Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by overfeed 315 days ago
DARPA funds all kinds of things without being involved / having a military or government presence in the thing - a contemporary example would be DARPA kick-starting self-driving vehicles.

IMO, the web was authentically p2p before online Paypal, banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. It's still possible to subscribe to blogs (said nuggets) via RSS - which is miraculously having a renaissance - but it's all going to be drowned out by the relentless, unfeeling firehouse of AI slop.
1 comments
wrs 315 days ago
OK, but that seems like a funny definition of "military presence", since DARPA is the military.

The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned". [0]

[0] https://www.grandchallenge.org/grandchallenge/docs/Grand_Cha...

link
overfeed 314 days ago
It appears we e have different thresholds on what counts as "military presence".

By way of explanation: rocketry was funded and developed for military ends, including von Braun's earlier work on the V2 and later work on missiles across the Atlantic and the development of ICBMs. IMO, there's no military presence in human spaceflight[1], but you may see it differently due to the heritage of the propulsion system.

link