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Comment by apostacy | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly terrified that America's nuclear missile silos are going to get "upgraded". Let them keep their 8 inch floppies and text interfaces, for the love of god. It works fine the way it is.

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It will be fine they will just download the nuke app off of the app store and sign into Facebook for authentication.

I'm sure it will only need 70 or so NPM modules.

Only 70? That's a stretch. This is 2019, after all, not 2015. Those 70 dependencies are only the first-line dependencies. Their dependencies will bring in another thousand.

Hey, when you need to pad a string, what else are you supposed to do?

Hardware fails over time and gets increasingly less reliable and harder to source. These types of upgrades are mostly about maintaining existing functionality on modern hardware.

In the case of nuclear missiles, this is entirely a good thing. If both sides can just maintain Potemkin nuclear arsenals we'll achieve gradual disarmament through obsolescence.

We might hope that at some point in the early 2100s, somebody will notice that none of the nuclear missiles work anymore, and with any luck, the engineering knowledge to create new ones will have been lost.

Or, preferably, simply seen as a childish use of rockets and nuclear energy while the tech is being used productively elsewhere.

Fogbank, lost knowledge regained

https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_...

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