Thrashy

Yeah. We can quibble over the moral dimension of public servants getting out vs staying in to try and stop the coming insanity, but any HUMINT asset on assignment outside of friendly first-world nations would be stupid not to take early retirement ASAP. Even if Trump doesn't burn them like he did to so many last time around, there's a drug-addled oligarch in debt to several foreign countries who's leading a squad of college-age numpties from department to department on a mission to extract all their confidential data and put it on unsecured servers for nebulous ends. Somebody's gonna leak or lose or sell their names, guaranteed.

I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven't regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

I don't blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones... but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.

I design labs, and my current employer serves primarily higher ed and government clients. This is gonna blow a massive hole in our bottom line, and fear that something like this was coming is why I'm starting to look for employers with an international footprint and/or more private sector clientele. Even if this freeze is only temporary, it's going to kick off a massive wave of brain drain from universities and federal labs to private industry and foreign institutions, and I don't blame the folks making those choices, but it's also gonna impact how much demand there is for my services.

Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it's quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody's hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu's star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don't have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday's hiccup) Nobara was much closer to "it just works" out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I'm an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh... twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that's what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.

Say it with me now: model collapse! I think this approach is especially insidious in that rather than dumping obvious nonsense into the training corpus that can then be scrubbed, it pushes the downstream LLM invisibly towards spontaneously imploding.

As an emergency medical program maybe it's the equivalent of an Army medic treating every complaint with 800mg ibuprofen and a bottle of water.

Only in the world of scrappy "low-cost" commercial endeavors, AFAIK. The appeal of FRC-style reactors has more to do with lower cost of construction than any inherent physical advantages. Tokamaks are still where most of the nationally- and internationally-funded research is happening.

I was personally rooting for stellarators, but whatever operational benefits they offer over tokamaks seems to be outweighed by the incredible design complexity that they add, and they've stayed small-scale research projects relative to tokamaks.

The "finding a job" part is the sticking point, I'm finding. Many places are clamping down on immigration due to the various enduring refugee crises of the last decade, and even when one has a profession listed by their target country's government as a high-demand occupation, few employers are willing to jump through hoops to hire somebody who doesn't already have a visa and work authorization.

Right now I'm looking at international firms with US presence as a way to perhaps get assigned overseas down the road, but it's not a straightforward process. Unless you've got the liquidity buy a "golden visa" (cheapest option right now is Malta at €125k...) most of the easy visa options only allow for tourism or education, not work and long-term residency.

737s don't have RATs. According to some 737 pilots I've seen commenting, the APU is operable in flight, but doesn't kick in automatically and would have required ~60 seconds to start. The main electrical generators don't automatically restart after tripping, either, so a scenario where electric power is hypothetically available, but a panicked or overloaded flight crew don't take the steps to bring it online, is plausible.

Hydraulics and electric system are independent in commercial aircraft -- hydraulic pumps are directly driven from the engines, as are electrical generators. Redundancy is provided via independent loops/buses from each engine. A bird strike on its own is unlikely to be energetic enough to sever one of those independent systems, let alone all four. Losing both engines could do it, -- but again, they had enough thrust to attempt a go-around, so they weren't a glider immediately after the bird strike. The 737 is an old-school design, too, so most critical components have full manual reversion -- as long as you have airspeed and altitude enough to get to the runway, you can fly and land the plane just with cable controls and manual releases in the event of total electric and hydraulic failure.

I did a bit of reading from other sources and this particular aircraft predates the requirement for battery backup of the FDR and CVR, and the APU does not start up automatically on a power failure, so the failure chain for that part of the incident isn't as long as I initially thought. Still, lots of questions, and I think the simplest explanation so far is the aircrew panicking and making a survivable situation into a bloodbath.

Everything about this incident is just so fucking odd. That a bird strike could take out both engines isn't unheard of (see US Airways Flight 1549) but I've heard reports that there was a failed emergency landing attempt before the one that we saw video of, so they clearly had thrust enough to stay in the air for a go-around, and from the video we saw they carried in a ton more speed than I would expect if there had been catastrophic damage to both engines.

Except that the lack of landing gear suggests loss of hydraulic power from both engines... Except there is an emergency release that drops the gear on a 737 with just gravity, and there's no evidence this was even attempted.

Now it looks like some electrical systems, including power to the data recorders, died right at the start of the incident, which would require not just double engine failure but failure of the APU and backup battery systems. That just seems incredibly unlikely.

Catastrophic electrical failure several minutes before the crash, though, would suggest that it wasn't just a case of a panicked aircrew making a chain of bad decisions, which was my initial read of the situation and maybe the best fit for the rest of the circumstances.

I just can't think of a chain of events that could reasonably lead to all the failures in evidence while still allowing the aircraft to remain airworthy for two landing attempts.

And then you get to the horrifying fact that a relatively new and modern airport had a giant concrete obstacle in what would be considered the Runway Safety Area at a US facility... Like, what the fuck? That seems like it's designed to create this sort of a disaster.