[HN Gopher] Why Does DARPA Work?
___________________________________________________________________
Why Does DARPA Work?
Author : MKais
Score : 215 points
Date : 2020-06-28 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (benjaminreinhardt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benjaminreinhardt.com)
| dsukhin wrote:
| The irony is palpable:
|
| > _I would rather this be read by a few people motivated to take
| action than by a broad audience who will find it merely
| interesting. In that vein, if you find yourself wanting to share
| this on Twitter or Hacker News, consider instead sharing it with
| one or two friends who will take action on it. Thank you for
| indulging me!_
|
| I'm glad of course it was shared here. As a distillation - I
| think the author's theme lies with enabling more __researchers__
| rather than business people to take moonshots and do foundational
| knowledge building and discovery that redefines a field and
| _then_ focus on commercialization from a birds eye view by
| technically capable visionaries.
|
| This is the SBIR [1] model (also a US Gov requirement to fund
| small business research for any federal agency with >$100M in
| funding), the Bell Labs model (which yeilded amazing foundational
| work like UNIX and the transistor and was a direct result of
| AT&T's monopoly and excess resources), and perhaps even the YC
| model (though that one is obviously focused on a shorter horizon
| and more on commercializing existing tech and more rarely on
| foundational research).
|
| I've personally thought about this problem a lot and done this at
| a small scale and would love to expand upon it.
| https://augmentedlabs.org Would love to hear others experiences
| and thoughts.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Business_Innovation_Re...
| xVedun wrote:
| It seems that this would be a much better way of funding research
| in a general sense, since that seems to be the general process of
| their problem solving. The only thing is that to apply this to
| other fields, the barrier for getting people that are equally
| motivated and intelligent about analyzing if the research is
| 'going' somewhere is high
| currymj wrote:
| A bill, the Endless Frontiers Act, has been introduced in both
| houses of Congress to make a section of the National Science
| Foundation that works more like DARPA, while massively increasing
| its funding. The idea is to extend the DARPA model to many more
| non-military areas, just as suggested in this article.
|
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/us-lawmakers-unveil-...
|
| Certainly a timely article. I don't know whether it's a good
| thing or not. The DARPA model has certainly been productive, but
| it isn't suited for every research topic or subdiscipline.
|
| As discussed in the article, currently NSF is the most open to
| basic science of funding agencies, and gives grantees the most
| latitude in what they work on. That is a valuable thing to have
| in the ecosystem.
|
| If Congress expects the majority of publicly-funded research even
| from the NSF to be on short-term grants for specific visions and
| technologies, it will rule out working on a lot of important
| things.
| gh02t wrote:
| There is also already ARPA-E, which is a similar mandate to
| DARPA (i.e., risky projects with high payoff) for energy
| technology. How effective it has been thus far is a matter of
| debate due to a variety of factors, but I like the basic idea.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E
| siege_engineer wrote:
| Author here. I actually wrote a discussion of the Endless
| Frontier Act: https://benjaminreinhardt.com/the-endless-
| frontier-act/
|
| I agree that the ARPA model is not suitable for all (or even
| the majority of research) and the act doesn't inspire
| confidence that shifting the NSF towards a DARPA-like model
| would do well.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| Just wanted to say, thanks for writing the article about
| DARPA, and this analysis of the endless frontiers act. From
| reading both articles, obviously you're very pro-DARPA and
| anti-NSF.
|
| I have two thoughts that might erode your thesis a bit, that
| 1) I think you're overestimating the amount of time that
| faculty spend on writing grants. We like to complain about
| it, but I've tracked my time to the minute over the past 7
| years, and grant writing (both the proposals and the reports)
| is about 2% of my work time. 2) You might be misunderstanding
| indirect costs like many people, where you say "Universities
| can take more than half of grant money as administrative
| overhead". Indirect cost math is funny, but in order for
| administrative overhead to be more than half of the grant,
| the indirect cost rate would have to be over 100%. I can
| explain more if you're interested.
|
| Obviously we're both biased by our job, but it's still useful
| to read your perspective.
| siege_engineer wrote:
| Appreciate the correction about indirect cost math - I've
| applied for several grants but never did lab accounting so
| I interpreted it incorrectly when professors told me "50%
| overhead." I'll fix that when I'm at a computer.
|
| I would characterize my position as less "pro DARPA and
| anti NSF" and more "I think on the margin the world needs
| more DARPA-like activity more than it needs more NSF-like
| activity"
| twarge wrote:
| I would say the key difference between DARPA funding and other
| research functing is that DARPA PMs have a crystal clear map of
| the leading edge in a field that's ready for advancement and can
| target it perfectly with both money and real competition.
| ycombonator wrote:
| Put some BLM, antifa and communists in there. They will burn down
| the place is an afternoon.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I'm not sure where this comment is even coming from. Whether
| you agree or disagree with their agenda, these are all
| inherently movements of civil-disobedience, seeking to up-end a
| cultural status quo. Upending the cultural status quo is
| inherently short-term destabilizing even if it improves long-
| term state stability.
|
| That said, BLM is clearly about finding a pareto improvement to
| individual well-being in the context of systemic racism, Antifa
| is as anti-government as the so called "Patriot" movement, and
| Communists value fairness over maximal well-being. Maybe I'm
| dense but I don't see how these three collectives are at all
| inherently related.
|
| Organizations working to defend the State (like DARPA) are
| dedicated to both the short and long term survivability of the
| State. Any activist movement, right or left, is definitionally
| not aligned with the interests of the short-term status quo,
| even if they may well produce innovations that promote long-
| term stability. That said, those goals don't have an impact on
| the output of an R&D organization, except as they allow or
| disallow diversity of thought within an R&D organization. Any
| ideology, "left", "right", or "center", sufficiently outspoken
| enough, can be used to suppress the diversity of thought
| necessary to recognize/embrace true innovations when they are
| produced.
| fastball wrote:
| I'd like to write a comment but I generally prefer to have read
| the entire article before I do... see you in a week or so.
|
| Jokes aside, I agree with the author (I think) that DARPA has
| been a surprisingly effective org in an age of frequent failures
| of other orgs with similarly lofty goals.
|
| DARPA is effectively what things like the SoftBank Vision Fund
| should've been (wanted to be?). It would certainly be interesting
| to see what it would look like to have a privately run clone of
| DARPA if you injected as much cash as the Vision Fund did. Per
| the article, about $400M/y is spent on actual R&D by DARPA, where
| as Vision Fund has injected that amount into single companies
| many times over.
| [deleted]
| jariel wrote:
| Vision Fund is there to throw huge amounts of money at a
| business in order to ramp it up quickly and capture large,
| global markets.
|
| Think Uber: disrupting the Taxi business (or just regulations
| ...). Once something like Uber starts to work, a 'Vision Fund'
| takes this fledgling thing and backs it with billions to
| conquer the world.
|
| It's not about moon-shots, it's about market power and speed on
| a global scale.
|
| Like hyper-supercharged 'Round C or D' - instead of doing an
| initial public offering for cash, you take on massive cash from
| Vision.
|
| Wether or not it will work is something else, but there's logic
| there.
| scotty79 wrote:
| My more top level view is that DARPA and such are just side
| channels to sneakily funnel public money into research.
|
| In theory free market should take care of the economy. It's
| really good at optimizing manufacturing processes and getting
| stuff as cheaply as possible into hands of as many people as
| possible.
|
| However there's one thing essential to the economy that free
| market sucks at. It's research. And that's not because companies
| are bad at doing research. It's because companies are bad at
| funding research. Research is inherently risky and no sane
| capitalist will invest in anything beyond tinker level research
| because he will loose. And he's not supposed to loose.
|
| In theory you could fund research overtly with country budget,
| but no one is going to support that. Why spend money on eggheads
| playing with useless stuff if people are hungry and streets are
| dirty?
|
| What nobody opposes is giving more money to the military. And
| what anyone can't oppose is military spending money in whichever
| way they please. So they can spend it on research. Most will be
| wasted, very few will have actual military potential. The rest
| can be graciously dumped into the economy for companies to
| tinker, optimize making of, manufacture, market and sell.
|
| IMHO military is the core of USA success (or even success of
| global capitalism), not through might, but through ability to get
| plenty of public money and ability to allocate it into things
| that would never get funded in any other way.
| alibaba_x wrote:
| Great comment.
|
| I agree that companies would much rather do the exploiting and
| leave exploration to the government.
| thoraway1010 wrote:
| Small anecdote, but good experience with DARPA and SBIR both. One
| thing I liked - they seemed pretty low overhead / low hassle and
| outcome / objective focused.
|
| That contrasts VERY strong with most govt contracting which is
| under allowable cost or cost reimbursement setups where the
| absolute most important criteria is to bill enough costs to draw
| contract in the right cost buckets (which can be super annoying
| if local agencies require super complicated budget mod
| processes).
|
| In the cost based contracts, the focus really focuses on the
| accounting for the costs and other compliance related items. Ie,
| did you send someone to a conference with govt money, how can you
| prove you didn't use the govt money in this way or that way etc
| etc. Bam, welcome to personal activity reports with fund codes
| that no one understands (ie, major universities have an insane
| number of codes), and all the nightmares that follow including a
| fair bit of rule pending that even normally ethical folks find
| themselves being asked to to get through the paperwork.
|
| Seriously, you deliver the product at 50% of cost? You will get a
| nasty note from the head of your agency saying make sure you draw
| full contract because agency budget depends on the indirect
| portion of this award (ie, 30% to overhead) and even the govt
| agency supervising (who also budgeted based on a cut of full
| contract) AND other folks for whom leftover money makes life
| difficult (harder to close contract etc) AND because a lot of
| govt funding is on the repeat what we did last year model so
| drawing down everything avoids a cut next year when you may
| really need it.
|
| You determine it would be cheaper to do x vs y and that required
| a budget mod? Wait 1-2 months for commission approval if you even
| bother trying to fight it through (changes < 10% often ignored
| thankfully).
|
| I don't know how the accounting for SBIRs etc work, but somehow
| those projects always seemed more results oriented (so a LOT more
| fun to work on, focus is on getting a solution going).
| tia4tia wrote:
| SBIR? Totally corrupt.
|
| Please don't ask. Can not, will not, must not tell.
|
| I can tell you one thing. If not the best but the second best
| or third best proposal is accepted, IT IS a problem for the US
| in the long run. Side node: there is money on China!
|
| Fell free to down vote me down. Again Please don't ask. Can
| not, will not, must not tell.
| tia4tia wrote:
| I can tell you one thing about SBIR. "We have occasionly
| accepted new researchers"
|
| Really? SBIR is about blue sky research and funding blue sky
| ideas, potentially to risky for VC. It should be about NEW
| ideas and not about funding for contract research of buddies.
| And for SME and not for "independwnt" spin offs of large
| corporations.
|
| In China, I can get you funded.
| tia4tia wrote:
| "don't apply" VC buddy of mine and former SBIR grantee who
| explained me how his "application" was selected out of the
| large stack of applicants.
|
| If asked: I am drunk and make this up. No wolf. Nothing to
| see here.
| peterwoerner wrote:
| I used to work for a company doing SBIR work. We finished a
| contract underbudget returned the surplus money and got audited
| because of it.
|
| I don't know all of the accounting details, but SBIR has some
| leeway (because its supposed to be research) but it's not
| perfect. However, you are allowed to use surplus money to fund
| development of things which are related to what you actually
| put in the proposal/contract. So if you have a $100k contract,
| and meeting the requirements only required on the $75k, you
| should and do spend the rest of the $25k on extra features. But
| you have to spend all the money.
|
| I think the real thing about SBIR money, is that three people
| get phase 1 money and only one or two will get phase 2 money so
| you really have to deliver in order to get selected. Then if
| you get the phase 2, there basically isn't phase 3 money, so
| you better get to a product that is ready to be sold. Finally
| if can't show on paper a return on investment (e.g. nonSBIR
| funding or revenue from sales/acquisition) they cut you off
| from the SBIR spigot. So the incentives align with getting work
| done.
| mncharity wrote:
| If it were possible, a closer reading of history might provide
| additional lessons. For instance, ARPA took a hit in the early
| '90s under Bush. Some silver linings, but that's a transition
| which might illuminate process tradeoffs.
|
| There was (at least back then) an ongoing meta discussion about
| how to do better. So it might be useful to explore not just the
| organizational designs which were realized, but also the space of
| things considered. For instance, before Bush hit, there was
| discussion of tiny "fix that!" grants. Like there's one person
| who is an outlier in understanding how to do X, and their book
| just isn't getting finished. So rather than society waiting years
| on diffusion and reinvention (which is what ended up happening),
| it might be worth paying someone to sit outside their office, and
| stand on their desk, and be a forcing factor on making the book
| happen.
|
| At least back then, with a failed attempt at a commerce ARPA
| clone, it was thought important to have a clear metric to
| prioritize projects. "What's better for DoD?", rather than the
| far less tractable "what's better for the commercial economy?".
|
| Perhaps I missed it skimming, but a major issue has been the
| death valley between research and commercial impact. And attempts
| to address that making things even worse (ie, researchers
| encouraged to think commercialization, sacrifice impact by
| holding things close, and then commercialization generally fails,
| so there's no offsetting benefit). And there's the unfortunate
| pipeline from research to patent to unsuccessful startup to
| dominant company having yet more anticompetitive ammo. I wonder
| if it might be fruitful to broaden focus to the research pipeline
| rooted in ARPA? Because a successful clone would presumably again
| face this difficulty. And there might be some other design point
| that is less ARPA-like, but does impact better.
|
| How well ARPA works comes and goes. It's not a stable
| equilibrium. So instead of asking how to create a successful
| clone, perhaps one might ask how to create something viable in
| the vicinity of success, and separately, how to increase time
| spent less distant from success?
|
| The difference between an old-school autonomous PM, rolodex and
| checkbook in hand, showing up on your doorstep and saying "I've
| heard you interested in doing X - what would you need?", and say
| NSF exploratory grants of "groups with the following
| characteristics, may submit grants addressing the following
| issues, with a deadline of mumble, and the following
| logistics"... is really really big.
| empath75 wrote:
| When you say that 'DARPA' "works", what precisely do you mean by
| that, and how do you measure success? It seems to me that it
| primarily works by throwing large amounts of money at academics
| and then claiming credit for anything they invent, whether or not
| it contributes to whatever DARPA is trying to accomplish.
| darpa_commentor wrote:
| DARPA is effective, but this document paints a rosy picture that
| is far from the truth. I've been a part of DARPA projects both
| commerical, university and on the government side.
|
| The real process is:
|
| 1. PM gets picked due to knowing someone or being a former
| employee.
|
| 2. The biggest test of a program isn't if it's doable or a good
| idea, but if its able to be transitioned to another government
| agency with deeper pockets.
|
| 3. Most contracts are lost before you begin writing, as people
| have insider information about what the PM wants. This is done
| through just talking with each other (remember that most of the
| PMs come from the same companies), and not through any other
| formal process.
|
| 4. DARPA has some really cool stuff, but fails to transition it
| well enough (leading to 2.)
|
| DARPA is not without it's problems, but has a better track record
| then NSF (NIH has them beat). What is funny is that you quickly
| realize how much bunk there is in scientific research and how
| many papers are not replicated.
| dnautics wrote:
| this aligns with my experience. NIH has a better track record
| than DARPA, which has a better track record than NSF and the
| worst is the DOE. The DOE knows this and is trying to cargo-
| cult DARPA through stuff like ARPA-E. Predictable results have
| ensued.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| What does a better track record mean? More papers? Products?
| Social impact? Why is DOE the worst?
| tia4tia wrote:
| 100% on track. You will get downvoted!
| raziel2701 wrote:
| What is a better track record? I don't know what that means?
| More papers? More consumer products? More social impact?
| golemiprague wrote:
| > Only 5-10 out of every 100 programs successfully produce
| transformative research, while only 10% of projects are
| terminated early
|
| How is this different to the regular startup ecosystem in
| principal? It doesn't look so special to me
| dnautics wrote:
| Does DARPA work(anymore)? The first example of how it works was
| it's "badass program managers", but all of the program managers
| I've met have been, to put it lightly, idiots. One of the worst
| was the PM in charge of the entire subject research division. It
| turned out, they had a graduate thesis that was entirely
| observing an instrument artifact (showing bad jugement). Not too
| long after I interacted with them, there was a minor scandal in
| the community because postdoc who struggled with reproducing the
| effect and complained about the results was abused and railroaded
| by the PI in charge of the project. Shortly thereafter the PM
| didn't seem to be a PM anymore.
| dnautics wrote:
| Oh to make things even funnier, last I checked, said ex-DARPA
| pm was working on a biotech startup around diagnostics
| frommicro-blood draws. You can't make this shit up.
| siege_engineer wrote:
| Author here. It's an important question. I would argue that
| DARPA does not work as well as it did in the 1960's but that
| your experience with PMs isn't representative.
|
| Even though it's less than other government orgs, DARPA still
| has more process than it used to. Additionally, the opportunity
| cost for people who would make excellent PMs has become
| steadily higher over time.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| ...so your best anecdote about why DARPA doesn't work is that
| they fire incompetent PMs?
| dnautics wrote:
| Yes, after being promoted to the head of the division with
| several people speculating that they were being groomed for
| even higher posts. And it took a scandal to get rid of them.
| Person should never had been a PM in the first place.
|
| You never hear people say "it's proof that Congress works
| because they ejected that pedophile (sending lewd messages to
| the pages) from their seat".
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Hate to break it to you, but "an incompetent person rising
| through the ranks quickly before crashing and burning" is
| something that happens in pretty literally every large org.
|
| Any 60 year old organization with a large budget is going
| to have multiple instances of this happening.
| watwut wrote:
| It however matters quite a lot what it takes to removed
| them from such position and how often does that happen.
| It also depends whether there is a system that can
| identify such people people and minimize damage they
| cause. In this case apparently, it took a lot and there
| was no system.
| dnautics wrote:
| Perhaps I have a flair for the dramatic, but consider my
| statement that I haven't met a competent pm in the
| division I was in (n~5). The incentives are not that
| well-aligned. Think about it this way. If you're really
| smart, why do you become a DARPA PM, and not a PI?
|
| Yes there are a few good reasons, but the population it
| applies to have largely been selected out by the postdoc
| phase (where I would say you have had sufficient
| experience with crushing scientific and engineering
| failure onself and watching others to be effective) and
| the pool of candidates therefore is vanishing.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> If you 're really smart, why do you become a DARPA PM,
| and not a PI?_
|
| Reasons are myriad.
|
| 100% of the PMs I've worked with had tenure and
| successful labs prior to becoming PMs, and went back to
| their institution & restarted their labs after leaving
| DARPA. The reason for leaving your lab to be PM is fairly
| obvious: controlling the funding gives you a lot of
| leverage for shaping the priorities of the field, in a
| way that merely running your own lab doesn't.
|
| Maybe your division sucked. I've only ever worked with
| highly competent PMs, and all of the programs I've worked
| on ended in commercialization.
|
| Anyways, prosecuting individual cases doesn't seem like a
| particularly good way of evaluating the effectiveness of
| an agency.
| dnautics wrote:
| Well, it's pretty obvious that DARPA has different
| standards in different divisions (division I was in was
| relatively new), then. Which still makes me wonder wtf
| they are anymore.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> division I was in was relatively new_
|
| That makes sense.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| What does PI mean in this context? I've worked in
| software projects for 20 years and not once have I
| stumbled upon the term.
| jsizzle wrote:
| Principal Investigator, basically the lead researcher
| m-ee wrote:
| Facebooks building 8 was run by a former darpa chief and went
| up in smoke. Also anecdata but it was enough to make me
| question how good their process really is
| s_y_n_t_a_x wrote:
| Keyword is "former". She probably left because of this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan#Potential_con
| f...
|
| I don't think a single person that no longer works there
| can represent the entire process of an agency.
|
| If anything, Facebook's building 8, only reflects badly on
| her and Facebook.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| IMO this analysis gets caught up looking for answers in process
| when the real problem that DARPA solves is a political-economic
| one.
|
| ATT didn't invent the internet not for lack of process, they were
| extremely innovative. They held back on innovations because they
| were making huge sums of money overcharging long distance
| mainframe-mainframe data link rates in the 50's-70's. DARPA
| succeeded as a trust buster.
|
| They have the resources and legality to make whatever they want,
| regardless of patents (because National Security/patent law).
| They can make technology a reality, then develop political
| support with working prototypes. They build things to show how
| the Government is getting screwed over by some giant defense
| corp, because of a lack of competition in certain types of
| contracts.
|
| I think they are becoming less relevant because the corporate-
| political landscape is becoming more trust-based.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| With all due respect to the incredible amount of intelligence,
| knowledge, and insight in display on HN, your comment, with
| it's culminating sentence, may be the most insightful thing
| I've read on HN.
|
| I don't care if this comment doesn't meet HN guidelines. I
| needed to celebrate your comment.
| siege_engineer wrote:
| Author here. Good point about DARPA serving a political-
| economic role. It's a different lens on the coordination role.
|
| Is the corporate-political landscape becoming more trust-based
| than the Military-Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned
| about?
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I don't understand the comparison in reference to the
| question of 'Why Does DARPA Work?' or my comment.
|
| Military-Industrial Complex is where defense industry profit
| motives drive unwarranted political influence that shapes
| defense policy, foreign policy. Military-Industrial Complex
| drives defense spending up.
|
| Trust is about the erosion of market competition, which
| results in decrease product value-price ratio. In the context
| of defense product, it means that the products that the
| consumer (here military/govt) can buy from the market become
| increasingly expensive and weak. Which creates an opportunity
| for consumers to do-it-better-yourself-and-for-less, which to
| me, explains DARPA.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| How are they becoming less relevant?
|
| The DARPA grand challenges have bootstrapped:
|
| 1. Self driving cars and got them working as a prototype. [1]
| 2. A rapid Orbital Launch Program (Still in progress after only
| one competitor left)[2] 3. A subterranean challenge to map and
| search underground environments [1] 4. A way to use social
| networking to find something that is time critical [2] 5. Onion
| routing which is used in Tor. [3] 6. Cyber Grand Challenge to
| automate the exploitation and securing network systems [4]
|
| Note that competitors also have open sourced what they have
| done. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2007) [4]
| https://www.darpa.mil/program/cyber-grand-challenge
| shoguning wrote:
| > The DARPA grand challenges have bootstrapped:
|
| I have a contrarian opinion about the impact of DARPA and
| related programs (ARPA-e especially). To some extent, there
| is a confusion of cause and effect. DARPA is good at
| identifying possible nascent technologies and funding them.
| They then have a flag planted, and can claim "we helped
| invent X", which is hard to disprove. But was it because of
| DARPA involvement, or was DARPA merely there at the right
| time? They have definitely funded plenty of projects that go
| nowhere.
|
| ARPA-e makes this strategy explicit. They'll give money to an
| up-and-coming startup between rounds and then claim all later
| investment as "follow-on funding". They then report "follow-
| on funding" as a success metric to congress, which seems easy
| to game. ARPA-e has been around for over 10 years and I don't
| think they can point to anything coming out of the program as
| a legitimate game changer.
|
| I do think the applied research programs do some good and has
| some impact, mostly as a way to convene the broader
| technology community. But for the most part I would rather
| have the government focus on funding basic research instead
| of applied research.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| How are they less relevant? Well it's a bit left-field but I
| believe part of the reason why the political climate has
| become more pro-trust within the last twenty years is that
| international tech dominance is a national security boon.
| DARPA is not going to be asked to create ground-breaking tech
| in search, tracking, social media, tech generally, because
| the tech giants are already providing more than defense
| strategists could possibly have hoped for, on the world
| stage.
|
| So instead we have these contests, the insights of which are
| handed out to existing companies to help them make
| incremental improvements. But the Onion browser isn't going
| to be rolled out to secure political autonomy throughout the
| world, or small business competitiveness because the data
| tracking is too valuable for surveillance programs. The
| national security/intel value of big tech companies has given
| those companies so much good will that govt
| officials/politicians have been unwilling to consider
| innovations that would undermine them.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I'm not arguing applications I'm arguing innovation. They
| do the initial research and then companies monetize .
| Animats wrote:
| Back in the early days of the Internet, I met some of the Bell
| Labs people working in that area. What they didn't like about
| an IP-based network was the jitter. That was totally
| unacceptable for voice. They wanted something with reliable
| clocking, and had come up with Datakit. That sends all packets
| for a given call over the same path, in order. You don't open a
| virtual circuit unless all the nodes have enough bandwidth for
| it. Telcos still use Datakit, and Asynchronous Transfer Mode is
| a successor to it.
|
| I never dreamed that people would accept the degradation of
| telephony to 1 second of delay jitter with random dropouts and
| echoes.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Acceptance of the degradation couldn't be done in a day. It
| required societal acclimatization.
| p1esk wrote:
| 1 second of delay jitter with random dropouts and echoes are
| typically caused by problems at the ends (poor wifi/cellular
| signal, too much load on cpu during a high res video call,
| laptop overheating, etc). UDP protocol allows to make a call
| even in the presence of such issues, whereas circuit
| switching with reliable clocking would simply not work at
| all.
| xgk wrote:
| Other networking protocols coming from a telco background, in
| particular ATM and ISDN, were all circuit switched, and had
| suitable resource reservation for QoS. Acceptance of
| telephony degradation was probably driven by cost: VoIP was
| free and that made a difference, especially for international
| calls. In my experience, in 2020 the VoIP calls I make are
| really high quality, even better than 1980s-style ISDN calls,
| and the main cause of audio quality degradation are people
| using "hands-free" setups with their laptops.
| bane wrote:
| I remember when cross-oceanic long distance calls required
| both parties to shout as loud as they could into the phone --
| and often still not be heard well enough to make out what
| they were saying.
|
| Modern IP telephony often has very high quality voice
| reproduction (my wi-fi to wi-fi Fi calls sound fantastic), in
| exchange for some timing issues. Echoes usually get solved in
| software (usually), and dropouts seem to be the main
| complaint.
|
| In exchange, my wife can call her family in South Korea for
| approximately nothing, using the same data backbone as we use
| to watch movies and read web pages.
| justicezyx wrote:
| You can have ip over time multiplexing data link layer,
| like the IP over ATM. I believe they were still used in the
| core voice networking.
|
| IP won because they are more flexible, and open. And the
| Internet cement the win because of that.
|
| That's way planning ahead too far works less and less
| successful for bigger and bigger project. Too much dynamic
| is embed in the long wiring process. It becomes impossible
| to have a plan work out correctly.
| hitekker wrote:
| You raise an interesting point that the author shies away from
| addressing.
|
| Can you elaborate on the phrase "becoming more trust-based" ?
| Do you mean that decision makers in this landscape rely more on
| the strength of their connections than their individual
| understanding?
| lazyjeff wrote:
| That's a good point. University labs are more nimble than a
| military contractor. The PI at a university directly does the
| work with their students (in some big labs, it's arguable that
| the PI manages the students that directly do the work). Whereas
| the contact at a military contractor is an accounts person,
| with lawyers and managers between them and the people doing the
| work.
|
| Cost-wise, universities usually charge an indirect cost rate of
| 50-65% (which many people improperly think it means is the
| percent of the grant money taken by the university), whereas
| the military contractor charges an indirect cost rate of
| 120-200%.
|
| So basically, about 70 cents of every dollar spent at a
| university directly goes towards the work (and trains students
| as a side effect; and as a triple bonus the cost paid towards
| student's tuition has no indirects on it at all), while only 30
| cents of the dollar spent at a military contractor goes towards
| the work (and probably much less towards the people actually
| doing the work).
| godelmachine wrote:
| There's an organization closely resembling DARPA but with
| exclusive focus on computing. Wish more gets written on it -
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Advanced_Research...
| walczyk wrote:
| Darpa is incredible because it's run by scientists and not
| managers. A lot of small tech is also run like that, it's so
| refreshing.
| maxander wrote:
| A big part of the "DARPA formula" that doesn't seem to get much
| treatment here is _consistency_. DARPA is going to spend a few
| billion this year, and it spent a few billion last year, and it
| spent a few billion twenty years ago, and you can feel confident
| they 'll spend a few billion next year. That means that if an
| academic researcher or similar can position their lab in an area
| that DARPA likes, they have a good shot at reliable funding for
| the length of a career. With all the economic uncertainties
| around research, this is _tremendously appealing_ and will cause
| a lot of smart people to re-orient their entire research programs
| around DARPA-friendly subjects [0]. A funding organization that
| might disappear in a few years, by contrast, will get plenty of
| grant applications, but won 't attract nearly the same level of
| researcher devotion.
|
| (As a side note, I want to pull out a quote I thought was really
| nice, hidden a ways in:
|
| "DARPA funds wacky things that go nowhere. DARPA programs have a
| 5--10% success rate and have included things like jetpacks,
| earthworm robots, creating fusion with sound waves, spider-man
| wall climbing, and bomb detecting bees. _You can't cut off just
| one tail of a distribution_. ")
|
| [0] Which may, incidentally, go a ways towards explaining why
| DARPA heads describe their projects as "idea-limited"
| Aperocky wrote:
| creating fusion with sound waves (or shock waves, which is
| essentially what sound becomes at high enough energy) is one of
| the crazier ideas I've heard..
| eximius wrote:
| It's literally one of the ways they make nuclear bombs so it
| isn't that crazy.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Well yeah, if your shock waves for fusion are created by
| nuclear fission chain reaction that technology has been
| quite ready and mature since the 1960s.
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