Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Former child prodigy with a Special Interest he immediately shares with anybody who takes a passing interest in him, prone to over explaining, so uncomfortable with emotionally charged situations he sends an astral projection to fill in for him… I personally don’t think it’s intended to be read that way, but I can see how some might choose to do so.





  • My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

    Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.


  • This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

    1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or

    2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he’s quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

    Prolonging the war doesn’t guarantee he won’t end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he’s running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don’t matter to him.






  • They’re flying these in very low and slow, which is hard for SAM radars to detect and lock on to unless you’re right up next to them – and once they’re past the front lines Russia doesn’t have many (if any) point defense installations.

    In fact I imagine that the economic impacts of these attacks may be a secondary goal, and the main intent is actually to force Russia to pull SAM systems off the front line and redeploy them across the Russian interior to defend facilities they thought were safely out of Ukraine’s reach. The fewer defenses on the front line, the more capable Ukraine’s air force is to support efforts on the ground.



  • Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:

    1. vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
    2. emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system

    Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.


  • There are so many things that were horrifying about the US’s prosecution of the Global War on Terror, but at least when confronted with the same problem the US was like, “what if we invented a knife missile that can hit a guy in the driver’s seat of a car without hurting anybody standing next to the car?” whereas the IDF took the position that a 100:1 ratio of innocent bystander to presumed militant is totally acceptable (in an environment where fully half of those innocent bystanders are children to boot). Just absolutely ghoulish levels of inhumanity.


  • Given what they’ve done elsewhere I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100% remote-piloted via satellite internet (most of their sea drones are controlled via Starlink, for instance) but in the case of fixed infrastructure, a smart fusion of GPS, IMU, and potentially video image matching for terminal guidance (these aren’t big bombs in the grand scheme of things and it’s important to hit the right part of a sprawling refinery or factory complex in order to knock it out for an appreciable amount of time) could overcome GPS jamming, and be well within the technical capabilities of the Ukrainian arms industry. TERCOM as implemented in the Tomahawk runs on early-80’s computing power, and it’s only gotten easier. Machine vision frameworks are widely available and well-understood software these days, and can run on fairly modest hobby hardware to boot.


  • I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.




  • I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I’m coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I’ve switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it’s been relatively smooth sailing.