The secretive weapons were found to be electronic massagers modified with a flammable magnesium-based substance, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

One source said these incendiary devices do not get caught by traditional security controls

Well, I guess prepare for air security to care more about vibrators than in the past.

As he was arrested, the DOJ alleged he was at the rear of a vehicle with the drone powered up and the explosive device was armed and located next to the drone.

In September 2024, Philippi drove with undercover employees of the FBI to an electric substation previously researched and targeted by him and Philippi conducted reconnaissance of the substation. The DOJ alleges that while driving, he ordered a plastic explosive composition known as C-4 and other explosives from the undercover.

He later allegedly purchased black powder to be used in pipe bombs, which Philippi intended to use during the attack. The DOJ said he contacted another confidential human source, “If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis.”

Philippi also allegedly discussed operational security, including the need for disguises, the use of leather gloves, wearing shoes that are too big, the need to burn their clothes after the attack and not bringing smartphones on the night of the attack.

Then, on Nov. 2, 2024, he participated in a Nordic ritual, which included reciting a Nordic prayer and discussing the Norse god Odin. Philippi allegedly told the undercover that “this is where the New Age begins” and that it was “time to do something big” that would be remembered “in the annals of history.”

I imagine that it’s kinda an unpleasant moment when you abruptly discover that all your fellow white supremacists who have been working with you towards this glorious moment of blowing stuff up are actually FBI agents.

No, but it goes both ways. They have missiles aimed at us. We have missiles aimed at them. They probably aren’t gonna be better off if they use theirs. As long as we structure stuff such that escalation from them is disadvantageous to them, and as long as they’re acting rationally, they’re incentivized to not act, whether in smaller things like bombing airliners or larger things like the missiles.

Sure, but that was accidental. If they could have avoided that shootdown, they would have, and while I have no doubt that a lot of countries were annoyed by them not paying compensation, they were also aware that Russia wasn’t intentionally trying to shoot down an airliner.

If Russia, say, adopted a policy of sending fighters into Poland and firing missiles at any airliners they find in Polish airspace, that’s going to garner a more-unpleasant response.

The timeframe is pretty short.

That might be doable down the line if there were serious aims at long-run cooperation, but I’ve also read some articles making a case that due to divergent interest, Russia and NK probably won’t stick tightly together post-war.

Guess we’ll see.

I’m guessing that they’re gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.

I expect that it’s some degree of problem, no matter what.

One element that’s kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is a decision-making model developed by United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Booda+site%3Amil

The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they’re still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases – think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time – it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.

Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.

In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea

The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.

Unfortunately, these didn’t use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn’t work in English.

As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would – assuming no extra relays were involved, which would involve more decoding and encoding – hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.

One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that loop.

I’m not that worried about this.

It wasn’t a good idea for Iran back when Iran tried bombing airliners as leverage.

I am even more comfortable saying that it’d be a bad idea for Russia.

Russia could, no doubt, bring down airliners one way or another if it were set on doing so, but:

• I think that it’s very questionable that Russia actually benefits from escalation. That will only happen if Russia is (a) being irrational (not impossible, but diplomats can go bang on that), or (b) we’ve dicked up managing the escalation ladder. Russia doesn’t come out on top in pretty much any kind of conflict with NATO, so trying to generate more conflict once Russia hits the “there is a response” threshold, which they are definitely past, seems like a bad idea.

• What’s the worst that happens? Maybe a coordinated attack on multiple airliners, kills a few hundred, thousand people, destroys a handful of jets? I mean, sure, that’s bad, but it’s not that big a deal as interstate conflict goes. Like, if Russia wants to attack in some way, that’s a pretty bad way to expend the advantage of surprise.

Maybe the idea could be that an attack couldn’t be firmly attributed to Russia, especially if Russian intelligence tries paying people in country to do something, as was the case IIRC with those arson attacks earlier, but then it’s at least more-difficult for Russia to use that as leverage. Like, trying to make use of the window where you both have plausible deniability so that the other side doesn’t feel like they’re on firm enough ground to act and actually feels confident enough that you were responsible to be affected by using it as leverage seems like a very narrow and dangerous place to act.

If it were a fantastic way to conduct interstate conflict, then this sort of thing would be the norm in interstate conflict, and it isn’t.

These projects would hinder Sweden’s defense by disrupting radar, sensor systems, and submarine detection, important for NATO’s newest member given nearby Russian threats.

Hmmmmm. Haven’t seen discussion on the radar or other sensor implications there. Be interesting to see The War Zone or similar run an article.

If one can viably use offshore wind farms as radar cover, that seems like it might be something to look into developing counters for more-generally, because those are probably going to become more widespread.

That’s probably especially true for Europe and some places in Southeast Asia, as they’re surrounded by shallow seas, where there may be a lot of offshore wind infrastructure showing up.

EDIT: Going the other way – China might be building offshore wind, and we probably have an interest in having subs be able to operate without being detected in the South China Sea, I wonder if it’s possible to synchronize submarine prop RPM to turbine RPM or something to maximize stealth.

EDIT2: For radar, might be able to use aerostat-based radars, see over turbines. Won’t help with microphone arrays or whatever, though. Could maybe stick sensors on the wind turbine bases, though. Add some cost, maybe, but then instead of a veil obscuring your view, you’ve got a lot of eyeballs.

EDIT3:

V Adm Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of Nato’s allied maritime command (Marcom), told the Guardian in April: “We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy through cables, internet cables, pipelines. All of our economy under the sea is under threat.”

Yeah, that’s a whole 'nother ball of wax. As I pointed out back during discussions around Nord Stream 2, there is literally not even legal protection for pipelines, as things stand.

The only protection for cables today is a treaty negotiated in France in the 1800s intended to cover telegraph cables (like, they weren’t running HVDC lines then).

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Submarine_Telegraph_Cables

That does not limit coverage just to data cables (despite the phrasing in the WP article I link to).

Dates to 1884. That’s the state of the art legally in the world in 2024, which is kinda mind-blowing.

My guess is that the US never had a strong reason to drive this, because the US is mostly surrounded by deep seas and doesn’t have anything important nearby across water, so not a whole lot of reason to build submarine infrastructure in relative terms or for it to be really critical for US security.

But the legal status is probably a lot more important for Europe, which has the Scandinavian penninsula, is mostly made up of penninsulas surrounded by shallow seas, has Africa across the Med, stuff like that. I think that there’s a good argument for the EU to have internal legal rules, like, Brussels-level powers to facilitate things like building pipelines and power lines overland rather than submarine. You had Spain trying to build critical infrastructure submarine around France to link the Iberian energy island to the rest of the EU rather than through France because France didn’t agree, which is a clusterfuck, but even if they do that, there are still some inescapable geographic realities – they’re probably going to still have more incentive for submarine infrastructure. So my suspicion is that Europe is likely to drive any change in the legal situation.

EDIT4: Potential areas of improvement might include:

• Legal requirements on where ships, or maybe large ships, can anchor. Anchor-dragging, “accidental” or not, can damage lines.

• Some mechanism for providing legal protection for infrastructure in international waters, especially pipelines.

• Some mechanism for quickly detecting and localizing damage to infrastructure. Possibly also detecting mechanical disruption, like dragging.

• Possibly the means to defend infrastructure. Part of the problem is that you can take out a lot of infrastructure at the depths they’re talking about with a COTS UUV from a surface ship that, last I looked around the Nord Stream 2 thing, was like $20k. That means that counters to something like a submarine, like lining your infrastructure with the equivalent of CAPTORs, isn’t gonna be economically effective; you can’t counter a group of 10 of those showing up at some point along the infrastructure. I have no idea if it’s even possible to reasonably counter attacks using current technology, even if they can be detected. Being able to attribute attacks to an attacker and deter them might be more realistic.

deleted by creator

The Guild represents more than 600 software developers, data analysts, and designers

The Tech Guild has been negotiating a contract since March 2022

If you’re a software engineer in New York City and you want more pay, in all seriousness, I’d think that working for someone other than the New York Times would be an easier route than staying there and trying to extract more money from the NYT or dicking around with a union. Like, your skillset is applicable elsewhere, and newspapers have been having a rough time of it. If they aren’t paying market wage, just walk over to another employer.

kagis

For the New York City Area:

New York Times, New York City, Software Engineer:

Facebook, New York City, Software Engineer – a tech company that, last I was paying attention to software engineering salaries, had a reputation for strongly-competitive compensation:

Americans have grown smug. They’ve never seen war at home. Not truly.

Outside of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, no adversary in war has ever had the military ability to significantly impact the contiguous US, and while that may well happen one day, it isn’t gonna be Iran of 2024 who changes that run.

It’s also not likely that any country will have that ability near term outside of a preemptive nuclear strike, and a country set on doing that has to be able to counter or accept the US response, which I don’t anticipate any country doing in the near future.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/we-asked-a-military-expert-if-the-whole-world-could-conquer-the-united-states/

More-realistic concerns might be terrorism or economic pressure.

strikers probably don’t feel financially safe extending the strike.

https://myedmondsnews.com/2024/11/machinists-union-leadership-urges-approval-of-new-boeing-contract-offer/

Leaders of Boeing’s aircraft machinists union are recommending striking members approve a new contract offer from the company that would raise average annual pay for the workers to nearly $120,000.

With the latest offer, the company proposes a 38% general wage increase over four years

If a 38% raise is $120k, then they’re currently averaging $87k/year.

If you’re making $87k/year – and that’s individual income, probably have a bunch of dual earners – you really should not be living paycheck-to-paycheck. That doesn’t even have to do with strikes, just should be maintaining an emergency fund.

I would call Hades and pretty much anything people call an “action roguelike” a roguelite, but I have a hard time calling something not a roguelike for using graphics, even being pretty strict about the definition. Like, there are a number of originally-ASCII roguelikes that have tilesets. Those don’t functionally change the game in any way than other than directly dropping the tiles in. Does that mean that Nethack-family games or Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup aren’t roguelikes?

My red lines are:

• Gotta be turn-based. Maybe I’d accept a purely forced-turn version of a turn-based roguelike, like Mangband.

• At least some element of procedurally-generated maps and loot that alters how one needs to play the game from run to run. I’d definitely call many games that still have many handcrafted maps – Tales of Mag’eyal 2 or Caves of Qud, say – roguelikes.

• At least the option for permadeath, and that that be the primary mode of play. Some Caves of Qud was originally permadeath-only, but added a mode that avoids it.

• Grid-based. Hex grid is fine, like Hoplite.

Those are Berlin Interpretation elements. In addition:

• Top-down view (or functionally-equivalent, like equivalent, like isometric). I wouldn’t call a first-person grid-based game – and there were a lot of 1980s and 1990s RPGs that used that structure – a roguelike.

• Only direct control of one character at a time. I wouldn’t rule out Nethack for indirectly-controlled pets or Caves of Qud for letting one switch which character the player’s “mind” is controlling.

I don’t think that I’d make it a hard requirement, but all good roguelikes that I’ve played involve a lot of analysis and trying to find synergies among character abilities or item or monster or map characteristics, often in nonobvious ways. That’s a big part of the game.

I dunno if it’s the worst relative to historical stuff for Lahore and Delhi, but India tends to be at about the back of the pack globally when I look at AQI maps.

kagis

https://waqi.info/#/c/6.168/6.699/3z

They’re gonna have some pretty hefty smog going on.

.io is especially popular because it resembles the computer term “input-output.” It is huge with start-ups and IT companies.

Well, those companies should also have the technical chops to know better.

I still think that most of opening up the TLD space was a mistake, not just the two-character stuff. Very few new TLDs have actually provided a lot of use, but they have created a “brand tax” on companies that don’t want confusing use of similar registrations and who then go register the equivalent domains.

.biz vs .com is a great example.

Another replied: “The real lesson to be learned here is that a lot of people would clearly attend a Halloween parade and Dublin City Council should organise one next year.”

It’s going to be kind of funny if a hoax announcement winds up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

you don’t directly vote for the president,

Well, okay, so, the US does have the electoral college, and strictly-speaking, you’re choosing electors that choose the President, but the election is and has for a long time functionally been a direct one. That is, you know the person that you are voting for in voting for the elector. Some states don’t even constitutionally let electors vote for anyone other than the person they have pledged to vote for, and in any case, the electors are chosen by the parties, who have no incentive to choose someone likely to vote for anyone other than the candidate that they’ve pledged to vote for, so it’s not really an aspect of the electoral system in the normal case. While false electors exist, normally as a protest vote if they know that their candidate can’t win, they’re rare and have never altered the outcome of an election.

This came up this year in some discussion in the context of what happens if a President drops out after being placed on the ballot but prior to becoming President, which I assume is what you’re thinking about, so that the electors cannot vote for the person on the ballot, and in that situation, yeah, they’d have to find some kind of fallback.

But that’s a pretty limited corner case. That is, they don’t just have a blank check to go out and build coalitions and select someone.

Kagi has an AI search option which IIRC is on by default – or at least was at one point – where it’ll try to also synthesize an answer and stick it in a box with the results, but you can just turn it off in your preferences. I have it off.

There may be a day when we have AI assistants that are so good that their summaries are better than looking at the original source, but I’d put a high bar on that, and think that we’ve got a way to go.

I don’t have a Google account precisely because I want to make it harder for Google to build a profile on me, so I probably don’t see profile-based data other than the limited extent to which Google uses IP geolocation as an input to results.