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Yes. But. There's many companies that build up a reputation then cash in on that reputation. Eg Mercedes in the 90s. So you could end up paying more for cheap rubbish.

It would be nice if the EU or someone introduced an energy star type system for reliability and repairability so that consumers could have some kind of idea what the quality is likely to be.


Not according to what I've just read. It's sold in china via a joint venture with saic and seems to have been slightly redesigned for the china market.

Well it depends what legal protections are there to back it up. If you get threatened with blacklisting without recourse, that seems like a bad thing.

What are the costs of the installation based on? I haven't been able to find any for sale?

Just went to the Alessi site for more details. List one for £160 and one for £170. No obvious difference. Click on "what is the capacity of the toru kettle" and it makes you wait for an ai to answer the question.

What am I supposed to infer about the quality of a design company when they can't even get such simple things right?


Well, if it looks cool and it nearly works that is totally on brand for Alessi!

They're different sizes, it's in the description and it's also described under "More info" > "Capacity (cl)". I'm not seeing the "What is the capacity..." button you mentioned.

I'm on mobile, Firefox.

Given the state of missile tech, is that as relevant anymore? If you strap a missile on to a Cessna that can take down a 5th gen fighter before it knows you're there. Doesn't really matter what fancy doodads the latest and greatest jet has.

Further if your 5th gen jets are relying on tech from your adversary....


The fancy doodads 5th generation has is reduced radar signature, improved sensors and data-link. The 5th generation can see and fire against a 4th gen fighter and evade before being detected and it can do that without EWACS (which are big, slow and easy to kill). That's why the US has a gap on replacing the current EWACS because it doesn't really need them.

Stealth is somewhat overrated, especially 5th gen. Sure you get a lower radar cross-section which means you are less visible to X-band radar but near-peer adversaries or even non-peer technologically advanced adversaries don't rely only on X-band radar, to say nothing of distributed array radar where the transmitter and receiver are not in the same location. More than one networked war plane in the air are essentially distributed array radar. There are other bands which admittedly as not as good as X-band in terms of how much energy you need and how accurately you can locate things. But you can send a missile in the general direction using say S-band and have the missile turn on it's seeker once it's closer. Once the missile is close enough, a stealth plan can no longer hide. This is what the Russian S-400 and S-500 do for example.

Even when Serbia was bombed during the Clinton years, American stealth bombers escaped not due to stealth but because they used decoys towed by fiber optics which transmitted what the missile seeker expected to receive from the plane while also aggressively jamming the missile seeker so the missile hit the decoy not the plane. One stealth bomber was hit anyway.

Safran and other European manufacturers arguably produce decoys that are as good as anything US planes have, arguably better because they decided not to go all in on stealth and focus on other measures instead. Stealth is certainly better to have than not but stealth also means somewhat worse aerodynamics and much less serviceability. You need to apply stealth paint and cure it any time you work on the plane. The plane needs more work and is harder to work on because of the tradeoffs made to achieve stealth. So instead of 75%+ of the planes being available at any one time, you only have about 50% of the planes available at any one time and total operational costs are much higher.

Given these disadvantages, it's not completely clear how much of a benefit 5th gen stealth is in a near-peer conflict. If the US is fighting Iraq fine. Now, if you can actually achieve what defense manufacturers say they will achieve with 6th gen stealth, where you have much lower RCS to all bands of radar from all directions, that could be a game changer but we don't actually know yet. The F-35 still doesn't do everything it was supposed to be able to do when the program started, so I would take these claims with a large grain of salt. And stealth countermeasures will continue to evolve.


I'm not an expert by any means but my understanding is improved missiles mean this is more relevant than ever.

Non-stealthy 4th gen fighters are sitting ducks in 2026 against a peer opponent as we've seen in ukraine


Yes and no, there is no easy binary answer here.

At altitude most AA is radar based, thus a lower RCS will help directly in not being seen. So you can get closer to the enemy you still can see because of the higher RCS. For BVR fights this is essential.

Those machines shouldn't be low level though. IR missles don't care about RCS. It is not their natural territory either.

Third that Cessna is not hidden either. From above (i.e. an AWACS) it can be seen very good. From the ground it can hide low and slow. But so can dedicated planes too, which is practised regularly.


Well yes, I'm taking an extreme example.

I'm just thinking about something like the meteor missile, if you're up against a 5th gen jet with shorter range missiles, the 5th gen jet doesn't necessarily have the advantage.

Then there's things like drones. A cheap drone with a good missile is arguably the better option than an expensive jet with poor weapons.

Yes, the best option is the good jet with the good missile, but most militaries have limited budgets, so it isn't a question of having all the the things, but one of where that money is best spent. I suppose you could argue that the military knows best, but then the US military insisted on keeping cannon around on jets just in case, so it seems to me, at least plausible that the current view is more about inertia than bang for buck.


>currency libraries

Are there some hidden depths to formatting/converting that I'm missing? And yes. I know not to use floats


Currency conversions is a fantastically more complicated task than most people realize. Also, performing transforms.

I'd label it as more related to Jevon's paradox. They arent saying they're the same individual. Just that this is very quickly undone by other developments.

But anyway it'll devolves pretty quickly into a fallacy where you shouldn't do anything because your neighbour is a bigger problem (forget the name).


> neither naive code nor the absolute limit you can reach with each language

Maybe a nit pick. But this isn't a basis to say you can't compare the code. The 'average' code is going to be somewhere between your two extremes. Assuming on average, the code was written by the average programmer, you can get an insight in to what the average programmer of a programming language should expect.

Now it may be that populations of programmers favour different things (speed, memory usage, ease of implementation) but that still forms a valid comparison.


We are talking about the benchmark game here. The code for different languages was written by different programmers. For some languages, there were multiple implementations and many iterations. In this case, the researchers used the fastest one.

Some of the implementations are extremely optimized and took a lot of effort. Some implementations are not. So you might be comparing highly optimized JavaScript code with naive, below-average TypeScript code. You cannot compare those.

It would be much better if they used the same level of optimization for each language, but they didn't. Furthermore it is called a "Game" (it used to be called a "Shoot-out") because you shouldn't take it seriously. So it shouldn't be the basis of serious research.


I'm confused because there is no Typescript on the benchmark games that I can see. So what are they even using for Typescript here?

Isn't that like saying X compiles to assembly as so should be as efficient as assembly?

I'm not an expert on the internals of typescript. But your comment doesn't indicate you are an expert either.


You don't have to be an expert in TypeScript to know that the TypeScript compiler just strips the types from the code and leaves the rest as-is (if you are targeting a somewhat modern JS engine). The runtime performance of a TypeScript program is the same as that of the equivalent JavaScript program.

But of course, a TypeScript program could be much slower than a different JavaScript program, as is probably happening in this case.

I agree with others that the difference in results between JavaScript and TypeScript makes the quality of this paper highly suspect.


Well you need to know enough to know whether it's doing run time checks also.

And also whether it's generating less efficient code to satisfy the type safety requirement.


It isn't. Typescript is basically javascript with type annotations. There is a shorthand for class member initialisation and for defining enums, but that's basically it. There are no extra safety checks inserted. You get compile-time typechecking and nothing else.

It's more like comparing assembly against the same program but with comments.

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