An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles.
So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?
Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?
If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.
Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.
Ships are giant hunks of metal and radio emitters. They light up on SAR satellites[0]. Sentinel-1 gets whole earth coverage and a revisit time of 1-3 days[1] with two active satellites. And that's the public stuff, if you can afford a fleet or even some extra fuel to steer them into interesting orbits you can get faster revisits.
There is a french company (https://unseenlabs.com/fr/) that specializes in tracking ship at sea through observing their RF emission from space. Cool tech. I'm pretty sure their main clients are not all civil...
5-10 ships moving at speed across the ocean. Blasting the skies with radar.
Its as easy as anything is to find it in the ocean. And were pretty damn good at tracking ships at sea even small fishing vessels let alone a floating city.
The threat model to CSGs are basically nuclear submarines from nations that would simply tail the group if needed.
U.S. anti-submarine doctrine for surface vessels is pretty much just “run away”, that’s how dangerous subs are, so that’s why U.S. CSGs often include an attack submarine escort.
I really don’t want to work for the defense industry, but I have to admit that they do have very fun problems to solve. You know there are people at NRO who are dedicated to ship tracking via satellite. I assume they can easily track ships without cloud cover, but how do they do it when it’s cloudy? Heat signatures? Synthetic Aperture Radar? Wake detection?
For the first one, just look at wikipedia lists of government says that fly as little triangular constellations, like Yaogan 9A, 9B, 9C on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaogan
Those are ELINT birds that use multilateration to spot emitters globally.
SAR can spot wakes far, far, larger than ships using the same techniques as SAR measuring ground erosion, etc.
I'd be mildly surprised if they not using SAR for this all the time, not only during cloud cover. The Soviet Union was using radar satellites (the RORSATs) to track carriers decades ago.
Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this. SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
I would think that medium and high orbit optical tracking (daytime, cloudless sky) is probably used, because with video you can reasonably track subpixel targets if they're high contrast, without a lot of data transmission requirements.
> Bandwidth and processing are substantial bottlenecks with SAR; Only targeted and stationary applications have been broadly useful so far, and more focus has been put on planes than satellites for this.
I'm not sure why you assume this, this is factually incorrect. Satellite based SAR has been successfully used for civilian ship detection applications (traffic management, illegal fishing, smuggling detection, etc) for over three decades. I am sure its military use goes back much further.
> SAR is not as simple as taking a static image with a fixed resolution, your sensing window has got a target velocity and distance in mind and the antenna and processing needs to be tuned for that.
No? SAR satellites take thousands of SAR images of stationary scenes every day. It's true that object motion in the scene introduces artifacts, specifically displacement from true position - this is often called the "train off track" phenomenon, as a train moving at speed when viewed with SAR from the right angle will look like it's driving through the adjacent field rather than on the track. However, this isn't a significant problem, and can actually be useful in some situations (eg: looking at how far a ship is deflected from its wake to estimate its speed).
40 years ago the USN was working on using SAR with a elliptical kalmann filter to detect _submarine_ wakes. I assume things haven't digressed since then.
IME here in Colorado, a lot of them pay as well, or better, than run of the mill tech companies. I suspect the AI and "FAANG" companies may pay more, but I personally wouldn't work for any of those. In any case, I'd take $160k in Colorado over $240k in California any day.
And the problems are definitely a lot more interesting.
There might be some secret technology that we're unaware of but as far as we know magnetometers can only be used to detect underwater targets at very short ranges. I highly doubt that they're used on military reconnaissance satellites.
No, a submarine wake can't be detected at any significant depth. That idea has been tried several times and it never worked, not enough signal. I suppose I can't rule out some secret scientific breakthrough but the basic physics involved make it highly unlikely.
Eh, not really. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites used for marine ship detection have extremely wide sensor swath widths, and ships show up as very bright radar targets against the ocean. Detecting a large ship, even in a very large search area, is almost trivial.
Identifying a ship is harder, but not insurmountable. In particular, large ships like aircraft carriers tend to have very identifiable radar signatures if your resolution is high enough.
How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable.
Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.
This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.
But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.
Granted, but how does satellite radar actually see ships at all? How do the ships not blend into the ocean (the relative difference between the distances between ship<->satellite and ocean<->satellite is minescule)?
Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.
Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.
A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.
> I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?
That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.
However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.
If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns. They aren't the magic cannon it was designed for but do they really not fit? Apparently we are now putting hypersonic missiles in those mounts instead.
A Zumwalt with 5 inch gun offers almost no mission capability above a simple coast guard cutter.
They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3 hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.
The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by elderly people on the congressional arms committees that have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.
The reality is since the development of anti ship missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber guns of some sort.
The Zumwalt class are being refitted to carry CSP. And the boutique gun system is really a complex thing, it's not like packing in a bunch of VLS containers.
Just do a youtube search and you'll find plenty of talking head explainer videos. Ignore the talking head and just look at the imagery and data they share.
I mean fuck, I can pretty easily find the strait of hormuz on the map, pretty sure intelligence agencies can too and just look there for the carrier. If I can't find the carrier there, then I can plot the course between France and hormuz and do a brute force search over that course taking into account such a ship's relative velocity, since it's not like the carrier is gonna zig-zag through south america and the north pole on its way there to avoid detection. Is what I'm saying something sci-fi?
You can rent access to nearly real-time custom satellite targeting for <$3k per image. That means while you're correct that not all countries can afford it, most can.
Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks.
It did not say if it had acted at the request of US authorities.
To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full speed.
So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
So the satellite can know where the ship is, because it knows where it isn't? Then it's a simple matter of subtracting the isn't from the is, or the is from the isn't (whichever is greater)?
I admit I'm incredibly naive on this subject, but what makes it so hard to track an object as large as an aircraft carrier when starting from a known position such as a naval port?
You certainly can't do continuous observation but even just with commercial satellite offerings you can get pretty close.
For example nowadays Planet Labs [1] offers 30-50cm resolution imaging at a rate of one image or 120sec video stream every 90 minutes over a given 500 km^2 region. There is no situation where an aircraft carrier is going to be capable of evading a commercial satellite offering with that frequency and resolution. Once you know approximately where it is or even where it was in the semi-recent past, it's fairly trivial to narrow in and build a track off the location and course.
Break out the pocket book and pay Planet Labs to do it. You could do it with much less frequent visits than this probably the search area for it every 2 hours isn't very large and image recognition systems are pretty good. The big threat is cloud cover.
Note that that article is from 2020. Nowadays the frequency is actually down to 90 minutes/1.5hr. The resolution is up as well and they can do massive image capture (~500km^2) and video (120sec stream) from their passes.
Also nowadays they provide multi-spectal capture as well which can mostly see through cloud cover even if it takes a bit more bandwidth and postprocessing.
The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.
Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.
So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.
And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.
If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.
...literally yes (to the latter)? Is that not exactly why modern warships have to implement things like measures to reduce their radar cross section? If you could actually just rely on "ocean too big" then there would be no need for that.
It is in part for small crafts (frigates and corvettes) but for pretty much anything larger there's no concealing those ships.
The primary reason however for minimizing radar cross section and increasing radar scatter is to harden protections against radar based weapon systems during a conflict.
Even if the ship is still visible in peacetime operations, once electronic countermeasures/ECM are engaged, it gets an order of magnitude harder for guided missiles to still "see" the ship.
Depending on the kit, once missiles are in the air the ship and all of their friends in their strike group/squadron is going to start jamming radar, popping decoys, and trying to dazzle the missiles effectively enough for RIM-174/SM-6, RIM-66/SM-1, and RIM-67/SM-2s to intercept it without the missiles evading. And should the missile make it to close-in range then it's just praying that the phalanx/CIWS takes care of it.
And if everything fails then all that jamming and dazzling + the reduced radar cross section is going to hopefully result in the missiles being slightly off target/not a complete kill on the vessel.
So they still serve a purpose. Just not for stealth. Instead serving as compounding increases to survival odds in engagement scenarios.
But what you're describing is stealth. "Stealth" doesn't mean "invisible". Humans wearing combat fatigues aren't literally invisible either especially when moving, they're just harder to track/get a visual lock on to aim at.
The point still stands that you cannot rely on "ocean is too big for anyone to find me" because it very much is not.
I think you are sim-interpreting what I was saying (and if you see what I've posted elsewhere in the discussion thread I'm very much in agreement with you).
I was just saying that stealth is a component of ship design for small crafts (i.e. those that would generally stay close to the coast) but that it's not the case for larger ships and even for those smaller ships it's just not the primary purpose for radar optimized hulls.
Close to the coast, non-coastal radar won't be able to detect ships nearly as well as out at sea where they stand out like a sore thumb. And of course coastal radar will still light up any ship so stealth there is of little value on foreign shores.
But really outside of some niche cases for small crafts, radar "stealth" is all about survivability and not the traditional view of stealth.
Those are the few countries that France needs to worry about.
Doesn't matter whether Estonia, Honduras, Laos, and Luxembourg can track their carrier, or not.
EDIT: In confined waters (like the Mediterranean), many more countries could track the carrier if they cared to. Even back in the 1950's, the Soviets got quite adept at loading "fishing boats" with electronic equipment, then trailing behind US Navy carrier groups.
Billy Boy from the Island can use commercial satellites to map mud huts for his vaccine NGO, i'm sure any nation state can find a few quid to locate a war ship.
> it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean
I just ran some googled numbers over my envelope, and I get that the Mediterranean sea (great circle distance between Gibraltar and Beirut is 2300mi) is about 14000x larger than the bow-to-stern length (858') of the carrier.
That's... not that terribly difficult as an imaging problem. Just a very tractable number of well-resolved 12k phone camera images would be able to bullseye it.
Obviously there are technical problems to be solved, like how to get the phones into the stratosphere on a regular basis for coverage, and the annoyance of "clouds" blocking the view. So it's not a DIY project.
But it seems eminently doable to me. The barriers in place are definitely not that the "empty space is just too big". The globe is kinda small these days.
And you've defined a harder problem! Once you've found it once it's much easier to find in the future: it can only go so fast, and it's constrained to stay in relatively deep water.
Aircraft carriers sail from home ports and are frequently visible to all. The Charles de Gaulle was previously in Denmark for instance, then obviously everyone can also see you crossing the English Channel and Straight of Gibraltar.
So from there it is only a matter of keeping an eye on it for anyone with satellites. So obviously all the "big guys" know where the other guys' capital ships are.
We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean.
They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.
A commercial jet is both way smaller and faster moving than an aircraft carrier. I suspect this is like saying: why can’t you see the fly in the photo, the turtle is right there!
There's a nonzero chance military intelligence agencies of multiple countries know exactly where that plane fell, but none can say anything, because that would reveal the true extent of their capabilities.
They could just feed the data to some associated outside party with some other plausible explanation. But, there are only a few, maybe two countries, with the ability and desire to have listening stations all over the ocean, and neither one is particularly interested in the Indian ocean.
They don't normally go that fast from what I understand. That is their top speed in reserve they can use for evasive maneuvers, they don't want to go faster than their support fleet or deal with the high maintenance running at threshold will cause.
It's like when you drive your car you're not normally redlining it since that will kill the engine if you do it all the time.
Surprisingly, it is much easier to find a big chunk of steel floating on the Mediterranean, knowing where it was a couple of days ago, than a smaller object disintegrated in small pieces under the Indian Ocean. Go figure.
Err, no. The consensus and available evidence including washed up components seems to be that it crashed in the Indian Ocean, that's the (also vast) space between ~Australia and ~Africa, bounded in the north by Indonesia, the Indian subcontinent, and Arabia. It crashed somewhere in the eastern portion, not far from Indonesia and Australia. Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC. The Pacific is the other (eastern) side of Australia, which stretches from the Aussie-Kiwi approach to the South Pole to Alaska, and Vladivostok to Tierra del Fuego.
> Currents then took parts as far as the Maldives/Sri Lanka, IIRC
Some bits ended up on a beach of the Réunion island, closer to Madagascar than Sri Lanka. I am not disagreeing, it’s just that the whole story is fascinating. It’s easy to think "well, it just crashed into the sea so of course some bits would show up on a beach" until you look at the Indian Ocean with a proper projection and figure the scale.
Floating is a powerful physical configuration! You get currents plus windspeed. If you're in to this sort of thing, I can recommend The Seacraft of Prehistory, We: The Navigators, and Archaeology of the Boat approximately in that order.
Are you making the same point as the person you said "err, no" to, or are you correcting the inconsequential details while not addressing their main point?
Nobody was looking for MH370 while it was in the air. After a few hours, it rapidly became a submarine, which is a type of craft that's well known for being hard to find. In addition to that, it took on its new submersible form in one of the most remote areas of the ocean, rather than in a small and very busy sea.
If they have ships in the area sure but picking it out of the ocean if you don't already know where it is on satellite data is a lot harder. Until the last decade or so satellite tracking of ships visually was essentially the domain of huge defense budgets like the US that had more continuous satellite coverage. It'd be interesting to see how well that could be done now with something like Planet and tracking it forwards in time from port visits or other known publicized pinpointing.
Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don’t have any ships in the area and also don’t have any satellites that could take pictures, right?
America has intelligence-sharing agreements with allied nations wherein our satellites are taking photos on the allies' behalf of things that we might not otherwise be interested in. I'm sure China and Russia have similar arrangements with their allies.
China is absolutely sharing intel with Iran. They cannot believe their luck. The US is getting itself into a Ukraine, draining all their advanced weapon stocks, delivering tons of real war data for China to work with.
It's like Christmas. Real practice tracking US assets and wargaming against them is such a break for them.
I bet you could do it with a big enough expense account with Planet Labs and the compute power to process the images these days. Track it forwards from the last public port of call or *INT leak like this strava data. 3.7m accuracy seems like enough to do it. It's not enough to target it directly but it would be enough to get more capable assets into the right area a la the interception of Japan's ships when they attacked Midway.
I mean, a personal yacht can sail around the world, that's not really demonstrating whether the vessel is useful in combat operations anywhere in the world.
Then you probably should accept that proxy wars work both ways. And well, it's not really Iran's fault that its borders has crept so close to the US military bases.
Who is Iran a proxy for? Russia, as usual, has only benefited from Trump's actions.
The one thing you can say about Iran is that they were absolute morons not to actually build or otherwise acquire a nuclear arsenal. They had decades. If Pakistan could do it...
It's such a retarded take that hitting Russia's main ally (iran) is somehow pro-russia. Does taking out their number two ally (Venezuela) also help them?
Russia cares about Iran mainly to the extent it's a thorn in the West's side. They don't care much about Trump's self-inflicted footgunnery, especially because the arms and dollars that we dissipate in Iran won't be available to Kyiv.
If Russia cared that much about Iran, they'd have armed them, and they would making much more noise now. (Somewhat to your point, though, it was Iran who was selling arms and expertise to Russia.)
Describing Venezuela as Russia's #2 ally ahead of countries like China and Belarus is certainly a take. Out of respect for the house rules, though, I won't use the R-word to describe it, however applicable it may be.
That's in a sun synchronous orbit so would only over fly once a day so the task does get a lot tougher. A few days of bad weather and you've largely lost the ship.
Track not the ship itself but the planes that take off and land on it. Many sites will expose their paths, you'll see the planes circling in a pattern around "some void" - that's the ship.
You can find yesterday's location easily on flightradar24.com. Try it it will make you feel like an ossint sleuth or something. Look to the south of Cyprus.
Now that's not realtime because I'm telling you after the fact. But if you were paid to do it, of course, then you'd spend some money on an actual account on this and similar services, which would get you many more filters and much more precise data.
Not at all, depends on the mission. In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship right now on flightradar.
It was patrolling ~100km below Cyprus's main southern city.
Move the timeline to yesterday, find a non-Boeing military plane in that zone, enable flight traces and keep trying planes until you see an ovoidal pattern circling around "nothing"... but that nothingness moves over time.m; that's the ship.
> In fact you can spot yesterday's location of the ship right now on flightradar.
No need to go that far. Macron did press conferences in Cyprus and on the Charles de Gaulle. You just need a passing glance at the headlines of a French newspaper. Or any decent international news channel (granted, that’s a bit tricky in the US).
Maybe, maybe not. When the US did their venezuela maduro operation they turned on adsb on f15e for whatever reason. And only turned it on for like a portion of the mission so maybe that wasn’t intentional.
Especially aircraft carriers deliberately let their position public in order to cause the fear and alignment that are destined to. It's that they don't publish their accurate position but only the approximate.
That's not really the point. The issue is that a soldier almost certainly without a lot of thought ended up leaking information that he wasn't aware of leaking.
And furthermore identifiable information of a particular individual, which people can use to for example find out what unit he is deployed with, which may give you information about what the mission is about and so on.
In WW2 when transmitting morse code individual operators used to have what was called a 'fist', skilled listeners could identify and track operators by their unique signature. This was used during world war 2 to track where particular individuals and units were moved which gave people a great deal of information not just where but what they were up to.
If you leak the Fitbit information of a guy who foreign intelligence has identified as being part of a unit that's always involved in particular operations you didn't just give something obvious away but potentially something very sensitive.
Sorry to be the one to inform you that we edit history in git.
There has been reporting on nemoclaw for the last couple weeks. Are you supposing that journalists were writing about software that hadn't even been designed?
> Sorry to be the one to inform you that we edit history in git.
Who is "we"? Do you work for NVidia?
> There has been reporting on nemoclaw for the last couple weeks.
The earliest reporting I've seen was yesterday. Can you link something from prior to March 14?
edit: I did find some articles from before March 14[0] which says NVidia was "prepping" this. Which is extremely funny, because it means they were hyping up software which hadn't even started being written yet. The AI bubble truly does not stop delivering.
> Are you supposing that journalists were writing about software that hadn't even been designed?
If you think journalists writing about things that will never exist is new, welcome to the real world. There's a whole term for it.[1]
I am not anyone special. I don't know anything about nvidia. I just know that the "4 day history" you think matters, is not a reasonable belief given that random youtubers have been reporting on it.
and by "we" i mean git users. people who used git for its usefulness before github existed, and understand the value of a clean history over an accurate history.
There's nothing clean about the history. You think commits like [0], with the commit message "improve", count as "clean"? What do you think the motivation for the author would be to modify git history to make it appear that this was written over a weekend, including separating each feature/commit by a few hours, which corresponds to a reasonable amount of time that it may have taken to write that feature? Including a break on Mar 15 at 1:18 AM PDT before continuing to commit at Mar 15 at 12:43 PM PDT. Hey, isn't there a normal human behaviour that occurs around this time every day which takes 6-10 hours?
I'm fully aware you can rewrite git history to whatever you want, but this is an occam's razor situation here. You'd only think this wasn't a weekend project if you desperately wanted to believe that this was some major initiative for some reason.
Just let go of the notion that a 4 day github history necessarily means the project is only 4 days old. It's a ridiculous assumption to base an argument off of. It's extremely normal to have work in one, perhaps internal, repo which you then blast over to a public repo in one (or a few) big commits. There is zero reason for them to let you see their internal progress.
> It's extremely normal to have work in one, perhaps internal, repo which you then blast over to a public repo in one (or a few) big commits.
Did you even read the commit history? That is not what is happening here.
This is turning into a "don't believe your lying eyes" situation. Why are you people so desperate to pretend this wasn't written in a weekend?
> There is zero reason for them to let you see their internal progress.
Again, I ask you -- what is the reason for them to edit commit history to show incremental progress as if it were written in a weekend, when it actually was not?
Okay, so there's overwhelming evidence that their public github history is accurate and Nemoclaw was written in a weekend, and the only reason to think it's not accurate is that... it's technically possible to edit git history, and also there's no reasonable explanation for why they would have edited git history they way they did.
So... yeah, draw your own conclusion I guess, whatever.
Lmfao. This is how I know you have never worked at a big company before. I promise you every big company has processes around open sourcing things. It's not something that just whip up and release over a weekend. Just the legal approval would have taken months
I have buddies at Nvidia. Their primary platform is not GitHub. Sorry you're so naive. Almost certainly this was built in house for at least a month or two prior. Then private repo. Approvals. Then public
Not to mention the fact that Jensen literally announced it in their biggest yearly launch conference. No you're totally right. He mandated someone build it over the weekend while drafting up a full presentation and launch announcement about it
That's more plausible than the very normal practice of developing internally, scrubbing commits of any accidental whoopsies, vetting it and then putting it out publicly
"Overwhelming evidence" = git history that is completely fungible. Once you're done here I have a lobster claw to sell you
> Again, I ask you -- what is the reason for them to edit commit history to show incremental progress as if it were written in a weekend, when it actually was not?
Answer this question or we're done here, thanks.
> Almost certainly this was built in house for at least a month or two prior. Then private repo. Approvals. Then public.
Source, other than you making it up?
> That's more plausible than the very normal practice of developing internally, scrubbing commits of any accidental whoopsies, vetting it and then putting it out publicly
Could you point to a specific commit you believe is a representation of an internal data transfer from a separate source control system which is not representative of work achievable within the time period represented by the differential between the commit time and the time of the prior commit?
You cannot really be this naive but i'll play along:
> what is the reason for them to edit commit history to show incremental progress as if it were written in a weekend, when it actually was not?
Like i said. You are letting on that you have never actually worked on an internal project that is going to go open source. There are a million and one reasons. Here are some completely normal and plausible ones. It was worked on over weeks internally, commits referenced other internal NVIDIA software/libraries they used. It name dropped projects and code names. Maybe it was just an extremely long chain of messy commits that is improper to have on a potentially big open source repo. So here's what happens (since you clearly are unaware of how people operate in this world), you "unstage" everything and write canonical commits free of all the garbage. You squash, you merge, you set up standards, you leave a clean commit history. All of it very important for open source
> Source, other than you making it up?
Ah yes let me just go ping the people who worked on it. Lol. Source is my decade long experience working on similar projects where i literally did this scrubbing of commits. You have a circuitous argument "It was done in a weekend because the commits say so" is really quite the hill to die on
> Could you point to a specific commit you believe is a representation of an internal data transfer
If there was any indication left over of a "transfer", it wouldn't have done it's purpose would it? But if you really are looking for something, how about the fact that there's only one human contributor of the first few commits. Very odd, you would think a massive open sourcing of a project like this would probably involve a team right? Or do you believe AI tools have gotten that good that one engineer is just driving with Claude and open sourcing full launches?
Here, how about we just do some critical thinking. Nvidia setup a "Set up NemoClaw" booth at their GTC that was happening just a few days ago. Jensen had a full presentation for it and it was a big highlight.
Do you really think a company as big as Nvidia is hinging the release of a big announcement on the hope that ONE engineer is going to START working on it a few days before the announcement and ACTUALLY get it done to a point where they can talk about it on stage?
Please come on, no one can be this dense. You have to be trolling. Try another argument than "The commits say so". Just apply a basic level of understanding of how software is built and released
Nothing more to discuss here, the commit history (and your lack of coherent responses beyond hypothetical "it's technically possible it COULD have happened this way") speak for themselves. Thanks for trying though.
edit: Wait, you don't "have buddies at NVidia" -- you literally work at NVidia. Weird that you tried to hide this information? No wonder you're so desperate to pretend this project is more than it actually is though, it must be embarrassing for you that your company didn't scrub git history properly before making this public!
Ding ding ding. See it would have been too easy to just say "i know for a fact". I just wanted to walk you to the conclusion. Congrats.
Now you are more enlightened about how things work. Of course Nvidia is a big company not everyone that works at nvidia knows everything about every team. That's by design. Welcome to working at a big company! I do have buddies that worked on this project internally and yes it was done over many weeks and months
Thanks for playing. I do know for a fact it's definitely not what you think it is but i had a chuckle watching you twist yourself in a knot trying to convince me you knew better. Why would i disclose information about myself? odd thing to expect from someone. But had you riled up enough to have you go looking through my comment history then my github then my website huh! Must have really struck a nerve. Don't worry i won't do the same to you. I don't care about random people yapping on the internet enough
edit: Removing, not productive to engage with this. pre-emptive apology to dang/tom if this gets cleaned up, most of this thread is not productive and I should not have continued responding much earlier.
Lol where did i make it sound like any of that? Just saw you confidently make the wrong claim and tried to socratic method you into understanding. You are sadly too far gone to understand
Good ad hominem. I'd be riled up too if i was publicly dressed down and proved to be wrong. So now you know, commit history doesn't mean jack sh!t. Sorry i had to ruin Christmas for you
> you guys wanted to make this look like it was written in a weekend though
Imagine thinking this was done to convince anyone about the TIME it took to write this project. Here's a very simple explanation, those commits reflect a PORT over to public Github to reflect launch. Author chose to do it in some number of commits instead of "feat: Full implementation in one commit". The port happened before their announcement. Not the write of it
Now I won't propose hypotheses because clearly the socratic method didn't work on you. So now sit down and learn how things work
And next time, try not to be so confidently wrong on the internet. I had a very good laugh watching you twist and turn yourself. Must have been typing furiously thinking you really were in the right :)
> Why are you people so desperate to pretend this wasn't written in a weekend?
Because it wasn't? And your only "proof" of it was commit history. "You're telling me to not believe my lying eyes" hilarious. You are being told again and again that it means nothing. It's not blockchain. You are allowed to write commits as you see fit without making it a system of record of time spent
> People with above room temp IQ can figure out what's going on here
Yes we can. We have one person convinced they can look at commit history and say for sure that is exactly when that code was written. No developer agrees with you. As you have been told a couple times by other people above as well
It's quite obvious you work at some small shop or are a freelancer and have never done work in any kind of big environment. No you cannot just open source a "weekend" project at any big company. Wherever you are you may be allowed to vibe code and ship something under your company's github willy nilly.
It's just not the reality in any serious place. No one is trying to deceive you. You have just deceived yourself. Thanks again for playing
You can have the last word you are so desperate for
I kind of hope nemoclaw uptake and spark usage pushes ARM into the spotlight for LLM development, making it the primary release target rather than x86.
This could be the opening we need to wrangle a truly opensource-first ecosystem away from Microsoft and apple.
I don't think there was as much pushback about his policy as much as there was discontent with an economic slowdown and a somewhat ironic (considering where we find ourselves) frustration with his age.
Well there was a lot of people, especially on the dem side of the spectrum, who weren't a fan of his public unwavering support of the genocide of the Palestinian people. Internal investigations within the party allegedly agree with this analysis.
But yes, people dislike Biden for a lot of things he didn't deserve to be disliked for, such as inflation which was caused by COVID and Trump and which Biden did a fantastic job of controlling, but which parts of the public simply perceived as "inflation went wild under Biden". Still, even though it's not fair, the message "I will do nothing different from (unpopular incumbent)" isn't great campaign strategy, in my opinion.
Google tells me that a Boeing 737 flies (cruises) at 430–470 knots. Also, the A-10 Warthog only cruises at 300 knows.
You wrote:
> Not a substantial enough speed increase to powerfully deter air defenses.
For modern air defenses like the Russian S-400 Triumf, pretty much all of their missiles can easily outrun (or catch!) any modern fighter jet. In your view, what speed would be "substantial enough"?
The role of the Osprey has, as I understand, been to transport troops into an area after it has been bombed to shit. In such a situation you've already destroyed the air defenses (or you're fighting guerillas who are relying on portable anti-air weapons)
I can't imagine what other role a VTOL would eventually play. It's too fragile for CAS, too slow for air supremacy, not enough payload for bombing, and recon is better served by drones or satellites. The only reason to have an expensive, heavy plane take off and land in a warzone would seem to be moving people in and out.
Agree with this take for the most part. Vibe coding is bad enough with an engineer in charge. Without a computer science background or engineering experience it's way too easy to go off the rails.
The exception would obviously be all the skilled coders who got turned into PM's over the years due to bad salary/title structures or poor organization structure.
I am a bit confused with the consistency of this community in speaking about MBA’s running their orgs or PM’s making bad decisions… it feels like more resistance by engineers to learn business than the business side not learning code. What I mean is that what a company values seems to be widely understood and the reaction from HN is “they’re wrong.” If anything, this is the green light for engineers to step into the business side and fix all the complaints they’ve had for decades.
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So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.
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