My experience is admittedly entirely from the IC side before I came to Platform One last year. And yes, when it came to ground processing and dissemination of g

My experience is admittedly entirely from the IC side before I came to Platform One last year. And yes, when it came to ground processing and dissemination of geointelligence products, we absolutely did prove we were doing what we were supposed to be doing, to an extremely exacting standard. I'm talking exact specs on false positive rates of cloud detections. Written explanations of pixel by pixel differences from the last release's test keys traced to an RFC. Verification that something worked equally well over cities, jungles, deserts, ocean, mountains. Sometimes getting dinged for ridiculous attention to detail stuff like accurate multi-tile pixel registration of a mosaic collection over Mount Everest, just to prove it still worked in the worst possible spot on the planet for our topographic earth models. When you see people above asking "what are the examples where we're a decade or more ahead of the commercial world," satellite imagery is one of the places where we're a decade or more ahead of the commercial world. I don't know if you recall Trump accidentally declassifying a collection on Twitter a few years back and imagery experts skeptical that it actually could have been taken from space given the resolution. That is not even remotely the tip of the iceberg of what we can do. I would not have even believed what we can do until I saw it. So I actually am used to being in an environment run by technical experts in physics and image science who know exactly what they want, write down clear, specific, and exacting requirements, and actually meeting those requirements. But you know what? We had the infrastructure to do it. A complete clone of the operational system with a cloned production data flow, putting the next release through exactly the same load, so we could detect the differences and any bugs immediately. Actual continuous integration because there was somewhere we could integrate to. Then I come to Platform One and it's here's an AWS account and some buzzword tech products that say they enable GitOps and CI. Figure out how to use them and stand up your own servers from scratch. And you know what? I'm a confident person. I perfectly believe I can do that. But not very quickly. And if my five person team is supposed to do design, development, test, operations, and maintenance all by ourselves, it is never going to happen quickly. Process can't save you from underprovisioning of resources. But apparently the government is just not willing to spend money any more. It's hard to see how. It's not like the federal budget is getting any smaller. But I have no idea where that money is going. At least some of that used to be going toward extremely superior radical technology that the public is skeptical of because it's all classified and they don't hear about it, but trust me, it's there.