Exactly the point. Military grade means nothing in regard to its actual quality. It's just another inane marketing tactic.

It's more like "meets" requirements

And usually it's specifically functional requirements. Unless it was spelled out, it was considered and or was designed out / shitty to save cash

Unfortunately in this case meets requirements just means it ticks a box. The meme is talking about people thinking military grade is top of the line. Like how the cheapest tire you can buy is legal and meets regulations, but it doesn’t mean it’s good.

It depends on how well you specified the requirements. Like not leaving out things you might consider obvious. Eg if you're specifying a sight that includes a range scale, make sure you include that the ranges should be calibrated such that calibrating it at one range will make it accurate at the others instead of just adding random lines and numbers that look like it shows correct range dropoff, and that the ranges correspond to the ammunition that will be fired instead of just copy/pasting from a .22 range sight.

Think of it like making a wish from a genie (folklore genie, not disney).

I review bids for government frequently. The requirement is to accept the lowest bid that meets all the requirements. The thing is, if the requirements aren't written well, it can be a very, very bad deal.

For instance we bid out for a janitorial contract where the bid did not include refilling cleaner bottles from the dispenser in the janitorial closet, so we had to accept a bid where that wasn't included, and they charged us $60 every time they topped off the bottles.

Affirmative!

Smoke you!

Absolutely not, take AR triggers for example. The shit they ship with palmetto state builds is "military grade" (read mil-spec) and functional, but is garbage compared to something like a geissele SSAE, or a trigger tech.

Are we getting a schematic of proprietary technology on Lemmy? Let me get my notebook.

I'm guessing poor documentation exacerbated by security clearance checks.

Allow me to explain with a practical example: you have a camera on the network, and you want automate taking snapshots in response to some arbitrary trigger (e.g. every minute, or whenever a separate motion sensor is activated). There are standards and conventions for type of integration, but military grade hardware often wants you to do things from first principles.

Typical consumer/IP camera: the camera has a REST API for its command set, so you can formulate a HTTP request like GET http://my-camera-ip/command/snap?stream=0 and the server will respond with image data. You can knock this out in maybe < 30 mins and < 100 lines of code. If you're a bit crafty, you can add support for multiple different camera models, which may vary in URI formation and authentication.

On the other hand, trying to do this with a military grade camera, the experience is usually something like this: The camera comes with proprietary client software that is closed source. In UI you can click a 'snap' button to take an image, but no viable route for automation. You try to reverse engineer it with Wireshark, but it appears to be a WebSocket connection with constant data transfer, which makes dissecting the 'snap' command difficult.

You check the manual, and the only mention of how to directly command the camera is via a serial line. That's the first problem: you don't want to run a long cable from the server running your automation, to the camera itself. So you buy a small serial device server, and run a serial cable between it and the camera. It will forward any byte sequence that is sent to it over your LAN, to the camera's serial input.

The manual references a separate document that explains the communication protocol, which should explain what byte sequence to send to 'snap' an image. You hunt down this document, and. Uh-oh. It's 344 pages long. Ctrl+F, you look for "snap" and find it's in section 17. It references some earlier sections about sync bites, message headers, and checksums. You finally work out that the full byte sequence you need to send to trigger a snapshot is00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A. You write code that sends that sequence over TCP to the serial device server. But there's a problem: you're not receiving any bytes back. Where is the resultant image?

You go back to the manual and it mentions that "snapshots and recordings are stored on the internal SD card" and "SD card contents are available via FTP". It doesn't give a spec, or even a filesystem, for the SD card. After trying a bunch of different ones, the camera finally detects your SDXC card formatted as exFAT: the magic combo.

There is no explanation of the FTP functionality in the manual, so you try the default FTP port, and make some educated guesses for the right username/password combo. None of them work, so you contact the manufacturers for help. 2 weeks later, they respond with the credentials. Finally, you're in, and you're seeing new image files showing up whenever you send the byte sequence. Success! Now, your code does something like this:

1. Send 00 7E 11 3D 01 00 0E 0D 0A via TCP to serial device server
2. Wait a moment
3. Connect to camera FTP server and download image file from SD card

A week later, your boss walks in and says that a new competitor, manufacturer B, has cameras with much more impressive IR sensors for nighttime surveillance. The existing cameras will be replaced starting next week. None of what you have built is reusable for manufacturer B cameras; it's time for a new adventure.

It's mind-boggling. It's like the manufacturers' engineers have not spoken to anyone who has written any software in the last 20 years.

He just liked messing with the people in line who took the bait.

"...wait, what do you mean?"

"Well, think about it. When they decide who's going to build it, they're not going to pay more than necessary. They'll pay as little as possible. I was looking at those bolts up there..."

Now I'd be curious to see what kind of roller coaster Joe Shmoe from down the street would come up with. https://youtube.com/shorts/hNOBJ6Woal4

Man I want to get military surplus too just to date curiosity but I am afraid of getting yeeted into the Larpers' group.