Comment by true_religion
4 days ago
I think you are torturing the analogy.
A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.
Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.
Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.
Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.
> Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Moats and high walls, sure. But to this day, the absolute best way to stop any attacker is to dig a trench (most minus water) and to build low parapets, primarily of dirt, sand, barbed wire and ideally some anti tank stuff.
The moat never really went away.
Moats were there to protect your castle which had your military and the supplies to keep them fed.
If you go to guerrilla warfare immediately, you’re basically now forced to face the enemy on the field on even ground even when you are on the defense.
All they have to do is burn your lands, destroy your fields, kill your civilians and you have lost.
They’ll do all that and safely retreat back home leaving you defanged.
That’s what medieval warfare was all about. Not absolute surrender and conquest, just temporary suppression and maybe forcing your enemy to pay your tribute.
How does your moat do against a B-52?
A lot better than expected, as Vietnam proved.
3 replies →
You may be missing the point, unsure if purposefully or not, but you can't just rent B-52 for $250 a month.
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trenches aren't stopping the attackers, only protecting the defenders. You "men" the trenches to make them effective
Moats or high walls also didn't stop attackers. You "manned" the walls for both to be effective.
Why do you think star forts had that shape? Why do you think castle walls had murder holes or arrow slits? Etc, etc.