Musings of a minor megalomaniac
Starship’s maiden full-stack experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” following what looked to me like somebody forgot to flip the seperate-enable switch. All those dark engines didn’t look real encouraging either. Probably knew it wasn’t going to make insertion long before watching the spin dance to abort.
Wanna bet they were on some timeline pressure in a years-long lead-time NASA contract?
LATE UPDATE: They didn’t even have the launch pad ready.
The cartoon’s title is just Qualifications. When Randall’s results become people thinking they know what the computer tells them, I’ll start referring to the outcomes as another A-i-i event. We used to call it subversion back in the day, when the targets were enemies of the state. Today’s electronically-acquired targets can be just about anybody when Big Tech, Pharma, or something with an online and/or broadcast presence and enough coding resources wants your money.
Artificially Induced Intelligence.
I kept this page on an open Firefox tab through launch and deployment. It’s still a great place to start exploring NASA’s online Webb content.
First Stunning Image of Cassiopeia A
I read about the lead-up to this in a Wired™ article last year. Seems like Law Enforcement is making progress, but it’s hard to tell who is winning what Cyber War. Cyber analogies to meatspace are many and varied. The one I remember telling my Dad while home on a visit re-loading his borked laptop was: “Imagine the computer is like your cyber house. There are dozens of burglars waiting right outside for you to leave a window unlocked.”
Enter an email address you own and see how it was looking for you over recent years of malicious cyber activity…
Been a big fan ever since I was old enough to read. Now it’s time for a new generation to take the mantle.
It’s been almost a month since I started that new workstation build before coming back up on some new hardware. But it wasn’t what was pictured in that post. People at the local Amazon™ warehouse must hate me. I had at least two of everything here before sending most of it back while looking for the bad DIMM. Ended up being at least 3 bad DIMMs in 4 seperate packaged pairs before they were all returned after selecting a different model.
Never found them intermittently bad like that before. It helps to have at least a midrange mobo with post lights. There really is a 1st time for everything – especially with all the junk coming out of China these days. This was the 3rd mobo. I kinda liked the looks of the AsRock model before it better, but oh well…
This tech refresh basically involves what we used to call a forklift migration to Rocky Linux, with a new workstation now online and Onion3 coming…
Late Update: Latest replacement DIMM pair lasted 2 days before they quit. At least I can run it half populated. Longest PC build ever.
You might assume taking pictures for a living is a pretty cush job. Probably is relatively so in many cases, but we bring photographers up the hard way in the Air Force. I got to work with the Combat Camera guys in Bosnia, and was ceaselessly impressed by them the whole time. Those guys along with the ones who did the actual jumping out of helicopters on nighttime roundups had it tough.
IMHO, the highest degree of difficulty in finding and arresting PWFWC’s (persons wanted for war crimes). was at the Combat Camera level. They literally flew around at night suspended in harnesses under stealthed Blackhawks recording IR evidence and intel stuff. That’s on my Top 10 list of Badass.
Elon Musk, After Buying Twitter, Is Now Twitter’s Most-Followed User. You were warned. Echo chamber construction complete? He’s gonna kill Twitter™(2).
Artificial Billionaire: “Dori-Hacohen said it was “pretty rich” for Musk to have signed it, citing a reported rise in misinformation on Twitter following his acquisition of the platform, documented by civil society group Common Cause and others.”
Undershot this one a bit. In retrospect, I now remember how long the lead times on this stuff are. They were probably already buying parts for GEO-6 when I made that last prognostication. So good – we have a full GEO constellation to work with, going forward.
“The Space Based Infrared System Geosynchronous Earth Orbit – Satellite-6 (SBIRS GEO-6) was formally transferred from Space Systems Command (SSC) to Space Operations Command (SpOC), March 24, 2023.”
You never know who’s lookin’ on…
First we build a platform spanning the globe enabling unfettered, un-regulated real-time electronic communication between individuals of any persuasion. Then we spend decades stuffing it full of all sorts of data about everyone and everything. Finish up by coding software that analyzes and re-combobulates that data in unpredictable ways. Voila!
Europol sounds alarm about criminal use of ChatGPT, sees grim outlook. Elon’s worried Micro$oft has the lead and lackeys he has left at Twitter™ aren’t training his bots fast enough to replace the workers he’s trying to do away with.
It’s just a bunch of wire and fiber optics and microwaves connecting everybody and everything. Most of it is laying on the bottom of the ocean.
“Washington’s decision to nix any Hong Kong terminus for the four planned subsea cable deals upended the plans of Google, Meta and Amazon. These tech titans have been among the biggest investors in new cables over the last decade as they seek to link up a network of data centers in the United States and Asia that underpin their fast-growing Cloud computing businesses, according to TeleGeography.”
It’s been awhile since hearing it bandied about, and I suspect the rate is finally beginning to slow, but back at the dawn of the digital age, Gordon Moore saw and understood a profound truth that energized the high tech industry for fifty years.
In 1968, Moore and Robert Noyce, one of the eight engineers who left Shockley, again struck out on their own. With $500,000 of their own money and the backing of venture capitalist Arthur Rock, they founded Intel, a name based on joining the words “integrated” and “electronics.”
Wanna bet Dorsey was getting advice from some South African emerald industry spawn? It went something like…” ya man, it’s like money on the Internet.” Then the fuckwit went on to tell him a bunch of Paypal™ stories, except the part about how he almost bankrupted it before departure. Wonder how “risk averse” the mutherfuckers are now?
“March 24 (Reuters) – Shares of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc (SQ.N) fell 3% in afternoon trading on Friday, a day after the payments firm’s Cash App business became the latest target of U.S. short seller Hindenburg Research.”
….how fucking stupid they are? Trying to remember how many times I killed a weed by pulling the top off. I’m pretty sure it’s zero – just like every other failed attempt at banning things throughout history. Problem will only get worse in Utah, once the kids find out.
I’ve been harping on this for going on twenty years. Social media platforms are nothing but disruptive, amoral, cash-generating online scams. Yes -plenty of mundane messaging and entertainment also gets done. But Meta, Twitter and Youtube’s primary and only important objective is monetizing the private information of it’s users.
Still think it’s worth it?
“Reports on social media during the week of March 6 that some venture capital firms, including influential investor Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, were advising companies to pull cash from tech-focused SVB snowballed into a stock rout and sent customers scrambling for the exit. Authorities shut SVB on March 10.”
Here’s just one of many examples of the small-print warning you might see on literally any legitimate business website today. Communication is a 2-way street. You’ve been warned:
“This site is being monitored by one or more third-party software(s), and may capture information about you and your visit. You may opt-out from the data collection on your visit through a universal consumer options page located at https://collectionoptoutservices.com/”
Anybody want to guess what that “collectionoptoutservices” page does? It saves GoDaddy™ from collecting it themselves. Social media’s just one of the quick, easy modern vectors – lettin’ ya drive yourselves crazy, while robbing you behind your back.
“James Webb recently found six examples of galaxies that are too big too early. This discovery can significantly change our understanding of the early Universe. In this interview, I’m talking with Dr Joel Leja, who is a part of the team behind the research.”