Our National Parks are amazing!

For now.

The first UAV in the 1800s were incendiary balloons, Austrian attack on Venice.

A. M. Low was a pioneer in rocket guidance systems, planes, etc. In 1917 the “flying bomb” (a controlled airplane) was developed, and later developed into the Kettering Bug - a bomb with wings - which had a terrible success rate and never got used in combat. You can see a reproduction in Dayton, Ohio, at the museum for the Air Force.

Target drones (training drones for military pilots) were made by Radioplane and sold to the Army in the 1940s. That led to the SD-2 Overseer in the 1950s.

Which led to the Lightning Bug, based on target drone designs, used to monitor the Chinese, then Vietnam. They would deploy a parachute so they could be picked up mid-air so they wouldn’t fall into foreign hands. China shot down a few of them and set the shot them down and set those drones up for public display.

Drones have a much longer history than you’d think!

At work, a CTO for a firm we were designing a solution for got upset because hardware was in customs, and tariffs needed to be paid.

He didn’t understand why the manufacturer wasn’t paying, and it had to be pointed out (by someone from the other company bringing this hardware) that tariffs are a tax on importing, not exporting, and for every single contract they have ever had, tariffs are paid by the client.

This was not a small company, either. We’re talking about a fairly large firm in finance. And the CTO didn’t understand how tariffs work.

We’re fucked.

Yup, was getting an uber (I can’t drive for very long or the pain starts), he was chatty and excited about Trump.

Asked what he thought about the anti-immigrant talk (oh obviously thats the bad ones!), and the fact that there was a pandemic and prices skyrocketed (Biden’s fault even though that all started before he was in office), etc. Paraphrased obviously.

I don’t know what can possibly be said to these folks to have them understand, but as a result, we have… Well all this current nonsense.

This is one of those cases where an algorithm carefully trained on only relevant data can have value.

Hopefully more people learn that this is the important part.

It becomes nonsense when you just feed it everything and the kitchen sink. A well trained model works.

8 months ago:

Literally in a car with an immigrant right now who voted Trump because things were cheaper before covid.
FFS.

I’m curious what that guy thinks today. Or if he’s still in the US.

Thats what I thought.

Ive seen the “We have salt beads!” one recently, but none with the plastic microbeads.