AnyOldName3

Yes I am, because that’s a safe assumption, just like assuming gravity will keep working. We’d need to discover new physics to make Lithium and Sodium plausibly form different compounds as our current understanding of physics predicts them to behave nearly the same. At this point in time, there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything wrong with that part of physics.

Lithium’s energy density is largely the cause of its flammability - if you accept density and capacity comparable to another battery chemistry, you can get it down to a comparable fire risk, even if there’s not much point bothering.

Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.

Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.

Under modern physics, Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of. Anything else that might be better won’t be a chemical battery, and it’s not like there’s any reason to suspect some new magic thing will be created like a pocket-size fusion reactor that will make chemical batteries totally obsolete any time soon. Decades more of lithium batteries being relevant are as close to guaranteed as can be.

The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.

Technically it’s just that particular English translation that’s copyrighted. The original text is public domain.

One of the stills from one of the videos that the BBC showed identifying it as a Tomahawk showed it at a very un-cruise-missile way up, so it could just have malfunctioned during terminal guidance or been clipped but not destroyed by air defence, and then hit the wrong target. It could also just have been a governmenty-looking building close enough to an intended target that whoever was checking it didn’t notice it wasn’t the target. It’s a lot easier to get everything right when the whole mission is to hit one person with one missile when everyone’s got enough time to do their job perfectly and everything’s been rehearsed than when there are thousands of targets and people are doing things in a rush, especially if orders are coming from people who don’t care about international law.

There’s nothing inherent to small components to suggest that you have to review them. If they’re small, it’s easier to tell yourself that the LLM probably got them right and you’re justified in not checking.

Using an LLM to write tests and small components is still vibe coding.

Reform aren’t devoid of ties to Russia, so where the UK’s national security is at odds with Putin’s interests, it won’t be a priority. Russian gas will never be sold to the UK again if the UK stops buying gas.

The article is a bit untrustworthy as it keeps switching between Hornet and Super Hornet, even though they’re different planes, and an expert would know that.

You’ve linked an article about a tank with an anti-drone cage being defeated, so even if it does point out that there are situations where a shaped charge can be made to work on a drone, it doesn’t support the original claim that shaped charges can be protected against by a small anti-drone cage.

Armour piercing shaped charges are more sensitive to the direction they hit at than to the distance, so they’re unsuitable for use on drones because you’re rarely, if ever, going to line them up just right, and armour piercing squash head munitions need to be going fast enough that they squash against the armour they’re trying to pierce before detonation, so need to be carried by something much faster than a drone. Suicide drones just have a lump of explosive as heavy as they can carry, and being 30cm further away from a simple explosion rarely stops it ruining your day.

That was mainly when Russian equipment was getting mesh fitted directly to its outside instead of cheap netting being placed over roads. If you fit an anti-drone cage to something, it only moves the explosion about a foot further away, which often isn’t enough to make a meaningful difference to survivability. If you make the cage bigger, your vehicle stops fitting though gaps, so that’s not practical. Covering a road can keep the explosion metres away, though, and protects everything using the road rather than just the one vehicle.

CV padding and main character syndrome.

Password managers are supposed to be designed to resist a situation where they’re compromised, and are only ever supposed to see a mysterious blob of encrypted data without ever having access to any information that would help decrypt it. The headline’s more like M1 Abrams Tanks Vulnerable to Small Arms Fire - it’d be totally expected that most things die when shot with bullets, but the point of a tank is that it doesn’t, so it’s a big deal if it does.

If it’s the problem that I’ve seen people complain about in the past, it’s effectively the same as HTTPS ‘not supporting’ end to end encryption because it runs over IP and IP packets contain the IP address of where they need to go, so someone can see that two IP addresses are communicating, which is unavoidable as otherwise there’s nothing to say where the data needs to go, so no way for it to get there. Someone did a blog post a couple of years ago claiming Matrix was unsecure as encrypted messages had their destination homeserver in plaintext, but that doesn’t carry any information that isn’t implied by the fact that the message is being sent to that homeserver’s IP.

To be fair, if I had all that money, I’d probably just pay someone to figure out how to make it do the most good, and continue spending at least some of my time shitposting. It’s okay to have hobbies, but it’s bad to hoard the money or invest it in evil.

I’ve found this is really dependent on placement. If I put my libre a couple of centimeters away from the region I usually use, it’ll read low all night, but as long as I stick to the zone I’ve determined to be fine, it’ll agree with a blood test even if I’ve had pressure on it for ages. Also, the 3 is more forgiving than the 1 or 2 because it’s smaller than the older models, so affects how much the skin bends and squishes less.