jcs

I used to work for the U.S. Department of Defense and can confidently approve of massive defense budget cuts and merging of several military branches. This is only a single and relatively minor anecdote, but it is a small piece of a much larger problem and is one I can share from personal experience:

I used to be the government lead for a highly successful defensive capability that only consisted of myself and 2-3 defense contractors. We outperformed several long-standing projects that had 10x the staff, 100x the budget, and had been around for approx 10 years without going operational ("operational" in this case meaning that intelligence analysts are authorized to provide actionable intelligence derived solely from the tool). My team released 3 operational releases within 1 calendar year from the start of contract.

I don't say this to disparage the staff of the other project(s), but rather to highlight how the government can afford to cut long-standing under-performing projects and become more lean and efficient. The government funding allocation is often in the realm of $300k/yr for a single FTE. Multiply that by a team of 20-30 that works on a project that is shelfware after 8-10 years.

My same project was approached by numerous branches of the US and FVEY military community. Branch A offered tons of money to put it on a ship; branch B offered even more money to put it in the back of reconnaissance aircraft or fighter jet; branch C offered money to make it man-packable for ground troops. US taxpayers already paid for this capability once (my team and myself) and we made it as unclassified (i.e. disseminable) and modular as possible (it was literally designed to run on a general host computer running Linux), yet each branch was willing to fork over tens of millions of dollars for something they could have installed on a $2k computer using some internal software repository. And that's what I suggested they do.

Again, this is just one minor anecdote. How often does this happen where taxpayers are forced (being that they have absolutely no control over how the defense budget is organized) to pay for the same (perhaps MUCH more expensive) tools e.g. 5-10 times because military branch A, B, C, etc, want their own flavor of the same thing? Why does the military often have pissing matches of authority when there is so much overlap between some of them? Take away their stick by taking away some of their funding, and force them to share and cooperate.

Sometimes a trash bin is located near the door, so I'll use the same paper towel I used to dry my hands to open the door, hold the door open with my foot, then throw the paper towel in the bin. But these make hygiene so much easier:

By Arch, do you use SteamOS on your gaming rig? And if not, what would be the determining factor?

Turkey pesto sandwiches and combo pizzas - this must be a pre-pandemic photo.

And the sysadmin said "well done, good and faithful servant."

"Do you feel like a hero yet?" - Spec Ops: The Line

Well, safer and better in the driver's mind until they fly too close to the sun and realize following the accident that there was a puncture or that the rubber delaminated off the belt during the commute. This happened fairly regularly at the track I worked at, though that was more from folks running their slicks too long.

I have a very hard time believing that an internal combustion engine would sustain significant damage prior to stalling. An engine could run, albeit very poorly, with extreme backpressure (say, an exhaust blockage but perhaps some leaks elsewhere in the exhaust system). If the exhaust was perfectly sealed, there would be so much backpressure that the mixture would be starved of air and there would simply not be any explosion in the cylinders. I have limited knowledge of diesel engines but would expect a similar result.

Here's a video where an exhaust pipe is plugged. You can see how quickly the car stalls (at 10:00): https://piped.video/watch?v=jnoW0skAChA

Louis Rossmann provided a video announcement of Grayjay today, describing the product as paid open-source software with a custom/restrictive license.

• Website: https://grayjay.app
• Announcement: https://youtu.be/5DePDzfyWkw
• Source code: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay

We're just normal men.

It's a valid point that it could potentially create some confusion when a user assumes that everything in Signal is secure. Unencrypted SMS threads could contain an open padlock icon and even an ominous red window border, but someone inevitably will not understand the difference.

However, my frustration has been how both convenience and security is reduced by removing SMS from Signal.

Many people will continue to use SMS for a variety of reasons, necessitating the use of an additional app. So now we have people continuing to communicate over this insecure protocol, but with the additional target vector of potential vulnerabilities in the supplemental app.

Imagine a world where we can adopt a scalable, secure, open communication protocol where users can use whatever app they want. Imagine humanity moving past the diaspora of special-snowflake chat apps and on to better things.