Allen Pan #humor #video #manufacturing goofy nonlethal #weaponry like a “bola gun”.
#video #toread showing a “God’s Eye view” of the dropoff in traffic on the Strait of Hormuz from last night, drawing from public data sources.
#shorts #video showing some mechanical #jugaad tricks: screwing a bottle over a padlock to prevent rusting, running a machine screw through a tapped hole in a box-end wrench to make it adjustable (the tip of the screw being the movable wrench jaw), improvising a sort of hole saw or fly cutter for PVC pipes by driving sharp-tipped screws through a metal plate (with a larger pointed screw serving as the center), using a locked tape measure on a nail as an improvised compass, milling a slot into the end of a large machine screw to wind a wire into a spring along the screw thread, welding a bike chain to a steel pipe for a sort of improvised chain whip for turning hex screws, replacing one of the knuckles of a pin barrel hinge with a torsion spring for self-closing doors, and a rather dubious tool for tracing irregular wall contours onto wood.
Sallie Winchester of the Winchester Mystery House was not superstitious. #history
#USA is partly evacuating multiple military bases in the Middle East following attacks from #Iran, totaling a few thousand evacuees. “The Navy does not yet have an answer for what will happen to cars and furniture left behind in the rush to leave. The Navy is also not telling evacuees when or if they will be returning to their bases in the Middle East.” #politics
all the wonderful images we’ve been seeing in the #news of the damage to US bases will be cut off now: “Satellite imaging firm #Planet-Labs said on Saturday it will indefinitely withhold visuals of #Iran and the region of conflict in the Middle East to comply with a request from the U.S. government.” #USA #censorship
notes on #low-power #electronics design (powered by #NFC)
shared #LLM #neural-networks hosting, halfway to #self-hosting #AI, “multiplexing on a 3rd party GPU cloud”. esafak mentions vast.ai and TensorDock as alternatives.
SDL port of the old IBM PC game Sopwith (2). #videogames
Was the dress gold and white, or was it blue and black? The latter, it turned out. From 02015.
“Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation” #AI #neural-networks #paper #toread (April fool?)
Robert Fulton’s Skyhook, featured in a James Bond movie. #history #pdf
the #USA war crimes statute law Hegseth violated the other day
#Bangladesh is rationing gasoline because of the war in #Iran
#censorship on Moscow’s internet service, with an attempted whitelisting regime, trying to move messaging onto VK’s new "MAX" clone of WeChat. Bank cards aren’t working reliably.
Direct current microgrid standards, but only if you give them your personal information. #energy #futurism #electronics
#video on "backstugas", #Sweden’s dugout #housing, of which 50,000 were recorded in the 01885 census. Walls typically timber or stone. Overlapping birchbark sheets over planks waterproofed the roof, held down by sod. Dwellers were “backstugasittare”, who owned no land, the poorest of the rural poor. Mostly stock photos with an AI slop voiceover. The Laga Skifte land reform confiscated the village common land they were built on, and industrialization provided employment.
#Lisp is like the Plank Road in Naperville obsoleted by the #AI railroad
#humor #history #video about medieval inns, taverns, and alehouses
#news #video on the rescue of the lost #USA fighter pilot from #Iran today
#news #video from 60 Minutes about how #drones from the #Ukraine war have transformed war, and what that means for #Iran. Says Ukraine now produces 4 million drones a year. Profiles Roman Tkechenko’s #Tencor ground drone company, Air Logix, and its investors, former US Marines William McNulty and Lenore Caraffa, with their investment fund specializing in Ukrainian weapons (“UA1”?). The guy Ukraine has in charge of drones says they have about a one-week feedback time from designing a drone to incorporating feedback from its use in the field into the next generation of drone design. #weaponry
#news #video #interview of #Palmer-Luckey from two weeks ago. Apparently he’s mass-producing robotic "Ghost Shark" submarines in #Australia now, delivering the first submarine a year ahead of schedule. He describes himself as a “caricature” and a “larger-than-life character”, and says that gets him retweets, which is only helpful for recruiting. Only about half of #Anduril’s products are public, he says, choosing to single out Fury, the autonomous fighter jet. The first Arsenal-1 production lines are going live in a few weeks, so, I guess April, rather than the planned June, and will be making Barracuda, Fury, etc. He expects it to be in full-scale production by Q2 02027. Oh, and he says he has prototype autonomous #subterrenes. #weaponry
#video #interview with on #Ethan-Thornton of "Mach Industries", a 22-year-old making #weaponry called Viper, Dart, and Stratus, and who thinks that balloons will be the key to future air warfare because of their asymmetry: 100× more costly to shoot down than to put up. He’s the one that took Venom (which he calls Pike) from concept to flight in 71 days. He blames the names on the government. He is mostly talking about wars with “hundreds of thousands” of #flying weapons, perhaps unaware that Ukraine and Russia build millions of #drones per year.
#news #video #interview with MIT dropout #Ethan-Thornton of #Mach-Industries from 7 months ago. He suggests that priority targets for swarms of #drones would be cellphone towers, high-voltage transformers, and cranes in ports, in order to “stop your industrial machine”, war crimes similar to those Trump is threatening in Iran this week. Shows Stratus (balloon-based), Viper, and Glide. Thornton envisions coming out with new models every 6 months or every year, a sharp contrast to the one-week roundtrip touted in Ukraine. He’s also very focused on decentralizing #manufacturing because he expects it to be a target in war. #weaponry
full 4-hour #video #interview with #Ethan-Thornton of #Mach-Industries, 3 weeks ago. The interviewer, Shawn Ryan, is this ex Navy SEAL dude who is into some bullshit about supernatural beings building the pyramids.
Thornton doesn’t really understand the Tragedy of the Commons, thinks it’s about companies making insufficient profits because of competition.
Atlas Shrugged is his favorite book.
His childhood summers were fixing old tractors and combines on the West Texas farm of his grandfather farm, who also had a hobby of building and flying experimental aircraft.
He got a visit from the ATF in high school after he started Mach at 16 because he built .50-calibre oxyhydrogen rifle #weaponry and had paid a machinist to build a better one.
“I think the stratosphere is sort of the most important military domain moving forward.”
Also as a teen he stole his mom’s credit card and bought a microscope and two sheep’s brains online to learn about neurosurgery.
He says he’s motivated by “individual sovereignty”, which is why he’s passionate about #Ukraine’s national sovereignty, but “China/Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important”.
“Decentralization” is also why Viper is vertical takeoff: so there’s no runway to bomb.
He envisions making up to 2 million Vipers and having them do everything a fighter jet can do, although right now it’s a kamikaze.
Ryan points out that decentralization means discarding the entire world military infrastructure of bases. Thornton points out that it means you can’t require a tanker to refuel. Containerized anti-ship missiles mean any container ship is a potential destroyer in disguise.
Thornton mentions Anduril’s "Eagle Eye".
At 2h48m Ryan presents him a rifle as a gift.
He says the company would not be in business today if he hadn’t moved from Austin to Huntington Beach, in Orange County, CA, where 95+% of the engineers he needed to hire lived (“niche RF, niche propulsion, niche GNC”).
Both Ryan and Thornton are fairly right-wing, but both agree that the US government has lost a lot of trust internationally and needs to regain it, in particular alluding to Trump and Vance’s shenanigans to increase European defense spending and to #Trump’s unpredictable #tariffs, but don’t see how that trust can be regained. Also interesting to hear Thornton express concern about and opposition to the “terrifying” “neofeudalist” planned obsolescence of iPhones, John Deere tractors, etc., which I normally think of as a left-wing concern.
#video #toread about #underground #dwelling #bunkers in #Ukraine