If a fix is relatively low cost and improves the software in a way that makes it easier to modify in the future, it makes it easier to change the requirements. In aggregate these pay off.
If a missile passes the long hurdles and hoops built into modern Defence T&E procurement it will only ever be considered out of spec once it fails.
For a good portion of platforms they will go into service, be used for a decade or longer, and not once will the design be modified before going end of life and replaced.
If you wanted to progressively iterate or improve on these platforms, then yes continual updates and investing in the eradication of tech debt is well worth the cost.
If you're strapping explosives attached to a rocket engine to your vehicle and pointing it at someone, there is merit in knowing it will behave exactly the same way it has done the past 1000 times.
Neither ethos in modifying a system is necessarily wrong, but you do have to choose which you're going with, and what the merits and drawbacks of that are.
This permission is so weirdly named and scary, and the applications never tell you why they're requesting it... on iOS it would be against the developer guidelines...
Apple shot themselves in the foot in the late 2010s by switching to deep learning methods and making things slower and worse, with the spell checker being the worst example.
What's nuts about that presentation is that the github frontend has gone from ~.2 to >2 Million lines of code in the last 5-6 years. 10x the code... to get slower?
That also means a much larger team and great possibilities for good perf reviews, so basically an excellent outcome in a corporate env. People follow incentives.
You just do it at enterprise scale with all the people needed to make it enterprise legible... and a couple of setbacks and change orders later and you're at 2.5x the original budget!
AT $250 an hour and 8 hours per day / 2000 hours per year, that's almost ~50 people years, which likely means a team of 10-12 devs working on it over 18 months with another 1-3 design and product and project people in the way making things look good until the bill arrived. Accenture is good at that. [0]
My experience while working in consulting - 1-2 dev, 2 testers, 2 analysts, subject matter expert, scrumbag, product owner, platform owner, designer but she’s always very busy, and some other people that rhyme with management. So about 10 people managing 1 persons work which in principle I’m fine with, except you need to sit just insane amount of meetings and meeting with more than 2 people is horribly exhausting for me.
Theoretically, perhaps, but I don’t think anyone with a serious interest in weapons would pursue it. From a nonproliferation perspective, I’d guess the infrastructure necessary to remove contaminants from uranium bred through the thorium cycle would be costly and difficult to conceal.
Multiple countries have detonated nuclear bombs using U-233 derived from thorium reactors! [0] Practically I agree with you that thorium is proliferation resistant and if someone is bomb hungry they won't prioritize it, but if you want to set up the bomb and all you have is thorium... The infrastructure wouldn't necessarily be significantly larger or worse than conventional enrichment.
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