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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1516 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Direct quote from the Reuters Weekend Briefing newsletter for today:

I'm in your base and I'm taking your chips

  • Parts and labor: Defense startups are raiding the automotive and fracking industries for parts to accelerate weapons development. The US stopped Polestar, majority owned by China's Geely Holding, from selling new models domestically. Owners want to know who's going to service their cars.

  • AI: Argentina's president announced a congressional bill to create non-human corporations run by artificial intelligence. Look behind the curtain and you'll find they would need humans anyway, experts say.

The heading is a reference to a 20-year-old meme.

Wait wait wait.

Defense startups are “raiding” the automotive industry? We’ve had the opposite problem, where automotive startups are pulling talent out of the defense establishment. I’m not sure that it extends to parts, except in the general sort of 18 month lead times that we’ve had on and off since the pandemic.

The defense startups I’ve seen tend, as always, to go for the off-the-shelf options. Sticking an arduino to the new generation of automotive sensors and so on. Or training models on rented compute, I guess? If you show up with a cheap solution to one of the outstanding issues, some branch of the DoW will be in your corner when it’s time to get it through compliance.

California-based Castelion, which makes solid rocket motors and hypersonic weapons, turned to the auto industry for sophisticated electronic components used in advanced driver-assistance systems and electric vehicles to help steer its missiles to targets. These auto-industry processors, known as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, can be bought at a tenth of the cost and obtained six times faster than comparable versions used in the aerospace industry, Chief Operating Officer Sean Pitt said.

The oil and gas industry has been another important supply-chain resource for Castelion. Rather than sourcing high-pressure metal tubes from aerospace vendors with long lead times, the company is using high-temperature, stress-rated precision machined tubes used to help crack open rocks in the fracking process.

These tubes are built to handle heat and pressure levels comparable to what is required for a rocket motor, but are sold by far more vendors, at lower prices, than the aerospace-industry equivalent, Pitt said. Castelion, recently valued at nearly $3 billion, has won big Pentagon contracts to make over 500 hypersonic weapons.

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