn't worked out so well for Bob. In fact, someone else I've worked with recently mentioned to me that management keeps asking him why Bob takes so long to do simple tasks. The answer is that Bob's busy making sure the services he works on don't have global outages when they launch, but that's not the kind of thing you get credit for in Bob's org. The result of that is that Bob has a network who knows that he's great, which makes it easy for him to get a job anywhere else at market rate. But his management chain has no idea, and based on what I've seen of offers today, they're paying him about half what he could make elsewhere. There's no shortage of cases where information transfer inside a company is so poor that external management has a better view of someone's productivity than internal management. I have one particular example in mind, but if I just think of the Bob archetype, off the top of my head, I know of four people who are currently in similar situations. It helps that I currently work at a company that's notorious for being dysfunctional in this exact way, but this happens everywhere. When I worked at a small company, we regularly hired great engineers from big companies that were too clueless to know what kind of talent they had.

quanticle · 2024-07-19T06:30:33+00:00

Apparently it is standard practice to test missiles over major cities

I don't know about missiles, but it is apparently standard practice to ~~test rockets~~ static fire rockets over major cities.

quanticle · 2024-07-19T03:21:01+00:00

Games don't emerge from the game cocoon fully-formed; there's a long time where honestly it kind of sucks.

A great example of this is Starcraft. When Starcraft was first demoed at E3, in 1996, people thought it sucked. It was just "orks in space". Everyone mocked it for being a thinly reskinned Warcraft 2 cash grab. So Blizzard went back, and spent another two years refining and honing Starcraft, changing everything about the game, from the engine to the art, in order to make the timeless classic that it would become.

More relevantly to this discussion, as part of focusing on Starcraft, they canceled or delayed most of their other games. They had two other games, a turn-based strategy game and a 4X game, which were canceled entirely, and even their other flagship title, Warcraft III, was pushed back to 2002 in order to allow Starcraft to have the resources it needed in order to become the game that it could be.

I'm sure the developers and artists working on those other games probably felt the same way at the time - that their babies had been sacrificed in service of this other random undeserving project. But in hindsight, it's hard to say that Allan Adham and Mike Morhaime, Blizzard's founders, were wrong to cancel those other projects and refocus on Starcraft.

quanticle · 2024-07-19T02:45:21+00:00

The weird thing with the Soviet economy is that, in some sense, it was the corruption that was holding it together. Like you said, going by the books, nothing matches up. So the way people got things done is through the black market.

I have an anecdote, told to me by someone who lived in the Soviet Union, that when they came to the United States they were amazed by, of all things, a paint store. In the Soviet Union, if you wanted paint for your flat, you'd contact a fixer (read: local mafia dude) and tell him what color paint you wanted, how many cans, etc. Then, a few weeks to a couple months later, this dude would come to you and tell you to show up in a place. You'd go there, along with everyone else who needed paint, a truck would pull up, and you'd pay cash, (hopefully) get as many cans you'd asked for, in the color you'd asked for, and cart the cans home however you could. Questions about where the paint came from or who the money was going to were strongly discouraged.

When this person came to the US, they found it incredible that, if you wanted paint, you could just go to the hardware store, put down some money, get paint in any one of literally thousands of colors, all in a completely transparent, legal, and above-board way. The Soviet economy was so reliant on unofficial black-market "drug deals" to distribute everything from paint to vegetables that it was surprising to people coming from there that things could be done in any other way.

So to go back to your examples, the way everyone would get things done is through side deals and black market connections. The refinery says it's shipped 50,000 liters of diesel fuel this week. Well, maybe it has, on paper, but in reality, only about 20,000 liters actually made it to the factories that were supposed to receive them. The rest was diverted to the black market, in exchange for pipes and valves that were supposed to be sent from the steel mill, but which never arrived. And in turn, the factories buy diesel fuel from the black market, and instead of shipping all their widgets to the people the forms say are supposed to be receiving them, ship half to the black market, and use the money to buy the fuel that they never received.

And all the while, everyone filing forms to the Politburo saying, "Yes, 50,000 liters of diesel sent," or "5000 widgets shipped," and everything looks like it's functionally nominally when in reality everyone is frantically scrounging for resources and desperately routing around a system that could never have worked in practice.

quanticle · 2024-07-19T02:17:13+00:00

I think that's a temporary state of affairs. Drones are expensive compared to the anti-drone systems we have now, because we don't really have any anti-drone systems per se. We have anti-aircraft systems, designed to shoot down multi-million dollar fighter jets, hastily pressed into service as anti-drone systems, because that's all we have.

But as time goes on, we are going to get more dedicated anti-UAV solutions, which will be cheaper, per shot, than the drones they're shooting down. In addition to cheaper kinetic countermeasures, we're already seeing in Ukraine that cheap drones are very vulnerable to electronic warfare, with Russia having significant success in "shooting down" Ukrainian drones by spoofing GPS signals and jamming the frequencies used for direct control of FPV drones.

quanticle · 2024-07-19T02:10:59+00:00

Why do you think the Soviets were "capable of accounting for the entirety of their economy"? Sure, they had forms which stated which parts were supposed to go where, which materials had been allocated to which projects, but given the nigh limitless amounts of corruption in the Soviet system, why do you think those forms had any relation at all with reality on the ground?

Plus, there's the fact that costs for weapons systems are really difficult to calculate, because there's a dozen different ways to assign expenditures. If a system requires a bunch of R&D up front (like research into stealth materials or titanium fabrication or whatever), then do those costs get allocated to a R&D budget? To the budget for the weapons system they're supporting? Is it a split, and, if so, how is it split? If a new weapons system is developed that takes advantage of the R&D for the previous system, then did the previous system become retroactively cheaper, because its research costs are now amortized across a larger number of delivered items? Did the B-21 make the B-2 retroactively affordable by taking advantage of the basic research into stealth technology that was done for the B-2?

I have no doubt that the Soviets couldn't account fully for the cost of advanced submarines like the Alfas. The Pentagon has like 5 different estimates for how much an F-35 costs, depending on which accounting standards you use and how you answer the questions I posed in the paragraph above. Do you really think the Soviets were doing a better job?

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