tal

tal , 7 hours ago

I mean, if the Threadiverse has enough volume to be useful, someone -- probably many people -- are going to be logging and training things off it too, probably.

tal , 6 hours ago (edited 6 hours ago)

I mean, China was always gonna develop, and then the much larger population was going to dominate.

The war exacerbates it by isolating Russia, but China was gonna grow in relative strength.

tal , 6 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Burger

A Luther Burger, or doughnut burger (among several naming variations), is a hamburger or cheeseburger with one or more glazed doughnuts in place of the bun. These burgers have a disputed origin, and tend to run between approximately 800 and 1,500 calories (3,300 and 6,300 kJ).

tal , 6 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian

The unusual flavour and odour of the fruit have prompted many people to express diverse and passionate views ranging from deep appreciation to intense disgust. Writing in 1856, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace provided a much-quoted description of the flavour of the durian:

The five cells are silky-white within, and are filled with a mass of firm, cream-coloured pulp, containing about three seeds each. This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acidic nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact, to eat Durians is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience. ... as producing a food of the most exquisite flavour it is unsurpassed.[a]

Wallace described himself as being at first reluctant to try it because of the aroma, "but in Borneo I found a ripe fruit on the ground, and, eating it out of doors, I at once became a confirmed Durian eater". He cited one traveller from 1599:[b] "it is of such an excellent taste that it surpasses in flavour all other fruits of the world, according to those who have tasted it." He cites another writer: "To those not used to it, it seems at first to smell like rotten onions, but immediately after they have tasted it they prefer it to all other food. The natives give it honourable titles, exalt it, and make verses on it."

While Wallace cautions that "the smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable", later descriptions by Westerners are more graphic in detail. Novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory". Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says:

 its odor is best described as pig-excrement, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.

Other comparisons have been made with the civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray and used surgical swabs.

tal , 1 day ago

EGA

Oh, that's a neat idea as a prompt term, using specific display classes.

tal , 1 day ago

Well, on my subscriptions list, I've got:

3D printing: !3dprinting

AI-generated images: !imageai

PC Building: !buildapc

Home Automation: !homeautomation

Searching lemmyverse.net's community search for "maker" turns up a fair number of hits that might be interesting to you:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=maker

tal , 1 day ago

I'd call it a "hoodie".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodie

A hoodie (in some cases spelled hoody[1] and alternatively known as a hooded garment)[2] is a type of sweatshirt[1] with a hood that partially or fully covers the wearer's head or face.

Wikipedia says that the zipper can be a defining characteristic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacket

List of jackets

• Hoodie, a zippered hooded sweatshirt (non zippered can be considered a sweatshirt only)

tal , 1 day ago

Sounds like it!

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/sweatshirt_n?tl=true

The earliest known use of the noun sweatshirt is in the 1920s.

OED's earliest evidence for sweatshirt is from 1929, in Sears, Roebuck Catalogue.

EDIT: I never really thought about the word until now, realized that it's a portmanteau of "sweater" and "shirt".

tal , 1 day ago

I don't know what services you like, but "victim se" seems to turn up hits elsewhere. The "se" makes it unique enough.

https://www.beatport.com/artist/victim-se/1080119/tracks

tal , 1 day ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everlong

Although the song is normally performed with electric guitars, vocalist/guitarist Dave Grohl's solo acoustic variation gained popularity after an impromptu rendition on Howard Stern's radio show in 1998.[19] The band has performed it acoustically since then and an acoustic performance concludes their 2006 live CD and DVD Skin and Bones. Additionally, an acoustic version was released on Foo Fighters' 2009 Greatest Hits album.

The very first hit I get on YouTube is for the Greatest Hits version. Is that it?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AAMgHB-1_Fo

tal , 1 day ago

Skin and Bones

This is the Skin and Bones one, but that's live, and I assume that you'd have probably remembered if it were live.

EDIT: Oh, I see what you mean. There are about a million acoustic covers of Everlong on YouTube done by other people.

tal , 1 day ago

Congrats!

tal , 1 day ago

It was The Destruction of Laputa from Castle in the Sky.

Edit: Or it was Sora from Escaflowne.

"The Destruction Of Laputa"

"Sora"

tal , 2 days ago

• Binning. By detecting defects and working around them by making a design that can function without some portions of the processor and disabling a defective part of a processor, and selling it as a lower grade, one can have a higher rate of salable processors.

• Splitting up the market to permit use of price discrimination. If I know that people who want error-correcting memory are less price sensitive than those that are, I have a separate line of processors and motherboards that costs much more and avoid offering error correcting memory on my cheaper line. This converts consumer surplus into producer surplus.

tal , 3 days ago

Black, sliced olives are something that I really like on pizza and some other savory foods.

I'm less-enthusiastic about green olives. I used to really dislike them as a kid. I'm okay with them now -- I think that as you grow up, your sense of taste becomes weaker and some things that were just overwhelming become more-palatable -- but it's still not a favorite food.

tal , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, I don't think that it's a fantastic recipe for a character. The powers restrict the plots.

I think that less-potent powers tend to make for better story.

A lot of fictional series in various formats -- not just comic books -- make characters or events more-important or more-powerful over the course of the series, to top each previous episode, and I think that the plots tend to become increasingly constrained late in a lot of series.

tal , 2 days ago

The live-action TV series was kind of like some of the early comic books I've seen -- the characters tooling around openly during the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjIEBCVFaGM

I think I prefer the darker approach, where stuff happens at night.

tal , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

You never see WonderMan.

googles

Apparently not a "spin-off", though it looks like there was some friction over the relationship to Wonder Woman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Man

Marvel Comics' then-publisher Stan Lee said in 1978, "You know, years ago we brought out Wonder Man, and [DC Comics] sued us because they had Wonder Woman, and... I said okay, I'll discontinue Wonder Man. And all of a sudden they've got Power Girl [after Marvel had introduced Power Man]. Oh, boy. How unfair."[7]

tal , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I'm kind of annoyed by most superheroes as characters because of the costume thing.

The spandex thing that's a pretty-common convention was because the Comic Code Authority disallowed nudity. Solution? Skintight outfits.

Now, I've got no problem with nudity, or salaciousness, or outright adult comics for that matter.

But we've got all that historical baggage of just about everyone running around in skintight outfits. So a lot of the genre winds up with having to come up with elaborate explanations as to why they're wearing the things.

The CCA is long dead. You can have nudity or salaciousness in comic books if you want. But the convention is still with us because of designs that date to that era, and it's just senseless. I feel like it kinda restricts the genre and doesn't help the immersion.

There are comic characters who don't do the spandex thing. John Constantine or Dick Tracy wear trenchcoats. Dream in Sandman doesn't have fixed garb, but doesn't do spandex.

The Parahumans series -- Worm and Ward web serials, not comic books but certainly superheroes -- are what I'd call some examples of modern superheroes that don't have a design dating from an era where there were CCA constraints. Granted, they aren't graphic novels or comic books, so there are different incentives, but even so.

tal , 2 days ago

So she’s a lawyer, so is Daredevil, it’s a job that doesn’t lend itself well to perilous adventures.

Perry Mason's kind of a Sherlock Holmes-type character. Not a superhero, but a lawyer character who does get into dangerous situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason

Perry Mason is a fictional character, an American criminal defense lawyer who is the main character in works of detective fiction written by Erle Stanley Gardner. Perry Mason features in 82 novels and 4 short stories, all of which involve a client being charged with murder, usually involving a preliminary hearing or jury trial. Typically, Mason establishes his client's innocence by finding the real murderer. The character was inspired by famed Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Earl Rogers.

tal , 3 days ago

Unless you live in a swing state, who you vote for for President probably won't have much chance of affecting the outcome anyway.

https://www.270towin.com/maps/consensus-2024-presidential-election-forecast

That's Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

tal , 4 days ago

Vauxhall owner

For those of us not familiar with Vauxhall:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellantis

Stellantis N.V. is a multinational automotive manufacturing corporation formed from the merger in 2021 of the Italian–American conglomerate Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and the French PSA Group.[12][13][14]

Stellantis designs, manufactures, and sells automobiles bearing its 14 brands: Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall.

tal , 4 days ago

In a potential future conflict, high-value GPS satellites risk being hit or interfered with. If this happens, the loss of GPS could have severe consequences for communication, navigation, and banking systems in the United States.

Banking?

tal , 4 days ago

If you mean pickup trucks, that's also a tariff-protected market. Frankly, the Japanese and European manufacturers probably should have taken over there in a competitive market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken. The period from 1961 to 1964 of tensions and negotiations surrounding the issue was known as the "Chicken War", taking place at the height of Cold War politics.

tal , 4 days ago

I can believe that it won't happen in 2024.

I am pretty confident that in the long run, pretty much everyone is gonna wind up there, though. Like, part of the time spent searching is identifying information on the page and combining from multiple sources. Having the computer do that is gonna be faster than a human.

There are gonna be problems, like attributability of the original source, poisoning AIs via getting malicious information into their training data, citing the material yourself, and so forth. But I don't think that those are gonna be insurmountable.

It's actually kind of interesting how much using something like an LLM looks like Project Babel in the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. The AI there was very explicit that it didn't have reasoning capability, could just take natural-language queries, find information, combine it, and produce a human-format answer. But it couldn't make judgement calls or do independent reasoning, and regularly rejected queries that required that.

Though that was intended as an academic tool, not something for the masses, and it was excellent at citing sources, which the existing LLM-based systems are awful at.

tal , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for "sounding convincing", without care for correctness or truthfulness.

I think that I'd put it in a slightly less-loaded way, and say that an LLM just produces content that has similar properties to its training content.

The problem is real. Frankly, while I think that there are a lot of things that existing LLM systems are surprisingly good at, I am not at all sure that replacing search engines will be it (though I am confident that in the long run, some form of AI system will be).

What you can't do with systems like the ones today is to take one data source and another data source that have conflicting information and then have the LLM-using AI create a "deep understanding" of each and then evaluate which is more-likely truthful in the context of other things that have been accepted as true. Humans do something like that (and the human approach isn't infallible either, though I'd call it a lot more capable).

But that doesn't mean that you can't use heuristics for estimating the accuracy of data and that might be enough to solve a lot of problems. Like, I might decide that 4Chan should maybe have less-weight as a solution, or text that ranks highly on a "sarcastic" sentiment analysis program should have less weight. And I can train the AI to learn such weightings based on human scoring of the text that it generates.

Also, I'm pretty sure that an LLM-based system could attach a "confidence rating" to text it outputs, and that might also solve a lot of issues.

tal , 5 days ago

I'm pretty tired of the high proportion of politics in news too. And election years are worse.

However, it's also not very common that you have a candidate and ex-leader being in court.

And, well, end of the day, what we see on here is what we submit. This is a link-aggregation service. If you don't want political news, submit other stuff. If you really want, it'd be possible to create a community that does only non-political news, or other specific subsets. I remember that Reddit had some subreddit devoted to positive news, to address the disproportionate coverage of negative events.

EDIT: This community is actually an example specifically of such a subset already, as it excludes US-only news: "Not United States Internal News". I imagine that someone in Slovakia or wherever doesn't want to be inundated in a deluge of stuff that only people in the US care about.

tal , 5 days ago

putting pressure on water companies to stop dumping sewage in them.

I mean, it's a result of using older combined sewers. The sewer and drains go to the same place, so when there's enough rain, the system gets overwhelmed and dumps some amount without treating it.

I'm sure that if people are willing to pay what it'd cost to upgrade the sewer system, that upgrading it isn't a problem, but it's not free, and one has to weigh the cost against that benefit.

I've got one relative living in a city in the US that's in the process of doing that shift away from a combined sewer system, and the total cost of the rebuild is around $5,000 per resident (not household, but resident). That's a fair bit of money to ask the population to pay.

In their case, it wasn't driven purely by a desire to convert from a combined sewer system, but because the existing system needed to be fixed, and if you're going to have to do major repairs anyway, then it's time to bite the bullet and pay for dealing with the combined sewer. I'm thinking that it may be that British cities might do something like that -- kick the can down the road until the system really has to be replaced anyway, and then pay what it costs to move away from the combined sewer.

tal , 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blooming_onion

tal , 7 days ago

• Probably eliminates a lot of the problems with making a tank amphibious.

tal , 7 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

There (shouldn't) be any blast from the gun firing released inside the tank itself. So, you've got vibration that'll pass through the water. It might increase that, but that's not direct exposure to the blast.

There's still air around the muzzle. Maybe water makes up some of the distance, but there is still a buffer of compressable air in there.

I'm not sure that it wouldn't cause problems, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't, either. I don't think that it'd just be the "depth charge near people in the water" issue.

EDIT: Though some artillery has that recoil-compensating mechanism where the breach moves back when the gun fires. I dunno whether that's true of the main gun on an MBT, but if so, that might cause issues.

googles

Yeah, here's an Abrams doing it. That might suck.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sC2ePKRvo9k

tal , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

The first shaver I got was an electric, rotary one. Was okay, pulled a bit.

Later in life, I swtched to electric ones with a foil. Better about pulling, more-durable. I believe those are older. No idea why they moved away from those to rotaries.

Later in life, I switched to those cartridge razors, decided I preferred those. Smoother shave. No idea why they moved away from those.

Later in life, I just switched to a standard safety razor, uses standard old double-sided safety razor blades. No reason to pay for the cartridges, pulls less, seems that the blades last longer.

Every time I've moved to an older system, I've been happier with it than with the later system.

I don't plan to ever move to a straight razor, but I gotta say that it's one of the very few areas that I feel like newer has pretty consistently been worse. I kind of wish that I'd just started out with a double-sided safety razor from the get-go.

EDIT: I will add that I don't really care that much about blades or specific razor or soap or aftershave. I've tried a number, been happy with everything I've used. However, I was not happy with a plastic-bristle shaving brush I got -- the soap just slides off it easily, makes a mess. A boar brush I got doesn't do that. Might be that they've figured out how to make plastic-bristle shaving brushes with a more-textured bristle surface or something, but I'd default to getting one made out of some type of actual hair.

tal , 7 days ago

I'm pretty sure that the commenter isn't American, as he's using spaces as a numeric group separator.

tal , 8 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

More to the point, if Russia is going to keep doing this, then I think that we're going to need some more jam resistance. Absent outright destroying the transmitters or trying to apply pressure to Russia to stop it themselves, we can't really stop the jamming as things stand.

The US military has some additional jam resistance that they can use with GPS -- I believe, from past reading, that part of it involves having directional broadcasts, which I assume means that there are a limited number of areas that can benefit from it, and I think that it requires military, M-code-capable receivers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Military_(M-code)

I don't know if it might be possible to provide at least limited access to this without compromising US military security.

It might also be possible to reactivate the old Loran-C stations. It sounds like Europe closed theirs down about eight years ago; I don't know if the physical hardware is still present in the area. I don't think that those provide enough accuracy for missile targeting, so Russia may not jam those.

The introduction of civilian satellite navigation in the 1990s led to a rapid drop-off in Loran-C use. Discussions about the future of Loran-C began in the 1990s; several turn-off dates were announced and then cancelled. In 2010, the US and Canadian systems were shut down, along with Loran-C/CHAYKA stations that were shared with Russia.[2][3] Several other chains remained active; some were upgraded for continued use. At the end of 2015, navigation chains in most of Europe were turned off.[4] In December 2015 in the United States, there was also renewed discussion of funding an eLoran system,[5] and NIST offered to fund development of a microchip-sized eLoran receiver for distribution of timing signals.[6]

EDIT: Sounds like people are already talking about it.

https://www.eetimes.eu/are-we-over-dependent-on-gnss/

eLORAN possible PNT alternative to GNSS

The threat of malicious actors disrupting satellite-based PNT services has risen significantly in recent years, driving regional initiatives to seek viable alternatives. One development is the renewed interest in LORAN, a long-range hyperbolic navigation system first developed in the 1940s. LORAN and its contemporaries—Consol, Decca and Omega—utilized time-of-arrival and phase-difference measurement techniques involving a chain of two or more transmitting stations to establish a position fix. Maritime and aeronautical charts had specially printed hyperbolic curves that allowed navigators to plot receiver-derived coordinates. These navigation systems typically used low frequencies of 90–120 kHz and provided relatively accurate positioning information, particularly for shipping in coastal waters. LORAN-A, the first implementation, used 1.85 MHz to 1.95 MHz, but subsequent versions LORAN-B and LORAN-C moved to the 100-kHz spectrum.

By the late 1980s, with the widespread availability of commercial GPS receivers, LORAN and Decca systems fell out of popularity. In 2010, the U.S. government considered LORAN-C obsolete and instigated a program of service closures and station dismantling. Most European LORAN-C coverage lasted until 2015, after which services stopped. All but one LORAN station, Anthorn (U.K.), remains.

During the later stages of LORAN use, an enhanced version of LORAN (eLORAN) was developed to meet the demand for accurate timing applications. eLORAN offers improved positional accuracy, stated to be on par with unenhanced GNSS, and with the provision of time-synchronization capabilities supported a wider range of use cases. Unfortunately, eLORAN never saw commercial deployment, but against the backdrop of global uncertainties and GNSS vulnerabilities, it offers a viable alternative to satellite-based PNT.

Unlike satellite GNSS signals, the typical output power of an eLORAN transmitter is 200-kW ERP, and because they are located on land rather than in space and use low frequencies, the received signal strength is significantly stronger. Attempting to jam an eLORAN transmitter would require considerable power capability and physically large antennas, which, even if possible, would highlight the jamming station’s location.

EDIT2: While I'd guess that Lithuania and similar are mostly-concerned about maintaining safe navigation, I'd imagine that GPS jamming sucks from a smartphone standpoint too. Google and Apple both run location services; as long as they know the location of WiFi or Bluetooth stations in the area, and a smartphone can receive their broadcasts, they should be able to get a fix. One possibility might be the government rolling out WiFi stations -- could even provide municipal WiFi if they want from it, but that's not necessary -- in urban areas where jamming is really bad and then just telling Apple and Google the precise location of the transmitters and their IDs (since I don't know if the "auto-learning" of a position can work without a GPS signal). Then if you're Lithuanian or whatever, the phone can get a position fix off the government WiFi points.

tal , 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

That's interesting, but from reading it, I think that they're trying to solve a different problem. The issue that the Baltics and Finland are hitting is GPS jamming creating problems with positional data, which is used for navigation.

But it sounds like these guys are looking at trying to solve the problem of providing synchronized clocks countrywide (which is related in that having synchronized clocks is required for some positioning systems, but not quite the same thing; you can have synchronized clocks without knowing your position). They're just using GPS as a time source.

Interestingly, they also mention possibly using this "new Loran" thing too (though to solve their time problem, not to determine location).

NITRO is extensible to additional and future time sources and technologies (e.g., over-
the-air radio & TV broadcasts, Signals of Opportunity, planned ELORAN solution)

EDIT: For their timekeeping problem, I'm also kind of surprised that there's no reference to the atomic clock radio transmissions that we run for the contiguous US. But maybe that's vulnerable to spoofing or something.

googles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB

WWVB is a time signal radio station near Fort Collins, Colorado and is operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).[1] Most radio-controlled clocks in North America[2] use WWVB's transmissions to set the correct time.

The normally 70 kW ERP signal transmitted from WWVB uses a 60 kHz carrier wave derived from a set of atomic clocks located at the transmitter site, yielding a frequency uncertainty of less than 1 part in 1012. A time code based on the IRIG "H" format and derived from the same set of atomic clocks is modulated onto the carrier wave using pulse-width modulation and amplitude-shift keying at one bit per second. A single complete frame of time code begins at the start of each minute, lasts one minute, and conveys the year, day of year, hour, minute, and other information as of the beginning of the minute.

tal , 8 days ago

considers

Were they going to stock it in all stores to begin with?

Like, I assume that they don't just use a fixed strategy to stock stores across the country. Even aside from regional fashion preferences, you've got varying climate as an input. Part of what they do as a retailer is gonna be recording what people buy and making optimal use of advertising and stocking space to sell to people, and in a computer era, I'd think that they'd be doing that at a more-fine-grained level than nationwide.

googles

It looks like Target pulled Confederate flag gear from their stores in the past too. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that they probably weren't selling them in, say, their San Francisco locations, even prior to that. Similarly, I'm also guessing that they probably aren't selling "pridewear" in rural Mississippi or whatnot. That isn't even to deal with people getting grouchy about it being there...just that those items aren't gonna sell well.

tal , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

To put the shoe on the other foot, the US had trouble effectively getting fighters up for 9/11. On the surface of it, dealing with a civilian airliner seems like it should be trivial compared to a warplane. But North American air defense had been designed around an assumption that there would always be advance warning of incoming aircraft out over the Atlantic or Pacific or Arctic, not a sudden discovery that an aircraft was already inside US airspace and heading for the Capitol, and alert levels had been lowered after the Cold War.

As a result, at the time, the "ready aircraft" were not kept armed. Loading weapons aboard required time that wasn't available, and the fighter pilots involved scrambled unarmed, with the intention of suicide-ramming Flight 93.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/911-takedown-never-happened-180955222/

Orders had come from Vice President Dick Cheney for her squadron to get airborne and stop Flight 93 from reaching Washington D.C. Penney and her squadron leader, Mark (“Sass”) Sasseville, were to launch first. With no live missiles on board, they had nothing but their aircraft to use as a weapon. It would take upwards of an hour to assemble and load the missiles on to a jet. Another pair of F-16s would stay until missiles could be loaded, but Penney and Sasseville were to take off immediately.

“I’m zipping up my G-suit when Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll take the cockpit.’ [Meaning that he would ram into Flight 93’s front end.] I would take the tail,” she said. “I’ve had people ask me, ‘Who told you would have to ram the airplane? Who ordered you?’ But no one did. What was said was all that was said.”

In the event, the passengers voted to storm the cockpit, were breaking down the door, and the hijackers power-dived the plane into the ground, thus eliminating the necessity.

tal , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

I mean, there just wasn't any realistic threat that we expected from Russia or China or such. We've got sensor networks that should be able to pick up any aircraft even being prepared, much less flying in from a long ways out, even if they did take off.

There's some accident-risk price to pay for readiness -- like, you can have accidents with weapons, and any time that weapons are floating around outside arsenals, there's at least some potential for them to go astray. And the more weapons systems you have in a "ready to engage" status, the more-twitchy it makes everyone else. Suppose we kept a couple thousand fighters armed and on the runway. That's gonna make some other countries twitchy that they have little time to react.

The "DEFCON level" is basically a slider that trades shorter response time for increased risk of things going wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON

Readiness condition	Exercise term	Description	Readiness
DEFCON 1	COCKED PISTOL	Nuclear war is imminent or has already begun	Maximum readiness.
DEFCON 2	FAST PACE	Next step to nuclear war	Armed forces ready to deploy and engage in less than six hours
DEFCON 3	ROUND HOUSE	Increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness	Air Force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes
DEFCON 4	DOUBLE TAKE	Increased intelligence watch and strengthened security measures	Above normal readiness
DEFCON 5	FADE OUT	Lowest state of readiness	Normal readiness

If we can, we keep it at low levels. Minimizes risk of accidents, avoids putting pressure on other parties.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had it at an elevated level. That means that we can respond rapidly, and we're more-prepared to get hit with a major nuclear strike and still hit back as hard as possible. But it also...creates room for things to go rather badly, accidentally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

At 10:00 pm EDT the next day, the US raised the readiness level of Strategic Air Command (SAC) forces to DEFCON 2. For the only confirmed time in US history, B-52 bombers went on continuous airborne alert, and B-47 medium bombers were dispersed to various military and civilian airfields and made ready to take off, fully equipped, on 15 minutes' notice.[114] One-eighth of SAC's 1,436 bombers were on airborne alert, and some 145 intercontinental ballistic missiles stood on ready alert, some of which targeted Cuba.[115] Air Defense Command (ADC) redeployed 161 nuclear-armed interceptors to 16 dispersal fields within nine hours, with one third maintaining 15-minute alert status.[92] Twenty-three nuclear-armed B-52s were sent to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union so it would believe that the US was serious.

As part of that, military aircraft were loaded with nuclear weapons, including a fleet of interceptors, and dispersed to civilian airports and airstrips to minimize the number that could be destroyed on the ground in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

Some of those airfields were -- not surprisingly -- not as secured against ground intrusions as military bases. At one point, a security guard saw a shadowy figure moving around the outskirts of one such civilian airfield, fired a burst at it from his submachine gun, but it made it over the fence and away. He hit his sabotage alarm. At that alert level, the presumption is that any detected sabotage attempt would be likely part of a preemptive strike, and doctrine dictated that the whole interceptor force get airborne and start heading towards the Soviet Union. They were rolling down the runways across the US when the sabotage alarm was cancelled -- upon further investigation of the traces left, it turned out that the figure was probably just a bear. But...a shit-ton of warplanes armed with (air-to-air, not strategic) nuclear weapons leaving the ground and heading towards the Soviet Union creates further potential for inadvertent escalation.

We had one incident, some years back, where the ground crew at an arsenal dicked up, loaded a bomber with live nukes rather than inert missiles, and the crew inadvertently flew to another airbase before the crew there checked, noticed that they had live nuclear weapons on their field, and started pushing red buttons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear_incident_terminology#Bent_Spear

An example of a Bent Spear incident occurred on the August 2007 flight of a B-52 bomber from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB which mistakenly carried six cruise missiles with live nuclear warheads.[4]

Now, okay, those are extreme examples of risks -- a few F-16s armed with conventional weapons don't pose as much of a concern. But it does illustrate, I think, that there's a tradeoff involved. At the time, the risk of accidents was considered higher than the benefit from having a more-rapid response.

In any event, after 9/11, doctrine was revised, and the ready fighters are now kept armed. I'm not saying that the move was the right one. I'm just saying that there are real tradeoffs to be maintaining a high alert level. The USAF hadn't been told to expect to deal with a civilian aircraft in US airspace suddenly going hostile, so they hadn't structured their response system accordingly. The RuAF may or may not have made decisions about how to deal with civilian aircraft.

The Mathias Rust situation that someone else mentioned, as a I recall, dealt with Soviet doctrine where responses had been relaxed to help avoid accidental shootdowns, and that was part of how he made it to Red Square.

googles

Yeah: "The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust

Rust disappeared from the Finnish air traffic radar near Espoo.[5] Control personnel presumed an emergency and a rescue effort was organized, including a Finnish Border Guard patrol boat. They found an oil patch near Sipoo where Rust had disappeared from radar observation, and conducted an underwater search but did not find anything.

Rust crossed the Baltic coastline over Estonia and turned towards Moscow. At 14:29 he appeared on Soviet Air Defence Forces (PVO) radar and, after failure to reply to an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) signal, was assigned combat number 8255. Three Surface-to-air missile battalions of 54th Air Defence Corps tracked him for some time, but failed to obtain permission to launch missiles at him.[9] All air defences were readied and two interceptors were sent to investigate. At 14:48, near Gdov, MiG-23 pilot Senior Lieutenant A. Puchnin observed a white sport airplane similar to a Yakovlev Yak-12 and asked for permission to engage, but was denied.[5][10]

The fighters lost contact with Rust soon after this. While they were being directed back to him, he disappeared from radar near Staraya Russa. West German magazine Bunte speculated that he might have landed there for some time, noting that he changed his clothes during his flight and that he took too much time to fly to Moscow considering his airplane's speed and the weather conditions.

Air defence re-established contact with Rust's plane several times but confusion resulted from all of these events. The PVO system had shortly before been divided into several districts, which simplified management but created additional work for tracking officers at the districts' borders. The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust.[5]

Near Torzhok there was a similar situation, as increased air traffic was created by a search and rescue operation. Rust, flying a slow propeller-driven aircraft, was confused with one of the helicopters participating with the operation. He was detected several more times and given false friendly recognition twice. Rust was considered as a domestic training airplane defying regulations, and was assigned the least priority by air defense.[5]

Around 19:00, Rust appeared above Moscow. He had initially intended to land in the Kremlin, but he reasoned that landing inside, hidden by the Kremlin walls, would have allowed the KGB to arrest him and deny the incident. Therefore, he changed his landing place to Red Square.[5] Dense pedestrian traffic did not allow him to land there either, so after circling about the square one more time, he was able to land on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge by St. Basil's Cathedral. A later inquiry found that trolleybus wires normally strung over the bridge—which would have prevented his landing there—had been removed for maintenance that morning, and were replaced the next day.[5] After taxiing past the cathedral, he stopped about 100 metres (330 ft) from the square, where he was greeted by curious passersby and asked for autographs.[11] When asked where he was from, he replied "Germany" making the bystanders think he was from East Germany; but when he said West Germany, they were surprised.[12] A British doctor videotaped Rust circling over Red Square and landing on the bridge.[12] Rust was arrested two hours later.[13]

Is it embarrassing? Well, I guess so. Rust made it to pretty sensitive airspace, shouldn't have. But, big picture...odds are also pretty good that if NATO's going to have a war with the Warsaw Pact, it's probably not going to involve sending a little prop plane to Red Square. Not saying that there's no risk there for a decapitation strike or something, but the Soviet airforce had to make a tradeoff in terms of how many of their own aircraft they shoot down accidentally versus whether they make sure to deal with some little prop plane wandering around.

tal , 8 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

There may be two factors there.

First, I think that the text is talking about those converted ultralight planes, not all long-range strikes. You had smaller drones; these were probably Ukrainian special forces operating behind enemy lines.

Second, I think I saw a similar quote, and IIRC, in the text I read, it wasn't "20% of capacity", but "strikes against refineries that comprise 20% of capacity". The strikes didn't necessarily shut a given refinery down fully.

tal , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Skimming some material online, it looks like the best mechanism to get day-level dating for very old historical times are going to be celestial events, like eclipses, because we can run motions of those bodies backwards to compute precisely when the event occurred.

I searched for "first recorded eclipse":

https://www.livescience.com/59686-first-records-solar-eclipses.html

The first recorded notation referencing an eclipse dates to about 5,000 years ago, according to NASA. Spiral petroglyphs carved on three ancient stone monuments in Ireland at Loughcrew in County Meath, depict alignments of the sun, moon and horizon, and likely represent a solar eclipse that occurred Nov. 30, 3340 B.C., NASA reported.

That isn't a first (well, other than in being the first known recorded eclipse to us), but my bet is that it'll be some event on the same day or within a specified number of days of an eclipse or similar.

So that probably places an outer bound on when such an event would have been known to have occurred, unless there's some other form of celestial event recorded way, way back when.

EDIT: Though it sounds like there is some controversy as to whether that is in fact what is being depicted.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/oldest-eclipse-art-loughcrew-ireland

EDIT2: and also according to the article, our accuracy in running those back that far starts to fall off:

Perhaps the biggest hole in Griffin’s theory is the date of the ancient eclipse that coincided, more or less, with the tomb’s construction. Earth’s rate of rotation fluctuates just enough over time to make calculating the path of totality for prehistoric eclipses imprecise. In fact, even programs designed to make those calculations can only do so reliably about as far back as the eighth century B.C. Steele says.

“We can’t just calculate back to 3000 B.C. and say that such-and-such an eclipse was visible in a certain place,” he adds. “The 3340 B.C. eclipse might not have been visible in Ireland at all.”

tal , 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

It sounds like one complexity is that while eclipses can be run accurately (maybe not where they are visible), the problem is that when the day occurred is not, and you want to know the day. Apparently, there are some unknown factors affecting the rate of Earth's rotation a bit, and the error is enough that it becomes significant across millennia.

https://theconversation.com/archeoastronomy-uses-the-rare-times-and-places-of-previous-total-solar-eclipses-to-help-us-measure-history-222709

Changing predictions

Precisely predicting future eclipses, or plotting the paths of historical eclipses, requires knowing the positions of the sun, moon and Earth. Computers can track the motions of each, but the challenge here is that these motions are not constant. As the moon causes tides in Earth’s oceans, the process also causes the moon to slowly drift away from the Earth and the length of day on Earth to slowly increase.

Essentially, the length of a day on Earth is getting longer by roughly 18 microseconds every year, or one second every 55,000 years. After hundreds or thousands of years, that fraction of a second per day adds up to several hours.

The change in Earth’s day also affects dating historical eclipses — if the difference in the length of day is not corrected for, calculations may be inaccurate by thousands of kilometers. As such, when using eclipses to date historical events a correction must be applied; uncertainties in the correction can make ancient eclipse identifications harder to pin down in the absence of additional information to help narrow down the possibilities.

Measuring changing day-lengths

For those solar eclipses that are well established, they open a window into tracking Earth’s length-of-day across the centuries. By timing eclipses over the last 2,000 years, researchers have mapped out the length of Earth’s day over that same span. The value of 18 microseconds per year is an average, but sometimes the Earth slows down a bit more and sometimes a bit less.

Tides alone can’t explain this pattern — there is something more going on between the moon and the Earth, and the cause is still unknown. This mystery, however, can be explored thanks to solar eclipses.

We can measure a change in length of a day on Earth with instruments now, but we wouldn’t be able to capture that change hundreds or thousands of years back in time without a precise measuring stick and records of eclipses over millennia and across the world. Total solar eclipses allow us to peer into not only our own history, but the history of the Earth itself.

So if you had an event that was recorded happening in conjunction with an eclipse, we could maybe tell you pretty precisely how long ago it was in units of seconds. But we wouldn't know how many days ago it was, because the day is not a fixed unit of time and we don't know sufficiently-accurately how the length of a day has changed over that period.

tal , 9 days ago

Squatter's rights wouldn't be applicable here, time aside.

The point of squatter's rights isn't to try to generate more housing in random nooks, but to force regularization of the situation -- like to encourage property owners to act to eject people now rather than waiting fifty years and then, surprise, enforcing submarine legal rights.

Using squatter's rights requires that possession be adverse and open. Like, you can't secretly hole up in a corner somewhere, as the person in the article did. You have to be very clear, have everyone know that you're living there. The property owner also has to be making no efforts to remove the person. Those restrictions aren't just arbitrary -- they're to limit it to situations where is a long-running divergence between legality and the situation in place and where nobody is attempting to rectify the situation themselves (either via selling rights to live there or ejecting a person or whatever).

tal , 8 days ago

I don’t know about M4, but with the M3 Apple’s compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple’s chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they’re nowhere close to native.

Oh, that's interesting, thanks. I may be a year or two out-of-date. I believe I was looking at M2 hardware.

tal , 7 days ago

considers

I think that mount the mount(1) command is probably calling the mount(2) system call, and it's returning ENOENT, error 2. The mount(2) man page says "ENOENT A pathname was empty or had a nonexistent component.".

Hmm. So, I expect from the cyan color there that that "luks-d8..." thing is a symlink that points at some device file that LUKS creates when that luksOpen command runs.

Maybe ls -l /dev/mapper/luks-d8... and see what it points at and whether that exists as a first step? It's probably gonna be some device file somewhere in /dev.