(date: 2024-12-08 07:05:11)
date: 2024-12-08, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
A Reason To Smile
https://steady.substack.com/p/blue-velvet
date: 2024-12-08, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-maze
date: 2024-12-08, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On Thursday, December 5, in Chicago, Illinois, former president Barack Obama gave the third in an annual series of lectures he has delivered since 2022 at his foundation’s Democracy Forum, which gathers experts, leaders, and young people to explore ways to safeguard democracy through community action.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-7-2024
date: 2024-12-08, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-6-2024-f63
date: 2024-12-08, updated: 2024-12-08, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045805-jia-tolentino-on-the-some
date: 2024-12-07, updated: 2024-12-07, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045804-a-fantastic-interactive-f
date: 2024-12-07, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
I’m running Ultraviolet Grasslands (UVG) using 2d6 rules. UVG itself uses d20 rules and so I often have to translate back and forth and it is not very satisfying, to be honest.
So what to do? In a recent episode of the Internet Office Hours podcast, @Whidou suggested a system of immunities. So here are my thoughts.
Weapons are either “normal” (2d6 damage) or “extreme violence” (3d6 damage). Some weapons might be practically instant death weapons, like plasma guns, necrotic blasters desintegrators and the like. These might do 4d6 and more damage.
| Normal Weapon | Vicious Weapon |
|---|---|
| Dagger | Halberd |
| Axe | Chainsword |
| Spear | Cat Rifle |
| Blade | Radiant Gun |
| Bow | Ultra Blaster |
| Pistol | Blue God Blaster |
| Scimitar | |
| Long Knife | |
| Cutlass | |
| Rapier | |
| Claymore | |
| Zweihänder | |
| Crossbow |
Armour either makes you “hard to hit” (3d6 ≤ attribute + skill) or “impossible to hit”.
| Armour | Hard to hit | Impossible to hit |
|---|---|---|
| Iron Breastplatte | Blade weapons | none |
| Skinchanger Suit | Blade weapons | none |
| Ballistic Linen | Scimitar | Sluggers (Pistol, SMG, Rifle) |
| Scale Shirt | Blade weapons | none |
| Lobster Armour | Normal weapons | none |
| Bone Mesh Armnour | All weapons | none |
| Spectral Combat Suit | Energy weapons, Sluggers | Normal weapons |
| Porcelain Armour | Energy weapons, Sluggers | Normal weapons |
| Golem Armour | Energy weapons | Normal weapons, Sluggers |
Perhaps it would be best to extend the list of tags UVG uses. Then weapons can have tags such as Cut, Stab, Crush, Slug, Energy, Necrotic, Blast – and armour can confer protection or immunity against these tags. Other tags are easy to add:
| Weapon | Tags |
|---|---|
| Dagger | Stab, Close |
| Axe | Crush, Close |
| Spear | Stab |
| Sword | Cut |
| Bow | Stab, Range |
| Pistol | Slug, Range |
| SMG | Slug, Range |
| Scimitar | Cut |
| Long Knife | Stab |
| Cutlass | Cut, Stab |
| Rapier | Stab |
| Claymore | Cut, Crush |
| Zweihänder | Cut, Crush |
| Crossbow | Crush, Range |
| Halberd | Crush, Vicious |
| Chainsword | Energy, Vicious |
| Cat Rifle | Slug, Range, Vicious |
| Radiant Gun | Energy, Range, Vicious |
| Ultra Blaster | Blast, Energy, Range, Vicious |
| Blue God Blaster | Blast, Necrotic, Range, Vicious |
Vicious weapons do 3d6 damage; blast weapons do 4d6 damage. Stationary guns like plasma guns go on a different list but do 5d6 and more damage. Scope creep!
And then armour! Using some more tags, too.
| Armour | Hard to hit | Impossible to hit | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iron Breastplate | Cut, Stab | none | Hot, Bulky |
| Skinchanger Suit | Cut | none | Alive, Rare |
| Ballistic Linen | Cut, Stab | Slug | Cool |
| Scale Shirt | Cut | none | Hot, Bulky |
| Lobster Armour | Cut, Stab, Crush | none | Cool, Bulky |
| Steel Cuirass | Cut, Stab | none | Hot, Bulky |
| Bone Mesh Armour | Cut, Stab, Crush, Necrotic | none | Cool, Bulky, Rare |
| Spectral Combat Suit | Energy, Slug | Cut, Stab, Crush | Cool, Power 6, Bulky |
| Porcelain Armour | Energy, Slug | Cut, Stab, Crush | Cool, Power 6, Bulky |
| Golem Armour | Energy | Cut, Stab, Crush, Slug | Cool, Power 8, Rare |
A shield can be used to negate a single hit. (“Shields shall be splintered.”)
I wonder how good spears and other stabbing weapons are, though. Cutting weapons really must be the best weapons against unarmoured opponents! Why were axes unpopular given the table above? There must be more to it.
Let’s test some assumptions:
Surprising result: Swords are pretty bad against armoured opponents. Perhaps they are mostly a status symbol after all. A status symbol of a ruling warrior class over unarmed peasants. They’re probably just easier to carry than spears.
#RPG #2d6 #Ultraviolet Grasslands
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-12-07-armour
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-07, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Screen
shot of my blogroll on Scripting News. It’s dynamic. Shown are the
latest posts on the emptywheel
blog. When a blog updates it moves to the top of the list. A 2024
adaptation of a
concept
from early blogging days. It should be part of the social web. You can
try it out realtime at
scripting.com.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/07.html#a165306
date: 2024-12-07, updated: 2024-12-07, from: Russell Graves, Syonyk’s Project Blog
https://www.sevarg.net/2024/12/07/treasure-valley-idaho-jail-communications/
date: 2024-12-07, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Yesterday I wrote that I’d trade in my Model Y if an non-Tesla EV came along that equaled it. A few people asked what I liked about the Model Y that I’m not finding in alternatives. Here’s the list.
So this turned into an ad for Tesla. Heh.
There are reasons we love it so much.
Just separate from Musk and all’s well.
I’ve been thinking Tesla drivers who love America should have some kind of demonstration. We all park our cars around local Tesla dealers, let the police tow our cars, only to be replaced by other Teslas. We’re all computer nerds, we could probably even figure out the scheduling. We probably have nearly as much money as they do. Just sayin.
Tired of companies that push us around politically and Tesla is one of the worst. So far they’ve managed to convince us they aren’t Elon Musk, but that’s a mirage, he is the company and the company is him. They are completely one and the same.
Like the My Pillow guy and his pillows. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/12/07/142329.html?title=whyILikeMyModelY
date: 2024-12-07, updated: 2024-12-07, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>The Isle of Man Government runs an annual conference to promote the tiny nation as a destination for online businesses.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/07/digital_isle_2024/
date: 2024-12-07, from: Robert Reich’s blog
With Heather Lofthouse, Michael Lahanas-Calderón, and Yours Truly, Robert Reich
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/rage-against-the-machine-the-coffee
date: 2024-12-07, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
👉 Do you have a blog? I’m offering to edit 5 people’s draft posts! I’ve had zero takers so far. Win of the week: bought so many things I’ve been needing to! Made up for four and a half years of delayed purchases over Black Friday weekend 😆 Looking forward to: reading a book this weekend Stuff […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/06/weeknotes-nov-30-dec-6-2024/
date: 2024-12-07, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-6-2024
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-06, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Musk and the monied class are taking over
https://steady.substack.com/p/plutocracies-thrive-in-darkness
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
2018: I’m not picky about where I get new ideas.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/06.html#a231440
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
As
Trump’s cabinet takes shape it’s as if the cast of HBO’s
Silicon
Valley is taking over the US government. I’m glad to be alive. I
really liked the show, it was incredible satire having lived through
pretty much the whole thing, I swear some of the scenes felt like they
were set in my backyard at the
hacienda
in Woodside or at one of our
offices,
esp in the early days of
DaveNet and this blog or the
early days of TechCrunch.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/06.html#a223059
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
When Bluesky was experiencing its huge post-election surge, it was exciting because lots of users were experiencing the surge in followers and engagement. It was exhilirating. That has slowed to nothing now, no more engagement there than on Threads, Masto or Twitter. The character limit on Bluesky being considerably less than the others makes it harder to rekindle interest imho. And btw the euphoria being gone is neither good or bad, it just is.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/06.html#a222841
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update:
Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is one possibility. But what if children or hostages are in it? Lay down barriers, and the driver might swerve into a school bus. Spike his tires, and he might fishtail into a van—if the spikes stop him at all. Existing traps, made from elastic, may halt a Hyundai, but they’re no match for a Hummer. In addition, officers put themselves at risk of being run down while setting up the traps…
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
ChatGPT is also a tutor. I’m learning new ways of coding SQL through drill and it’s also improving my JavaScript code. It’s infinitely impatient. It does make mistakes, but that’s also good for the drill, catching the mistakes is instructive too. And in programming you always have to be looking for errors, because you’ll almost always find them. “Runs the first time” is a rare occurrence, no matter who wrote the code.”
http://scripting.com/2024/12/06.html#a220057
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045801-a-bluesky-starter-pack-of
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/this-is-what-the-internets-for
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045803-404-media-reporting-on-40
date: 2024-12-06, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-5-2024-8bb
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-07, from: Daring Fireball
If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/dont_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_generative_ai_bullshit_bathwater
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/dick-van-dyke-coldplay-video
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045793-the-sound-of-traffic-and
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045784-the-collapse-of-self-wort
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045800-after-almost-25-years-pau
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/nasas-rocket-engine-fireplace
date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Rupert blog
This month I got my official diagnosis for Adult ADHD. It’s fun to share experiences with friends. While ADHD presents some new waters to navigate, it isn’t exactly news to me. Thanks to Dr. TikTok, I’ve suspected this outcome for a few years now. It’s nice to have a proper diagnosis though. If I’m struggling to focus or feeling overwhelmed, I know the probable root cause is how my brain processes dopamine and norepinephrine impacting my executive function.
There are different flavors of ADHD, so I can only describe my experience:
I’ve developed a lot of coping and masking strategies over the years that have allowed me to maintain a decent level of productivity. In my 20s I used to manage this by brute force and caffeine. But now that I’m in my 40s with a lot more responsibilities and spinning plates, I feel the reins slipping a bit. To help with this, I’m trying out a non-stimulant sNRI medication that tries to repair that norepinephrine processing. It takes a week or so to fully activate so it’s not an instant fix, and to be honest I don’t quite know what to expect. I’m excited to see if it makes a difference but even if it doesn’t I’m happy to be on a journey.
Anyways, cheers to unique brains.
https://daverupert.com/2024/12/adhd/
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045787-subtle-foreshadowing-i-la
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’m getting a new Apple Watch today, the latest model. My current watch, which I wear all the time (except when it’s charging) is a 5th gen. The new one is 10th. I had to upgrade because there’s a Tesla watch app out now that won’t run on my old watch. It’s the most rational add-on for the car. A must-have.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/06.html#a151018
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-06, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
drive a
Tesla
Model Y, the best car I’ve ever owned. I wish Elon Musk wasn’t
associated with it. If there were a good alternative to the Tesla, I
would divest in a minute. I could afford to do it and would welcome the
opportunity.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/06.html#a150415
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Bruce Schneier blog
This tool seems to do a pretty good job.
The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool regularly checks devices for potential compromise. But the company also offers a free version of the feature for anyone who downloads the iVerify Basics app for $1. These users can walk through steps to generate and send a special diagnostic utility file to iVerify and receive analysis within hours. Free users can use the tool once a month. iVerify’s infrastructure is built to be privacy-preserving, but to run the Mobile Threat Hunting feature, users must enter an email address so the company has a way to contact them if a scan turns up spyware—as it did in the seven recent Pegasus discoveries…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/detecting-pegasus-infections.html
date: 2024-12-06, from: Robert Reich’s blog
With his plans to use the military to root out undocumented immigrants and to use the Justice Department and FBI to punish his political enemies
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/are-we-heading-toward-a-second-civil
date: 2024-12-06, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-5-2024
date: 2024-12-06, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
On December 5 2024 I held a brief webinar explaining the ideas and concepts behind Rock-solid curl, and I figured I would just share the video here: See also: rock-solid.curl.dev
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/06/rock-solid-curl-on-video/
date: 2024-12-06, from: Matt Haughey blog
Today I covered about 400 miles, going from Iowa to the St. Louis Gateway Arch, then on to my final destination of Terre Haute. Over the past four days I've driven through 9 states total that covered about 2300 miles.
Iowa is the heartland of America, and when
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/indiana-or-bust-day-4-finale/
@Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed (date: 2024-12-06, from: Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed)
why, if I were a French noble in the 1780s, I would simply remind commoners about the sanctity of life, and how important it is to be kind
https://bsky.app/profile/sixfoot6.bsky.social/post/3lcm6v5lhes2l
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-07, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.status.news/p/los-angeles-times-patrick-soon-shiong
date: 2024-12-06, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Fine cuts This huge rock is probably a glacial erratic that we encountered on a lakeside walk in Kerry. Note, though, the sharpness of the edges on the fragments. A stonemason would be proud of those cuts. Quote of the … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-6-december-2024/40167/
date: 2024-12-06, updated: 2024-12-06, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/looney-tunes-backgrounds
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
17-minute podcast I recorded on Tuesday after hearing that the president of South Korea had declared martial law.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/05.html#a231426
date: 2024-12-05, from: Stephen Wolfram blog
This
is a follow-on to Why Does Biological Evolution Work? A Minimal Model
for Biological Evolution and Other Adaptive Processes [May 3, 2024].
Even More from an Extremely Simple Model A few months ago I introduced
an extremely simple “adaptive cellular automaton” model that seems to do
remarkably well at capturing the essence of what’s […]
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Chuck Shotton: “Posting a video to YouTube is infinitely easier for a lot of people than understanding how to publish a podcast.” True.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/05.html#a225519
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045788-indivisible-a-practical-g
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045789-you-dont-actually-have-to
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-latest-rivals-are-getting-help-from-openai
date: 2024-12-05, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
@HeyeBodo stellt auf fedi jeden Tag eine Frage zum Rollenspielsetting. Die darf man dann beantworten. Da ich schon lange nichts mehr auf Deutsch hier auf dem Blog geschrieben habe, werde ich die Gelegenheit wahrnehmen, das hier zu tun. Allerdings habe ich vor, alles auf dieser Seite zu sammeln. Das wird für die Leser, die dem Blog via einem Feed folgen, wahrscheinlich etwas seltsam, denn heute gibt es nur Antworten auf die ersten zwei Tage. Mir fällt leider auch keine andere Lösung ein, denn irgendwie will ich auch nicht jeden Tag eine Seite schreiben.
Eine typische Karte, wie ich sie vorbereiten würde, ist von Ost nach West ca. 30 Tagesreisen breit und von Nord nach Süd ca. 10–20 Tagesreisen hoch. Das sieht ästhetisch gut aus, bietet Platz für ein paar Städte, Magiertürme, Monsterlager, Bauernhöfe, versteckte Siedlungen, und so weiter. Ein paar Seen, ein oder zwei Gebirge mit Pässen und Handelsrouten, viele Flüsse. Ich weigere mich, eine genau Grösse anzugeben und behaupte einfach, ein Feld auf der Karte ist eine Tagesreise. Wenn es keine Wege gibt, behaupte ich manchmal, dass eine Tagesreise vielleicht nur 5–10km sind. Klar kann man als trainierter Legionär auf einer römischen Strasse vielleicht ab und zu einen 50km Marsch machen, oder 30km weit ziehen, aber in einem Tal, wo die Talwände steil und von Bächen zerklüftet sind, wo der Talboden versumpft und wild ist, wo das Wasser überall steht und fliesst, das Unterholz im Wald dicht ist, weil die Wisente immer wieder Lichtungen reissen und es keine richtige Forstwirtschaft gibt, kann ich mir nicht vorstellen, dass Leute mit 20–30kg Ausrüstung pro Person mehr als ein paar Kilometer weit kommen. Ich schliesse da von mir auf andere. 😅
Und damit kommen wir zum nächsten Thema, angenommen, ein Feld ist 10km und dann ist eine Karte von 30×20 ungefähr so gross wie die ganze Schweiz.
Die Ausdehnung der Schweiz beträgt von Norden nach Süden 220km und von Osten nach Westen 348km. … Die Schweiz gliedert sich in drei geografische Zonen: die Alpen mit einem Anteil von etwa 58% der Gesamtfläche, das Mittelland mit rund 31% und der Jura mit 11%. 48 Schweizer Berge sind über 4000 m hoch. Obwohl Gebirge insgesamt 70% des Staatsgebietes einnehmen, lebt in diesem Gebiet nur ein Viertel der Bevölkerung. – Geografie – Fakten und Zahlen, Eidgenössisches Departement für auswärtige Angelegenheiten (EDA)
In diesem Gebiet gibt es 26 Kantone und entsprechend 26 grössere Orte und ein Vielfaches an Burgen. An jedem Talausgang hat es eine Burg. In grösseren Tälern hat es mehrere Burgen. Wenn wir jetzt von 30×20 Feldern ausgehen, von denen 58% Gebirge sind, bleiben 348 Felder für die 26 Kantone oder im Durchschnitt 13 Felder pro Kanton.
Jetzt bin ich selber überrascht, wie überdimensioniert und leer meine Karten sind. Da muss viel, viel mehr rein!
Meine Welt ist vor allem von der Umwelt inspiriert, in der ich lebe. Die Berge, Täler und Hügel, in denen ich selber herumlaufe, inspirieren mich für mein Spiel. Ich versuche natürlich mir vorzustellen, wie es früher aussah, vor den Flussbegradigungen, vor der Trockenlegung der Sümpfe, vor dem Strassenbau. Und somit ist klar, dass all diese Vorstellungen aus der Vergangenheit irgendwie kollidieren und kollabieren müssen. Das Resultat ist unrealistisch und weltfremd, und doch vertraut genug.
Die Monster und Menschen sind in vielem wohl von Conan und dem Herr der Ringe bestimmt. Die Elfen sind eher keine Elben, sondern irgendwo zwischen der Elfenwelt und Elric von Melniboné angesiedelt; die Orks irgendwo zwischen Mordor und Skyrim; die Halblinge bei den Hobbits; die Goblins in Moria; die Bäume in Fangorn; die Götter stammen aus der nordischen Tradition (Odin, Thor, Loki), aber auch aus dem Zweistromland (Ishtar, Marduk, Pazuzu), Griechenland (Hekate) oder aus Ägypten (Thot, Ra, Set), aus Hyperborea (ebenfalls Set) und aus D&D (Orcus).
In meiner Fantasy gibt es abgestürzte Raumschiffe, Laserpistolen, Pistolen, Gewehre, Astralsegler, fliegende Schiffe, und so weiter, aber ungleich verteilt. Aus Sicht der Spielenden ist ein Plattenpanzer mit Schild die beste Rüstung. Hochwertige Rüstungen gibt es, doch dann sind es Prunkstücke, die mehr kosten, aber nicht mehr nützen. Fantastische Technologie gibt es im Rahmen von “Golem Rüstungen”, die dann einem Plattenpanzer +2 und Schild +2 entsprechen und mit einer passenden Energiequelle dann zu Plattenpanzer +4 und Schild +4 gesteigert werden könnten. Ich kann mich allerdings nicht erinnern, dass dies jemand am Tisch je geschafft hat. Die Laserpistolen sind sehr einfach gehalten: Ein Schuss macht 1W6 Schaden wie eine Schusswaffe, Trefferwurf normal durch Geschicklichkeit beeinflusst, Nachladen unnötig. Schaden liegt in der Grössenordnung von einem magischen Geschoss. Eine Plasmakanone funktioniert wie ein Bitzschlag und und macht 5W6 Schaden entlang einer Linie, ein Granatwerfer wie ein Feuerball und macht 5W6 Schaden im Zielgebiet, Rettungswurf gegen Drachenodem für halben Schaden. Das könnten genau so gut Zauberstäbe mit Ladungen sein. So lässt sich alles entweder mit Technik oder Magie erklären und es macht keinen grossen Unterschied, da es die Rolle eines Technikers für die Spielenden nicht als Klasse gibt. In dem Sinne ist alle Technik verloren gegangene und wiederentdeckte Technik, die nicht wirklich beherrscht ist, die wie Magie verwendet wird.
Auch die Zeitgeschichte ist mir egal. Bei aller Technologie von Waffen, Rüstungen, Schiffstypen, Sprengkörpern und so weiter wird frisch und fröhlich durcheinander gemischt. Die technologischen Unterschiede von Hopliten und Conquistadores, zwischen Kataphrakten und Rittern, zwischen Skythen, Mongolen und Hunnen, zwischen Vikingern und Reisläufern, Landsknechten und Legionären interessiert mich nicht richtig.
Gespielt wird in einer Fantasiewelt, in der man keinen Sprengstoff und kein Pulver kaufen kann. Die Schiffe sind aus Holz und von Segelkraft betrieben. Kohleindustrie und Stahlindustrie gibt es nicht, also gibt es keine Schiesswaffen und kein Dampfmaschinen, also auch keine Eisenbahn, keinen Zeppelin, kein Flugzeug. Es gibt keinen Wilden Westen, kein kolonialen Weltreiche, kein Zeitalter der Entdeckungen. In diesem Sinne ist auch der Kapitalismus als “Finanztechnologie” nicht entdeckt.
In den D&D-artigen Spielen vermischen sich Dinge: Auf der einen Seite sind Monster Konsequenzen für soziale Rätsel, wo es um etwas geht, weil die Gewaltbereitschaft der Gegner allen Gesprächen, so lustig und geblödelt sie auch daherkommen, jeder Zeit in Mord und Totschlag umschlagen können. Bildlich sind diese Monster menschenähnlich, damit auch geredet werden kann. Überhaupt ist mir wichtig, dass die Monster reden wollen. Ich tendiere dazu, Regeln zu ignorieren, die das erschweren.
Die zweite Sorte Monster sind Monster, die den Mainstreamalpträumen entspringen. Kraken, Spinnen, Würmer. Hier gibt es alles von Körperhorror, Gestaltwandlern, Chimären, Fleischmagie und mehr. Hier gibt es auch Zwischenstufen. Auch diese Monster reden, aber es unterstreicht mehr den Alptraum. Wovon reden denn Harpyien, Ghule, Matikore und Trolle ausser vom ewigen Leben und wie alles verflucht ist? Hier gibt es dann auch eine Traumlogik, wo man nicht immer eine rationale Diskussion führen kann.
Wenn ich Traveller spiele, dann sind die erste Sorte Monster immer Menschen und die zweite Sorte Monster immer Maschinen oder Institution, Organisationen, Firmen, Staaten, Prozesse, Gerichte, Polizei und Militär – auch hier geht es ins Alptraum-artige: Hoffnungslosigkeit, lange Zeiträume, unmenschliche Bedingungen, Entfernungen, Zeiten, kafkaeske Komplikationen, faschistisches Gedankengut, Gewaltspiralen, Krieg – das sind die Alpträume, mit denen man nicht mehr rational diskutieren kann, weil die Gegenseite auch kein menschliches Werteversändnis mehr hat.
Meistens hat es latente Kolonialsituation oder soziale Ungerechtigkeit, sei es die Feudalherrschaft, Theokratie, Plutokratie, Kleptokratie oder ähnliche Konflikte. Das sind verhärtete Fronten, welche nur mit einer grossen Kampagne umgestossen werden können – und das soll man auch dürfen aber auch lassen dürfen. Wenn es einen Krieg gibt, dann ist er weit weg und man sieht nur die Flüchtenden, Desertierenden, Maraudierenden, das Elend und die Verzweiflung aus der Ferne.
Wenn der Krieg zu aktiv ist, dann entsteht der Wunsch, einzugreifen und Einfluss auf Schlachten und Ereignisse zu haben, als sei man Hauptfigur in einem Film. Aber so will ich das fast nie spielen. Also braucht es eine angespannte Lage, die aber ohne Einflussnahme der Spieler statisch bleibt. Nur so kann ich eine Sandbox leiten. Wenn wir dann mal 30 Spielabende gespielt haben, darf es Änderungen geben, vielleicht eine Massenschlacht, eine Änderung der Machtverhältnisse. Aber der Krieg selber steht nicht im Zentrum des Spiels.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-11-28-rollenspieladvent
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045791-an-unidentified-disease-d
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/vintage-hand-drawn-vhs-labels
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045776-32-rules-for-flying-now
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045785-reminder-christopher-nola
date: 2024-12-05, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-4-2024-088
@John’s World Wide Wall Display (date: 2024-12-05, from: John’s World Wide Wall Display)
That is the way the Google Cookie Crumbles. A good example for my class to look past the first results.
https://johnjohnston.info/blog/the-way-the-cookie-crumbles/
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045783-the-average-brightness-of
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Looking for more excellent WordLand bug report writers. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/12/05.html#a180019
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>FreeBSD 14.2, the latest point release of the most widely used of the BSDs, brings some new features to tempt Docker fans.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/freebsd_142/
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/any-suggestions-for-the-gift-guide
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045781-you-have-not-died-of
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
As if in response to Dom’s idea, overnight, via email Leslie Joyce sends a link to a feed containing first episodes of new fiction podcasts. First comment, how useful! I love this idea as a user. And second, how innovative! I love this idea as a media hacker, what a clever use of RSS. I’ve added it to my blogroll and to my shared list of podcast feeds.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/05.html#a153816
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-05, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Dom
Christie has an
interesting
idea related to listening
lists. Aggregate all the shows from all the feeds in a list into a
single feed. This seems brilliant because it reduces the implementation
in the client to almost nothing, just rebuild a feed periodically, it
could be done entirely in the client app. But it also could be something
users could share with other users, sort of a meta-channel. I think it’s
brilliant with the caveat that sometimes when you implement it you find
something that makes it more complex than it seems at first. This is the
second idea I’ve heard that the initial listening lists idea spawned. I
think there’s a lot of unexplored possibilities here.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/05.html#a153203
date: 2024-12-05, from: Jeff Geerling blog
AmpereOne: Cores are the new MHz
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><em>Cores</em> are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket!</p>
Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere’s the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is inside the box pictured above.
It has 192 custom Arm cores running at 3.2 Gigahertz, and in some benchmarks, it stays in the ring with AMD’s fastest EPYC chip, the 9965 “Turin Dense”, which also has 192 cores.
High-core-count servers are the cutting edge in datacenters, and they’re
so insane, most software doesn’t even know how to handle it.
btop has to go full screen on the CPU graph just to fit all
the cores:
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/ampereone-cores-are-new-mhz
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045777-a-playlist-of-the-100
date: 2024-12-05, from: Liam on Linux
First Unix box I ever touched, in my first job, here on the Isle of
Man 36Y ago.
It was a demo machine, but my employers, CSL
Delta, never sold any AFAIK. It sat there, running but unused, all day
every day. Our one had a mono text display on it, and no graphics
ability that I know of.
I played around, I wrote “Hello,
world!” in C and compiled it and it took me a while to find that the
result wasn’t called “hello” or “hello.exe” or anything but
“a.out”.
If I had the knowledge then, I’d have written a
Mandelbrot generator or something and had it sit there cranking them out
– but I was not skilled enough. It was not networked to our office
network, but it had a synchronous modem allowing it to access some IBM
online service which we used to look up tech support
info.
Synchronous modem comms, or serial comms, are very
different indeed to the familiar Unix asynchronous serial comms used on
RS-232 connections for terminals and things. Sync comms are a mainframe
thing, more than a microcomputer
thing.
https://wiki.radioreference.com/index.php/Asynchronous_vs_Sy…
That
modem was a very specialised bit of kit that cost more than a whole PC –
when PCs cost many thousands each – and it couldn’t talk to anything
else except remote IBM mainframes, basically.
The RT/PC felt
more powerful than a high-end IBM PC compatible of the time, but only
marginally. It had a bit of the feeling of Windows NT about 6-7 years
later: when you were typing away and you did something demanding, the
hard disk cranked up and you could hear, and even feel the vibrations,
that the machine was working hard, but it stayed responding to you the
same as ever. It’s a bit hard to describe because all modern OSes work
like this, but it was not normal in the 1980s.
Then, OSes
didn’t multitask or they did it badly, and things like hard disk
controllers of the time took over the CPU completely when reading or
writing. So on MS-DOS, or PC-DOS or OS/2 1.x or DR Concurrent DOS, when
you typed commands or interacted with programs, the computer responded
right away as fast as it could. But if you gave a command that made the
machine work hard, like asked for a print preview or a spell-check of a
multi-page document, or sorted a spreadsheet of thousands of rows, or
asked it to draw a graph from hundreds of points of data, the computer
locked up on you. The hard disks span up, you heard the read/write heads
chattering away as it worked, but it was no longer listening to you and
anything you pressed or typed was lost. Or, worse, buffered, and when it
was done, then it tried to do those commands, and quite possibly did
something very much not what you wanted, like deleted loads of
work.
(Decades later something similar happened with cooling
fans, and now that’s going away too. But with hearing the fans spin up,
there’s a hysteresis: it takes time, and tens of billions of CPU cycles,
for the CPU to heat up, so the fans come on later, and maybe stay on for
a while after it’s done. A PC locking up as the hard disk went crazy was
immediate.)
The RT/PC was a Unix box. It didn’t do that. No
idea how much RAM or disk ours had: maybe 4MB if that, perhaps 100-200MB
disk. A lot for 1988! But if I did, say,
cd / ls
-laR
… then it would sit there for several minutes with the
HDD chuntering away, listing files to screen… but what was remarkable
was that you could switch to another virtual console and it stayed
perfectly responsive as if nothing were happening. That hard disk was
SCSI of course, so it didn’t use loads of CPU under heavy disk
load.
The machine always felt a little slower, a little less
responsive than DOS, but it never slowed down even when working hard.
You had the feeling of sitting behind the wheel of a Rolls Royce with
some massive engine there, but pulling a massive weight, so it didn’t
accelerate or brake fast, but could just keep accelerating slowly and
steadily ’til you ran out of road… and you’d make an impressively large
crater.
We sold a lot of IBM PS/2 machines with Xenix, and it
was a Unix too and felt the same… but limited by the puny I/O buses of
even high-end 1980s IBM PS/2 kit, so it sssslllloooowwwweeeedddd way
down doing that big directory listing.
Whereas contemporary
PC OSes responded quicker but just locked up when working hard. This
included Windows 2, 3.x, 95, 98 and ME, and also OS/2 1.x, 2.x, and
Warp. The kernels did not support multithreading and background I/O very
well, so it didn’t matter that the hardware didn’t
either.
Then Windows NT 4.0 came along, and it did. Suddenly
the hardware mattered. But if you had a Pentium 1 machine, with an Intel
Triton chipset on the motherboard, there was an innocent looking driver
floppy in the box. On that was a busmastering DMA driver for the Intel
PIIX EIDE controller. Install it on Win9x and it could see a CD-ROM on
the PATA bus. Handy but not world-shattering.
Install it on
an NT machine and once the kernel booted, the sound of the hard disk
changed because the kernel was now using busmastering to load stuff from
disk into RAM. As the machine booted the mouse pointer kept moving
smoothly, with no jerkiness. When the login screen appeared it blinked
onto the screen and you could press Ctrl-Alt-Del and start typing and
your username appeared slowly but smoothly. The stars representing your
password, the same.
It suddenly had that “massive computer
power being used to keep the machine responsive” feeling of an RT/PC the
decade before. Like that PIIX driver had made the machine’s £100 cheapo
IDE disk into a £400 SCSI
disk.
comments
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/93060.html
date: 2024-12-05, from: mrusme blog
“Tokyo, formerly Edo, historically Tokio, and officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital and largest city of Japan. Its metropolitan area is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 million residents. Its metropolitan area is the largest in size and the most populous, with an area of 13,452 square kilometers and its city proper has a population of 13.99 million people. Located at the head of Tokyo Bay, the prefecture forms part of the Kantō region on the central Pacific coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. Tokyo is the political and economic center of the country, as well as the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the national government.”
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/travel/japan/tokyo-2024/
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>Wubuntu is a stripped-down Kubuntu, with custom themes and additional tools to make it look (a lot) and work (superficially) like Windows 11.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/05/wubuntu/
date: 2024-12-05, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Trump’s picks are submissive hacks whose cringeworthy subservience to him will bring down his administration — and possibly America
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-loyalty-and
date: 2024-12-05, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
In 1883, as the Republican Party moved into full-throated support for the industrialists who were concentrating the nation’s wealth into their own hands while factory workers stayed above the poverty line only by working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner responded to those worried about the extremes of wealth and poverty in the country with his book
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-4-2024
date: 2024-12-05, from: Matt Haughey blog
I drove about 550 miles today, across Nebraska on a sunny clear day that was so unseasonably warm I took my jacket off once when I was outside. I trekked into Lincoln and Omaha before I decided to solve yesterday's lingering question of whether I should head to
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/indiana-or-bust-day-3/
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://stanfordreview.org/levin-interview/amp/
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24313549/bezos-trump-optimistic-dealbook-summit-doge
date: 2024-12-05, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
Senators aren’t rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees
https://steady.substack.com/p/tapping-the-brakes
date: 2024-12-05, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/ken-burns-documentary-on-leonardo-da-vinci
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Daring Fireball
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045713-rob-stephenson-is-current
@Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed (date: 2024-12-04, from: Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed)
yep we out here
now speed running the arab spring
[contains quote post or other embedded content]
https://bsky.app/profile/sixfoot6.bsky.social/post/3lciydne5ls2n
date: 2024-12-04, from: John’s World Wide Wall Display
I’d be delighted to hear from others using H5P in Glow Blogs and am alway interested to talk to anyone about these topics.
https://johnjohnston.info/blog/glow-blogs-advent-24/
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045778-the-war-on-poverty-is
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-05, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045779-jesus-this-story-about-a
date: 2024-12-04, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-3-2024-3f2
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/2024-kottke-holiday-gift-guide
date: 2024-12-04, from: Chris Heilmann’s blog
I write a newsletter every week at https://wearedevelopers.com/newsletter with 150k subscribers. Today I recorded the 3 hours I spent putting the current edition together. Here it is sped up to one minute. I use my browser, lots of copy + paste and VS Code.
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045773-bloomberg-businessweeks-j
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I am definitely the last person to hear about ListenNotes search engine for podcasts. It’s incredible. Just starting to explore its capabilities.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/04.html#a154316
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045772-a-universal-plug-and-char
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-04, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I
filled out the Podcast Ideas
page I started as a placeholder on Nov 30. If you have a friend who
works on a podcast client, please send them a pointer to this
piece, or link to it from
your social web accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads or via your blog.
Let’s nurture and feed new features to the open podcast world, ones that
helps creators and influencers build new networks that can only work
outside of the silos. It’s time to start moving the market again, it’s
been stagnant for far too long.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/04.html#a150941
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>Elementary OS 8 "Circe" is here, based on Ubuntu 24.04, with Wayland support in the Pantheon desktop.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/04/elementary_os_8/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-04, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
A year old, but I only discovered it now.
https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/its-easy-not-to-talk-about-it/
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113594488534940547
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Bruce Schneier blog
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, it’s instructive to take stock of how democracy did.
In a Pew survey of Americans from earlier this fall, nearly eight times as many respondents expected AI to be used for mostly bad purposes…
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/ai-and-the-2024-elections.html
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
<p>Fancy spending time refreshing your setup over the holidays? Two of the more popular Windows-style FOSS desktops are about to drop new point releases, one for higher-end machines and one for lower-end kit.</p> https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/04/xfce_mint_cinnamon/
date: 2024-12-04, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends,
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-which-of-trumps-picks
date: 2024-12-04, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-3-2024
date: 2024-12-04, from: Matt Haughey blog
After 10 hours of driving, I covered 700 more miles today, starting in Utah this morning, then across all of Wyoming, and finally into Nebraska in the evening. It took about 12 hours total after a couple stops for quick naps and food and gas along the way.
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/indiana-or-bust-day-2/
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500/
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Daring Fireball
https://1password.com/daringfireball
date: 2024-12-04, updated: 2024-12-04, from: Daring Fireball
Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice — they read today as a postmortem for what happed to Intel over the last 20 years.
https://daringfireball.net/2024/12/andy_grove_was_right
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/trippy-extreme-close-ups-of-everyday-objects
date: 2024-12-03, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog
OK, what’s going on?
Looking at my logs, I’m adding TurnitinBot to my
robots.tx and I’m adding DocSpider to my web
server ban rules because the user agent string doesn’t contain a URL.
I also found an IP number from 147.124.205.0/24 quickly looking at all sorts of URLs, with changing user agents and no bot identification, so that entire network gets banned at the firewall.
And there was an IP number that requested the main page a hundred times. What the hell is wrong with people? They stopped an hour ago, so I’m not taking action.
Let’s see what happens next.
For the moment, the peak is over.
#Web #Administration #Butlerian Jihad
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-12-03-community-wiki
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045769-how-to-win-connect-4
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/werner-herzogs-nihilist-penguin
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045754-roku-offers-a-pbs-retro
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045756-heres-how-the-sun-will
date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
In Government Gangsters, Kash Patel identifies 60 individuals he alleges are part of a Deep State undermining the US government.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03/190202.html?title=allThePeopleOnPatelsList
date: 2024-12-03, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-2-2024-a02
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/the-best-goals-in-football-for-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Today’s song: Where is the love?
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03.html#a172921
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045767-on-standby-is-a-piece
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I frequently have trouble remembering the names of things I want to use in my writing. I’ve come to rely on ChatGPT for help. So I wrote to ChatGPT: “I’m trying to remember the name of the stone that has the key to understanding a language.” To which it replied: “You’re likely thinking of the Rosetta Stone. It was crucial in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs because it featured the same text written in three scripts: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphic. The Greek text provided the key to understanding the other two scripts.”
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03.html#a164214
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045766-maybe-youd-like-to-read
date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I was very happy to see this post on Bluesky this morning from a friend, Matthias Pfefferle, who works at Automattic on the connection between WordPress and ActivityPub.
In his post he asks if there is a BDG for creating a PDS for Bluesky.
A BDG is a Busy Developer’s Guide, something we did first for SOAP in 2001 when we were trying to figure out how to map XML-RPC onto it. Since then there have been lots of BDGs for all kinds of things. It’s a useful concept because developers are often overly busy, so we need to get right to the problem before understanding all the theory behind it. We need an example that works, and we’ll just do what it does. That also guarantees interop, which is the point of course.
Now we have a similar problem. Bluesky stores a user’s writing in a PDS. If we can generate a PDS for our blogs, theoretically Bluesky should be able to see them and use them as if they were created inside Bluesky. If it were easy to understand we could get busy converting everything so it works there. We can do that because we’re using popular simple formats like JSON (see below) to organize our work.
For example this is how I use JSON for my blog, the one you’re reading right now.
Here’s the question. What’s the absolutely simplest way to have that structure of posts represented in a Bluesky PDS?
PS: I had a conversation with ChatGPT to scope this out.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03/162708.html?title=weNeedABdgForBluesky
date: 2024-12-03, from: David Rosenthal’s blog
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arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.War accelerates technological progress. The war in Ukraine has not yet produced “slaughterbots” but it has greatly accelerated drone technology and taken some giant steps toward them. The most important of these steps is that the cost of precision strike has been reduced by 1-2 orders of magnitude, making it affordable for “non-state actors” and even individuals.
The “low-altitude economy” is a big trend in China at the moment. XPeng, one of China’s leading EV manufacturers, recently released a low-altitude flying car for instance. Drone deliveries are becoming increasingly common in Chinese cities, and various regions are actively developing low-altitude transportation networks. Shanghai, for instance, plans to establish 400 low-altitude flight routes by 2027.
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this experiment in Pingyin County might seem small, but it could be the beginning of something truly revolutionary. This is China effectively experimenting around becoming the world’s first truly three-dimensional economy, with low-altitude transportation and logistics networks. In a decade or two Chinese cities might have as much activity happening in the sky as on the ground.
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| By Mil.ru, CC BY 4.0, Link |
That has made some sections of the front lines, for example around Siversk in Luhansk province, practically no-go areas for humans. Drones are now responsible for a majority of battlefield losses, overtaking artillery, according to Ukrainian sources.
The Ukrainian state is buying more than it once was, but voluntary foundations still provide at least a third of all drones used by the army.
.jpg)
Compare this to the US
FGM-148
Javelin with a unit cost of around $250K, a range of less than 5Km
and weighing 22Kg. Is one Javelin as effective as 50 FPV drones
delivering perhaps six times the weight of warhead at more than twice
the range?is a versatile platform capable of mining, bombing enemy positions, delivering supplies, transporting drones, firing an assault rifle or grenade launcher, and relaying communicationsThen there is the night bomber drone the Ukrainians call “Vampire” and the Russians Baba Yaga:
The drone is a large hexacopter (6-rotor) drone. It is equipped with an infrared (thermal imaging) camera and able to carry up to a 33-pound (15kg) rocket warhead.@PStyle0ne1 tweeted video of a Baba Yaga destroying a Russian BUK-M1 air defense system hidden in a forest at night with a precise bomb drop. Drones in this class are also highly effective at laying minefields.
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Baba Yaga was used both as a bomber deploying “mortar-sized munitions” and also as a “mother-ship” drone equipped with a signal repeater, anti-jamming equipment, batteries, and directional antennas. Its ability to function as a signal repeater extended the battery life and range of secondary drones. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the drones have been used primarily at night.
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ZALA
Lancet Nickel nitride, CC0 |
Khyzak REBOFF is a new Ukrainian FPV kamikaze drone with fiber optic cable for communication instead of radio. This makes it immune to jamming , the most effective protection against small drones.The video in this tweet shows that the fiber doesn’t impair the FPV drone’s remarkable agility. And this tweet from the Russian side highlights the high-definition video characteristic of fiber optic drones. This thread discusses the many advantages fiber optics have over radio in drone warfare. However, replacing radio with fiber adds cost and weight, and reduces range.
Russia has deployed similar technology with the Prince Vandal FPV used in action since August, and which has been lethally effective. However, Ukrainian expert Serhii Flash believes this is a Chinese model which the Russian suppliers rebranded and sold to the military (at a 750% markup), and which was not designed for military use.
Attaching infrared and visible light sensors to unmanned systems with onboard object detection and tracking will also increase model performance and targeting effects regardless of illumination conditions. The Ukrainian army is already deploying semiautonomous multirotor drones with onboard edge devices to fly munitions into Russian tanks autonomously.Max Hunter’s Ukraine rolls out dozens of AI systems to help its drones hit targets provides more detail:
Ukraine is using dozens of domestically made AI-augmented systems for its drones to reach targets on the battlefield without being piloted, a senior official said, disclosing new details about the race against Russia to harness automation.
Systems that use artificial intelligence allow cheap drones carrying explosives to spot or fly to their targets in areas protected by extensive signal jamming, which has reduced the effectiveness of manually piloted drones.
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A Ukrainian official told Reuters in July that most first person view units’ target strike rate had fallen to 30%-50%, while for new pilots that can be as low as 10%, and that signal jamming was the main problem.
The official predicted that AI-operated first person view drones could achieve hit rates of around 80%.
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The Russians claim they have recovered a Ukrainian FPV with AI target acquisition and terminal guidance.That is a $130 add-on. Special Kherson Cat tweeted video of an attack:
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The FPV has a ‘Google Coral AI’ single board computer for machine language development.
The 129th TD Brigade stopped a Russian BTR-82 in Kursk region, and finished it off with FPV with an automatic targeting systemThe Odessa Journal’s Ukrainians have created an AI for drones that automatically identifies and strikes targets provides more detail:
Our AI system not only recognizes static targets but also performs precise targeting of moving objects at speeds of up to 60 km/h. It can simultaneously track multiple targets and prioritize one for strikeThe Economist’s How Ukraine uses cheap AI-guided drones to deadly effect against Russia agrees with this cost estimate:
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Unlike traditional computer vision technologies, this system was trained on a specially created database and can recognize seven types of targets: infantry, cars, minivans, trucks, air defense systems, artillery, tanks, and armored vehicles.
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The automatic target recognition range varies from 150 to 800 meters depending on the object type, with the maximum targeting range being up to 1000 meters. The system can be installed on any type of FPV kamikaze drones, including multicopters, wings, and airplanes. It is equipped with its own camera, connects to the flight controller and standard VTX, and drone control is done via a standard remote.
According to the interview, the system costs about $50 more than traditional targeting systems.
Yaroslav Azhnyuk, the founder of The Fourth Law, says that his own “autonomy module” is around $50 to $100 per unit for Ukrainian customers buying thousands of units.The cost-benefit ratio of adding AI is reportedly considerable:
Data from the battlefield suggest that the hit rate for these AI-guided drones is currently above 80%. That is higher than the rate of manually piloted drones. As important, the training burden declines dramatically. Mr Liscovich notes that, although there are now more highly experienced drone pilots, some with thousands of hours of flying time, the average quality of Ukrainian personnel has fallen over time as less motivated people are conscripted. “We can train an operator within 30 minutes and the quality of the engagement doesn’t depend on their piloting skills,”With feedback from use in combat, the performance of these systems is improving rapidly:
Rudimentary object-recognition software has been in use, on both sides, for over a year. But it is getting better. Lorenz Meier of Auterion, a Switzerland-based firm, says that between spring and summer his firm’s software, known as Skynode, managed to double the range at which a drone could engage a target, from 500 metres to 1km or so. He says that improvements in the resolution of images captured by drones have since increased that further. The Economist understands that AI systems are sometimes locking onto targets at perhaps double that distance, far beyond the range at which basic jammers could take out the drone.The innovation cycle is accelerating:
Mr Meier reckons that fewer than a tenth of drones are AI-guided at present. But that number is rising. Ukraine’s innovation cycles are relentless, with feedback loops in some cases down to a few days. The simplicity of FPV drones, which Ukraine builds from off-the-shelf components, can also act as a hindrance: it makes them easy to replicate. One manufacturer says Russian reverse engineering can be as quick as three weeks, but encryption means that the software can be protected from copying.These autonomous systems are still vulnerable to jamming before they get close enough for the AI to recognize the target. Some idea of the intensity of the electronic warfare in Ukraine can be gained from Charlie Metcalfe’s Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense:
Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov hates going to the front line. The risks terrify him. “I’m really not happy to do it at all,” he says. But to perform his particular self-appointed role in the Russia-Ukraine war, he believes it’s critical to exchange the relative safety of his suburban home north of the capital for places where the prospect of death is much more immediate. “From Kyiv,” he says, “nobody sees the real situation.”@GrandpaRoy2 reports that:
So about once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.
He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers—including many soldiers and government officials—on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night—one of which was flying directly above his van.
Both sides in Ukraine are developing video frequency channels lower than the standard 5.8GHz.Here is a thread discussing the hand-held drone detectors snooping on the drones’ video channels.
The Russians are using technology from satellite TV dishes to make a 3.3GHz video channel for their fixed-wing reconnaissance drones.
Ukrainian drone units have developed an analog video board for their FPVs at 1.2GHz, to escape interception and monitoring by the Russians.
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How CRPA
works |
The CRPA antenna exploits the fact that a GPS satellite signal and a ground based jamming signal arrive from different directions. It consists of an array of antennas that measure the direction and time of arrival of different signalsCRPAs can be enhanced with algorithms to defend against spoofing, but they are only partly effective:
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Cometa
CRPA |
Recently Russian Shahed drones have been ‘spoofed’ when their global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) received Ukrainian false coordinates that resulted in them flying back to Russia and Belarus . The “Cometa” GNSS is resistant to jamming, but vulnerable to spoofing.Because both reconnaissance and strike drones are expendable, mass production is critical. The Ukrainian Review reports that:
The Cometa CRPA (Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna) GNSS was upgraded this year to a jam-resistant 8 antenna array, but is obviously still vulnerable to spoofing.
For 2024-2025, MoD have already contracted 1.8 million drones for almost UAH 147 billion.
Long-range drones, FPV, reconnaissance copters, aircraft-type UAVs, attack copters.
Another 366,940 drones are planned to be delivered by the end of 2024.
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Most drone batteries are made in China, which is why the Chinese government was able to pull the plug on battery supplies to U.S. military drone maker Skydio last month.FPV drones may be relatively cheap, but a war consumes them at an enormous rate. The technical problems can be solved but the financial ones are harder:
Skydio CEO Adam Bry reassured customers that they would quickly find an alternate source, but warned that for the next few months Skydio X10 batteries would be rationed — one per drone.
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While not all cells are created equal, they are essentially commodity products manufactured by the billion. They’re made mainly by big players in the Far East; China dominates but it does not have a monopoly. Other sources are readily available.
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To build your own drone batteries, you have to source quality cells from a reliable supplier and assemble them into battery packs. And that is exactly what Ukrainian drone maker Wild Hornets has been doing for some time.
A video on social media explains Wild Hornets’ process. The building blocks for its battery packs are Samsung 50S, which are optimized for high-power applications and have a respectable 5000 mAH capacity.
Last month, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a speech his country had produced 1.5 million drones so far this year, far short of an annual manufacturing capacity of over 4 million. All that was lacking is the money to buy them all.
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Shahed
136 Alexpl CC BY 4.0 |
In Ukraine, hundreds of new drone manufacturers sprung up to meet demand. One of them, FP (formerly named Fire Point), was founded by a group of Ukrainian movie producers and businessmen and released an unmanned mini plane in the summer of 2023. FP’s drone can fly 1,000 kilometers at up to 205 km per hour, carrying 60 to 100 kilograms (130 to 220 pounds) of explosives. Ukrainian forces have so far used them to strike six airfields, two arms depots and a naval base in Russia, according to the company.
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| HX-2 |
This kamikaze drone has a range of up to 100 km and weighs about 12 kg and a speed of up to 220 km/hThis is similar to Brimstone’s capabilities but slower, smaller, longer-ranged and much cheaper.
The main feature of the HX-2 is its integration with advanced machine vision algorithms, which provide autonomous target recognition and their destruction even with active electronic warfare.
Ukraine’s new drones are also cheap. A kit of 10 Fire Point drones plus a control station and transport, including three mobile trailers, costs $580,000. That’s a fraction of the cost of military drones produced by western arms manufacturers, though it’s still a stretch for Ukraine’s military budget. FP says it can produce at least 500 drones per month, but that Ukraine’s defense ministry struggles to buy a fifth of that.
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“It is the primary heavy machine gun of NATO countries and has been used by many other countries as well. U.S. forces have used the M2 longer than any other firearm except the .45 ACP M1911 pistol, which was also designed by John Browning.This tweet has video of one of them downing a Shahed 136.
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Yak-52
and kill |
The Yak-52, which costs mere hundreds of dollars per flight hour, presents a cost-effective solution against drones valued around $100,000. In a remarkable three-month period starting May, the aircraft reportedly shot down at least a dozen Russian drones, with increasing kill markings documenting its effectiveness,
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Over a field east of Poltava, the sound of a 4-cylinder piston engine rumbles through the quiet of the night. A small electronic box attached to a cell tower records the sound, identifying the audio profile of a Geran-2 loitering munition, and transmits the data for processing. Responding to an alert, two soldiers fire up the engine on their Nissan pickup truck and go speeding down the road to the grid coordinates provided. In position, they scan the horizon in the direction of the attack. They have only a narrow window of opportunity. Tracers arc into the sky from their old but reliable DShK, their efforts rewarded as the drone disappears in a fireball.
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these models can be further categorized into either ‘reconnaissance’ or ‘strike’, with 11 reconnaissance models and 3 strike models, of which 850 and 20 were intercepted,Note that this analysis confirms the effectiveness of the drone interception campaign but shows it started in late August.
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It should be noted that this study does not include examples and video footage of Russian FPV interceptions; we note that the presently recorded ratio is 870:8 in this regard.
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In mid-2023, faced with the ever-growing threat from Ukraine’s first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones, Russian tanks and armored personal carriers (APCs) began being fitted with so-called “cope cages” aimed at limiting the impact of attack.
Initially these took the form of improvised crude grills, frames and screens to protect their turrets and other vulnerable parts. Over time, the cages became bigger, eventually covering most of the vehicle, with reports that anti-drone grills were being fitted to newly built tanks and APCs in the factory. They also started to appear on Israeli tanks moving against Hamas in Gaza.
In early April this year, Russian troops, seemingly concerned that their improvised and even factory-fitted grills weren’t providing adequate protection, began supplementing their cages with armored boxes covering the whole tank
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U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.Given the incredible lethality of drones in Ukraine, this seems like a problem. The WSJ story provided more details:
Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors.
For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.
The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.
The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.
Over 17 days, the drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back. Some shone small lights, making them look like a constellation moving in the night sky—or a science-fiction movie, Kelly said, “‘Close Encounters at Langley.’” They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them.The swarms were clearly a sophisticated operation:
Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley, he said, were unlike any past incursion.
U.S. officials didn’t believe hobbyists were flying the drones, given the complexity of the operation. The drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air and smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower. Occasionally, they hovered.Shaheds do sound like lawn movers, fly around 100mph, and have the endurance to fly several circuits of Langley between 6pm and midnight. General Kelly might have over-estimated the length; the fixed-wing drones may have been Shahed 136 equivalents. The map shows the vast area from which a Shahed 136-class drone attack on Langley could be launched.
They came from the north around 6 p.m. to traverse the base, which sits on a peninsula at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and continued south, beyond the reach of radar. They repeated the pattern and then disappeared, typically by midnight.
offered few specifics about the incursions but talked about some of the steps NORTHCOM is taking in the wake of those incidents.But these drones weren’t their problem:
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Replying to our question, Guillot told us he did not know if they were tracked back to their recovery point or whether they could have been launched by a vessel off the coast.
The Langley incursions were among more than 600 reported over U.S. military installations since 2022, NORAD stated Tuesday. In the wake of the rash of drone activity over Langley AFB, NORTHCOM was tasked by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to look at drone incursions across the U.S., Guillot said.
“I saw that NORAD’s responsibility for countering UAS was very limited to something that would be an attack of national consequence,” he explained not the small drones as seen over Langley and elsewhere. NORTHCOM, meanwhile, has no responsibility or authority to take action, because the services are charged with securing their facilities.Altman explains that the Dept. of Defense has had their head in the sand about the threat for years:
As we have frequently reported, there have been unidentified drone incursions for years over U.S. military installations, warning areas, and critical government facilities. Among them were a very similar repeated rashes of claimed drone sightings in Colorado in 2020 in an area where many of America’s ICBMs are based. Another took place at the Palo Verde nuclear facility in Arizona in 2019.Using FOIA requests, The War Zone’s Jospeh Trevithick, Adam Kehoe and MARC Cecotti have revealed similar reports dating back to 2016. The Press Association’s Unidentified drones spotted over three UK airbases, US air force confirms makes it clear this isn’t just a US problem:
Also in 2019, drones swarmed over a U.S. Navy exercise taking place 100 miles off the coast of California, raising concerns that an adversary was trying to suck up critical intelligence, including very sensitive electronic and signals emissions of America’s most advanced air defense and command and control systems.
More recently, we were the first to write about drone flights over the highly-secure Plant 42 in Palmdale California that were so concerning a temporary flight restriction was issued for the airspace over the facility.
Unidentified drones were spotted over three airbases in Britain used by the US air force (USAF)And also:
“Small unmanned aerial systems” were seen between 20 and 22 November over RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.
A mystery drone was seen trailing HMS Queen Elizabeth, the British aircraft carrier, as it entered the port of Hamburg, in Germany, on FridayThese incursions are continuing.
in the Rio Grande Valley sector of Texas alone, Border Patrol has faced over 10,000 drone incursions and 25,000 drone sightings in just one year.An academic study of this problem is Narco drones: tracing the evolution of cartel aerial tactics in Mexico’s low-intensity conflicts by Ghaleb Krame, Vlado Vivoda and Amanda Davies,which:
examines the evolution of drone tactics employed by drug cartels in Mexico from 2017 to 2022. The research traces the increasing sophistication of drone technology, payload capacities, and adaptability of cartels in employing airborne drones in low-intensity conflicts.Note that this research does not include developments driven by the Ukraine war. The rapid cost reductions in drone technology since likely mean much greater use of drones by criminal organizations.
“I think there’s certainly a role for fighters. There’s a role for non-kinetic or low-collateral kinetic capabilities that would be at the smaller end. And then I’m a big proponent for advances in directed energy, laser and high power microwave. So those non-kinetic capabilities that bring a kinetic result of bringing down the systems, and I think it has to be layered in today’s today’s threat.”
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Even if counter-drone policies are clarified and solidified, and authorities get expanded, there are still other concerns at play, especially when it comes to collateral damage. Shooting something down with a gun-based system or a surface-to-air missile carries inherent dangers of projectiles or interceptors, or debris from them, falling onto innocent bystanders below. The aforementioned Centurion C-RAM fires specialized self-destructing ammunition to reduce these risks.Here, for example, is an Oerlikon Revolver in Ukraine firing air-burst ammunition. But the ammunition isn’t the only problem:
The drone, or what is left of it, which could include undetonated explosive warheads or other potentially hazardous payloads, would also fall to Earth in an uncontrolled manner after any such engagement.The Russians frequently explain burning oil refineries and similar mishaps on debris from successful interceptions of drones. Someone whose house was destroyed by the 50Kg warhead of a shot-down Shahed 136 would have reason to be upset. Deciding on a suitable counter-drone policy is complex:
Maybe even more importantly is that these weapons do fail and they are packed with high explosives and traveling at high speed, which could cause very unpredictable harm to people and property in a large potential impact area. Then there is the idea that you have to know exactly what you are shooting at, and that can be harder than it sounds when dealing with strange objects in the sky, especially in populated areas where civilian air traffic is dense. Making the call to shoot down an object over the U.S. is an incredibly complex task that never actually occurred until recently.
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Tower
22 |
Three American service members were killed and dozens more were injured in an unmanned aerial drone attack on a base in Jordan on Sunday, President Biden and the U.S. military said.How was the drone able to penetrate US defenses and kill or injure more than 10% of the base occupants? Drone that killed US soldiers in Jordan followed American drone onto base, causing confusion by Natasha Bertrand, Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky explains:
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Mr. Biden said the attack happened at a base in northeast Jordan, a U.S. ally, close to the border with Syria. A U.S. official said the attack occurred at an outpost known as Tower 22, where roughly 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel are deployed, according to the Department of Defense.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East, initially put the number of injured at 25, but two U.S. officials soon said that figure had risen to more than 30. CENTCOM confirmed later Sunday night that at least 34 had been injured. Eight of the wounded service members had to be evacuated — some were in critical condition but all were stable, a defense official told CBS News.
The drone that killed three US Army soldiers and wounded dozens more in Jordan on Sunday approached the US military outpost, Tower 22, around the same time an American drone was returning to the base, which led to uncertainty over whether it was hostile and caused a delay to the US response, two US officials told CNN.These problems don’t go away if the counter-drone technology is electronic. Confusing the drone’s navigation with GPS spoofing or detaching an FPV drone from its pilot using a jammer may prevent it reaching its target but it doesn’t render it harmless to innocent bystanders.
The enemy drone followed the American drone as it approached, but it is not clear whether the enemy drone intentionally followed the American one or if it was a coincidence, one of the officials said.
Last night, Russia attacked Ukraine, launching a record number of strike drones—188—against our people. I want to thank our defenders of the sky for repelling the attack. Around 80 drones were shot down, and more than 90 were lost due to location disruption.A mysterious feature has been Ukraine’s reluctance to attack Russia’s electric grid, especially since their economy and military are completely dependent upon freight trains hauled by electric locomotives. This may have been part of the US’ “escalation management”.
Unfortunately, there has been damage to our critical infrastructure, and the situation in Ternopil remains challenging. All services and repair crews are on-site, doing everything to assist people and restore electricity as quickly as possible.
Precision strikes from a distance are a common practice of state warfare. However, the global proliferation of precision strike technologies, like missiles and armed drones, makes such weapons progressively available to non-state armed groups (NSAGs). We look at Daesh in Syria and Iraq and at the Houthis in Yemen as two case studies to analyse the consequences of this proliferation for non-state warfare.The Houthis, with help from Iran, have used precision strike systems much more sophisticated than the ones I deal with here to cause a major disruption to world trade, and to cause Western nations to expend vastly more expensive systems in a futile attempt to stop them.
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Now, scientists are attempting to make a motion sensor so precise it could minimize the nation’s reliance on global positioning satellites. Until recently, such a sensor — a thousand times more sensitive than today’s navigation-grade devices — would have filled a moving truck. But advancements are dramatically shrinking the size and cost of this technology.
For the first time, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have used silicon photonic microchip components to perform a quantum sensing technique called atom interferometry, an ultra-precise way of measuring acceleration.
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Besides size, cost has been a major obstacle to deploying quantum navigation devices. Every atom interferometer needs a laser system, and laser systems need modulators.
“Just one full-size single-sideband modulator, a commercially available one, is more than $10,000,” Lee said.
Miniaturizing bulky, expensive components into silicon photonic chips helps drive down these costs.
“We can make hundreds of modulators on a single 8-inch wafer and even more on a 12-inch wafer,” Kodigala said.
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Quantum inertial systems for commercial aircraft are undergoing
flight tests in
the
UK and
the
US. The image shows the unit Boeing is testing.
Mentour Pilot’s
video provides an accessible introduction to the
technology.
Even with Sandia’s progress in reducing the size and cost of
quantum intertial navigation, the technology is currently far out of
reach for low-cost drones. But if progress were to continue it would
mean that a drone, or more likely a drone swarm, could navigate to any
target whose coordinates were known without using any external
assistance that could be jammed or spoofed. Electrical grid transformers
would be one such target.
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/12/drones.html
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/does-every-species-get-a-billion-heartbeats-per-lifetime-1
@Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed (date: 2024-12-03, from: Ryan Gantz Bluesky feed)
weirdos flex but ok
[contains quote post or other embedded content]
https://bsky.app/profile/sixfoot6.bsky.social/post/3lcfwkqkcuc2s
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-12-03, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045734-merve-emre-converses-with
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
We’re looking for a Busy Developer’s Guide to Bluesky’s feed format.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03.html#a132136
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-12-03, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Wake up babe, a new Roy Casagranda just dropped
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bb8Z4j7h7A
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113589036413504479
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
BTW, another thing journalism is getting wrong, the FBI is not the squeaky clean organization they present it as.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03.html#a125809
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-03, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
President
Biden
pardoned
his son. I have no problem with that, because his son was accused as a
proxy for his father. If there is any legitimate use of presidential
pardons, this is it. Perhaps relatives of the president should also be
immune from prosecution. Does anyone really think
Hunter Biden
would have been tried for such petty crimes if he weren’t Biden’s son?
The journalists, as always, have equated two
very
different things. They’re playing their own game, trying to
self-pardon in a way, to avoid being a target for the incoming
administration, which we’re all scared of, and I guess that’s the point,
to scare us.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/03.html#a124843
date: 2024-12-03, updated: 2024-11-27, from: Bruce Schneier blog
In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics—but it won’t necessarily be for the worse.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to be more inclusive. AI avatars were used by presidential candidates in South Korea in electioneering, enabling them to provide answers to thousands of voters’ questions simultaneously. We are also starting to see AI tools aid fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts. AI techniques are starting to augment more traditional polling methods, helping campaigns get cheaper and faster data. And congressional candidates have started using AI robocallers to engage voters on issues. In 2025, these trends will continue. AI doesn’t need to be superior to human experts to augment the labor of an overworked canvasser, or to write ad copy similar to that of a junior campaign staffer or volunteer. Politics is competitive, and any technology that can bestow an advantage, or even just garner attention, will be used…
date: 2024-12-03, from: Robert Reich’s blog
President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter is understandable, but it inadvertently gives Trump ammunition
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/pardon-me
date: 2024-12-03, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Last night, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported that Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth, had been forced to leave previous leadership positions at the advocacy groups Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America because of serious allegations of “financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-2-2024
date: 2024-12-03, from: Anton Zhiyanov blog
A multi-purpose concurrency tool.
https://antonz.org/go-concurrency/channels/
date: 2024-12-03, from: Matt Haughey blog
I hit the road this morning around 9am, and just pulled off 40 miles into Utah for the night. After driving 12 hours and 742 miles, I'm about a third of the way to Indiana (total is ~2,250mi). Everything is ahead of schedule because I'm
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/indiana-or-bust-day-1/
date: 2024-12-03, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
My name and email address can be found in the VPN client application made by Cisco called AnyConnect. They are present there as part of the curl license, because this product – like thousands of others – uses libcurl. My name appears in many products. Apparently, people often have problems finding an appropriate address to … Continue reading No need to email me about Cisco AnyConnect
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/03/no-need-to-email-me-about-cisco-anyconnect/
date: 2024-12-03, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-1-2024-525
date: 2024-12-03, from: James Fallows, Substack
‘In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning.’ That was F. Scott Fitzgerald, in words I think about at 3 am.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-night-watch
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.wsj.com/tech/googling-is-for-old-people-thats-a-problem-for-google-5188a6ed
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045757-libertarian-reluctantly-c
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/musical-skiers
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/02/ep-415
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045763-my-friend-youngna-is-a
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045758-when-a-telescope-is-a
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Daring Fireball
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLHQGGN5?tag=df-amzn-20
date: 2024-12-02, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Cool things I saw on my road trip up the California coast. Patterns Exterior details Interior details
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/02/visual-details-california-coast/
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/playing-music-with-barcode-scanners
date: 2024-12-02, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Raspberry Pi boosts Pi 5 performance with SDRAM tuning
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><strong>tl;dr</strong> Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a <em>32%</em> speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon.</p>
My quest for the world record Geekbench 6 score on a Pi 5 continues, as a couple months ago Martin Rowan used cooling and NUMA emulation tricks to beat my then-record score.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/raspberry-pi-boosts-pi-5-performance-sdram-tuning
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Daring Fireball
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045761-madeleine-riffaud-hero-of
date: 2024-12-02, from: Om Malik blog
Last week, I wrote about a study conducted by TRG Datacenters that assessed the digital quality of life across U.S. cities by measuring metrics such as download speed, number of internet service providers, and customer ratings. I had some follow-up questions, so I requested access to the underlying data from the folks at TRG. I …
https://om.co/2024/12/02/californias-top-broadband-cities/
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045760-metaphorical-lessons-lear
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045759-after-37-years-the-80s
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/always-interesting-52-things-i-learned-in-2024
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-12-02, from: Jason Kittke’s blog
https://kottke.org/24/12/0045755-best-tv-shows-of-2024
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-02, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
WordLand
is the easy editor that writers using WordPress always deserved. I
updated the docs this morning
to include very basic getting started stuff, and it now includes a link
to a form where you can apply to be a tester. At this time it’s limited
to people who know how to write a bug report, how to find and read the
JavaScript console in a web browser, and take a screen shot that shows
clearly what went wrong. This the hardest part of getting a product fit
for general use, and I’m too old to try to wrangle workable bug reports
from well-intentioned users who basically aren’t scientists. This time
I’m determined to do this the right way without excess wear and tear on
me. 😄
http://scripting.com/2024/12/02.html#a140946
date: 2024-12-02, updated: 2024-11-21, from: Bruce Schneier blog
I recently wrote about the new iOS feature that forces an iPhone to reboot after it’s been inactive for a longish period of time.
Here are the technical details, discovered through reverse engineering. The feature triggers after seventy-two hours of inactivity, even it is remains connected to Wi-Fi.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/details-about-the-ios-inactivity-reboot-feature.html
date: 2024-12-02, from: Robert Reich’s blog
Friends,
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/musks-dangerous-bullying
date: 2024-12-02, from: Matt Haughey blog
I'm doing something unusual this week. Tomorrow morning, I'm taking off in a 2003 Jetta Wagon TDI on a road trip for over 2,500 miles to Indiana to drop the car off, then I'll fly home.
Why I'm doing this is
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/indiana-or-bust-day-0/
date: 2024-12-02, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talked about in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. The salon was held at the latter for locals and on Zoom for the world, at Noon Eastern time on Wednesday, December 4th. (Upcoming salons are […]
https://doc.searls.com/2024/12/01/community-library/
date: 2024-12-02, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Over the holiday weekend, President-elect Trump continued to name the people he wants in his incoming administration.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-1-2024
date: 2024-12-02, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Say ‘Cheese’! The Little Cheese Shop in Dingle on Saturday night. Quote of the Day “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Bismarck Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Grace | The … Continue reading
https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-2-december-2024/40146/
date: 2024-12-02, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-30-2024-f9d
date: 2024-12-01, from: Dan Rather’s Steady
There is no way to sufficiently express my gratitude to all of you who’ve offered your condolences.
https://steady.substack.com/p/a-note-from-dan
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’m using the term “RSS-based podcasts” in place of “podcasts” to make sure whoever reads it knows to ask the question of other “podcasts,” are you RSS-based? The best answer is to encourage YouTube et al to just connect their “podcasts” to RSS and everyone’s happy. Like “organic cheeseburgers.” :-)
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a213715
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
One
way to help RSS-based podcasts is to promote individual episodes
from the past. Sometimes shows are done, but the archive contains good
stuff. Not everything is based on current events. Music, art, history
for example. Also bring the feed out from hiding. At least the nerdy
people should understand how this stuff works. One of the big crimes was
when the browser makers tried to hide the feeds. I like to be able to
lift the hood even if I don’t understand what I’m looking at.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a204028
date: 2024-12-01, from: Matt Haughey blog
A smattering of favorites from the last 30 days: We saw Christine Sinclair's last home game in Portland, then some sort of election happened, we went to a concert, I went on some bike rides, I did some exploring then we went to Kansas City to see the
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/november-2024-in-photos/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
The Big Interview with Dan Rather podcast is gold. Just listened to his interview with Steven Van Zandt of the E Street Band and the Sopranos. There are nine seasons of this podcast between 2013 and 2021. Going to keep me busy for a while. The RSS feed works.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a201620
date: 2024-12-01, from: Matt Haughey blog
I remember when the first wave of 3D printers morphed into consumer products, somewhere around 2009 with Makerbot being a thing finally within reach of mere mortals. But I remember them as extremely finicky, where you had to print out half the parts to make the rest of it once
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/ok-fine-3d-printing-is-amazing-2/
date: 2024-12-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
He can turn the Democratic Party into a party that’s once again on the side of the little guy.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/winkler-for-chair
date: 2024-12-01, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
Do you have a blog post you’re stuck on or want feedback on? As a gift to the indie web community, I am offering to provide a developmental edit for up to five bloggers this December. What I’m offering I will provide feedback in writing for one draft blog post — whether the draft is […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/01/gift-to-the-indie-web-i-will-edit-your-blog-post/
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
For the record, Bluesky has completely taken over from Threads. Threads is basically at zero, needs something to shake it up. Obviously this could be different for everyone. And engagement on Twitter is pretty close to zero. I still check there periodically because despite what people say a lot of people I follow still post there. And I do too, since cross-posting costs me nothing. And it has been pointed out that deleting your Twitter account comes with a fairly huge risk. And if you do it, I wouldn’t announce it, because anyone apparently can claim your account once it is completely deactivated. And that could create some problems for you. Probably better to hold the account indefinitely.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a154838
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
I’ve exported the data from Bingeworthy 2 in JSON and uploaded to a new public repo. It can be used to seed the ratings table for the updated instance.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a152223
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
And welcome to the time of year you can’t remember what the day of the week is. For what it’s worth today is Sunday. Feels like Monday?
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a141136
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
And here, for the record, is the archive for November. A relatively lite month, only 87K worth of text. The norm is about 120K.
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a141059
@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-12-01, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)
Welcome to the last month of Scripting News in the year 2024. Each year goes by faster and faster. And as we move forward in time, there’s less room in front of us on the runway of life, and more behind us. At some point in the next decade my plane will probably take off. I feel a sense of urgency about getting it done. Still a fair amount on my todo list, but I’m making progress. As someone once said many times: Still diggin!
http://scripting.com/2024/12/01.html#a140918
date: 2024-12-01, from: Robert Reich’s blog
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-remains-of
date: 2024-12-01, from: Tracy Durnell Blog
What’s special about online writing? Blog posts, microblog posts, email newsletters, social media posts, comments — these are self-published pieces of writing by regular people, most of whom are not getting paid to write. Most people would have had limited access to this type of writing fifty years ago, when self-published writing was zines and, […]
https://tracydurnell.com/2024/11/30/the-impact-of-online-writing/
date: 2024-12-01, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-29-2024-5d9
date: 2024-12-01, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-30-2024
