I'm not sure what this is a reference to? Is it actually about Rails?

I come from a C++ background and mostly use PHP/Laravel today, and even though it does things less "efficiently" than the syntactic sugar in Ruby or low-level optimizations in .NET, I find that its lack of magic makes for much higher productivity in the long run. IMHO it feels like Ruby solves the easiest problems with sugar and then glosses over the hardest problems like they don't exist. So I just can't tell what problems it actually solves.

Generally, I think that cleverness was popular in the 2010s but has fallen out of fashion. A better pattern IMHO works more like Cordova or scripting in video games, where native plugins or a high-performance engine written in a language like Swift or Rust is driven by a scripting language like Javascript or Lua. Or better yet, driven declaratively by HTML or no-code media files that encode complex behavior like animations.

Of course all of this is going away with AI, and I anticipate atrociously poorly-written codebases that can't be managed by humans anymore. Like we might need pair programming just to take a crack at fixing something if the AI can't. I'm always wrong about this stuff though, so hopefully I'm wrong about this.

For a bit of context, I come from writing blitters on 8 MHz Mac Plusses, so I have a blind spot around slowness. Basically, that nothing should ever be slow today with GHz computers. So most slowness isn't a conceptual flaw, but an inefficient implementation.

These alternative frameworks are generally small enough that it might be kind of fun to stress test them and contribute some performance improvements. Especially with AI, I really have no excuse anymore.

Edit: after pondering this for 2 seconds, I suspect that it's actually a problem with backend requests. It may have some synchronous behavior (which I want) or layout dependency issues that force it to wait until all responses have arrived before rendering. That's a harder problem, but not insurmountable. Also things like this irk me, because browsers largely solved progressive layout in the 1990s and we seem to have lost that knowledge.

yea? JSX is much more than templating.

Firebase in this context is just a database and how you poll data on client or server from it. Nonsensical reference again.

Redux is still by far the most widely-used state management library in React apps. Some of that _is_ legacy usage, sure. But, our modern Redux Toolkit package has ~30M downloads a month. Zustand has become very popular as a client-side state option, and React Query is now the default standard data fetching tool, but you can see that even just RTK is still right up there in monthly NPM downloads:

- https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=redux&package=%40re...

I've frequently talked about the original reasons for Redux's creation, which of those are still relevant, and why Redux is still a very valid option to choose even for greenfield projects today:

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2024/07/presentations-why-...

Needless to say, getting anything to go to space is hard.

A nozzle engine doesnt have to account for this as much because the nozzle is keeping the pressure of the exhaust

If the pressure at exhaust is higher than ambient, the exhaust pushes outward against the ambient pressure and you get huge exhaust plumes, and lost efficiency.

Conversely, if the pressure at exhaust is lower, the ambient pressure pushes the exhaust inward into shock diamonds[1] and you, again, lose efficiency.

Engine bells specifically yield their max efficiency at one external pressure/altitude. The reason you see shock diamonds is most often from ground-level testing (or takeoff) of engines that perform best at altitude.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_diamond

You should be for example totally able to build an inflatable frame for a launch loop, making it possible to launch payloads from above most of the atmosphere.

Also for re-entry the more you lower the density of something, the less re-entry stresses there will be. So you could construct a giant low-pressure inflatable decelerator device and have it essentially float down all the way from orbit, incrementally shedding energy as it comes down over a longer period of time, taking care to balance the rate of descent, heating and internal/external pressures.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

I think I've internalized these stories enough to comfortably say (without giving anything away) that AI is incompatible with capitalism and probably money itself. That's why I consider it to be the last problem in computer science, because once we've solved problem solving, then the (artificial) scarcity of modern capitalism and the social darwinism it relies upon can simply be opted out of. Unless we collectively decide to subjugate ourselves under a Star Wars empire or Star Trek Borg dystopia.

The catch being that I have yet to see a billionaire speak out against the dangers of performative economics once machines surpass human productivity or take any meaningful action to implement UBI before it's too late. So on the current timeline, subjugation under an Iron Heel in the style of Jack London feels inevitable.

I hear this all the time, but to what end? If the input costs to produce most things ends up driving towards zero, then why would there be a need for UBI? Wouldn't UBI _be_ the performative economics mentioned?

A performative/underemployment economy keeps everyone working not out of necessity, but to appease the sentiments of the wealthy. I'd argue that we passed the point at which wages were tied to productivity sometime around 1970, meaning that we're already decades into a second Gilded Age where wealth comes from inheritance, investment and connections (forms of luck) rather than hard work.

And honestly, to call UBI performative when billionaires are trying to become trillionaires as countless people die of starvation every day just doesn't make any sense.

  - TCP should have been a reliability layer above UDB, not beside it (made P2P harder than it should be, mainly burdening teleconferencing and video games)
  - Window size field bytes should have been arbitrary length
  - Checksum size field bytes should have been arbitrary length and the algorithm should have been optionally customizable
  - Ports should have been unique binary strings of arbitrary length instead of numbers, and not limited in count (as mentioned)
  - Streams should have been encrypted by default, with clear transmission as the special case (symmetric key encryption was invented before TCP)
  - IP should have connected to an arbitrary peer ID, not a MAC address, for resumable sessions if network changes (maybe only securable with encryption)
  - Encrypted streams should not have been on a special port for HTTPS (not TCP's fault)
  - IP address field bytes should have been arbitrary length (not TCP's fault)
  - File descriptors could have been universal instead of using network sockets, unix sockets, files, pipes and bind/listen/accept/select (not TCP's fault)
  - Streams don't actually make sense in the first place, we needed state transfer with arbitrary datagram size and partial sends/ranges (not TCP's fault)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713493

I want to add that the author of the article wrote one of the cleanest and most concise summaries of the TCP protocol that I've ever read.

  text:
  
  it
  
  html:
  
  <span class="69">i</span><span class="74 sarcastic">t</span>
  
  css:
  
  /* could also use ch or ex instead of em */
  .69 + .74::before {
    margin-left: -0.1em;
  }
  
  .sarcastic {
    transform: skewX(-10deg);
  }
  
  /* loosen spacing a bit for certain randomness */
  .69 + .74.sarcastic::before {
    margin-left: -0.05em;
  }

I asked AI if there's a way to apply css to specific characters instead of selectors, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be possible (yet). It feels strange to live in a world where I could have just asked AI to do all of this for me in an online sandbox in less time than it took me to write this comment :-/

Other than Ports, the top 7 highest-margin industries (stock/crypto exchanges, stock exchanges, banks, toll road operators, financial services and asset management) are in financialization and rent-seeking, basically acting as middlemen that use other people's money to extract wealth.

Meanwhile the bottom 7 lowest-margin industries other than LiDAR and aircraft leasing (CRISPR, gene therapy, hydrogen fuel cell, genomics and mRNA therapeutics) arguably have some of the greatest potential to improve quality of life and help the planet.

Sometimes it feels like everything that I care about most has been marginalized and commodified to the point of financial inviability. Meanwhile people who simply came out on the winning side of the multiverse and pulled up the ladder behind them are doing so well that they mock the rest of us for working by actively making our lives harder at every opportunity.

OK, I'll bite. This is a very ungenerous take. Entities that aggregate and provide capital create enormous real human value. In fact, I would argue that most of the improvement in modern life that we all take for granted is because capital markets are available and accessible at scale. Where does the biotech company working on the new gene therapy get the billions it takes to develop and bring that drug to market? Where does the aircraft leasing company get the money to pony up for aircraft at hundreds of millions a pop?

I think it is fair to argue about whether the financial services use their position fairly/wisely/etc but it is unfair to dismiss the industry as "middlement using other people's money to extract wealth".

I have met people who sincerely seem to believe that if an entity makes money then it must be societally useful because otherwise the market would not reward them with profits.

This seems to me like a self-help belief for people in these lucrative but ultimately not very meaningful positions.

This is patently not true. The USSR had no financial markets and engaged in the production high value goods. Whether it did so more efficiently than its capitalist competition is another matter, and I believe the answer is likely no, but it clearly did more than subsistence farming.

The broader economic situation of the USSR is a very different question to whether or not they were able to progress beyond subsistence farming. One is a relatively nuanced topic, the other is a question that can be answered trivially by someone with the most basic historical knowledge, or even knowledge of modern Russia which clearly has not developed from subsistence farming to a developed economy in the time between 1991 and today.

Also, even if some financialization is beneficial that does not mean all of it is. Too much can be very harmful.

Facilitating value creation is value creation.

Nevertheless it is not exactly the same. A carpenter’s apprentice is useful only when paired with his master. He facilitates the carpenter in his value creation but lacks the skills to do anything on his own.

Unlike the apprentice however, finance never actually learns the stuff.

Again, all of this has it’s uses and all, it’s just gotten a bit out of hand in terms of gambling like behaviour and the push the financial world creates towards harmful monopolies.

With that in mind, there are two types of productive financial work: actuarial services and accounting. Actuaries act as the managers of society's resources, ensuring that net profit is made and risk well distributed, and accountants determine what those resources are. It is clear that many of the people in finance are not qualified to provide either of these services and simply leach profit out of the rest of the economy.

Notice that neither of these rely on capital markets and speculation. Speculators have been repeatedly proven to be horrible managers, performing worse than random chance. History is clear on this: if left to their own devices, speculators will destroy the economy. Only by means of strict regulation can they be forced into doing the productive actuarial and accounting work for which they are hypothetically employed. Yet for some reason, we still allow these people to operate without oversight in many cases and to extract massive profit beyond the value of their work.

Are you talking about the 2008 financial crisis? or do you mean something else?

Compare and contrast: resource allocation in finance-heavy Western nations with the same in the finance-light China. It's abundantly obvious to me that, through suppressing their financial sector, China has reached a superior economic outcome than they otherwise might have. We have elected to make traders the managers of our economy, and I think they have done a clear bad job and that we aught to reassess treating their decisions with such primacy.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manuf...

That article could be reduced to one phrase: "banks off-load mortgage risk by selling that debt to investors". But that doesn't drive clicks or strike the fear of corporations into your soul.

For example according to the OECD [1] 25% of Luxembourg's GDP (excluding interest and trading profits [2]) and 10% of employment is due to financial services! For comparison, for the UK and USA it's 8.8% and 8.3% of GDP.

In particular it's hard to me to see how market trading activity that provides a price for equities to the second, instead of say holding auctions every hour (which would probably greatly reduce profits for day traders and HFT), helps any drug development or aircraft leasing company to raise money. Financing deals don't happen on the market, and if market price is involved, typically something like the last month's average daily closing price is used.

We might call middlemen parasitic if they extract more value than they provide, but as you say, without finance the global economy wouldn't function. Let's instead consider the marginal utility of more of the economy being dedicated to finance. I'm convinced it's negative.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/04/oecd-economic-s...

[2] Quote from [1]:

> In the national accounts, financial services output is measured as the sum of financial intermediation services indirectly measured (FISIM) and fees, for instance on account keeping, credit cards, brokerage, financial advice and asset management. ... Trading profits and other interest income, for instance on bonds and derivative products, are excluded from the national account measure of financial services output.

My understanding is that the majority of big finance's income is from private equity or debt deals (pairing companies who need money with investors who have money), not from trading (there's very few people who we can confidently say are net winning traders and they don't scale).

Critically, all the revenue for things you mention have yet to materialize, so they will show up in this naive analysis as losers. What they really represent is _opportunity_. Some may materialize but others have been around for decades and it turns out the "application for profit" step is much harder than anticipated.

> margin (profit) is inversely correlated with value to humanity.

You say this like it's a bad thing, but arguably the most valuable things to humanity are food, water, and shelter. These are simultaneously so important and so cheap that they embody the term "commodity," and that's a good thing! A _ton_ of human ingenuity from every society and culture has been applied to making these things better and cheaper and more plentiful. The same thing is happening to solar power (mostly for geopolitical reasons), which is conspicuously not on either of your lists.

Shelter is the one bit in the hierarchy of needs that got weird. Since it's not a consumable, there's incentive to treat it as an investment. In theory there's nothing wrong with that, but the incentives combined with local politics can become toxic. So many voters in the US own real estate (with leverage!) that everyone agrees by default that prices must never go down. That leads to a trap where politics revolve around housing prices never falling.

Of course, this pretty closely matches the basic Econ 101 explanations of competition and free markets. The entire goal of competition is to reduce prices, specifically to get the market price of a good to trend down towards the marginal cost. The thing that's supposed to be good for society isn't that some people get very rich by selling things at high profit margins, but rather that the stuff we want is available at the lowest feasible price.

I learned advanced engineering topics only to find that the “hot” areas were social media and cell phones.

Not sure what, but always assumed there would be better uses of such an education.

I was largely mistaken.

You're missing how the calculation works.

Suppose you work in a lab doing genomics etc. You get paid, say, $100,000/year, and you require some equipment which costs another $100,000/year to pay off and which goes to pay the salaries of the people who invented or manufactured it. Then your lab has $210,000/year in revenue, which means $10,000 in profit and a margin of ~5%, which isn't super high.

That's good! It means the people paying for your services aren't paying a huge margin on top of your salary to receive your services so more people can afford it. Or it means you're getting paid $100,000 instead of $60,000, the latter of which would have quintupled the investors' profit but reduced your incentive to do that work, reducing the quality of the people they can attract to do it.

Whereas industries with high net margins are the ones that are the most dysfunctional or captured by incumbents. It's no surprise that all the finance stuff is there at the top since that's the most thoroughly captured industry in the country. But that doesn't mean you want other things to be like that, it means you want those things to be more competitive so the money is going to customers as lower prices or workers as higher wages instead of going to fat cats as higher margins.

The industries with excessive margins are the ones where the incumbents make it prohibitively expensive for anyone to invest in those industries by entering them as a new business, as opposed to buying the stock of the incumbents. Which is one of the risks to their investors -- their stock prices are thereby inflated and they're running the risk both that voters will never get mad enough to actually push through regulatory reform and that the huge market incentive to find a way to disrupt them will never actually find a way do it.

9th from the bottom is EV charging. You might think that's going to improve quality of life, but the reality is these are companies trying to be middle men in a commodity market. They want to profit from delivering electricity to locations along the highway. It's kind of stupid because most people can charge at home overnight and be good for the next day or three. OTOH if you're going on a long trip you'll want to plan stops at these places but since you're planning you can check prices too.

While these are bogeymen, they do provide clear services that people need.

Banks should be obvious. A toll road is the worst offender in the list, it's tough to justify the eternal regressive tax.

The rest falls into financial markets. A steelman argument here could be that those services all make the power of compound interest broadly available. It's maybe the only exponential power available to average people.

I think there's a good argument that financial markets are a big reason that people can ever retire.

There isn't. The reason people can finally retire in the 20th and 21st centuries is due to extreme exploitation of fossil fuels and using multiples of stored energy to make goods, which would normally be unavailable compared to the energy budget coming from the Sun in a given year.

You can argue in some way that the financial markets made this wealth easily accessible to the average joe through a 401k, but it could have been just as easily allocated using a different not-for-profit mechanism.

Article says Unit Economies or regulatory monopoly, but I'd be interested in something that goes deeper, specifically around financial services.

Every day is a new chance to re-examine what you most care about and make some surprising discoveries.

Or not :)

This is an absolutely insane take. If you truly believe it, then I propose two tests:

1. You should start a business that provides the same services without rent seeking. If they’re really these low-value things that are just charging high prices, then you should be able to setup very attractive alternatives, make a ton of money yourself, and improve the world in a big way.

2. If you don’t have the energy or willingness to start them yourself, you could limit your use of them to the absolute bare necessity. If you believe they extract value, you could probably do better for yourself by using them less.

Peter G. Peterson wrote about this in Gray Dawn 25 years ago, Scott Galloway talks about it today.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL385129M/Gray_dawn

https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...

John Mayer was playing music at Macworld 2007 (wish I could find the video) and said "Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. just make life more fun. It's like the opposite of terrorism":

https://www.cnet.com/culture/live-macworld-coverage/

I think of stuff like the Whole Earth Catalog as the opposite of neofeudalism and tech bro culture's revisionist history.

It doesn't have to be this way. Wealth inequality isn't invincible, or even inevitable. Back to basics works. We can get our hacker culture back. We can restore the timeline that's been stolen from us, the one we were on in the 90s before financialization and ensh@ttification ruined all the fun.

> We can restore the timeline that's been stolen from us, the one we were on in the 90s before financialization and ensh@ttification ruined all the fun.

It'd have to be a cultural change. Consumers at large have decided with their wallet they'll buy products made anywhere, of any quality, with missing or abusive support, if it means they can save a dime. Or that they'll sign away every ounce of privacy if it's free. Until we fix that problem, fixing anything else is going to be hard.

I like that younger generations care, or at least pretend to, about causes and sustainability. Not that that itself isn't being abused, but it's a glimmer of hope.

I couldn't care less about it, if some people live to make money, let them, as long as they do it legally.

On the other hand hacker culture is very lacking and the fact that we don't really own our devices is part of the issue.p

- Average people have to compete on price with the wealthy (which becomes harder as inequality rises)

- Wealthy people are incentivized to use their wealth to acquire things and extract rent, which drives up total costs and makes inequality worse

A lot of the resulting problems stay negligible or hidden or as long as there is enough overall growth, but as soon as that growth slows down these kinds of problems become very apparent.

When the person at the top has more than they can spend on necessities and luxuries, they put their money to work. That means buying assets and driving up their prices.

Some assets are fairly divorced from the "real" economy, but enough filter through to extract wealth from the masses who have to work for a living as eg. spiralling rents, inflated credentialism etc.

Cash and assets are phantom wealth, the kind that celebrities lose after their first big break when they forget to pay their taxes and everything gets repossessed. Real wealth is majority shareholder control of the means of production.

It's not so much that billionaires should be blamed for acquiring vast wealth, but that they are a symptom of a broken economic system. In that they use their wealth to lobby and capture the government so that they not only pay low or no taxes, they also get large government contracts and subsidies to multiply their wealth further. And they also own the mainstream media, so can use it to spread propaganda to convince people to vote against their own self-interest. So that deregulation, tax cuts and austerity appear to have equal footing with public investment, even though the former aren't supported by macroeconomic theory.

Why does this matter? Because the premise of trickle-down economics is that investing money at the top causes ripple effects in the economy that eventually reach the bottom. Which sounds nice in theory, but in practice, the wealthy use financialization and tax shelters to vacuum up capital so that it grows only for them. In effect turning themselves into black holes where capital only flows one way (see Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty). Thus shattering any logical argument for trickle-down economics.

The result being that there is plenty of money for private equity firms, real estate developers, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big pharma, fossil fuel companies, proxy wars in Middle East and former USSR, you get the idea. Yet there appears to be no money for food stamps, public education, public healthcare, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, university research, government grants, and yes - grants and loans for small businesses like startups.

Meaning that as the US government endlessly slashes funding for anything outside the status quo, the national debt only grows larger. Prices go up while wages stagnate. Paradoxes that apparently nobody can see, because they keep voting for the same people and parties. It's like Lucy pulling the football away just as Charlie Brown tries to kick it, but he never figures out that he's being fooled.

When for a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars we spend on, say, election advertising, we could cure several diseases. We could have thousands, maybe millions, of $10,000 grants for startups working on disruptive technologies, the type of grants that Y Combinator used to give when it started.

Instead we flush it all down the toilet year after year. So that hackers are forced to work in their parents' basements, on shoestring budgets, with skeleton crew teams, spending years of what little leisure time they have to build things that might have otherwise taken weeks. All so that billionaires and surveillance capitalism can keep vacuuming out our savings.

The US GDP is $30 trillion, and there are about 150 million workers. That's $200,000 per year, per worker. Yet the median income is around $65,000 per year. Meaning that 2/3 of our productivity gets skimmed by the wealthy. Where does that other $135,000 per year go? It's not going to hacker culture, that's for sure. So we run in place as the world burns.

- divergence -

This is perhaps my greatest frustration with wealth inequality. Billionaires like Elon Musk (not to single him out of the thousand others) sometimes fund innovative projects initially, but seem to get lost in the weeds doubling down on evolutionary tech, while missing obvious opportunities in fringe tech and old ideas that were suppressed.

For example, the Tesla turbine could have been used for an onboard generator, and what better opportunity than to build a hybrid Tesla car using it? Its main drawback is that it gets fouled by combustion products (with secondary drawbacks in low torque, noise, etc). So why not use natural gas, propane or hydrogen? Why not use an external combustion system that heats air and runs it through the turbine in place of using a larger (due to low compression) Stirling engine? Why not mount the turbine in sound dampening material or a vacuum? These are all trivially overcome engineering challenges. Yet we can't buy a cost-effective mass-produced Tesla turbine or even a Stirling engine of any appreciable power online.

As we see more and more of these missed or suppressed innovations by moneyed interests, I can't help but come to the conclusion that wealth inequality is the largest force stopping widespread prosperity, especially the kind brought by automation to provide basic resources. We can claim that so much progress has been made possible by crony capitalism, for example the computers we are writing and reading this comment on, but I believe that they exist despite concentrated wealth, not because of it.

And I'm worried that access to fee-based AI will widen the wealth gap even further. Because people with money will be able to pay AI to do their jobs and get paid, while people without money may be forced to do those jobs by hand performatively under ever-increasing pressure as the cost of AI only decreases due to economies of scale and Moore's law. So that the main goal for moneyed interests could become to deny access to capital to the working class so that they can be exploited. Even though it would be far easier and more beneficial to more people to distribute the costs of some minimal level of AI to everyone in the world.

I dunno, the more I see these exciting innovations that could practically be built for cost of materials (28 pounds of copper costs less than $150 and is the most expensive component) yet never reach widespread adoption - while other inferior products that use more material flourish - it makes me question if our market-based economy even works anymore. I'm not saying that older (antiquated?) alternatives like socialism/communism would work better today, just that there may be a post-scarcity 21st century economy where patents that could increase equivalent personal wealth by orders of magnitude are put into the public domain. Not for money, but as automated and open source goods/services/resources having equivalent value to what money would have provided. The closest I can get is stuff like solarpunk, which still hasn't caught on for reasons I don't understand.

Edit: before I get flamed too badly for this comment, I should add that neodymium magnets could perhaps cost more than copper, and/or be a scarcer resource. If I were working on this type of motor, I would try to get similar performance from non-rare-earth magnets and aluminum wire, as well as explore hybrid motors that achieve say 80% of the power and efficiency using only 20% of the rare stuff. On that note, we are long overdue for mass-produced graphene and carbon nanotube wire. We need a definitive answer as to whether they are safe enough to use commercially, or if they are a dead end like asbestos. I don't understand why billionaires don't put more money into getting this sort of first-principles "real work" done. If I won the internet lottery, I would set up a foundation with an endowment to tackle these pressing problems and invite hackers through grants, sort of like what MacKenzie Scott is doing.

It might not make sense to younger people, but for me growing up in the 1980s, there were many decades of tech stagnation where basically all alternatives to internal combustion engines were suppressed. And the people who made vast fortunes didn't care about disrupting the status quo, so we were forced to live with substandard tech and pay a premium for the privilege. It wasn't until Elon Musk disrupted the car industry with Tesla starting from 2004 that anything changed, which we take for granted now. I really idolized him before he lost his wunderkind status by falling for political propaganda like a mark. Maybe that's my own projection, I don't know anything anymore.

Whereas today, tech is evolving so rapidly that we don't have time to invent much before the singularity hits in the 2040s. We're facing a different existential crisis now, one of finding meaning when so much happens through manifestation outside of our own actions, instead of facing the void that we can't contribute due to the realities of the time it takes to afford the cost of living (a theme from Fight Club). So my points are maybe anachronisms now, frustrations from an era that no longer exists.

Why I got triggered by this motor: 1000 hp at 28 pounds is enough to lift a large car or truck. The rule for helicopters is about 5 pounds per hp (more with a longer prop that has a higher aspect ratio - edit: the Mars Ingenuity drone gets 3.6 lbs per hp in at atmosphere 1% as dense as ours). So 4 of these motors would make a quadcopter the likes of which we've never seen before. It's almost Star Wars tech IMHO. We're talking extremely high ceilings like 50,000 feet or more. Drones that fly at 400, 500 mph or more, even close to the speed of sound.

And we could have had this tech a long time ago, because it's not especially complex. It's just that nobody devoted the small investment for the research. Same for lithium iron batteries, especially LiFePO4, which could have arrived in the 1980s or 1990s because they're so easy to make. Possibly even the 1960s: the SR-71 flew in ..1964! But we had other priorities.

Anyway, it's a great accomplishment and I'm happy for them. I just mourn what might have been had the geopolitical situation been different.

They should solve the real problem of obtaining more funding and volunteers so that they can take on the increased volume of submissions. Especially now that AI's here and we can all be 3 times as productive for the same effort.

Huh, I guess it's only a subset of papers, not all of them. My brain doesn't work that way, because I don't like assigning custom rules for special cases (edit: because I usually view that as a form of discrimination). So sometimes I have a blind spot around the realities of a problem that someone is facing, that don't have much to do with its idealization.

What I mean is, I don't know that it's up to arXiv to determine what a "review article and position paper" is. Because of that, they must let all papers through, or have all papers face the same review standards.

When I see someone getting their fingers into something, like muddying/dithering concepts, shifting focus to something other than the crux of an argument (or using bad faith arguments, etc), I view it as corruption. It's a means for minority forces to insert their will over the majority. In this case, by potentially blocking meaningful work from reaching the public eye on a technicality.

So I admit that I was wrong to jump to conclusions. But I don't know that I was wrong in principle or spirit.

Those are terms of art, not arbitrary categories. They didn't make them up.

This does not seem like a win even if your “fight AI with AI plan works.”

  A($/Wh) D(Wh/kg) D(Wh/L) P($)  E(Wh) M(kg) Vol(L) V(V) C    S     URL(Sodium-ion)
  0.46    97.50    235.79  1.81  3.9   0.04  0.017  3.0  3000 18650 https://srikobatteries.com/product/sodium-ion-18650-3-0v-1-3ah-3-90wh-20c-rechargeable-battery/
  0.34    114.29   258.31  3.23  9.6   0.084 0.037  3.0  3000 26700 https://srikobatteries.com/product/sodium-ion-26700-3-0v-3-2ah-9-60wh-3c-rechargeable-battery/
  0.32    134.78   258.89  9.98  31.0  0.23  0.120  3.1  5000 33140 https://srikobatteries.com/product/sodium-ion-battery-33140-3-1v-10ah-31wh-12c-cylindrical-battery/
  0.40    112.50   224.09  21.85 54.0  0.48  0.241  3.0  5000 46145 https://srikobatteries.com/product/sodium-ion-46145-3-0v-18ah-54wh-10c-rechargeable-battery/
  0.20    122.22   231.09  43.70 220.0 1.8   0.952  3.2  5000 pack  https://srikobatteries.com/product/sodium-ion-na-5c-70ah-220wh-battery/
  
  C($/Wh) D(Wh/kg) D(Wh/L) P($)  E(Wh) M(kg) Vol(L) V(V) C    S     URL(Lithium-ion)
  0.23    252.00   761.77  2.85  12.6  0.05  0.017  3.6  300  18650 https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/samsung-35e
  0.16    262.01   742.41  2.85  18.0  0.069 0.024  3.6  300  21700 https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/samsung-50e
  
  O:   outlay
  D:   density
  P:   price
  E:   energy
  M:   mass
  Vol: volume
  V:   voltage
  C:   cycles
  S:   size
  
  Note: 26700 is not the same as 27100, they are just what each site specializes in.
  Comment: I think that it should have been 18065 instead of 18650 because then the last 3 digits could be length in mm, same for the others, but what do I know.
  Edit: I forgot to add cycles. When considered, they drop the price of sodium-ion to roughly 5-10 times less than lithium-ion for the batteries shown here.

  O($/Wh) D(Wh/kg) D(Wh/L) P($)  E(Wh) M(kg) Vol(L) V(V) C    S     URL(Lithium-ion)
  0.31    236.17   671.08  3.4   11.1  0.047 0.017  3.7  1000 18650 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wholesale-18650-Lithium-Battery-INR18650-3_1601503766893.html
  0.36    222.00   671.08  3.99  11.1  0.05  0.017  3.7  800  18650 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Hot-Selling-Factory-Price-INR18650-30Q_1601159662361.html
  0.83    160.00   290.20  4     4.8   0.03  0.017  3.2  2000 18650 https://www.batteryspace.com/LiFePO4-18650-Rechargeable-Cell-3.2V-1500-mAh-4.8Wh-7.5A-Rate.aspx
  0.36    227.85   1088.24 6.4   18    0.079 0.017  3.2  3000 18650 https://www.goldencellpower.com/product-item/18650-1100mah-3-2v-lifepo4-cells/
  0.36    222.78   1064.06 6.4   17.6  0.079 0.017  3.2  3000 18650 https://www.batteryspace.com/LiFePO4-18650-Rechargeable-Cell-3.2V-2000-mAh-6.4Wh-6A-Rate.aspx
  0.80    134.74   365.71  10.18 12.8  0.095 0.035  3.2  4000 26650 https://www.batteryspace.com/LiFePO4-26650-Rechargeable-Cell-3.2V-4000-mAh-12.8Wh-12A-Rate.aspx
  0.24    184.00   396.07  3.5   14.72 0.08  0.037  3.2  3000 26700 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/lithium-ion-battery-cell-26700-3_1601277009356.html
  0.31    240.00   413.29  4.8   15.36 0.064 0.037  3.2  4000 26700 https://www.sunpowernewenergy.com/product/26700-high-rate-lifepo4-battery-45e/
  0.31    160.00   128.28  4.8   15.36 0.096 0.120  3.2  4000 33140 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-Quality-LMFP-5AH-Cell-Lithium_1601161018743.html
  0.28    256.41   167.03  5.6   20    0.078 0.120  3.2  5000 33140 https://www.evlithium.com/LiFePO4-Battery/33140-20ah-lifepo4-battery-cell.html

  Edit: dangit, I made a mistake in my previous post. A($/Wh) and C($/Wh) were supposed to be O($/Wh) for outlay. I fixed this one to provide context.