If you need some inspiration, check out levelsio's explorations knowing nothing about game dev and creating a multiplayer flight simulator with Cursor. He's been working on it over the past week and has made great progress. He has several tweets describing the process.
I've seen multiple people say this, but when I have -- in my writing and I use ChatGPT to improve it, ChatGPT always removes the -- and rewords the sentence.
Here's my prompt, borrowed from Raycast and slightly modified:
---
Act as a spelling corrector, content writer, and text improver/editor. Reply to each message only with the rewritten text.
Strictly follow these rules:
- Correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors in the given text
- Enhance clarity and conciseness without altering the original meaning
- Divide lengthy sentences into shorter, more readable ones
- Eliminate unnecessary repetition while preserving important points
- Prioritize active voice over passive voice for a more engaging tone
- Opt for simpler, more accessible vocabulary when possible
- ALWAYS ensure the original meaning and intention of the given text
- ALWAYS detect and maintain the original language of the text
- ALWAYS maintain the existing tone of voice and style, e.g. formal, casual, polite, etc.
- NEVER surround the improved text with quotes or any additional formatting
- If the text is already well-written and requires no improvement, don't change the given text
Text to improve:
{selection}
Improved text:
Same, i always litter my texts with '--' and it's often a symptom of me not being able to structure the text properly. Chat-gpt will often nuke these and structure my text better.
I've also noticed that my ability to write properly structured and grammatically correct sentences have decreased rapidly since i began relying on LLMs for improving my writing.
So i'm actually trying to stop using it -- it's just so tempting to throw in some garbage and get a well structured text out!
I mean just see how much better it can make this comment:
---
Same here! I often find myself sprinkling my texts with "--," which is usually a sign that I'm struggling to structure my thoughts properly. ChatGPT often cleans these up and does a great job of organizing my text.
I've also noticed that my ability to write well-structured and grammatically correct sentences has declined significantly since I started relying on LLMs to improve my writing.
I'm actually trying to cut back on using them—but it's hard to resist the temptation to toss in a messy draft and get a neatly structured result back!
As someone who once worked on B-52s, I find it amusing how many "successors" it has outlasted. And I know why, because I worked on many of those, too.
It has taught me to be skeptical of unproven claims and promises, especially when someone is particularly passionate about them. Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy.
I have great respect for the XB-70. It's the only strategic bomber I haven't worked on or even seen in person, and it holds a certain "alternate reality" mystique for me.
> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy.
I don't know anything about B-52s, but I work on a project where we are essentially replacing a 40 year old weapon system with a new one. The new one should of course do the same things, preferably better, and do additional new things. The old system started out simple, but has since had most of its internals swapped both hardware and software wise a number of times. We have full access to all the documentation of the old system, but let's say there has been periods throughout these 40 years where this aspect hasn't exactly been top priority.
It doesn't come as a surprise to me that projects like JSF end up a complete clusterfuck. Everyone tends to underestimate the complexity of the system they operate/produce after a while because most of it is always there and just works.
There’s an urban legend in NYC that every incoming mayor since something like 1890 gets a letter, handed down from mayor to mayor, signed by all of the mayors, that says something like, and I am guessing here, but it is supposedly a very short letter:
Do not #%{>€!# with the sewer system. You may be tempted to, because it works so well it is invisible, to reduce its budget, or to overhaul it, or something.
Do not.
Fund it. Hire extremely competent people to run it, and do not replace them.
> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy.
As someone that has managed engineering teams for large projects, I 100% agree. One of the issues with computers IMO is that it has made bad engineering easier. Back when you had to check everything with a slide-rule, you had a real appreciation for the skill and engineering prowess and experience to make things absolutely dead simple.
One of my favorite things is in the watch world, every mechanism besides showing time is called complication. When one talks about a feature, or an item as a complication, just the act of doing that forces one to be more deliberate.
I like to say that whatever the complexity is, it is in the nature of the problem itself and isn’t something that’s open for us to design. Only when we design a solution we risk introducing complication.
Of course, we can always choose to solve the least complex problem.
True, but also modeling and iteration does lead you to unexpected solutions that can in turn solve complex problems that you couldn't have imagined could be solved. Landing rockets being an easy one, but that kind of iterative approach has been put to work in all kinds of fields.
One of the sources of this, which is now over, was the exponential increase in computing power. You could add complexity and your code would always run faster anyway, one of the popular benchmarks saw worse results on average than last year which never happened before. There are a lot of reasons for it some more speculative than others, and clearly computers will get faster in the future. But still.
No longer can software engineers arbitrarily add bloat and just get away with it.
"Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy."
That's what worries me about a lot of the shiny, super high tech, super expensive weapons systems of the US. These are fine against an overmatched enemy when you can fly back to a safe place for doing the necessary maintenance. This may change when there is a war against a capable enemy that can strike closer to home. The US has always had the advantage that the homeland was safe but that may change in the future. And once you lose a B-2 bomber it's very hard to replace.
It's literally impossible to replace a B-2 bomber: the production line was shut down years ago and much of the supply chain no longer exists. Existing B-2's (there are only 19 still in service) will be gradually replaced by new B-21 Raiders.
One of the long standing problems with US defense procurement is that they build a batch of something, then cut off all orders and dismantle the production line in order to free up funds to develop a successor model. This is tremendously risky because it leaves a gap of many years when it's impossible to replace attrition losses. If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21.
>"If the US is going to maintain a credible deterrent against China then something has to change. Either defense spending has to go up or we have to drastically scale back activities in other areas. And no, cheap AI drone swarms won't replace the capabilities of something like a B-21."
Assuming the US would actually need B21 capability in a war with China. Those will be probably blown up from the sky very fast. Besides I doubt wars with China and / or Russia will be limited to conventional means. Will probably escalate to nuclear very fast and then everybody is royally fucked.
Nah. Everything we know about the B-21 indicates that it's probably pretty survivable against the Chinese air defense system. Especially for stand-off strikes near the Taiwan Strait where it wouldn't have to overfly radar stations. The design was literally optimized for exactly that purpose.
Ironically the B-21 is probably safest in the air. The greatest kinetic threat is on the ground because forward air bases generally lack hardened aircraft shelters or effective missile defense. This is another reason why maintaining deterrence against China will require a major increase in defense spending or realignment of priorities.
The whole point of procuring a platform like the B-21 is to never have to use it. The strategic calculus is that just having it gives the US a range of conventional options short of global thermonuclear war, and thus forces adversaries to be more cautious.
It's hard to believe the B-21 would ever be stored at a forward missile base.
They'd likely take off from the US, fly wherever they need to go for their mission without landing, and then fly all the way back to the US. Same as the B-2.
Similarly it's unlikely a drone strike is an issue due to distance.
Believe it. Forward basing would be the only way to generate useful sortie rates in that type of conflict. Transiting even from Hickam just takes too long and requires too much tanker support. We're already short of tankers; they're wearing out and not being replaced quickly enough.
The greatest kinetic threat is from drone swarm attacks, which can be delivered to the vicinity of an airbase from a handful of anonymous-looking trucks or vans.
One or two grenade-strength shrapnel devices are enough to make a $700m dollar special project useless.
You could try a surprise drone attack from a container ship. Looks like the closest ship is about 125 miles away, that might be pushing the range a bit.
I think any war with China would be predominantly economic and cyber. I don’t think it’s viable for either party to perform a mainland strikes and I don’t think it would become nuclear, but who knows. If things escalate during the current POTUS’s term, I think it will come down to meetings and deal-makings, because that is POTUS’s passion and preferred way.
I think any war with Russia would be, well is, economic and cyber and proxy wars.
> I think it will come down to meetings and deal-makings, because that is POTUS’s passion and preferred way
Current POTUS is an egomaniacal moron. Things could very easily get out of his control, especially as he dismantles the US government and sources of influence throughout the world.
> Those will be probably blown up from the sky very fast.
Why do you say that? I'd think B21 is better (stealthier) than B2. I think there is a story about a B2 dropping a dud on NK undetected granted NK vs. China
Not only is the museum itself awesome (and free), they are also responsible for almost every US warplane on display around the world. You can download a spreadsheet from their website showing where planes are on "loan".
A good look at the XB-70. No narration, just highly detailed pictures.[1]
The XB-70 looks like nothing that came before, and nothing after it looks like the XB-70. Six engines side by side in the tail. It looks like a 1950s concept for a spaceplane. It was apparently a good aircraft, but expensive and didn't fit any military need of the time.
(The need for high-altitude supersonic bombers declined once surface to air missiles got good enough to hit them.)
I agree with you, but the issue afaik is that B-52 was more flexible whereas the B-70 was basically single purpose and basically obsoleted by ICBMs.
B-52s were able to pivot to new roles so have stayed around.
I'm humbled for us laughing at the one guy assigned to B-52 maintenance role when was in USAF training over 30 years ago "That old thing? Ha!". Who would have guessed..
You may find this amusing then. I was at Travis for a day (from McClellan) and I had time to stop by their museum. They had a G model on display and there was an older gentleman with a child looking at it. "What kind of plane is this, grandpa?" "I'm not sure - I think it's a cargo plane"
I had a really tough time resisting the urge to tell them the "cargo" came out the bottom.
Nobody can understand our fear of washing out and moving to the other side of the dorm to become a food handler and serving your former avionics classmates breakfast. This happened a lot while I was there.
> ICBMs also render other kinds of bombers obsolete and yet b52 and tu-95 are still around.
This has been proven utterly false since the 1960s, because a) you can't recall an ICBM after firing it, b) you can't retarget an ICBM after firing it, and c) there's no reliable way to tell nuke warheads from conventional ones, meaning every one you launch has to be assumed to have a nuclear payload, with all the world-ending consequences that entails.
The Air Force resurrected this zombie idea (conventional ICBMs) in the 2000s and called it Prompt Global Strike, only to can it for the obvious reasons.
It was not conventionally armed. It had dummy training warheads, conventional payloads for it are not even being developed. There are hardly any targets for which lobbing high explosive with an ICBM is cost effective.
From what I know, what actually killed the XB-70 was ICBM advancements.
The B-52 survived by becoming a low altitude bomber and an excellent, cheap nuclear-capable cruise missile delivery platform that was comparatively cheap to operate at the same level of effectiveness as the B1-B and B-2A for similar roles.
The B52 was never a low altitude bomber, you're thinking of the B1A, which was to be a high altitude, super sonic bomber but SAM missile tech advanced faster than the development of the bomber could happen, and it was canned, before being resurrected as a subsonic, low altitude bomber (the B1B). The XB-70 couldn't make that switch because it was a ridiculous design (for starters).
The B52 role was to have wings (and nuclear bombs) in the air constantly over the arctic to act as a deterrent. The only way that idea could attempt to survive out of the 50's is if they (or one of them) were < hour from a target at all times. They're huge, they flew slow, and their flight path didn't change much. The whole multi-decade mission was a huge waste of money; a stage drama.
The B52 also became a heavy bomber in Vietnam, with incredibly heavy loses. The Air Force in general in Vietnam was a shit show -- observe the F4.
It's only when you have air superiority can you dredge up a B52 to deliver a payload.
These are not winning strategies in a war that would start today by an adversary like China. We're going to be caught with our pants down with B52s as the stains on our underwear.
The Vietnam era is totally different. LeMay and Powers were sociopaths whose goal was to nuke things and intercept things that would nuke the US. Survivability wasn’t really a consideration - assuming you finished nuking the Soviets, there would be nothing to return to.
The needs of Vietnam required different tactics, and the airmen paid in blood for the myopic vision of the leaders.
Eh, the B52 has survived because it is amazing at being a bomb/missle/etc. dumptruck, and doesn’t have anything fancy which is expensive to maintain or particularly brittle.
Even the airframes are mostly still alive 50+ years later, which is mind blowing on aircraft. They have made a new B52 since ‘62 but they keep on trucking.
It isn’t super fast (the B1 is that), or stealthy (B2 or B21), or sexy (B1), or nimble (any of the generations of fighter bombers that have come and gone). It doesn’t fly particularly low. Or particularly high.
But god damn can it carry and drop absolutely massive quantities of whatever type of ordnance you want, pretty much anywhere you want on the globe, and do it over and over and over and over again. 70,000 lbs worth
The 737 is still around for pretty much the same reasons.
Any alternative ends up being less effective at the same tasks, or more niche/expensive.
They’re basically the alligators or horseshoe crabs of the airplane world. Or the M2 heavy machine gun. Or the Cessna 182 or Robinson R22 of the GA world.
KISS should always be #1 engineering principle, in any engineering. In software one I can speak a bit, the unnecessary complexities always bite back. Maybe not the creator of them, but given company always. Or as one quite bright guy said - 'this should be as simple as possible, but not simpler'.
But its borderline boring, nothing shiny, nothing to sell new subscriptions or trainings for, nothing to get promotions for, things that just keep running (TM) slip out of focus. Look at how brilliant engineers handle boredom and routine - usually very, very badly. Its not what 'hackers' want to do, despite thats exactly what all normal companies want to get. Unprofessional for sure, but when most of potential and otherwise brilliant employees have issues with this, they tend to get some slack.
> ...especially when someone is particularly passionate about them.
The engineer-type brain is very much prone to "... in order to prove we can," as opposed to "Because we should. Or because this is useful. Or because this even does the job claimed."
Across a range of fields. A/B testing "engagement hacks" falls into this category, as far as I'm concerned. It was certainly successful at the stated goals.
When the project started a Mach 3 strategic bomber that out of the reach of surface to air missiles, and that could hit multiple targets on its way, was a huge advantage. It was obsoleted by ICBMs and better antiaircraft weapons, but it was still a hugely successful development program. It just didn’t provide a useful plane, but helped develop all the parts for future ones.
Well, as i understood it has failed because it could no longer provide the main benefit over B-52 it was initially intended to provide: high-altitude penetration - over it's development time, engagement envelope of SAM systems expanded in altitude and speed so much that even XB-70 could no longer hope to get through. So it wasn't any better than B-52, except much pricier. It could also get to the target faster, but for applications where time of flight was critical, nothing could beat an ICBM anyway. They switched to cruise missiles - to keep B-52s out of harm's way, and low-altitude penetration (B-1B), then when radars became capable of discerning things vs ground reflections too well, they switched to stealth - but Soviet Union fell apart before they knew if it could work or not.
So it's not about any technical failures of XB-70 itself, just that it turned out to be unable to do the job it was planned for.
This seems unlikely just because the SR-71 never got hit with a missile.
They might have been afraid of the XB-70 getting hit but it likely never would have just because it turned out to be so hard to hit things at 70,000+ feet traveling at Mach 3+.
I am in awe of anyone who worked on bringing forth such projects into the world. In the mean time, in my little corner of the world, a team of people are struggling to conjure up a relatively "simple" website.
I always wondered why the B-52 didn’t get replaced by converted airliners (787 has quite similar dimensions I believe). Would be much cheaper to run and could do practically the same thing, no?
There was thought given to using 747s as cruise missile carrier aircraft.
Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
I read something about those systems, they really have that already in service? Damn.
Those kind of system would be really „cheap“ to deploy, you overwhelm a lot of air defense systems with it and well it’s transportable outside of air defense range.
They look the same to a layman, but they are very different airframes, with a different wing sweep and different load capabilities, among many, many other differences.
of course the b-52 is a completely different airframe. Just wondering what the reasons are you wouldn't be able to convert airliners to be used in that role. It's been done for fire bombing!
> Also that simplicity is king. Complexity is the enemy.
Which sounds good, but the B-52 planes used eight very old jet engines each that are complex to maintain.
Rolls Royce offered to replace these with four modern turbofan engines but were turned down.
They finally relented and there’s a new program that will run to the end of the 2030s(!) to replace the eight engines with… eight engines.
This doesn’t sound simple, or cheap.
I keep pointing out to people that if a real world war broke out, every country with a commercial wide body fleet will immediately convert them to bombers. Far cheaper, far simpler to maintain, and with much faster turnaround times / lower maintenance hours per flight hour.
You can't replace them with 4 engines because those will have to be of bigger diameter and they might scratch the ground of some less than perfect airfields. The engines HAVE to fit into the same nacelles. And they have to provide enough thrust while having same diameter -> this is hard because the goal of replacement is efficiency, and you replace a low-bypass engine for a high-bypass to increase efficiency, which means that hot section must be smaller, and thus able to survive more heat and pressure.
Previous programs of B-52 re-engining indeed, tried to replace 8 engines with 4. It never worked because of diameter/ground clearance issue. They had to wait until progress in aircraft engines allowed for the engine of same diameter to provide the necessary efficiency boost.
By the way, re-engining will vastly reduce air refuelling needs, and further extend airframe life because of lighter takeoff weights, as they won't need to take as much fuel on most missions. And in a pinch, almost any mission will be doable without refuelling at all.
In a peer war it's pretty damn dubious whether a B-52 with four modern engines will be more survivable than a B-52 with 8 antiques. Either way the most they'll be able to do is launch standoff munitions from a distance they hope will keep them safe, and if it doesn't then they're dead anyway. In a scenario short of that, we're just quibbling over the degree of waste American voters will put up with (it's the military, so the answer is a lot.)
That's pretty much irrelevant. Engine replacement is about increasing range and/or reducing tanker requirement/airframe wear, and reduction of maintenance costs because existing engines are ancient and their maintenance costs are high. One of the reasons this program has been postponed for so long was retirement of C-141 that left USAF with plenty of still good TF-33s. But now these are starting to run out too.
You're right, I intended to reply to the comment saying "In war, only capability matters. Nothing else". I don't think the engine replacements would/will meaningfully sway the balance of capabilities.
It's always disappointing to see such uninformed and yet overconfident comments on HN. Replacing the eight small B-52 engines with four larger ones was considered and rejected years ago because it would have forced much more extensive modifications to the airframe and other systems.
And it's extremely difficult to convert civilian airliners into bombers. The pressure hulls aren't designed around bomb bays and they lack external hard points. Even though the P-8 is based on the 737 the design had to be extensively modified to accommodate weapons through a major program lasting years. The resulting aircraft are new production, not modifications of airliners.
You're saying that my argument that "8 engines is not simple" is invalid because... it would not be simple to replace them with modern efficient engines... because there are 8 of them.
Yes. We agree: the setup is not standard, not simple, and requires 2x the maintenance that 1/2 the engines would for decades and decades.
Older and established isn't necessarily "simpler" or "cheaper".
The average annual maintenance cost of a B-52 is $70 million.
The maintenance cost of a 747 or a similar sized plane is more like $4 million, and they operate far more hours than the B-52 fleet.
A commercial plane equivalent to a B-52 costs something like $200M to purchase new, which is just three years of maintenance for a B-52!
Sure, sure, the out-of-the-box default for a commercial wide-body airliner is not immediately usable as a strategic bomber, but it's not that hard to add a bomb bay, in-air fuel port, etc...
We are talking about a nuclear bomber. They put fucking nukes on these things. We have 70 years of operational history showing that the 8 engine arrangement works, and there is no good reason to make anything more than the most minimal changes. Go ahead and do that until you're blue in the face with some inconsequential junk SaaS product or phone app or whatever, but warplanes (and especially this one) are not the place to do it.
I'm just going to hope you're not actually serious about converting a commercial airliner to a bomber.
The good reason to make changes is the hard reality that your opponents won’t slow down to accomodate your old, inefficient, maintenance-heavy fleet of bombers.
Even during peacetime the B-52 fleet is burning money, money that DOGE assures the voting public cannot be wasted on frivolous matters such as HIV prevention.
It’s like the Ukraine war. Perfectly good tanks turned out to be useless sitting ducks in the face of $500 drones.
If your assessment of role of armor in Ukraine is that it's useless because of drone developments, you're just not playing with a full deck of cards.
You can think what you want and I can't stop you, I just want to say that you shouldn't bring this up around people that do real engineering (especially in aerospace and defense) unless you want to look like an idiot.
Wow, you're really doubling down on the aggressive ignorance. Do you have any clue about what's involved in certifying a platform for the nuclear strike mission?
There's quite a bit of extra hardware needed on the aircraft for the nuclear mission. As well as testing for stuff like weapons separation. None of that is easy or cheap on converted civilian designs.
You would know this if you had bothered to do some basic research instead of posting ignorant and irrelevant comments. Like many arrogant engineers who love to pontificate about topics outside your area of expertise, I'm sure you're convinced you're right and everyone else is an idiot. So I'll pass on any further replies and let you believe that you "won".
Go do the research yourself please and link to articles that explain why carrying a cruise missile with nuclear warhead instead of a high explosive warhead adds $60M in annual maintenance costs to each active bomber.
I have never been a big gaming person, but the excellent storytelling has impacted me more than anything else, especially in The Secret of Monkey Island[1] series, which truly impressed me.
Up until Monkey Island, I remember the graphics being quite mediocre (like in King's Quest). Monkey Island's graphics wowed me at the time and really boosted the immersive experience.
On the other hand, I recall playing Haunted House[2] on an Atari 2600[2] back in 1982, where the graphics consisted of white squares on a black background, and it scared us as kids.
You're probably thinking of the kings quest games I-IV. KQ V which came out the same year as Monkey Island had pretty impressive hand drawn graphics, and King's Quest VI is absolutely outstanding.
Apparently, yes. I saw mention of discussion around the Trump administration potentially giving Apple a tariff waiver. And I believe in Trump’s last term, Apple did have some sort of waiver.
I’m on mobile but Googling for “Apple tariff waiver” and “Apple tariff exemption” will point you to several news items.
Pretty easy to avoid copyright by making your own icons then you are left with trademark.
I'm honestly at that point not sure if there is an issue you aren't offering a confusingly similar product. Mac isn't offering an icon pack they merely have one. At least they don't appear to have ever gone after Macish icon themes legally.
Apple regularly cease and desists unauthorized parties using their icons and other likenesses over the years. I’m not aware of an instance where one of those recipients have refused and went to court with Apple.
https://fly.pieter.com
https://x.com/levelsio
https://x.com/levelsio/status/1895540281488880095
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