While I don’t doubt that we will, at some point, have something like data centers in space, it kinda seems like a bad idea right now. Doing some searching, it looks like the cost to send something to orbit, using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is something around $1,500/kg. 1, 2 For a server which weighs 2-3 kg, that’s adding a significant cost on top of the expensive hardware costs already involved. Though, on the plus side, without the environmental impact and lawsuits from local opposition, this cost could balance out.

Then they need to deal with cooling. Keeping data centers cool is already a challenge. One of the main reasons communities have been lining up against data centers is their water usage, which is used for cooling. In space, you can’t just tap into the nearest water supply. Radiative cooling sucks, sure you could just build a bigger radiator, but that’s more mass you need to send to orbit, more complexity and something else you need to worry about micro-meteors slamming into. The International Space Station already uses a large, complex system for cooling and it has nothing like the internal heating of hundreds of GPUs churning out furry porn.

Lastly, maintenance is going to be a bitch. Granted, Microsoft has show that it is possible to run a lights-out data center effectively by dropping it in the ocean. Though, the fact that we don’t see more of that tells me that the economics of it likely don’t pencil out well compared to just paving over more farmland and ignoring the poors whining about things like fresh water.

This really seems like one of those ideas where someone needs to tell Mr. Pichai to put the bong down for a bit.

While that is possible, I’d seriously doubt it happening. Wagner’s run at Moscow seemed like the best opportunity for that to happen, but it just stalled out. I’m still surprised Prighozin, stopped his push short of Moscow. I was not surprised afterwards when an airplane he was on suffered “technical difficulties”. But, between the failure of Wagner to remove Putin and them now being rolled into the Russian military, I think Putin has done a lot to consolidate his control over the armed forces, exactly to prevent that outcome.

Ya, it could happen, I don’t believe it’s likely.

The big ones for me were a frequent, sudden, urgent need to pee and getting up multiple times a night to pee. I also drank a copious amount of water. Like, the whole “eight glasses a day” thing which used to be popular was confusing to me, as I’d drink that much in the first couple hours of the day. I finally went in to the doctor and got a blood test and my A1Cs were well over the “welcome to Diabetes Land” number. With diet, exercise and drugs I’m well controlled now and caught it early enough that I still have good feeling in my feet. Given my family history, and all the shit I ate in my younger days, it’s not really a surprise. I just have to be more careful now, but I have discovered an enjoyment of climbing because of it.

Really, if you have any family history of diabetes, start visiting your doctor on an annual basis and getting a blood test. It’s simple, and catching it earlier is good for preventing problems with neuropathy in your feet.

While I like the sentiment, unless the EU is interested in a WWII style total war and invasion of Russia, Putin is never going to be held to account for the invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian government (Read: Putin and his cronies) are not going to agree to hand Putin over to The Hague. Even if the current war ends on favorable terms for Ukraine, that is never going to look anything like the German or Japanese surrenders. At best, this war ends with Russian military exhaustion and withdrawal. More like the end of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. There will be no push to Moscow, no mass bombing of Russian factories or cities. Just Russian soldiers packing up and going home, leaving death and devastation behind for the survivors of their invasion to deal with.

Any negotiated peace is going to look pretty similar. It will stop the death sooner at the cost of giving Russia something it’s willing to accept. That’s the way negotiations work. If you want to force the other side to accept your terms, without any compromise, that’s what war is for. Since it seems neither the EU nor the US are willing to engage in a direct confrontation with Russia, then the only choice to end this war early is compromise. And Putin facing accountability is almost certainly not going to be on the table.

Wait, I’m conscious enough to have questions? So, now what?

It’s a simple test really. Have you ever considered thinking about having a inclination to plug the drive in? Well it’s probably broke now.

In all seriousness, I used Zip and Jazz drives professionally back in the early '00s. And gods above and below we lost so many hours of work to them just crapping out. We used them for system imaging. We were building out bespoke servers and workstations for physical access control systems. We stored golden images on zip discs and would image completed systems to send to the customers along with their systems. We created those images on other zip discs before taking them to the one system with a cd/dvd burner. We chewed through so many zip discs it was crazy.

I finally setup the dvd burning station on a cart so it could be wheeled over to customer systems. It provided a PXE server to boot from and images to both load the golden image over a network switch and image the competed systems. The savings in time and dead zip discs was huge.

I get playing with those things for nostalgia. But the only thing they could be relied upon to do was die.

First off, why does a beer company have personal data on customers? It seems like the best protection for this data would be, don’t have it in the first place. You sell beer, you don’t need to hoover up personal data on people to make and sell beer.

“That reflects a wider truth that companies are investing more than ever in digital defences, yet adversaries continue to outpace them, exploiting weak links in supply chains or breaking in through trusted partners,” he (Shankar Haridas, head of UK and Ireland at ManageEngine) added.

Ya, they are spending money, but failing at basic cyber hygiene (read: documentation, patching and network segmentation). But hey, I Mr. ManageEngine here will be happy to sell us another product which just papers over the failures to get the basics done. And it will almost certainly have “Agentic AI” to do…something.

The compromise seems to have started with network equipment at one site, impacting the OT environment and potentially expanding into IT systems

I’d bet a lot of money the Asahi security team had been screaming about the OT environment being a big, juicy target for a long time. But, applying security controls in the OT environment is hard and scary and might cause a blip in production. So nope, all those shit-boxes running Windows XP must never be touched. Also, NDR is expensive and hard, so stop asking about it. But yes, those same shit-boxes really do need to be fully internet connected and logged on 24x7 as a local admin, with the same password everywhere, because identity management is hard.

We seriously need to start dragging CTOs, CIOs and CEOs out into the street, tarring and feathering them when this shit happens. Also, the companies making the OT systems need to have their entire management put through a chipper shredder the first time one of them suggests that their systems just shouldn’t be patched. If your shit is so fragile that an OS patch might break something, chipper shredder goes BRRRR…

Sorry, OT systems are a bit of a pain point.

The Felon in Chief can bluster all he likes. When people don’t have the money to spend, they ain’t gonna spend it.

This is also why the Trump administration is considering helicopter money checks. These types of hand-outs can give people a sense of having money. The problem is that it ultimately drives inflation. We saw this with the stimulus checks during the pandemic. Arguably, something was needed then to support people during an actual emergency. But part of the inflation problems we have now can be traced back to those checks.

“Tariff” checks may give a short boost to holiday buying. But the long term damage is not going to be worth it to anyone but Trump. And that assumes the short term benefits last through the 2026 midterms.

The one argument for a multi-magazine setup would be ammo versatility. E.g. One magazine holds FMJ or the like for soft targets while the second holds armor piercing for hard targets or explosive/incendiary for anti-material. It’s not a great argument for it, and it’s probably why we don’t see it all that often. But, the good idea fairy is a regular visitor to the arms manufacturing industry.

Ya, AI as a tool has it’s place. I’m currently working on documentation to meet some security compliance frameworks (I work in cybersecurity). Said documentation is going to be made to look pretty and get a check in the box from the auditors. It will then be stored in a SharePoint library to be promptly lost and ignored until the next time we need to hand it over to the auditors. It’s paperwork for the sake of paperwork. And I’m going to have AI spit out most of it and just pepper in the important details and iron out the AI hallucinations. Even with the work of fixing the AI’s work, it will still take less time than making up all the bullshit on my own. This is what AI is good for. If I actually care about the results, and certainly if I care about accuracy, AI won’t be leaned on all that much.

The technology actually it pretty amazing, when you stop and think about it. But, it also often a solution in search of a problem.

Coming soon:
Assassin’s Creed: Long March

Which, might not be the worst game ever. The politics of it would be interesting though.

Never try to catch a falling knife.

Black Friday specials are never on the products you actually want, they are on products the business either wants to clear out or are specifically sourced for the sale. Once you’re in the store, you’ll see the products which they actually want you to buy and for which the prices are either not marked down or are actually marked up. It’s all just a scam to separate you from your money.

This is great, but the Senate seats up for election in 2026 make the Democrats winning a majority really, really tough. The current Senate is 53 Republicans, 43 Democrats and 2 Independents who caucus with Democrats. This means that the Democrats need to net +4 seats to gain control of the Senate. Sure, it’s possible but the map doesn’t look good.

For example, the Democrats best pickup opportunity is likely Susan Collins’s seat in Maine. Despite Maine leaning Democrat in statewide elections, this is a rodeo Collins knows very, very well. Democrats have been trying to knock her off for several cycles and yet she’s still here. Maybe this will be the year. But, if this is the best opportunity for Democrats, we aren’t off to a good start.

North Carolina is an open seat, which helps some. But, the State has consistently voted Republican in Statewide elections (and went for Trump by ~3 points in 2024). A large enough blue wave could overcome that, but it’s already an uphill battle. And things only get worse from here.

Next up is Ohio, which Trump won by ~11 points. We aren’t talking super-hard MAGA land there, but Democrat friendly, it ain’t. This is the state which gave us Vice President JD Vance as a Senator. The election here is for the remainder of Vance’s term. Hope may spring eternal, but there is a really sketchy looking reality hiding around the next corner with a sock full of pennies.

That takes us on to Iowa. This state was Trump +13 in 2024. Sure, some farmers may be pissed off about the tariffs, but enough to put a Democrat in the Senate? This seems to fall into the “time to put the bong down and reconnect with reality” territory. I mean, it’s always possible. With a really well calibrated Democratic candidate, the GOP picking a really flawed candidate and really poor economic conditions, maybe. But I wouldn’t be betting the farm on Democrats picking this one up.

And then we need to consider defense. Jon Ossof is up for re-election in Georgia. Georgia went for Trump by ~2 points. Not a large margin, but enough that Osoff isn’t a shoe-in. And Michigan (Trump +1) is an open seat election. The previous Senator (Gary Peters) was a Democrat, so there is certainly hope, but again this isn’t a certain thing. If either of those seats are lost, Democrats are then looking at Texas (Trump +14. Also, it’s fucking Texas).

I’m all for a Democratic Congress. But their chances in the Senate look pretty bleak.

There are a number of sites which provide either labs or virtual machines which are intentionally vulnerable. Some provide other resources to help learn.

• https://tryhackme.com/
• https://overthewire.org/wargames/
• https://crackmes.one/
• https://portal.offsec.com/labs/play
• https://www.hackthebox.eu/
• http://flaws.cloud/

I’d also suggest getting a good foundation in programming and building systems.

They are still legal tender, the Mint just isn’t producing them anymore. If things stay that way, eventually they will just become rarer and rarer until no one really sees them anymore (we stopped caring about them decades ago). Why bother with some convoluted, expensive plan to do anything about them? It’s really a problem that will solve itself for the cost of someone a bank occasionally delivering a bag of them to the Mint as they do with any currency which is old and should be taken out of circulation.

also dealing with a chronically higher baseline level of inflammation

Have you been tested for gluten intolerance and/or Celiac Disease? Chronic inflammation is one of the markers. It’s a very simple blood test, though it seems to be something doctors don’t always bother to check for. Talk to your doctor about the test.

For the ones they own or have a contract with, probably. However, there are two problems with that.

1. It will do fuck all for the AI models which are just scraping the internet and which have no contractual agreements with the blog (e.g. all the big ones).
2. It’s a fixing a problem the blog hosting platform created. They likely have a data sharing agreement with some organizations to make the scraping easy for those organizations (e.g. direct content database access). So, they are like the mob, offering you “protection” so long as you pay them not to break your shit.