- techdragon parentI wonder how long until the Wikipedia entry about 20% time is updated.
- Is it legal to rehearse or practice how to interact with border guards?
I don’t need to explain why someone could be deeply anxious interacting with US border officials… it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. And since looking anxious is a sign that you could be concealing things, thus drawing more attention from border officials… Coaching on how to handle an experience and avoid that anxious spiral and minimise the risk for such travellers… But I’m curious if this is legal. Or if it is legal, would it be construed as evidence of intent to deceive should a traveler do this and wind up being investigated in such a way that it turns up that they have undertaken such practice?
- Yeah, lithium ion is pretty dangerous and not to be fucked with… but actually we do allow filling up cars in private residences… You can just go get a fuel can or extra tank of your choice, fill it up at a station when fuel is cheap and keep it at home for a cheap top up to avoid having to go out of your way for cheap gas on those days when your low but not going near a gas station with good prices… no laws against it at all here in Australia and we’re a crazy nanny state so I’d be surprised if it was illegal somewhere else… except maybe California, where the fuel can is probably illegal to own if you don’t put a warning sticker about possibly causing cancer on it or something ridiculous like that.
- Thank you for taking the time to do the grim maths…
Also, holy ** I thought it was bad and probably going to be maybe 10-25 times higher… based on the utter devastation I have seen in satellite imagery… but over 150 times more…
The proportionality math for population density is just… ghastly.
- That’s one potential mitigating factor, but they were also using large bombs like 2000 pounders on targets that I’ve not seen any reputable military commentators agree as justifying such a large bomb…
like the typical comment are things like before and after satellite image comparisons and taking it at face value the claimed target exists for the sake of arguing the point… and they would say things like “that building needed 1000 pounds max and that’s probably overkill, you would probably want to just use two 500 pound bombs one on the first pass, and one on the second if it was still standing, heck I’d probably have argued for three 250 pounders bombs with penetration aids and have flow the sortie in a staggered pass so after each drop the next pilot can confirm if the target is still standing and drop theirs if necessary, but using a 2000 pound bomb is nuts on a target that size, they have air superiority and significant ground control to ensure minimal SAM risk from MANPADS, if I had suggested a sortie like this when I was a [whatever their rank was/is], it would have severely hurt my career due to how recklessly wasteful I would have appeared”
And that kind of commentary came up a lot in certain circles. Not even arguing the validity of the targets like the whole “hidden bunker under every second building” stuff… just legitimately tactical assessment of construction typical of the region, the cumulative seismic and shock load damage from prior nearly weapon detonations, and the honest appraisal that it was extremely overkill to use bombs that size… it was morbidly educational in a way.
- In genuinely morbid moment of being nerd snipped… I wonder if the ordinance dropped per square meter on Gaza is higher than the ordinance dropped be square meter on Vietnam… which was famously bombed so hard that detailed maps needed to be updated in order to accommodate how heavily cratered parts of the country were with heavily cratered hills and slopes literally shifting like a form of mechanical erosion by bombing.
- Sadly I suspect this will be the case… I don’t hold much hope on this whole thing actually ending… but I do have a glimmer of hope that they may have reached a tipping point due to one of the many slowly shifting parts of this tragedy… no idea what the tipping point is from the outside but it does kinda have the vibe of “maybe this is going to fall apart if they keep pushing”
- Ok, I’m really not sure why the simple answer isn’t getting across here.
His position as co-head of the nominal “department of government efficiency” only exists due to the legitimacy it has been granted by the recognition granted to it by the incoming administration… otherwise we would all be calling it some variety of the first buddy’s pet think tank and arguing over if the incoming administration would even pay attention to it or not… that is a government granted position of power, a position that it is pretty hard to argue is not part of the government that grants it legitimacy… therefore making it a position in government… even if it’s unpaid and advisory… it’s still practically in the government if not legally (for all the conflict of interest reasons you highlight)…
I’m not trying to make a civics or political science case here… I’m talking politics as the exercise of power by government upon the governed… he is currently having breakfast lunch and dinner with the incoming president, making arguments and shaping the cabinet, and contributing to the transition team… he’s involved with government… he’s “in” it.
- It’s currently just in name only. But that is likely to change soon in some form yet to be revealed when the new government is sworn in.
So legally it isn’t in government yet, however as it is officially part of the elected governments plans, you can make a sensible argument that it is part of the incoming transitional government that has been elected and while having now power due to not being sworn in yet, is indeed part of government by nature transition teams and the president elect having status in government by way of things like security briefings and other rights and privileges normally only held by the incumbent government like increased security protection…
It would be like saying a government in exile (a well established precedent of history) isn’t a government and none of the people in it are in government…
- Advisors can be in government… if it’s a government department even an advisory one, it’s part of government… and thus its employees are in government.
- They in all likelihood, have already started… to some extent…
Given the geopolitical context it’s extremely unlikely that they were willing to make a statement, even as vaguely shaped as the whole, “nato or nukes and we choose nato” thing was… in essence, why mention nukes are a possibility if you don’t think you can realistically build them?
And this makes a lot of sense, because Ukraine was at the heart of a lot of the most sophisticated work done in the Soviet Union, and as befits their legacy as the birthplace of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the Soviet Union, they were (prior to the invasion and war) the 7th largest user of Nuclear power in the world by total output at 13 gigawatts, and they are only beaten by France in terms of how much of their national energy production is powered by nuclear at 55%… they have retained a significant nuclear industry and they were even considering starting up domestic nuclear fuel fabrication prior to the war, which is indicative of them being able to do a lot more than just “run a nuclear power plant”, coupled with their domestic uranium reserves and the wartime entrepreneurial spirit they have brought to the entire field of drone warfare… I don’t doubt that someone somewhere in the government had a thought one day cursing about the failure of their allies to follow their obligations under the Budapest Memorandum, and decided to get some pretty smart people to work out just how hard it would be to get back their nuclear capability. With such a significant nuclear industry, getting plutonium and just skipping all the difficult uranium enrichment stuff would be comparatively easy for them.
And from prior published research on the matter of nuclear proliferation, it’s not as hard as a lot of people would likely presume… in 1964, the USA commissioned the “Nth Country Experiment” which can be sort of summed up as “we took 3 brand new phd physicists with no idea how to make a nuclear weapon, and timed how long it took them to work out how to build one without letting them peek at any of the classified info on how the existing nukes were built, they have to do the work from scratch with just public info and their brain smarts” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment … from scratch with, significantly less information than we all have available to us online today, if took the three of them 3 years to do. Ukraine has all the modern public information you or I have access to, likely a not insignificant amount of leftover classified information from the Soviet era, even if it’s just oral history and the spotty memories of long retired experts who were involved in building Soviet era nukes… and as recently demonstrated in the new domestic tactical missile and long range drone development efforts they have the capability to stand up domestic production of complex weapon systems… I think they know exactly how long it would take, they have a timeline, they have a rough idea what it would look like and they probably have a list of potential delivery platforms from their current arsenal… they just probably haven’t started actually, “making anything”
- Leaky seives, I doubt they would share the info if they are doing it … the Kursk front taught them a lesson.
- Well that’s kinda awesome to see, at long last it’s coming out of the development pipeline and now there are legitimate solid state batteries in consumer available products…
- Interesting to have a more complete picture of how this kind of YouTube scam works, with all the little differences between the normal and the music half of YouTube pointed out clearly along the way.
- They don’t care about that. I mean it’s the opening paragraph…
> I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire.
- Ok… so looking from the outside in Australia… a country with mandatory voting that always happens on weekends to make it incredibly easy for people to do their civic duty, thus allowing us to levy a fine against anyone who doesn’t vote… with electoral divisions and regional boundaries managed by a specific government department that has been structured so as to prevent politicians doing any gerrymandering…
In the USA it’s clear that voter suppression and gerrymandering have allowed for partisan groups of elites with both progressive and conservative views to hold onto power for decades as the voting public they represent feels more and more like their vote does not matter, or that they are unable to vote due to their financial situation (no time off, no money for transit, no money for required identification, required identification needs a fixed address and their homeless, etc)… it’s pretty dire… and I have always been kind of shocked how it’s managed to limp along with such statically low voter turnout for decades… money is speech (citizens united) and media are allowed to treat made up news as entertainment with no need to distinguish really from fiction (FCC vs Fox News)…
I don’t see any way the situation doesn’t eventually lead to demagoguery… because at some point your public is just so disenfranchised that a demagogue doesn’t have much work to do beyond “I’m not them, get the fuck out and vote for me so I can change things”…
But the problem with a demagogue is that even if they don’t turn dictator, they are by nature of their rise to power, going to be very dictator like, it’s their choice, their charisma, their force of will that motivated the voting public… the only problem is that the checks and balances to prevent the demagogue from becoming a dictator, have only been barely tested, first with FDR, then with Nixon, one who died before the change to the system was relevant, the other begrudgingly bowed out before the system had to fully engage with the issue...
How would you do it better?
- There was, we called them elections.
- This kind of low level testing can be such a pain. Its fortunate this hardware has netboot. This is the "easy" path for low level testing, I've worked with other stuff where the only option is virtual SD card devices and ... damn its a pain... you end up with devices like this https://hackaday.com/2014/06/08/the-in-circuit-sd-card-switc... or when you're lucky and have more budget, devices like the SDWire ( https://badgerd.nl/sdwirec/ or https://shop.3mdeb.com/shop/open-source-hardware/sdwire/ which are both based on an older Tizen dev team design)
- It’s about abstractions, and a lot of the time visual programming tools don’t get it right. Either they are too abstract and your limited to a set of nodes/blocks that are not powerful enough and adding more is challenging because the abstraction is so high there’s lots of overhead to get there, or the abstraction capabilities are too low and the ability to encapsulate and extend visually programmed code for reuse in other places or larger projects is hampered by the design.
About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.
And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.
Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.
- Given how many people are struggling to find enthusiasm to voice support for Biden due to the situation in Gaza and how he isn’t trying to play hardball with Netanyahu in comparison to the hardball Reagan played back in the day… there is a lot of negative sentiment for Biden due to his age and intransigence on many issues… from the outside looking in (I’m in Australia, so I don’t have a vote in this, I just care about the foreign policy implications) … the situation in the upcoming election is very much looking like a lot of people view it as “narcissistic nut job who seems extremely keen on fascism” and “old politician who might be getting just a little bit senile from time to time… but is also not doing enough to try and stop a genocide” … oh and and throwing your vote out for a third party candidate who literally had brain worms
This isn’t an inspiring group… I expect a non trivial percentage of Biden voters are literally just going to the polls thinking ”he’s the least worst of these people and the others would be so insanely worse that it’s my duty to vote for this guy to make sure the people who believe in the other guys don’t destroy my country”
A mandatory age limit (which remember is enshrined at the other end, we have precedent for someone being too young for the office of president) would force the Democratic Party to nominate a different candidate, who Biden would be obliged to support out of party loyalty since he is being forced to retire due to the age limit, and we might see a less “Passive” Democrat campaign that would be holding the other candidates to the fire on their various problems, from brain worms and heavy metal poisoning to dozens of felony charges and a felony conviction pending the obvious appeal after sentencing…
As for the future when people might live longer…
again from the outside… I’d like the USA to be less dominant because the monopolar world has been a destabilising influence that has slowly allowed US based business interests to corrupt the governments of allied countries and pressure long term changes that have had devastating effects like the current NHS situation in the UK, and the various small countries whose governments have lived and died at the whim of US foreign policy due. While broadly speaking in the long long term the USA has been a good steward of its global power… it has been at its best when it was competitive against other global powers and not sitting on some global throne of power just deciding who gets aid funding or pressuring for treaties like the TPP which have deeply pro business anti consumer political protections built into their bones…
why the big preamble? Well in the long long term i imagine that by the time a healthy person is fit enough to run a global power at the age of 125 (extrapolating from the current age relative to the 80 year cutoff in question) i imagine we’re going to be in the situation where smaller powers have significantly asymmetrical influence… if space travel and eventual efforts at colonisation succeed… eventually they will assert sovereignty due to the classic cycle of colonial development… either the colonising power expands fast enough to maintain their control over the colony or the colony being at a distance (be that economic, logistical, political, or something else) the colony will eventually drift away from the parent developing its own identity and want independence… if we have lunar, asteroid or mars colonies… I don’t see how a lunar colony with enough mass drivers already built for cargo and logistics reasons… couldn’t make any government on earth sit the fuck down and grant them independence… the relative merits of that independence movement are for the future to decide as it’s entirely hypothetical… but my point is that the world will be different… and if the world is different and things have changed, maybe you could just change the damn law and update the age… it seems so obvious you would just raise the age if there was sufficient political support.
And thank you for anyone who followed my rambling short sci fi thread to its blunt and obvious almost non-sequitur ending, I hope it was at least a mildly entertaining read.
- Good. The world can’t afford to be run by gerontocracy…
- Yeah, I’ve started to get a bit cautious about the quality control in these papers too… not because I doubt there’s a problem, but that I suspect it’s all too easy to ignore the quality control necessary to ensure lack of contamination when the researchers go in looking for a positive result… it’s a “cheap win” and I don’t like it…
I’d like to see some reproduction research on the more wild microplastics results akin to the level of diligence put in when Clair Cameron Patterson was developing Uranium Lead dating and discovered that due to lead added to petroleum based fuels the whole fucking planet was tainted with a level of background lead … he had to go a long way, basically building a clean room before such rooms were considered a normal part of precision research… to get a clean environment with no contamination and get accurate results.
It doesn’t have to be quite that bad for a modern researcher, but I’d like to see a lot more of these microplastics papers where they document that they used no or as close to no plastic at any point in sample handling… if a liquid sample has gone from a plastic sample jar and a plastic lid to a plastic pippet to a plastic ampoule with a plastic lid into a machine that agitated it and so on… well of course there’s a damn chance the sample has more plastic in it! I’m not even going to suggest that all the plastic came from the containers that would be stupid… but when I start seeing results like microplastic found in human testicular tissue… I want to know how careful they were with sample contamination because it’s important that we know how bad the problem is getting, is it “1000” or “1002” on whatever scale is being used may not seem like much when the error bars might be +/- 10… but it does matter when this result gets aggregated into meta analysis and other modern “re-processing” that helps us understand the world at the larger scale where studies of aggregate data are the only practical way to approach the problems.
- There’s also bulk triboelectric effects where the mechanical forces, and the subsequent physical movement of large blocks of material can build up static charges due to having different electron affinity, like a rubber balloon and a wool sweater… by rubbing one against the other a static charge builds up… one theory for earthquake lights is ground to sky discharge of triboelectric charge buildup due to different electron affinity between the two sides of a fault plane under stress… a large enough area can make a small enough difference add up, so even if it isn’t earthquake lights, the triboelectric effect could be contributing to what was measured in this case… fault “surfaces” are going to put square kilometres of differing materials against each other… a non zero effect per square meter, can add up quite a bit when applied to several square kilometres.
- It is wild you do not have this… and it goes to show how cable tv destroyed normal free to air tv so thoroughly that there are houses getting built without even an antenna hidden in the roof space when constructed.
In Australia it’s basically impossible to get a house without it having a free to air tv antenna and coax cable through the house to several locations from that antenna… you would basically have to specifically build your own house without it… and doing so even in this day and age would probably hurt your property values at least a little bit even in a rich suburb, and hurt them a LOT anywhere else.
- Treatment for PTSD can sometimes involve years of therapy, conservatively assuming monthly sessions (it’s not unusual for them to be every two weeks for serious cases) that’s well going to quickly rival the cost of any private/underground services…
The biggest problem here is that the treatment will remain fringe for longer, get less research money, and people suffering with PTSD will continue to suffer…
- You have the problem backwards. We shouldn’t care what the vacancy rate is for residential properties at least, we should be focused on minimising the percentage of the population who are “seeking but unable to find housing” and yes that is deliberately constructed to avoid dragging the whole cycles and causes of homelessness into the mix. If you are actively trying to get some kind of dwelling, buying or renting, and have not yet managed to do so, then you count for the statistics.
Speculation driven rises in residential real estate prices buy/rent are a plague on society and we need to stop framing the problem so that we lose sight of the purpose of housing, it’s to house people…
- Seriously… flakes are still “experimental”… come on… this is starting to look bad at this point… I have been refusing to get onboard while the entire community’s preferred methods are “experimental”… I don’t want to base my entire OS install on experimental features…
The flakes situation felt like the sort of thing that the next major release would have finally solved… it’s absolutely baffling to me that this is still not offical and enabled by default… I haven’t seen any new decent documentation in over year that doesn’t use flakes.
- Docker compose files have been treated like legacy technical debt in a lot of places and the availability of tools to easily convert them, has lead to the current situation where basically I only see new docker compose files used by themselves in hobby and amateur projects with any reasonably organised project making the jump to at least publishing both the compose AND the helm chart or kompose template driven kubernetes configuration files… the hobbyist use i have not qualms with, use what you want to use for your own stuff, but a large portion of the use of docker compose in this particular NAS as host ecosystem is using shared application deployment configurations to make it easy to start up things like Plex or qtorrent or NextCloud. These are organised efforts where people post files to indexes to make them easier for others to find, and the greater rigour of a kubernetes config is actually a good thing in this environment… but it’s more work and a lot of the time I have seen the kind of complaints the users make and the bar to entry is very low for these things… I remember when the only way used to be templated FreeBSD jails… and now they are telling the company a kubernetes config is too hard… I don’t care what they want to use in their own home lab, I care about how hard it is to fix when their poorly written docker compose file breaks… how hard it is to maintain my system security now that we’ve thrown out the more comprehensively documented security architecture of kubernetes for the docker compose world with a much less rigorous security story…
This is a step back and the users are in this case wrong to have wanted it. I’m expressing the same sentiment you might have if you found someone was lighting their house with whale oil powered lanterns for the last year… it’s not that it doesn’t light the house… it’s just a very damn strange way to light a house in the 21st century.
- Just FYI… This is not a politically “liberal” point of view, “free market” economic liberalism is usually associated with more politically conservative policies (as the “free market” heavily favours the status quo social stratification based on who currently have money being the ones most likely to continue making more money when there aren’t laws that force them to do things that don’t just make the most money for them)
The segments of American politics that identify as “liberal” and align with the Democratic Party, who hold this view are the kind of politicians a lot of people complain loudly about having been corrupted by donors and lobbyists. It’s also important to remember how decades of social stigma have been welded onto anything that doesn’t sound enough like “good old American free market capitalism” as the first creeping tendrils of “evil communism” … to the point where the average American has little idea there’s any difference between “socialism” and “communism”… and would prefer their political representatives to not say anything that sounds like either of them… this perpetuates the need to make sure the economy is always good because there’s little alternative and voters don’t seem to turn out for candidates that make them feel bad and the whole system devolves into what you can see today.