The point is a country like Iran can, in 2026, force the US Navy to keep an large stand off distance. How much further could a country like China keep the Navy back? What about in 10 years?
Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.
Seems like USN can still do whatever it was made for from this large standoff distance, also seems like it wasn't made for chasing individual nondescript trucks in a hundreds-miles-long mountainous shoreline.
One of the primary functions of navies historically has been to secure vital shipping lanes. It’s a big deal that USN can’t seem to fulfill that function anymore.
I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic. Effective anti-ship missiles have been around for a long time. Given how understandably sensitive commercial ship crews and owners are to even slight danger, there's just no way to reduce the risk to the necessary near-zero without a prolonged air campaign and/or land invasion to support the naval effort.
A medium-strength world power that it Iran only figured out how to make anti-ship missiles only 25 years ago. They sure got their hands on Chinese ones a bit before that, but that quantity just didn't amount to strait-blocking capability.
The technology has changed. The navies used to be able to protect shipping.
Now the task is much more difficult.
Just as battleships replaced ships of the line, and were in turn replaced by carriers, all due to technology changes.
Maybe there will be drone swarms or some other future magitech being able to protect shipping.
Or maybe the civilization will collapse due to internal (income inequality, widespread employment of AI), external (ecological disasters) or other (demographics, nuclear WW3) pressures before such technologies are developed.
Anduril has yet to deliver anything of consequence. I hope they shake up the industry but to say they are the next hot thing and write off the primes at this stage is premature.
Last gasps? The rent seeking class has literally never been more powerful.
"The Chinese open source model running on the box under my desk can pass the Turing Test. When you call, e-mail, text, or show me an ad, you’ll never know if it’s me or my model seeing it."
And the only thing they'll notice when you are replaced with that opensource model is the slight reduction in the required personnel budget going forward.
Is it any closer to functioning like Solidworks, NX, Creo, and all the other professional CAD software packages?
Edit: After opening it up it seems better than before but still not a replacement. I can use the draw tool to create a rectangle but than immediately cannot apply symmetry or equal length constraints until I delete others which shouldn't overlap. Clicking to create a cut or hole opens up a window that does not make it easy to create a new sketch from within or place something from within (but you can just make a sketch were you want something and then open them up and that they lock onto).
I've generally been a pretty harsh critic of FreeCAD because it represents the only entry in the market of linux CAD and it has frustrated me that it does not just do what is known to work. This seems usable. Still annoying, still not a replacement, but usable. So progress.
My impression of FreeCAD as a project is that for much if its life it has suffered from a certain amount of developer churn and lack of focus. It's like somebody builds a workbench and gets it working just good enough using a workflow that makes sense to them, but then nobody ever really bothers to flesh out the rest of it, so if you try to do things in a different way that may be perfectly sensible to you the result is a broken mess. Eventually somebody decides they can do better, and maybe they do, but the replacement still has a lot of rough spots that never get finished and the cycle starts again.
It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.
I hope. I only use Windows at this point because of CAD and FEA software and it gets worse every version. For FEA there are options on Linux but for CAD you have been SOL since most major CAD suites dropped Linux support over a decade ago.
It's inherently limited by its geometry kernel. Most "real" CAD suites use something like parasolid, usually with a bunch of extras slapped on top. Making a new one from scratch is a massive undertaking, but I'll remain forever hopeful that we get a new, modern, open-source kernel one of these days...
This isn't really true. The vast majority of problems are in the UI. The geometry kernel is limited, but it's good enough for an open source project. Compared to say OpenSCAD, Open CASCADE is leagues ahead.
I don't necessarily agree in this case - OCCT is more than capable for what FreeCAD is offering. Add to that the development trajectory of OCCT also seems to be really taking off recently (with the 8.0-RC, they've re-worked how all B-Spline algorithms work, with implications for all operations).
There are already at least two geometry kernels being written in scratch in Rust (see fornjot.app for one) --- the problem is the first parts are obvious/easy, so initial progress is rapid, then one hits the difficult/intractable parts and progress stalls, usually to be abandoned.
There are a couple of doctorates available for folks who are willing to research and publish in this space --- the commercial products are all holding their solutions as trade secrets in their code --- even then though, the edge cases are increasingly difficulty to solve in such a way as to not break what is already working, hence the commercial kernels having _very_ large teams working on them, or at least that is my understanding from what Michael Gibson (former lead developer of Rhino 3D, current developer of Moment of Inspiration 3D) has written on the topic.
The entire FreeCAD development philosophy is to not compare FreeCAD with commercial CAD tools. That's a cardinal sin. Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.
> Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.
There's an entire working group in the project comprised of people who have spent their entire career doing CAD and now take care of making FreeCAD get on par with proprietary counterparts.
There are numerous discussions online where users have constructive conversations with FreeCAD devs and provide useful input to mutual benefit.
Would you care to point me to a discussion where an actual FreeCAD contributor is completely hostile to someone like you?
That sounds fine except the part where private companies have cameras everywhere surveilling us, directly tied into dmv records to identify us, and then do whatever they want with that data. And not on a random store front or a persons front door but the major roads we all must use.
Even forgetting that, all this means is people that don't care about getting a ticket, either because they won't pay or it's a such a small amount to them that they don't care. just do what they want. Nothing is being "enforced", just taxed.
The idea that any of these companies have anything that represents ethics as they steal everyones data, fight against any regulation or accountability, all while they claim (or lie, depending on your view) they might make something that could endanger the human race as a whole, is laughable.
It's money and power with these people. Dig down and you'll find how this decision is motivated by one or both.
This is the opposite of security theater. It was an apparently an implementation of security with issues but restricting physical access, both for people and vehicles, is absolutely a real improvement to security.
Huh? The linked article is nothing more than "this guy is black, so therefore helping any underprivileged black people gain university admissions is bad"
It's outrageous racism. A conclusion about all minorities based on one person's math mistake, where the logic is entirely based on shared skin color.
If you replace the races and make it a conclusion about legacy admissions or something, it's obviously stupid and illogical, right?
"This white guy doesn't know Afghanistan from Kazakhstan. More proof legacy admissions is bad!"
There's a bunch of needlessly inflammatory bullshit in that article. "Innumerate woke Bolshevik" and making fun of someone because he thinks she looks like a Harry Potter character. This guy seems like nothing more than a high school bully. E-mailing someone asking them to respond is nothing more than a fig leaf.
> Anyone who signed that petition is not only my personal enemy, but the enemy of free speech, the enemy of the spirit of the academy, and the enemy of western civilization.
Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.
reply