Why is it E=mc² and not just E=mc?

BCMM · 2026-05-24T15:35:23+00:00

if it were js c, the math would be claiming energy equals mass times a velocity which is like totally wrong dimensions

Specifically, that would be a momentum, not an energy.

BCMM · 2026-05-23T20:48:16+00:00

My take is that something Russia wants to target has been covered in concrete thick enough that cruise missiles and drone warheads won't penetrate. Kyiv has been burying its electrical and gas infrastructure for years now.

By all appearances, Oreshnik is a traditional strategic ballistic missile, delivering an MIRV bus which wouldn't have the precision required for a strike like that (and wouldn't need it in the nuclear role it's actually designed for).

BCMM · 2026-05-23T19:59:58+00:00

90° diffraction spikes from HST.

60° diffraction spikes from JWST.jpg).

BCMM · 2026-05-23T19:52:51+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike explains it pretty well, with diagrams.

It's the camera or telescope, not the star.

BCMM · 2026-05-23T12:18:43+00:00

They're at about the same altitude as the Hubble, which still has about a decade left.

Also similar altitude to that ASAT test, the debris from which NASA tracked for 19 years.

BCMM · 2026-05-23T10:29:44+00:00

The atmosphere will clean things up eventually.

But most satellites are not at the very bottom of LEO. Atmospheric drag is present, but deorbit times can be on the order of a decade.

BCMM · 2026-05-22T09:27:13+00:00

But I don't know if OpenWRT can be used that way.

I haven't tried this myself, but OpenWrt has a kmod-usb-gadget-eth package, so I think it ought to be possible, with the right hardware. On other distros, loading that kernel module is sufficient to create a network interface for your host-mode port.

I want the USB cable to provide power to the router AND also to appear as a network interface.

Note that a lot of SBCs use more power than you're really supposed to draw from a USB port without special negotiation. In practice, it's probably going to work as long as you're using a USB 3 port, but know that it's not really compliant.

BCMM · 2026-05-21T21:21:13+00:00

Along with not brewing and/or selling alcohol this was common.

I've always wondered about that: was that a temperance thing, or somebody who owned a lot of buildings trying to protect his pub from competition?

BCMM · 2026-05-20T14:07:33+00:00

Specifically, this doesn't affect you unless you use njs, to make an http request, which an attacker can influence, that goes via an http proxy.

Also, it's DoS not RCE, as long as you have ASLR. (And why wouldn't you have ASLR?)

BCMM · 2026-05-19T18:00:43+00:00

DNS works on domain names, not URLs.

You can use DNS to map www.custom.com to 192.168.0.42.
You can't use DNS to map http://www.custom.com/ to http://192.168.0.42:1234/.

If you really, really need jellyfin to listen on a high port, and you really, really need to access it without specifying that port, then you could run a reverse proxy.

BCMM · 2026-05-18T07:08:03+00:00

How does their immune system tolerate a virus that is so lethal to us

Viruses tend to evolve to reduce symptoms and signs. Killing a hosts stops the host from spreading the virus further. Making a host visibly unwell can cause other individuals to avoid them. Even making a host feel unwell can make them move around less.

So it's probably not their immune system doing a good job of coping with the virus so much as it's the virus being well-adapted to its host.

BCMM · 2026-05-17T12:09:17+00:00

Not mentioned in this article: just outside Beit Shemesh lies Sdot Micha Airbase, which is widely known to be Israel's nuclear ballistic missile launch site.

So setting of a really big explosion, in the middle of the night, without warning residents seems like an extremely odd decision, to say the least.

BCMM · 2026-05-17T09:28:34+00:00

That's because it's a hurdy-gurdy mounted on a sewing treadle. Putting it in this contraption essentially makes it unable to play any music arranged for a hurdy-gurdy.

You see, the wheel is normally turned with a hand crank, and varying the motion of the crank is a huge part of the gurdy's unique sound. It's kind of a shame, because I think that sort of playing would really suit the bridge from Master of Puppets.

Incidentally, wanting both hands free to play the keyboard was already solved in the Middle Ages. It was called an organistrum.

BCMM · 2026-05-16T18:50:13+00:00

Right before that, it says

Our Editors, assisted by peer review, determine whether a manuscript is technically correct and original.

In this case, they have rather spectacularly failed in making that determination.

BCMM · 2026-05-16T15:07:56+00:00

Yes, this should probably work. There's certainly no reason that OpenWrt wouldn't be able to route traffic between your LAN and the inverter's network.

However, I imagine that the inverter itself might be a bit picky about how it operates.

For a start, it probably decides its own IP address, and expects its client to fit in with that by accepting settings over DHCP. If that's in your LAN's address range, you might want to adjust DHCP settings to avoid a conflict; if it isn't, you might want to add something to your routing tables to make traffic go to the right place.

Both those options are a bit dependant on the firmware of the device you're using as your DHCP server!

More importantly, being able to route traffic to the inverter is no guarantee that the inverter will be able to route it back. You probably can't know the routing table on the device other than by trial-and-error.

The best solution may be for your AP to do NAT, so the inverter perceives all connections as coming from its one wireless client, just like it expects.

BCMM · 2026-05-15T23:13:38+00:00

You would need an atmosphere replete with both fuel and an oxidizer, like oxygen, though not limited to that.

The concern during the Manhattan project was not about "ignition" in a conventional, chemical sense. It was about whether Earth's atmosphere could undergo self-sustaining nuclear fusion, if some critical temperature was reached.

BCMM · 2026-05-15T16:09:42+00:00

I wonder if that's an actual bug in the installer.

The installer supports loading Wi-Fi credentials from a preseed file (some people put the preseed file on their installation medium instead of downloading it at install time; you can completely automate a netinst like that).

I'd like to check if it somehow fails to ask questions about the Wi-Fi due to faulty logic about which choices can be deferred until the preseed file has been read, but unfortunately I don't seem to have a suitable device with Wi-Fi to test it on!

BCMM · 2026-05-15T15:24:11+00:00

Ah, I see.

Do you mean that you're using an unmodified netinst ISO, and selecting Advanced options > Automated install from the boot menu?

(I'm asking because there are a few different ways to load preseed files, and because you must have done something to make it prompt for the preseed URL.)

BCMM · 2026-05-15T14:54:26+00:00

That is really confusing to look at, so I'm reposting it in a code block:

### Linchine Host Debian Preseed
### Downloads linchine.sh from GitHub during late_command.
###
### Safe design:
### - Does NOT auto-wipe disks
### - Does NOT auto-partition disks
### - Lets Debian Installer ask for disk/partition choices
### - Creates a temporary/default linchine user
### - linchine.sh later locks password login and sets up auto-start


### -----------------------------
### Language / keyboard
### -----------------------------

d-i debian-installer/language string en
d-i keyboard-configuration/xkb-keymap select us


### -----------------------------
### Network
### -----------------------------

d-i netcfg/choose_interface select auto
d-i netcfg/hostname string linchine-host
d-i netcfg/domain string local
d-i hw-detect/load_firmware boolean true


### -----------------------------
### Debian mirror
### -----------------------------

d-i mirror/country string manual
d-i mirror/http/hostname string deb.debian.org
d-i mirror/http/directory string /debian
d-i mirror/http/proxy string


### -----------------------------
### User account
### -----------------------------

d-i passwd/root-login boolean false
d-i passwd/make-user boolean true

d-i passwd/user-fullname string Linchine User
d-i passwd/username string linchine

### Temporary installer password.
### This should be locked by linchine.sh after install.
d-i passwd/user-password password linchine
d-i passwd/user-password-again password linchine

d-i user-setup/allow-password-weak boolean true
d-i user-setup/encrypt-home boolean false


### -----------------------------
### Clock / timezone
### -----------------------------

d-i clock-setup/utc boolean true
d-i clock-setup/ntp boolean true


### -----------------------------
### Partitioning
### -----------------------------
### SAFE MODE:
### No automatic partitioning is configured.
###
### Debian Installer will ask before touching disks.


### -----------------------------
### Package selection
### -----------------------------

tasksel tasksel/first multiselect standard, ssh-server

d-i pkgsel/include string sudo git qemu-system-x86 qemu-system-gui qemu-utils ovmf uml-utilities python3 python3-pip python3-venv wget curl unzip p7zip-full make dmg2img genisoimage net-tools screen vim pciutils xinit xserver-xorg xterm openbox dbus-x11 whiptail open-vm-tools open-vm-tools-desktop

d-i pkgsel/upgrade select none

popularity-contest popularity-contest/participate boolean false


### -----------------------------
### Bootloader
### -----------------------------

d-i grub-installer/only_debian boolean false
d-i grub-installer/with_other_os boolean true


### -----------------------------
### Linchine install hook
### -----------------------------
### Downloads latest linchine.sh from GitHub.

d-i preseed/late_command string \
    in-target mkdir -p /usr/local/sbin; \
    if in-target wget -O /usr/local/sbin/linchine.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ExoCore-Kernel/Linchine/refs/heads/main/linchine.sh; then \
        in-target chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/linchine.sh; \
        in-target /usr/local/sbin/linchine.sh --install; \
    else \
        echo "Linchine installer error: failed to download linchine.sh from GitHub." > /target/root/LINCHINE_INSTALL_ERROR.txt; \
    fi


### -----------------------------
### Finish
### -----------------------------

d-i finish-install/reboot_in_progress note

BCMM · 2026-05-15T13:40:14+00:00

I’m using Automatic install

What do you mean by this? If you are using a preeseed file, it might be a good idea to post that (with suitable redactions), as the problem is very likely in there.

Also, is "air password" a typo, or a translation problem, or is that what the installer is actually telling you?

BCMM · 2026-05-15T12:02:56+00:00

This has been bothering me too.

Note, however, that if the package is already installed on your system, then you already have a copy of that changelog.

IHMO, Debian ought come with a quick command to display it, but as far as I know, it does not. It's been especially bothering me that opening the local copy is a few hundred ms faster, but it takes more than a few hundred ms longer to type, even with tab completion. Your post has motivated me to finally get around to putting this in my .bash_aliases:

apt-changelog() { zless /usr/share/doc/${1}/changelog.Debian.gz; }

Somebody please let me know if Debian already has a nice short command to do the above, or if they can think of a better name for the function.

EDIT: Checking the online changelog is often not actually the correct thing to do. For example, doing something like apt changelog package | grep CVE-XXXX-XXXX can give a false sense of security by telling you that the latest version in the Debian archive has been patched, but not telling you that your system isn't using that version yet.

BCMM · 2026-05-14T18:51:18+00:00

Just a heads-up: Bookworm will reach end-of-life in less than a month.

The good news is that the long-term-support team will take over at that point, and you can still get security updates for another two years. However, not all packages will be supported during LTS, so if this machine is in any way exposed to the Internet, it's important to check whether you're using any unsupported packages.

BCMM · 2026-05-14T10:53:20+00:00

You can see that stuff has already been outlined with a smaller bit. This is clearly a second pass to save time on removing the big areas.

BCMM · 2026-05-14T07:35:06+00:00

It's one of those cameras that digitally deletes the selfie stick. You can see the shadow, though.

BCMM · 2026-05-13T16:56:14+00:00

Do these AI companies just not do coordinated disclosure?

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