I hope anyone who is promoting these things has to help and elderly relative do something in an account they are having trouble accessing where they had to use a passkey to set it up. Or try giving your spouse access to a health account they need to access in a hurry. Or make a physical backup that a family member can use in case something happens to you and or your computer.

Because this is what happens when new tools are introduced? The cheap digital camera displaced tons of photographers, the computer displaces typists, etc. so yes, it seems impossible that a tool that makes producing written content cheaply won't displace writers.

I'm curious what people think about the following:

The idea of living off-grid, of having your own little self sufficient homestead, a cabin in the woods, a small farm, etc. doesn't seem to work without having a bunch of cash up front, another source of income, or turning it into a engine for running classes or making content. Where it is "self-sufficient" is generally where, to put it bluntly, it has to be because people are poor and don't have a choice.

I'm not familiar with sailing self sufficiency but in permaculture in the US, it seems the only people doing it successfully fund it via running classes, trainings, writing a book, making content, etc. or they do it essentially as a hobby funded by another career, family money, etc. The closest I've seen that does work is CSA's (community supported agriculture) but with those, as with most farming related work, there is generally ten underpaid laborers with no actual stake in the farm to one owner who gets by (also see woofing).

I'm not sure where I'm going with this but I thought given the topic there might be some people who visit with thoughts on it. Maybe it would be better to treat it as a goal of how to live ones life even if it isn't self-sufficient? I don't know. I just know there always seems to be a dichotomy between imagined and real in self-sufficiency that I struggle with.

is a contradiction to this - "but the internet and low end book stores like Amazon kindle are being flooded with LLM slop."

I'm not sure there there are labor statistics to look at but it seems impossible that the coming-into-existance of a tool that generates mass amounts of cheap product, with zero skill required, in a field wouldn't displace skilled workers in that field.

- https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/09/24/dont-let-ai-kil... - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/ai-authors-im... - https://fortune.com/2026/09/14/ai-slop-books-amazon-marketpl...

I propose we enact a new law that makes it so ai engineers can only fly on ai designed planes powered by ai designed engines flown by ai. Maybe then we'll get some real progress out of this slop producing crapware or the problem will be solved a different way.

4. Remember my predicted number is on the low side of how much juice they would need. Of course they get much better efficiency than a conventional jet on taxi and takeoff, so maybe it ends up being closer to what you are saying. I wish they had some more hard data.

5. Yep, commented on this in another post but even just removing takeoff wear and tear on a conventional engine would be big.

6. I would take that with a big dose of salt. United has a deal with Boom (a complete fraud of a company in my view) to purchase planes. So maybe not the best metric.

7. I haven't done the math but the $5 takeoff doesn't pass the smell test for me. $5 doesn't buy much juice (50 kWh? So like a gallon of jet fuel?) and getting a 30k+ lb plane to cruising altitude is not trivial.

"Personally - I don't know if they'll make it work, but it's definitely an interesting play, with more real thought put into it than most attempts I've seen."

Totally agree, which I never thought I would say about an aerospace startup.

Jet fuel has a specific energy of 12 kwh/kg and a density of 6.7 lb/gal (2). So 80 gallons of jet fuel is 536 lb, or 243 kg, and contains 2,916 kwh of energy. Jet engines are not very efficient, so lets say only 30% of this energy actually ends up being used. So 875 kwh.

Lets say we are using batteries that are 300 wh/kg (0.3 kwh/kg), which seems on the high side of what electric cars are using now (and that there are no efficiency loses in the electric motors or elsewhere).

Now maybe I messed up my unit conversions but I think that means to carry the same energy onboard you would need 6,428 lbs of batteries. And you are still going to carry atleast 1,600 lbs of fuel on top of that. And you have the weight of both electric and conventional engines.

I could see this reducing costs like they say but when many big costs are fixed (pilot, hangar, etc.) will this actually make sense? Will airlines fly something that has thousands of pounds less payload than a competitor but lower running costs? I don't know but it will be interesting to see.

(1) https://airinsight.com/seat-miles-gallon-fuel-burn-update/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel

Also their particleboard and cardboard furniture should be banned. Furniture should not dissolve when a drink gets spilled on it.

Dr. Abernethy, who passed in 2021, is probably known in the aerospace world more for Weibull analysis (1) than his J58 work, atleast that was the case for me before finding this. Anyone who is an enthusiast of the SR-71 will find it interesting.

(1) A type of analysis used widely to predict failures with limited test or field data.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321569

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Hard to make a case in 2026 that you can be oblivious to the potential of AI to do unexpected things that could impact other people.

"Did people know the machine was dangerous and didn't care, or did they not anticipate such a behavior?"

This framing of the issue as binary being either intentional negligence or blissful ignorance is not how liability works. If you are working with something potentially dangerous and impactful to society you no longer get to say "I didn't know" because we as a society hold you to a higher standard for getting the privilege of working with the potentially dangerous and impactful thing. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, truck drivers, etc. are all examples of this.

A trucker whose brakes fail causing a crash is liable even if the failure wasn't caused by intentional negligence because we hold them responsible to make sure they won't fail to begin with. A programmer and company whose safety measures fail resulting in a program hacking another company should absolutely be held accountable.