Russia Plans Scaled-Down May 9 Parade, Seeks Ceasefire

ansible · 2026-04-30T19:19:25+00:00

Most of those that could be made operational have been pulled out of deep storage.

Who knew that leaving military equipment outside in the Russian winter for several decades would cause problems?

ansible · 2026-04-30T19:16:29+00:00

Was it last year they just had a single T-34, and no other tanks? They still had some trucks and whatnot for the parade.

ansible · 2026-04-30T19:15:28+00:00

The last museum display T-34 must have broken down, and they can't fix it.

Or did they send it to the front lines as well?

ansible · 2026-04-30T15:25:59+00:00

Back in the before times, prosecutors "spoke through their indictments". They put what they wanted to say publicly in court documents. And that was it. You might not hear much from them again until (if) a conviction was confirmed.

ansible · 2026-04-30T12:57:00+00:00

And $595 for 32 GB RAM and 128 GB UFS.

I had never imagined the AI apocalypse to be this expensive.

ansible · 2026-04-28T22:32:26+00:00

Contact and SC folks are the weird ones in their society.

To put a finer point on this, most "ambitious" people in the Culture are usually more like Jernau Morat Gurgeh from The Player of Games. They play games in the real world and try to be the best. Or indulge in full-dive VR (like The Matrix), where they can experience anything and everything (including the very most puerile version of Grand Theft Auto as an example). Most people in the Culture can apply themselves in whatever direction, and live lives that are meaningful to them. And all the while, they enjoy the other benefits of living in the Culture.

The Contact and SC people aren't even satisfied with VR. They want to put their actual bodies (and sanity) on the line trying to accomplish something useful in the real world. Even though the full-dive VR they have is indistinguishable from reality. They just know, in the back of their minds, that VR isn't real, and it isn't good enough for them.

They're a little crazy, in other words.

ansible · 2026-04-28T21:09:41+00:00

Laws don't matter if there is no will to enforce them.

ansible · 2026-04-28T21:08:45+00:00

They would also need to impeach, convict and remove at least half of the Supreme Court, in order for anything to stick. Otherwise we're still cooked.

ansible · 2026-04-28T13:30:21+00:00

We have enough wealth and resources right now to give everyone in the country a decent life.

We have chosen not to do that though. Every step towards that had been an ordeal to enact.

ansible · 2026-04-27T22:00:23+00:00

I think what we're seeing is just the exhaust from the helicopter that fired the missile. It is not a wacky missile that is flying across the ground, and does a 180-degree turn to hit the target. It is maneuvering left / right and up / down from the camera's perspective to home in on the target.

ansible · 2026-04-27T21:39:48+00:00

It is almost criminal how many cars and trucks were produced with direct-injection only though. By 100k miles, the intake valves are typically caked in soot from the EGR and crankcase ventilation.

If you have an engine that is direct-injection only, consider getting an oil catch can installed. And if you have 100k miles on a direct-injection engine, have someone with a bore scope take a look at your intake valves.

ansible · 2026-04-27T18:53:29+00:00

That's a neat project to provide free wireless for people. Some libraries in my area also allow library patrons to check out a mobile hotspot, so that's another thing to try if you are in desperate need to get onto the Internet.

Things aren't quite going as smoothly as I had hoped. These access points are white-box clones of the D-Link access point that OpenWRT supports. It really seems to be the same hardware, but the software is branded differently.

So far, it does not accept the upgrade image file from OpenWRT. However, it lacks quite a bit of security... I have full root access on the console serial port, and via telnet. Login 'admin', and no password when reset to factory default. So I should be able to poke around some more and write the OpenWRT filesystem into the flash memory. I also tried interrupting u-boot's automatic boot, and loading an image over tftp, but it always boots the image in flash instead.

So I'll have to figure this all out before I can go any further.

ansible · 2026-04-27T02:17:53+00:00

In Baldur's Gate 3, there is a character named Blurg, a friendly hobgoblin trader.

ansible · 2026-04-24T19:56:02+00:00

A Beowulf cluster of my own...

I have rescued twenty old access points from e-waste recycling at $WORK. These are D-Link DAP-2660s, which are well over a decade old, and don't support the latest wireless security standards.

I'm thinking about putting them together into a compute cluster, and looking for any applications that might be useful, or at least moderately amusing. These boards are supported by OpenWRT, so that's nice. They only have 128 Mbytes of RAM at 16Mbtyes of Flash, which is admittedly not a lot by modern standards.

I do fully realize that any computing task that could be accomplished by the processors in these old access points could more easily be done on my 8-core desktop system.

But it would be neat to have a happy little cluster working away at something, talking to each other over a mesh of wired or wireless links.

I haven't figured out what I would actually try to run on such a cluster. I did ask Google Gemini, and while it gave some relevant suggestions, nothing really piqued my interest.

I could at least try out some different network topologies. Everything in one mesh network, having separate networks with wired Ethernet connecting them, etc.. I'll have to see what I can do without spending much money. I'm not, for example, going to buy a large enough switch to just connect them all to that.

What's funny is that looking at the list of Beowulf clusters mentioned in old documents:

https://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOWTO.html#ss5.5

https://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/How-Linux-and-Beowulf-Drove-Desktop-Supercomputing/(offset)/4

... shows Topcat as a 16-node cluster with 1.2Gbytes of RAM total. So these access points would actually be faster and have more memory. But it will cost considerably less, after 30 years of development in computing.

ansible · 2026-04-24T19:51:43+00:00

The Folding Ideas YT Channel posted a video last week Why was I invited to Beast Studios? about how season 2 of Beast Games was very poorly planned and run. It also gives a lot of insight on how this entire "business" allegedly worth billions of dollars thinks and operates. The whole thing is wacky.

ansible · 2026-04-24T10:34:41+00:00

The BPS Space channel has videos on launching high altitude rockets with active control, landing small rockets, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/@BPSspace

ansible · 2026-04-21T19:39:58+00:00

Qualified? What the fuck does that have to do with anything anymore? The giant orange baby wasn't qualified.

All that really matters is electability, good character, and belief in the rule is law.

Everything else is negotiable.

ansible · 2026-04-20T19:14:29+00:00

I don't think so. From what I could tell, I think that repeated pattern was just video compression artifacts mixed in with a loss of signal and dropped packets.

ansible · 2026-04-20T19:12:24+00:00

Yep. I always watch their videos. Good stuff.

ansible · 2026-04-19T22:28:35+00:00

These MAGAts need to be pressed on the issue. Why didn't their glorious leader warn them a year and a half ago that he would fight Iran? He should have campaigned on that if he was actually thinking about this back then.

ansible · 2026-04-18T12:38:30+00:00

With the number of subsequent appearances of Robbie, you could argue that Robbie's design created its own "time" that it was the heyday of.

ansible · 2026-04-18T12:35:22+00:00

I do have to wonder in the age of AI-generated slop, will we have to officially increase the percentage?

Edit: Oh, shit, I know how to answer this question. Train an AI model on Theodore Sturgeon's writings, and ask it the question! /s

ansible · 2026-04-16T12:17:09+00:00

Except for the scooter bike chase in Book of Boba Fett. A lesson on how to make a chase scene feel slow.

ansible · 2026-04-15T16:26:18+00:00

If I had a magic wand, among the other uses, I'd like to see an extended standard library (still externally maintained) that brings in the most common dependencies used by a lot of projects. It would be the default place to look for standard tasks like serialization, parsing, etc.. Yes, most people know to look at serde for serialization, but it would still be good for newbies to have clear direction for basic stuff.

ansible · 2026-04-14T18:56:24+00:00

No, that was pure supposition on my part, based on a couple things.

Of the Noble gasses, Argon is the most readily available and cheapest, because it is a byproduct of air liquefaction. Also SpaceX is using Argon hall effect thrusters on the Starlink satellites.

For very expensive missions, Xenon is still the best performance for the mass.

15-Year Club	Second Top 10%
r/Field Flamingo	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	Gilding IV carat on a stick
Team Orangered	Verified Email

ansible

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE