After the bombardment by Israel last year Russia sent a ton of Manpads, so they are certainly available. We've seen a very close call by an fa18 from a manpads. It's likely that Iran has passive sensor networks that they can use to spot patterns and provide forewarning to manpads teams.
I think you're right about stealth not being quite the game changer that it was. The Houthis were able to give f35s some close calls over Yemen last year. They're of course armed and trained by Iran, so we would expect to see some hits.
They are thinking on a longer timeline than a month. They kept some anti-air missiles in reserve for this phase of the war, where they aren't trying to defend Iran's airspace. They just need to hide and wait for opportunities to occasionally hurt the US, Israel and the other Gulf states.
Recall that the Serbs shot down a Nighthawk when they were in a similar situation to Iran. They kept some good AA missiles in reserve and used a system of spotters and just waited for an opportunity. Its likely that similar tactics were used by Iran.
Also recall that the Houthis, armed and trained by Iran, gave F35s some close calls over Yemen.
The story is actually quite interesting. The Serbs observed that a nighthawk would routinely fly the same route but their radar couldn’t lock on it unless the missile hatch were open, which they managed to elicit.
In short, it took 2 rare events to occur for it to happen.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
It was pretty much a given that over time some of these airplanes would be shot down. There's no way to get every single MANPAD or even some of the larger anti-aircraft setups. A jet can even be brought down by a canon or a bullet given enough luck. We've had quite a few near misses, there's a video of an Israeli F-16 evading a surface to air missile, there have been the F-35 that was hit but managed to continue and land, there were countless drones shot down.
This was inevitable and just a question of time. Out of >10k sorties something is going to get hit. I've no idea what range the military planners expected and how we're doing vs. that.
Why would that not be a bad sign? The US declared victory several times, but clearly Iran still has plenty of firepower to shoot down planes, and probably also ships in the Strait. If the US is incapable of preventing Iran from shooting ships and planes, how do they intend to win this?
OP left a little to interpretation, but, I think, top of the list starts with 'mission accomplished 2.0' meme followed by increased US casualties ( though I suppose the exact order likely depends on your current disposition ).
> But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets
Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.
For example: "Here our dataset that contains customer feedback comment fields; look through them, draw out themes, associations, and look for trends." Solving that with a deterministic program isn't a trivial problem, and it is likely cheaper solved via LLM.
It makes sense if the dataset is so large that LLM cost is a prohibitive factor. Otherwise a frontier LLM has the advantage of producing a better result.
I won't disagree that Germany's energy transition has been badly managed. However, after many years of needing subsidies in the last few years the economic case for solar + storage has changed. The most vivid example I've seen if that is Pakistan. They are a poor country with no subsidies and had a huge explosion of solar without the government even being aware at first. It's been so dramatic that they've had to cancel scheduled tanker deliveries of LNG because they had no place to put it.
The energy transition is a decades long project. Germany started early in order to bring costs down which took time. You should consider reexamining the economics
The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
> Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
The cost of solar panels is already low, that's why it's booming. This cost isn't the main constraint any more.
Panels on a vehicle have stronger requirements for low weight, and vibration tolerance than those on a fixed structure. They contribute to the complexity of the vehicle's power systems. They have to be designed with vehicle aerodynamics in mind.
And of course the limited surface area means that you do all of that, for a component that's it's barely able to keep the vehicles' aircon running. The physics of that will remain the same. Even of the total costs are low (and factors such as the vehicle weighing more are an unavoidable cost), the benefits are lower.
At any price point, including free solar panels, there are good arguments to put the panels on a fixed structure instead.
So maybe it will happen when we have run out of non-moving surfaces to put the panels on. i.e. don't hold your breath.
I'm reminded of during the Iraq occupation how Dick Cheney scolded the media for not saying how great things were going and said how much he liked Fox's coverage. And how not long after it was no longer possible to deny that things had gone terribly wrong and things weren't actually so rosy.
I think you're right about stealth not being quite the game changer that it was. The Houthis were able to give f35s some close calls over Yemen last year. They're of course armed and trained by Iran, so we would expect to see some hits.
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