> if you make the same argument for flight it looks really weak.
flight is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple physics where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1700s.
I think the argument holds. It's not about how straightforward something is, it's that evolutionary time scales are incomparable to the time it takes to purposefully invent something. The ways these goals are achieved are just too different for time comparisons to make sense. If I was living in the 19th century, I could recreate the same argument by saying that it took nature X billion years since life appeared for animals to first take flight, so surely our technology ever catching up to it is improbable if not impossible.
I'm sure that intelligence is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple math where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1900s.
If you read about in a textbook from year 2832, that is.
every time i say "the tech seems to be stagnating" or "this model seems worse" based on my observations i get this response. "well, it's better for other use cases." i have even heard people say "this is worse for the things i use it for, but i know it's better for things i don't use it for."
i have yet to hear anyone seriously explain to me a single real-world thing that GPT5 is better at with any sort of evidence (or even anecdote!) i've seen benchmarks! but i cannot point to a single person who seems to think that they are accomplishing real-world tasks with GPT5 better than they were with GPT4.
the few cases i have heard that venture near that ask may be moderately intriguing, but don't seem to justify the overall cost of building and running the model, even if there have been marginal or perhaps even impressive leaps in very narrow use cases. one of the core features of LLMs is they are allegedly general-purpose. i don't know that i really believe a company is worth billions if they take their flagship product that can write sentences, generate a plan, follow instructions and do math and they are constantly making it moderately better at writing sentences, or following instructions, or coming up with a plan and it consequently forgets how to do math, or becomes belligerent, or sycophantic, or what have you.
to me, as a user with a broad range of use cases (internet search, text manipulation, deep research, writing code) i haven't seen many meaningful increases in quality of task execution in a very, very long time. this tracks with my understanding of transformer models, as they don't work in a way that suggests to me that they COULD be good at executing tasks. this is why i'm always so skeptical of people saying "the big breakthrough is coming." transformer models seem self-limiting by merit of how they are designed. there are features of thought they simply lack, and while i accept there's probably nobody who fully understands how they work, i also think at this point we can safely say there is no superintelligence in there to eke out and we're at the margins of their performance.
the entire pitch behind GPT and OpenAI in general is that these are broadly applicable, dare-i-say near-AGI models that can be used by every human as an assistant to solve all their problems and can be prompted with simple, natural language english. if they can only be good at a few things at a time and require extensive prompt engineering to bully into consistent behavior, we've just created a non-deterministic programming language, a thing precisely nobody wants.
The simple explanation for all this, along with the milquetoast replies kasey_junk gave you, is that to its acolytes, AI and LLMs cannot fail, only be failed.
If it doesn't seem to work very well, it's because you're obviously prompting it wrong.
If it doesn't boost your productivity, either you're the problem yourself, or, again, you're obviously using it wrong.
If progress in LLMs seems to be stagnating, you're obviously not part of the use cases where progress is booming.
When you have presupposed that LLMs and this particular AI boom is definitely the future, all comments to the contrary are by definition incorrect. If you treat it as a given that this AI boom will succeed (by some vague metric of "success") and conquer the world, skepticism is basically a moral failing and anti-progress.
The exciting part about this belief system is how little you actually have to point to hard numbers and, indeed, rely on faith. You can just entirely vibe it. It FEELS better and more powerful to you, your spins on the LLM slot machine FEEL smarter and more usable, it FEELS like you're getting more done. It doesn't matter if those things are actually true over the long run, it's about the feels. If someone isn't sharing your vibes about the LLM slot machine, that's entirely their fault and problem.
And on the other side, to detractors, AI and LLMs cannot ever succeed. There's always another goalpost to shift.
If it seems to work well, it's because it's copying training data. Or it sometimes gets something wrong, so it's unreliable.
If they say it boosts their productivity, they're obviously deluded as to where they're _really_ spending time, or what they were doing was trivial.
If they point to improvements in benchmarks, it's because model vendors are training to the tests, or the benchmarks don't really measure real-world performance.
If the improvements are in complex operations where there aren't benchmarks, their reports are too vague and anecdotal.
The exciting part about this belief system is how little you have to investigate the actual products, and indeed, you can simply rely on a small set of canned responses. You can just entirely dismiss reports of success and progress; that's completely due to the reporter's incompetence and self-delusion.
I work in a company that's "all in on AI" and there's so much BS being blown up just because they can't have it fail because all the top dogs will have mud on their faces. They're literally just faking it. Just making up numbers, using biased surveys, making sure employees know it's being "appreciated" if they choose option A "Yes AI makes me so much more productive" etc.
This is definitely something that biases me against AI, sure. Seeing how the sausage is made doesn't help. Because it's really a lot of offal right now especially where I work.
I'm a very anti-corporate non-teamplayer kinda person so I tend to be highly critical, I'll never just go along with PR if it's actually false. I won't support my 'team' if it's just wrong. Which often rubs people the wrong way at work. Like when I emphasised in a training that AI results must be double checked. Or when I answered in an "anonymous" survey that I'd rather have a free lunch than "copilot" and rated it a 2 out of 5 in terms of added value (I mean, at the time it didn't even work in some apps)
But I'm kinda done with soul-killing corporatism anyway. Just waiting for some good redundancy packages when the AI bubble collapses :)
> If they say it boosts their productivity, they're obviously deluded as to where they're _really_ spending time, or what they were doing was trivial.
A pretty substantial number of developers are doing trivial edits to business applications all over the globe, pretty much continuously. At least in the low to mid double digits %
wouldn't call myself a detractor. i wouldn't call it a belief system i hold (i am an engineer 20 years into my career and would love to automate away the tedious parts of my job i've done a thousand times) as it is a position i hold based on the evidence i've seen in front of me.
i constantly hear that companies are running with "50% of their code written by AI!" but i've yet to meet an engineer who says they've personally seen this. i've met a few who say they see it through internal reporting, though it's not the case on their team. this is me personally! i'm not saying these people don't exist. i've heard it much more from senior leadership types i've met in the field - directors, vps, c-suite, so on.
i constantly hear that AI can do x, y, or z, but no matter how many people i talk to or how much i or my team works towards those goals, it doesn't really materialize. i can accept that i may be too stupid (though i'd argue that if that's the problem, the AI isn't as good as claimed) but i work with some brilliant people and if they can't see results, that means something to me.
i see people deploying the tool at my workplace, and recently had to deal with a situation where leadership was wondering why one of our top performers had slowed down substantially and gotten worse, only to find that the timeline exactly aligned with them switching to cursor as their IDE.
i read papers - lots of papers - and articles about both positive and negative assertions about LLMs and their applicability in the field. i don't feel like i've seen compelling evidence in research not done by the foundation model companies that supports the theory this is working well. i've seen lots of very valid and concerning discoveries reported by the foundation model companies, themselves!
there are many places in the world i am a hardliner on no generative AI and i'll be open about that - i don't want it in entertainment, certainly not in music, and god help me if i pick up the phone and call a company and an agent picks up.
for my job? i'm very open to it. i know the value i provide above what the technology could theoretically provide, i've written enough boilerplate and the same algorithms and approaches for years to prove to myself i can do it. if i can be as productive with less work, or more productive with the same work? bring it on. i am not worried about it taking my job. i would love it to fulfill its promise.
i will say, however, that it is starting to feel telling that when i lay out any sort of reasoned thought on the issue that (hopefully) exposes my assumptions, biases, and experiences, i largely get vague, vibes-based answers, unsourced statistics, and responses that heavily carry the implication that i'm unwilling to be convinced or being dogmatic. i very rarely get thoughtful responses, or actual engagement with the issues, concerns, or patterns i write about. oftentimes refutations of my concerns or issues with the tech are framed as an attack on my willingness to use or accept it, rather than a discussion of the technology on its merits.
while that isn't everything, i think it says something about the current state of discussion around the technology.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is _way_ better than previous sonnets and as good as Opus for the coding and research tasks I do daily.
I rarely use Google search anymore, both because llms got that ability embedded and the chatbots are good at looking through the swill search results have become.
"it's better at coding" is not useful information, sorry. i'd love to hear tangible ways it's actually better. does it still succumb to coding itself in circles, taking multiple dependencies to accomplish the same task, applying inconsistent, outdated, or non-idiomatic patterns for your codebase? has compliance with claude.md files and the like actually improved? what is the round trip time like on these improvements - do you have to have a long conversation to arrive at a simple result? does it still talk itself into loops where it keeps solving and unsolving the same problems? when you ask it to work through a complex refactor, does it still just randomly give up somewhere in the middle and decide there's nothing left to do? does it still sometimes attempt to run processes that aren't self-terminating to monitor their output and hang for upwards of ten minutes?
my experience with claude and its ilk are that they are insanely impressive in greenfield projects and collapse in legacy codebases quickly. they can be a force multiplier in the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing, i think, but the evidence of that even is pretty shaky: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
the pitch that "if i describe the task perfectly in absolute detail it will accomplish it correctly 80% of the time" doesn't appeal to me as a particularly compelling justification for the level of investment we're seeing. actually writing the code is the simplest part of my job. if i've done all the thinking already, i can just write the code. there's very little need for me to then filter that through a computer with an overly-verbose description of what i want.
as for your search results issue: i don't entirely disagree that google is unusable, but having switched to kagi... again, i'm not sure the order of magnitude of complexity of searching via an LLM is justified? maybe i'm just old, but i like a list of documents presented without much editorializing. google has been a user-hostile product for a long time, and its particularly recent quality collapse has been well-documented, but this seems a lot more a story of "a tool we relied on has gotten measurably worse" and not a story of "this tool is meaningfully better at accomplishing the same task." i'll hand it to chatgpt/claude that they are about as effective as google was at directing me to the right thing circa a decade ago, when it was still a functional product - but that brings me back to the point that "man, this is a lot of investment and expense to arrive at the same result way more indirectly."
You asked for a single anecdote of llms getting better at daily tasks. I provided two. You dismissed them as not valuable _to you_.
It’s fine that your preferences aren’t aligned such that you don’t value the model or improvements that we’ve seen. It’s troubling that you use that to suggest there haven’t been improvements.
you didn't provide an anecdote. you just said "it's better." an anecdote would be "claude 4 failed in x way, and claude 4.5 succeeds consistently." "it is better" is a statement of fact with literally no support.
the entire thrust of my statement was "i only hear nonspecific, vague vibes that it's better with literally no information to support that concept" and you replied with two nonspecific, vague vibes. sorry i don't find that compelling.
"troubling" is a wild word to use in this scenario.
My one shot rate for unattended prompts (triggered GitHub actions) has gone from about 2 in 3 to about 4 in 5 with my upgrade to 4.5 in the codebase I program in the most (one built largely pre-ai). These are highly biased to tasks I expect ai to do well.
Since the upgrade I don’t use opus at all for planning and design tasks. Anecdotally, I get the same level of performance on those because I can choose the model and I don’t choose opus. Sonnet is dramatically cheaper.
What’s troubling is that you made a big deal about not hearing any stories of improvements as if your bar was very low for said stories, then immediately raised the bar when given them. It means that one doesn’t know what level of data you actually want.
Specifics are worth talking about. I just felt it unfair to complain about raising the bar when you didn’t initially reach it.
In your own worlds: “You asked for a single anecdote of llms getting better at daily tasks.”
Which is already less specific than their request: “i'd love to hear tangible ways it's actually better.”
Saying “is getting better for accomplishing the real world tasks I ask of it” brings nothing to a discussion and was the kind of vague statement that they were initially complaining about. If LLM’s are really improving it’s not a major hurdle to say something meaningful about what specific is getting better. /tilting at windmills
Here's one. I have a head to head "benchmark" involving generating a React web app to display a Gantt chart, add tasks, layer overlaps, read and write to files, etc. I compared implementing this application using both Claude Code with Opus 4.1 / Sonnet 4 (scenario 1) and Claude Code 2 with Sonnet 4.5 (scenario 2) head to head.
The scenario 1 setup could complete the application but it had about 3 major and 3 minor implementation problems. Four of those were easily fixed by pointing them out, but two required significant back and forth with the model to resolve.
The scenario 2 setup completed the application and there were four minor issues, all of which were resolved with one or two corrective prompts.
Toy program, single run through, common cases, stochastic parrot, yadda yadda, but the difference was noticeable in this direct comparison and in other work I've done with the model I see a similar improvement.
so to clarify your case, you are having it generate a new application, from scratch, and then benchmarking the quality of the output and how fast it got to the solution you were seeking?
i will concede that in this arena, there does seem to be meaningful improvement.
i said this in one of my comments in this thread, but the place i routinely see the most improvement in output from LLMs (and find they perform best) for code generation is in green field projects, particularly ones whose development starts with an agent. some facts that make me side-eye this result (not yours in particular, just any benchmark that follows this model):
- the codebase, as long as a single agent and model are working on it, is probably suited to that model's biases and thus implicitly easier for it to work in and "understand."
- the codebase is likely relatively contained and simple.
- the codebase probably doesn't cross domains or require specialized knowledge of services or APIs that aren't already well-documented on the internet or weren't built by the tool.
these are definitely assumptions, but i'm fairly confident in their accuracy.
one of the key issues i've had approaching these agents is that all my "start with an LLM and continue" projects actually start incredibly impressively! i was pretty astounded even on the first version of claude code - i had claude building a service, web management interface AND react native app, in concert, to build an entire end to end application. it was great! early iteration was fast, particularly in the "mess around and find out what happens" phase of development.
where it collapsed, however, was when the codebase got really big, and when i started getting very opinionated about outcomes. my claude.md file grew and grew and seemed to enforce less and less behavior, and claude became less and less likely to successfully refactor or reuse code. this also tracks with my general understanding of what an LLM may be good or bad at - it can only hold so much context, and only as textual examples, not very effectively as concepts or mental models. this ultimately limits its ability to reason about complex architecture. it rapidly became faster for me to just make the changes i envisioned, and then claude became more of a refactoring tool that i very narrowly applied when i was too lazy to do the text wrangling myself.
i do believe that for rapid prototyping - particularly the case of "product manager trying to experiment and figure out some UX" - these tools will likely be invaluable, if they can remain cost effective.
the idea that i can use this, regularly, in the world of "things i do in my day-to-day job" seems a lot more far fetched, and i don't feel like the models have gotten meaningfully better at accomplishing those tasks. there's one notable exception of "explaining focused areas of the code", or as a turbo-charged grep that finds the area in the codebase where a given thing happens. i'd say that the roughly 60-70% success rate i see in those tasks is still a massive time savings to me because it focuses me on the right thing and my brain can fill in the rest of the gaps by reading the code. still, i wouldn't say its track record is phenomenal, nor do i feel like the progress has been particularly quick. it's been small, incremental improvements over a long period of time.
i don't doubt you've seen an improvement in this case (which is, as you admit, a benchmark) but it seems like LLMs keep performing better on benchmarks but that result isn't, as far as i can see, translating into improved performance on the day-to-day of building things or accomplishing real-world tasks. specifically in the case of GPT5, where this started, i have heard very little if any feedback on what it's better at that doesn't amount to "some things that i don't do." it is perfectly reasonable to respond to me that GPT5 is a unique flop, and other model iterations aren't as bad, in that case. i accept this is one specific product from one specific company - but i personally don't feel like i'm seeing meaningful evidence to support that assertion.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I really appreciate the willingness to discuss what you've seen in your experience. I think your observations are pretty much exactly correct in terms of where agents do best. I'd qualify in just a couple areas:
1. In my experience, Claude Code (I've used several other models and tools, but CC performs the best for me so that's my go-to) can do well with APIs and services that are proprietary as long as there's some sort of documentation for them it can get to (internal, Swagger, etc.), and you ensure that the model has that documentation prominently in context.
2. CC can also do well with brownfield development, but the scope _has_ to be constrained, either to a small standalone program or a defined slice of a larger application where you can draw real boundaries.
The best illustration I've seen of this is in a project that is going through final testing prior to release. The original "application" (I use the term loosely) was a C# DLL used to generate data-driven prescription monitoring program reporting.
It's not ultra-complicated but there's a two step process where you retrieve the report configuration data, then use that data to drive retrieval and assembly of the data elements needed for the final report. Formatting can differ based on state, on data available (reports with no data need special formatting), and on whether you're outputting in the context of transmission or for user review.
The original DLL was written in a very simplistic way, with no testing and no way to exercise the program without invoking it from its link points embedded in our main application. Fixing bugs and testing those fixes were both very painful as for production release we had to test all 50 states on a range of different data conditions, and do so by automating the parent application.
I used Claude Code to refactor this module, add DI and testing, and add a CLI that could easily exercise the logic in all different supported configurations. It took probably $50 worth of tokens (this was before I had a Max account, so it was full price) over the course of a few hours, most of which time I was in other meetings.
The final result did exhibit some classic LLM problems -- some of the tests were overspecific, it restructured without always fully cleaning up the existing functions, and it messed up a couple of paths through the business logic that I needed to debug and fix. But it easily saved me a couple days of wrestling with it myself, as I'm not super strong with C#. Our development teams are fully committed, and if I hadn't used CC for this it wouldn't have gotten done at all. Being able to run this on the side and get a 90% result I could then take to the finish line has real value for us, as the improved testing alone will see an immediate payback with future releases.
This isn't a huge application by any means, but it it's one example of where I've seen real value that is hitting production, and seems representative of a decently large category of line-of-business modules. I don't think there's any reason this wouldn't replicate on similarly-scoped products.
The biggest issue with Sonnet 4.5 is that it's chatty as fuuuck. It just won't shut up, it keeps producing massive markdown "reports" and "summaries" of every single minor change, wasting precious context.
With Sonnet 4 I rarely ran out of quota unexpectedly, but 4.5 chews through whatever little Anthropic gives us weekly.
Gpt5 isn't an improvement to me, but Claude sonnet4.5, handle terragrunt way, way better than the previous version did. It also go search AWS documentation by itself, and parse external documents way better. That's not LLM improvement, to be clear (except the terragrunt thing), I think it's improvement in data acquisition and a better inference engine. On react project it seems way, way less messy also, I have to use it more but the inference engine seems clearer. At least less prone to circular code, where it's stuck in a loop. It seems to be exiting the loop faster, even when the output isn't satisfactory (which isn't an issue to me, most of my prompt have more or less 'only write functions template, do not write the inside logic if it has to contain more than a loop', I fill the blanks myself)
realistically i've worked at very few companies whose delivery is held back meaningfully by the framework something is built in.
when there's friction, it's much more likely to come from poor planning, or constantly adding more functionality without stopping to reconsider architecture, or one of a thousand more organizational issues.
the innovation delivered by basically anyone working in software is extremely rarely a function of the tools they use to build the software, and many extremely successful products effectively started as CRUD apps, just organized in a way that really served a specific use case well.
the stuff i recall that truly transformed the way i've experienced the web - (what was at the time) AJAX, webGL, the canvas tag, websockets - tend to be shipped in the browser, and function equally well in basically any framework. i don't really think that i can point to a single new framework that truly changed the way i experience the web meaningfully.
react is probably the closest i can recall, but primarily because it was the one that caught on and made building really rich SPAs fashionable after the long slushy period of knockout and angular and backbone and handlebars and the thousand other disparate things cobbled together by every company. it catching on and taking over most of the industry meant people could move between jobs easier, contribute more quickly, and take easier advantage of countless libraries because they were either natively made for react or there was plenty of documentation and support for integrating them.
having that broad a universe of support might actually be a main source of innovation, when you think about it. having it be effortless to integrate basically anything in the js universe into your project because it's well-documented and has been done a thousand times means you can focus more easily on the unique parts of your project.
i'm definitely a little jaded, and 20ish years into my career i'm more business-minded than i was when i started, but i struggle to imagine a framework so profoundly and uniquely enabling of new things, that would have such a meaningful impact on my bottom line, that i would choose it and the trouble of hiring experienced engineers comfortable with it (or training new ones) when i could just bring on literally anyone in the entire industry, because basically all front-end devs are comfortable in react.
I wouldn't say I've worked at companies where the framework is exactly what holds back deliverability, but I have worked in plenty of environments where a complex front end is multiplying the work required to get a basic CRUD product out without a ton of benefit.
totally familiar with that - more often than not (in that it's always been the case) that is a function of how the company chose to build things, however, and not the base framework the product was built on.
in fact, the greatest source of that kind of trouble, in my experience, is constantly changing approaches and paradigms and patterns throughout the codebase to do something "more modern" without fully committing, leading to a super stratified codebase with dozens of patterns and weird hooks and bindings to make them all get along...
at what point does it make sense to say “maybe you don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt” because it sincerely feels well past that point by all measures.
I read that comment as a steelman of the position that this is genuine anti-corruption activity, and pointing out via doing so that even if you give them an incredibly unwarranted amount of good faith, it still doesn’t make any remote amount of sense.
i needed an "oh, that's really nice" story today. this delivered.
in every way, this seems well-intentioned, quirky, cute, fun, and positive. unless there's some subtext i'm missing, this is just a good and nice thing happening that's great for everyone involved.
apple ebbs and flows in terms of how on the ball they are in any given area, but it feels we're at a strange inflection point where their hardware is the best it's ever been and the software is inexplicably in a death spiral
i've been a heavy safari user for a while, mainly because i do make extensive use of the tab and history syncing across all my devices, and safari is the only actual browser you get on iOS - might as well use the native version.
lately safari has this habit of, on some websites, entirely locking up my device while loading web pages. like full on hard lock can't switch windows, nothing can be done, sometimes for upwards of 30 seconds. to go to my electric company's website, i have to use chrome. otherwise my computer becomes unusable.
i am not suggesting that their website isn't awful (it is) but it is inexcusable that on an M2 max laptop with 64 GB of ram that loading a slow or bulky website should make my computer completely unusable. i do not understand how this hasn't been addressed. it was intermittent before but it's a daily occurrence now.
this along with all the weird visual glitches, notifications snapping between sharp-edged boxes and rounded boxes repeatedly, sudden drops in frame rate on my iPhone display that seem to start and end for no reason, and it's starting to feel like everyone at apple uses their devices as beautiful paperweights primarily and doesn't actually interact with the software at all...
the thing that frustrates me deeply is i've explored the android ecosystem extensively (i've owned several samsung and pixel devices, even very recent ones as second phones) and find that whole space even worse and more unpleasant, with the shovelware play store and a general unpleasant and janky UI that has never felt right to me. so it's like... what's the GOOD option now?
there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.
And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.
Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.
Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small.
Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.
There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.
This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part
The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
"Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy.
The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though.
"in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment.
Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain this business model?
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
> At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes
I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...
Boom will only be the first. Other supersonic airliners will happen once Boom validates the market. We can do a lot better than Concorde did now, with higher efficiency engines and lighter materials.
I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.
There's a difference between "better than Concorde", which isn't exactly a high point of efficiency, and defying the laws of physics to make supersonic flights so cheap they can operate flights between origins and destinations that aren't commercially viable to fly direct at the moment (like your trip to Brazil) in sufficient comfort to attract people that don't do long haul at the moment
The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction
as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time
today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."
there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
I can't wait to see NASA's one. What I really hope is Mach 2 at altitudes higher than the Concorde, in order to minimize sonic booms on land. Even if we never get to fly supersonic over land again, a Mach 2 plane that can cross the Pacific would be incredible.
commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9
i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is:
- going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too.
- noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water.
it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
Air travel is more popular than ever and 2024 broke basically all records. Why would there be less case for faster flights?
Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-continental (without stops along the way) and there are people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay for this.
the way i've heard it explained is functionally that the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet.
people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or the time it takes for the most part - they mind being uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different place than you usually do.
at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde, was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.
i think most of the people you're talking about would prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.
i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but previously when discussing the return of supersonic flights with folks who know better than i, this was the general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its face.
> the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet
Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn’t have suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don’t have lay-flat options.)
In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic business seats. But lower service costs because you don’t need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.
The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a stopover, which means the market values the savings of a couple of hours at around $5000.
Air travel is more popular because of cheap flights, airline competition and a consolidation amongst manufacturers leading to standardisations. There's no evidence that the 0.1pct are going to swap their private jets that fly at 0.8 for sharing an aircraft flying on other people's schedules between airports they dont want to travel to/from.
Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive. Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.
Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing to pay to fly private. But how big is that market? Especially if you’re still going to raise prices 2-3x?
Some passengers are extremely price sensitive, but full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first (actual first class, not US domestic).
And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.
There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight.
West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
I'm not sure the people who pay full-boat fares for business and first today is a sufficient market for a new supersonic plane and a viable set of airline routes (within the range of the plane which probably doesn't include trans-Pacific).
i don't. i'm explicitly choosing not to be pedantic and instead hoping you'll take what i say as what it obviously is intended to mean and not as a very specific and accurate phrasing to be disassembled and torn apart without acknowledging the overall intent of the message.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).
And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.
Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.
So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...
As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)
All other things being equal, sure. But I'm probably not paying thousands of dollars to save a few hours. Maybe if that amount of money is basically pocket lint, but that's a tiny percentage of the population.
Concorde holds the world record in both directions actually.
F-BTSD did it:
- westbound in 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds on 12/13 October 1992, LIS-SDQ-ACA-HNL-GUM-BKK-BAH-LIS (Lisbon, Saint-Domingue, Acapulco, Honolulu, Guam, Bangkok, Bahrein, Lisbon)
- astbound in 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds on 15/16 August 1995, JFK-TLS-DXB-BKK-GUM-HNL-ACA-JFK (New York, Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu, Acapulco, New York)
Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before.
This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.
They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.
Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.
wow! this sure is great! gemini has worked so great up until this point - for example, i learned that a man who died in 1850 is one of three private owners of the airbus a340-600 last week! i'm so glad gemini exists and i absolutely cannot wait to experience a world wherein people get news from it.
as an avid apple music user i am continually frustrated by what an afterthought the windows app is
it's a continuation of apple's legacy of barely putting in the minimum to ship anything for windows.
there's a reason i won't use their password manager, etc. i still interact with windows, and basically any key app i use can't be apple-made because the windows experience will be utter trash and the linux experience will be nonexistent.
i make do with the windows apple music app but it is objectively a bad experience.
flight is an extremely straightforward concept based in relatively simple physics where the majority of the critical, foundational ideas involved were already near-completely understood in the late 1700s.
i really don't think it's fair to compare the two