This is some relatively technical Polish bluegrass. lol, a fun string of words. Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, they sound like a tight band. Tight, as in, playing almost perfectly together all the way down to the 16th notes. This is almost assuredly performed in one take with the whole band. I'd kill to know how much editing went into it. Are they this tight live?

I don't think their drummer is playing to a click track, which is pretty cool. That fast bass plucking is probably three fingers, very cool, and there's some pretty snazzy chords on the guitars in there.

We had it mostly nailed down 2000-some-odd days ago:

And:

The only questions are: low-frequency (edit: nope, high-frequency) acoustics or microwaves, and if microwaves, intent, because it could be unintentional (see details in previous threads).

I think Havana syndrome is a real thing, but I understand the suspicion. Were there a place in the world where the Russians would do this, it'd be Cuba. Not just b/c of Cuba's Russia-friendly regime, but because it's like 100 miles from continental U.S. soil. And it's tradition, hah.

Yes, exactly. I still think it's possible, but if the (assumed real) afflictions continued long after public reports, which have obviously been out for many years, I guess that more or less settles the intent question. And if they're doing it elsewhere, not just Cuba... intent.

But also... the intel agencies know what it is. I'm about 99% certain that they're about 99% certain what's doing it. If we can think through it here even somewhat well, and they've got teams of people working on it, even part-time, presumably they can e.g. build a device to detect a microwave source (or lack thereof). Nor would it be hard to detect ultrasound or sub-sonic acoustic stuff.

I think the press release is "we'll pretend we don't know exactly what it is to give you one last chance to fucking stop it". And:

Still, it remains unclear why it took American officials so long to acknowledge the problem, and why they still show no sign of having a plan to solve it.

Nah I don't buy that. I think releasing the amount of info in the article is part of the plan to solve it. I dunno why else intel agencies would go forward with this. You're not gonna hear stuff like

U.S. officials told 60 Minutes that a senior U.S. Department of Defense official was targeted as recently as July 2023 at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania

otherwise.

I agree that suspicion is always warranted when it comes to our intel agencies and Russia's, but I don't know what U.S. national interests would be furthered by lying about this. The idea (mine, just now) that this is a psyop designed to make MAGAs realize that Russia is bad has me giggling though (edit: I mean because you'd basically need to make Putin kill Trump live on camera in Times Square to change their minds, at this point)

I'm working on a Halloween album, Spooker of the House. Can't tell you how much fun I'm having with it. Start from scratch every song. Design my own synths, shape my drum samples custom, lots of chromatic and minor scales for spookiness, sampled my squeaky garage door, etc. The album will be tied together by a guy (me, many people are saying) broadcasting over the radio as he makes his last stand against some unnamed monsters. Yesterday I uploaded a song for a mix check (mono Sonos speaker, car audio, studio stereo monitors, phone and laptop speakers, airpods) and soundcloud suggested a tag for the genre: Moombahton. My song's not really moombahton at all, but it was a genre that I'd never heard of before, which is pretty rare, so I'm gonna spend some time listening to it in the near future. I'll probably steal some Moombahton elements for another track on the album, 'cuz Spooker of the House is a variety of styles, but loosely all electro pop. And my bandmate for a different music project is recently sending me some good stuff to chew on (lol, looks like that guy has a set of electronic tenor drums, which is what I played on drumline back in the day). I bet that guy grew up with this band.

I'm gearing up to code something in a few weeks that'll be pretty engrossing. An expansion and refinement of some code I wrote a few years ago which will make video data products unlike anything else in the world. There's also another blossoming corner of my field that I'm keen to familiarize myself with, so that'll be fun. I already have enough new content for two or three pretty quick papers, so it feels like it's gonna be a year or two that I can really have some fun while still staying productive.

Can't wait for the solar eclipse on April 8th. Got some family coming into town for it. My parents live pretty close by, in the path of totality. My relatives can have the guest bedroom, it should be pretty nice weather for camping in the yard.

Our TV reporters are like

touches earpiece

"... I'm being told that somebody, somewhere, is saying the words.."

glances down at the page in front of them

  SECOND NAKBA

looks back up at the camera

"... well, it's.. it's certainly some words, words that describe how they're feeling, which is likely quite bad at this moment. And now we're going to get back to clips of U.S. officials parroting the IDF. Thank you."

I read the chat with 'bl00 and spence, and I think my cynical takeaway is that once a country can make nuclear weapons, they can do almost whatever they want to any non-nuclear regional powers, using the threat of proliferation.

It's pretty sad that we'll just let Israel be expansionist, even if it takes a genocide to hasten in their perceived manifest destiny. We didn't ever really admonish Israel for their political oppression of Palestinians, but it's nice to know that a rapid, violent military op is also fine. U.S. foreign policy is moreso about an attempt to justify ongoing atrocities in the name of possible future atrocity prevention, sounds like. It reminds me of effective altruism, honestly.

Watching all this while my country uses the UN to shield Israel from accountability? Fucking sucks. My heart goes out to Palestine. But all of the tankies supporting Palestine who also fetishize Russia are a fucking joke, at least everyone can agree on that. It'd be hard for me not to wanna police them out of the pro-Palestine camp in America. And the camp is small. Very small.

Good friend of mine served as an adjunct prof, and suffered with low enrollment for a couple years. Then he offered a new course, an elective, on top of his standard PHYS 201 and PHYS 302 stuff: The Physics of Superheros. After that, he didn't have enrollment issues. I think people went through the course catalog and decided to have him as their prof for the standard stuff because he was teaching the superheros course, which filled up pretty dang fast. Marketing genius.

It's a shame showing a lack of successful measurement isn't rewarded or even encouraged.

Truth. I got scooped once, by a matter of days, was just about to submit to a journal, and one of my advisors said, basically, "oh well. next time." I was like "well it's kind of a complimentary paper, reconfirming the same physics", and they said "so what? you gotta be first." Same idea, though. Even though the paper would have contributed to the field, I was discouraged from publication. I should've published anyway, in hindsight, just like all the null results and other reconfirmations. But especially so, because the paper was already written and everything.

grad students span gamut from 'wait, why isn't B a constant?' out-of-their-depth beginners to the likes of you, who probably shake their head at visiting professors' inexperience with methodology.

Eh, not common at all. Only once has this very notably happened, I think, when some theorists with no idea how particle spectrometers work were trying to use our data to do something with relativistic gauge invariance. They got shot down pretty badly at a conference. I just went off googling, and I can see they never published. Righteous, the process works! But it's very true that grad students in physics are selected primarily through their skills in mathematics, which is obviously necessary, but I've seen how often some of the students very skilled with maths struggle when they get into research. Creativity, critical thinking, and math skillz rolled into a single person is super rare. There were only one or two people in my class of twenty that had all three, and it sure as hell wasn't me.

By the way, it's funny because I'm still in grad school, hah, for just one more week! Fell off the wagon for a few years. Went to rehab for booze. Doing much better. I should probably write a pretty lengthy post about rehab, though. My god, what a funny experience.

Nobody shoots private industry in the foot like private industry.

And who can forget the LK-99 thing last summer?

That's what I thought your post was about, bfx. But nope, a completely different superconductivity let down. I'm impressed someone laid out this particular saga in longform.

Several other researchers told the news team that the principal investigator does not typically produce all the plots. “That’s weird,” Canfield says.

lol this is so commonly true. So many grad students will run the labs for like 80 hours a week, gather the data sets they were told to, and then have no idea what any of it means. Instead of the advisor telling them, the boss'll just swoop in and publish, and the lab rats will be lucky if they get a coauthorship. It's also a reminder that my advisor was so badass that he can't be stopped from making his own plots. He writes code code, not just toggling image and graph settings.

It's perfect that the story ends with him lying about his work on Twitter. Primo perfecto.

Can't believe they got Jason Statham back for Transporter 10

If SCOTUS felt like they needed to "supremely" settle whether or not a president is immune for crimes while presidenting, they had the opportunity to do so, when Jack Smith put the question to them in December. They said "nope, we don't want to", and punted it back to the DC appellate court. The three judges in the appellate court wrote a long, technical ruling savaging the Trump camp's arguments, which was appealed, like we all expected. So it's back to SCOTUS. For them to now say "oh, wow, well we haven't really thought about it, and we'll have to hear oral arguments, hmmmmm, how about starting in two months?" is a fucking joke. We all know that they won't allow absolute immunity, because that'd be irreversibly squandering the power of the judiciary, among other issues. The appellate ruling was so well done that it would have been more than acceptable to slap the SCOTUS seal of approval on it and call it a day, either by not taking it up or with a quick certification, or at least by expediting the process like they have for the Trump vs. Colorado insurrection-ballot-removal case. This affects the election too, so if one case requires quick attention, so should the other. Coincidentally, the quick Colorado case ruling is going to help Trump, and the slow presidential immunity ruling is going to help Trump.

I've heard people say that this schedule is actually pretty fast-tracked for this SCOTUS, and... OK? I do not give a shit that they've already lowered the bar of expectations for themselves. This is obviously a massive win that they have handed Donald Trump, and not by accident. Any dumbass arguing in good faith knows that this needs to be resolved ASAP, and that's simply not what they're doing. And they know it. Pretending like this is even worthy of their time is part of their act.

He doesn't even really need to pardon himself, because DoJ won't prosecute a sitting president. But I agree, he'll do it anyway, for fun, and headlines, and because now the taxpayer will be picking up the tab for all the legal proceedings.

I have also realized, maybe about a year ago or so, that he'll never go to prison, no matter what. But a conviction on the J6 stuff might finally be enough to tank him in the election.

It's funny because we hadn't proven our inability to understand fascism enough, we needed to unquestioningly back Israel. At least we had Russia right, all of us, for a while, but that's more than officially over for MAGA.

Oh which reminds me, Biden's probably going to lose a lot of the Muslim vote, for obvious reasons, but maybe also partially for what may be a not-obvious reason to many folks. Fascism's a global problem. I think we are exporting.

It's also funny that the "anti-globalists" are buddy buddy with fascists all around the globe. Ha ha

edit: btw, when I was in your neck of the woods we had three (of three) first generation immigrant Lyft drivers, all of whom were Trump-friendly. One guy even commented when we were on 1st street "Look at all the businesses boarded up from BLM. Terrible." Maybe they thought because we said we were Texan we'd be into that, though.

Yeah. Gonna be a lot of LLM Florida man stories.

barely slept since Friday

Same. But I do like checking back in here when I hit a roadblock at work. It's synergistic.

Good luck with your coming week. Mine's gonna be crunch time, but I think I'm almost ready. Peaceeeee

... I'm unlikely to trust LLMs with stuff I don't know a lot about.

That is the only way to fly, in my opinion, and we haven't discussed this much (edit: well nah we kinda have), but people aren't going to use it like that, obviously.

Don't blame you for any filterings. I kinda like livening up this place. It's LLM season on hubski, baby. But one last quick story! I'm a couple miles from home standing in line to order a burger (probably in flip flops again) and a guy gets in the to-go line. Says "Order for so-and-so", and the cashier checks the order tickets. Nothin'. He says "I called such and such number". She refers to some post-its behind her, and sees that it's the other branch across town that he called and ordered from. He then says "watch", pulls up his phone, and goes "Siri, call Restaurant X on Street Y" (where we are), and it was replicable, it dialed the other branch again. He goes "so it's not my fault. I should get some food for free, I already paid". And I think he did. And he cut everyone in line. I wasn't in a hurry, it was nice to have front row seats for such a prescient demonstration.

It's gonna be a fun time.

But it doesn't have to know what it is. You're thinking about a conceptual understanding in the range of artificial general intelligence. The LLM's just gonna tell you something that's probably right, if you prompt it well. I think of current model capabilities like:

It'll probably get "What is 5+7?" right every single time.

If you ask it "I have five apples, and then I get seven more. How many apples do I have?" it'll get it right maybe 99.9% of the time. Most of the 0.1% is probably "seven".

If you ask it "I've got two friends from out of town and three local friends meeting up with my family of seven, how many seats do I reserve a table for?" it'll get it right maybe 99.5% of the time. The 0.5% should be interesting. "Everyone". "One hundred and fifty wedding guests". "Tables near you are mostly made of oak wood. The median price at Lowes and Home Depot is $497.21.

And so on.

You might be able to bully an LLM into nonsense, though. If it wasn't bullying, like a real disagreement with model outputs, maybe you're better off tracking down the source material (which is hopefully part of the output) and seeing what's up if you're at all unsure. In either case, you have no way to really affect the source training model material unless the owner lets you in somehow, like by ingesting the conversation back into the LLM with a super high index of certainty or something. Otherwise, as soon as you close the window you bullied it in, the thing "knows" 5+7=12 again, i.e. it'll spit out the right answer almost always.

It could be good for virtual learning, but the mistakes could be devastating. Hey, it's just like regular learning.

Ahh, of course, the feedback thing. I don't do anything live, so I can just get away with a pretty simple gate and headphones. No chance of loops. Hadn't really thought about how I would suppress feedback loops without killing the channel or at least lowering the volume. But now I completely get it. I got really close to connecting the dots a long time ago when I suggested basically TEF in a convo with you a few years back. My mistake was thinking about mixing. I was thinking about minimizing phase cancellations as a function of frequencies. But duh:

My co-worker would bolt a plasma spectrometer with accelerometers on it to a vibration table with some special isolators between the instrument and mounting baseplate, and we'd shake them with a sine sweep survey starting from like 1 Hz up through, I dunno, 40 kHz or something like that, and a power spectrogram level was input to govern the amplitude around each frequency. JUST like what you're doing with mics? We do it too. We'd already calculated the approximate normal modes of the instrument from 3D CAD models (we used Ansys), and so we notched the input frequency spectral energy around the normal modes so we don't overdrive the thing during vibe testing. And then we shake it with the launch environment, a white-noise spectrum, still modestly notched around the normal mode frequencies (which might have needed slight readjustments from the sine sweep results). By the way, at GSFC, they have like a 10 foot diameter gramophone to just blast shit with. I'd guess it was for Saturn V's, hahah, but I don't know! Didn't get the story. (edit: ohhhhh, I think it might've been for cleaning, especially considering that it was being kept in one of the anterooms bordering a clean room. They must be using the thing to knock any loose particles off of equipment or instruments with sound. We did the same thing with an ultrasonic bath after de-greasing parts with trychloride, before the final isopropyl wipe down. They'd soundblast it after that. Probably a pretty clean room.)

What you get is uncanny valley nightmare fuel

Which has its uses, heh, though perhaps mostly uncommercializable.

I also pointed out that if you ask an LLM "give me the stochastic mean of this vector through a set of points" you are using the LLM as it was intended to be used - it will give you the mediocrity every time and, because it's basically a hyperadvanced Magic 8 Ball every now and then it will be brilliant.

Absolutely agree. The LLM is navigating topological features inside a parameter space. With boundaries, and curvature, yeah. It's what I'm doing for the magnetosphere, actually. Same kind of idea. Except with I dunno maybe a billion axes instead of the four I use. But yeah, sometimes if you move just a little bit in the parameter space from where you started last time, or you start off in a slightly different direction, the topology might map to some drastically different places. Occasionally they will conjoin into beauty. AISI; artificial idiot savant intelligence.

Hadn't heard any AI tunes yet, and figured there was good reason for it. I don't go looking for them, and a really good one would have found its way to me by now if it existed.

...people who don't need AI...

We don't, agreed. I only want it for selfish reasons. And I only want it if I can feel assured it isn't going to cripple society. So I don't want it. Nvm.

Feels like we're all getting a better handle on the level of complexity to expect though. It'll change. Hopefully not too fast, this has apparently been jarring enough for the world already, but AGI in two years? I just don't think so, and I'm 100% sure that ASI isn't only three years out.

Since I'm like public journaling now instead of just allowing thoughts to pass through my head without any reinforcement and then showing up to hubski like "oh, I don't have anything", I'll give an example. "If I tried to LLM at work".

There's a global model of the magnetosphere and surrounding solar wind environment that I run through a public website. I query the model for a certain day or time that I want (step 1). Wait a few days, then I look through the results and do the science (step 2).

For step 1, there is no benefit in having a program input the date and time with a few choices that I make for which sub-components of the magnetosphere model I want to use, because it takes about five minutes. For step 2, the way that I look through the data requires an entire methodology in which I'm using outputs from the model to re-input back into the next time-step for visualization. I'm tracing magnetic field lines through time/space and the magnetosphere as it convects (I've automated it using a python webcrawler and maths to produce a movie). The idea that I could simply ask an LLM to do this is pretty funny. It's so specialized that I can guarantee it would fail immensely to know wtf I meant when I said "take the results from this model run and show me a movie of magnetospheric convection. I want bundles of magnetic field lines that pass through the reconnection site near satellite XYZ emphasized". I think the amount of additional information I would need to feed it for the thing to even come close is infinite, because it's probably never going to give me something good. More on that below. But let's say that it does. It's the game of "how do I know it's right?" again. I've gotta inspect all of the code that it wrote to do it, and I can guarantee that it's gonna be an implementation that's a way different structure than mine. I'm going to put in so much effort checking it that I'm not going to save an iota of time.

OK, so I have my video, one way or the other. I can now look through it and do the actual science, linking it into an analysis of data from that satellite. There is simply no fucking way that any LLM or AGI on the foreseeable horizon could do this. Doing the science means comparing the new m'sphere model outputs to the existing data analysis, linking new interesting/publishable physics of the two, discussing how this is different or similar to previous studies, and thinking about how the results can be applied towards the next step. It requires a deep understanding of how this contributes to the field. This is at least approaching ASI territory.

Furthermore, for the science, the LLM or whatever it is has no interest in images. It only cares only about model outputs. It would actually have to perform the conjugate of what I have to, and take the images from previous movies of magnetosphere convection and put them into a form for comparison with the magnetosphere model output data. The whatever it is will have to know how to transform the data into formats suitable for comparison, and then it'll have to have correctly ingested the publishing record to form a pseudo-understanding of everything. Can't imagine the lengths it would have to go to output something like "we can see that if the only difference is a Y-component reversal of the upstream magnetic field in the solar wind, the reconnection site moves southward towards the spacecraft, because the X-line is shifting to accommodate cusp reconnection relocating from the cusps on the dawn and north and dusk and south quadrants to the dawn, south and dusk, north quadrants, respectively". Would the Whatever know that it'd be good to run the magnetosphere model I used for the period of time used in the previous study, which used a completely separate m'sphere model, to factor in the differences between the two models that might explain the behavior instead? Does it know that it's important to comment on the distance from the satellite to the reconnection site? Is the data analysis conclusion that the satellite is at a reconnection site actually wrong? Are there shortcomings in the m'sphere model that help explain why the m'sphere model's reconnection site differs from where we actually found it?

It's obviously not advisable to expect this inside of two or several decades. Maybe it could build me a movie, but I doubt it. Unless I am guaranteed a running instance of my efforts to coach it is preserved and always available should I achieve a successful/correct movie once, or that any new pseudo-understanding I had to lead it to is properly assimilated into the root system, there's no reason to even begin trying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not something publicly available yet, and I can see massive hurdles to it ever happening. lol, what am I gonna say? "That's right! You finally did it. Now, don't forget how to do this the next time I ask, I don't want to have to spend another seven months filling in the gaps in your understanding of this again"? Hahahha

"Filling in gaps of understanding" deserves a dissection, because it's more general, not just for physics or science, but for anything. The process looks like hell. Because, like we've said, the LLM doesn't know what's "correct", it's not going to ask you any substantive questions. It's going to output what it outputs, and you'll have to look at the outputs, and tell it why it's wrong. Iteratively. Having it fix one thing could break another. It could even infinitely diverge instead of ever converging on the solution you want it to. This all assumes that you know what you're looking for, what "right" means. And then, even if it does get things right, yeah, unless you work at the company that owns the LLM, it's all forgotten when you close the instance.

Job security. Job security for all!

I could honestly benefit from an involved re-visiting of philosophy, but it doesn't really feel terribly necessary, all things considered, at the moment. This is my field's IFLS. Except not, because it's just flat out wrong, as opposed to a flavorful interpretation of quantum mechanics.

No worries, fam is good. I'll periodically re-enter an "oh shit, it's fascism!" check-in phase, but I try to keep it Stoic more of the time, these days. Like, I'm not chanting the serenity prayer, just wishing for the same thing more often than I used to.

They're about as informal as flip-flops anyway.

OH, that reminds me: For your consideration, I'd like to submit the most American thing ever done, possibly. I wore my flip-flops to the McDonald's in downtown Bern, Switzerland, while unknowingly incubating covid that I'd gotten on the plane ride. A homeless woman outside goes "PLUGH, l'Americaine!", and all I could do was think to myself "I know, right?".

Since I hate myself, I watched Trump's speech from yesterday. Nobody has to read this. There's no surprises. I'm just cataloging, because it was hella relevant. Hellevant. Hell event.

This one's a bit different than a typical rally or campaign event because he's addressing an explicitly Christian evangelical audience. This is like, the base of his base, and he knows exactly who he's pandering to. He knows exactly what their issues are. Truly though, he is a very skilled orator, and I don't really question whether he's as late along in cognitive decline as maybe some other people, maybe just one guy, out there, maybe running for president as well.

One of the biggest, longest cheers was when Trump began talking about support for Israel. He blamed Biden for Oct. 7th. He even had a guy come up on the mic and tell a remarkable tale of fictional Zionism tailored to an American audience. Painted Trump as Israel's savior. Amazing. Then, for a solid five minutes, Trump proceeds to tell the construction details for the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem that he had relocated there (maybe he truly missed building things? idk). No teleprompter. Frequently throughout the entire speech, he's just riffing. It's very, very, very well received.

The narrative about the Iran deal is hilarious. "We canceled the nuclear deal. It was a bad deal. Obama's. Then we imposed sanctions on their oil, which were very successful. But Iran still got a lot of money somehow, and now they're building a nuclear weapon, and Joe Biden has done NOTHING." It doesn't have to be true or remotely make sense. Besides, favorable foreign policy will be awarded to countries with leaders Trump likes, so hopefully you're fantastically wealthy, you're a fascist strongman, and you've already appeased him by kissing the ring.

He praises SCOTUS, and Clarence Thomas (only Clarence Thomas) by name. Gonna privatize schools. Gonna "defeat gender ideology" (he'll probably use the word "exterminate" in a few weeks or so, in case it was unclear what the insinuation might be). Gonna pardon J6ers. If you pick any other issue and find the worst option, that's the policy platform.

Earlier in the, uh, the show, Trump tells them to their faces something like "the communists try to destroy religion, and fascists co-opt the religious for their own power. Fascists like Joe Biden. Don't fall for it." I love this, this is an especially strong "fuck you", straight to me. Right into my mouth. It's a fascist little shitgoblin telling me that he knows exactly what he's doing, that he knows that I know what he's doing, and that we both know I can basically do fuckall about it besides vote. Why not lay out exactly how to do fascism while pulling the fascist trick of saying, actually, no, it's the other side doing that. He can say anything. It doesn't matter to these folks anymore. All of the reports suggesting that Trump has replaced Jesus as the head of the evangelical church? Yes. Yes, he has.

He seems to draw physical power from losing court cases. I'm pretty sure he's convinced he'll avoid prison. I think so too. I think that he'll win the election, but even if he doesn't, and then, even if he unleashes hell on Biden after losing, he'll never get locked up. He might ultimately be pardoned by Biden, if it comes to that, to "preserve the dignity of American presidency". Or something.

Anyway, the Israel stuff is pretty new. And abhorrent, obviously. It dominates the speech, easily the most time spent on a single topic. Trump also repeats his claim that he'll "settle" the Russia-Ukraine war within a day. We all know that "settle" means do everything that he can to give Putin Ukraine, right? Surely we all know that. Perhaps Trump can re-appropriate any ex-Ukraine funds to the massive deportation operation they're gonna try. Keeping kids in cages was child's play. Haha. Wordplay.

It's fuckin' wild to live through this. The logical endpoint of the republican party, who're hellbent on destroying the country if they can't have it after radicalizing themselves into a bunch of hate-worthy, corrupt morons. This will not end well. The sooner the better.

['X0Oo_am_Unitoinz'_e-hubski_bAdtimes_dairy_oO0X'] post 11/??

previous

Oh good, I guess I'm on the right track, I just hadn't really sat down for a few minutes and thought about it in a while. Welp, I'm off to mumble "I'M THE WEAPON" to myself and plaster a bunch of Punisher stickers on my car.

TBH if you don't like capitalism, you should like this.

Don't go all accelerationist on us!

Seriously though, this is but the latest salve of "things will get worse before they get better". If enough things get worse all at once, there really isn't a guarantee that they'll get better for a loooooong time.

I'm trying to find the upside of this. Unless I'm a capitalist looking to lay-off a huge number of workers, fuck this shit.

So yeah, fuck this shit.

Any nuke set off in low Earth orbit, where all the military stuff is, presumably, would cook a few satellites in the nearby vicinity, but the rad belts are further out. Only LEO stuff with a high orbital inclination (i.e. passing through the auroral zone) would see prolonged exposure. We build military stuff with some pretty beefy rad shielding, I'm sure. Jupiter's natural radiation environment is pretty crazy too, we had to thicken up everything for JUNO. Dat magnetosphere. But yes, it does worry me that a detonation of an intercepted nuke or two in space could knock out enough military satellites to initiate a chain of events that would play out no better than if the first nuke or two had made it to their targets. I guess a lot of it depends on if the things go off or not. It would not surprise me to learn that the Russians build their nukes with something like a deadman's switch, where if anything went wrong, it was rigged to blow, whereas the Responsible Nuclear Arsenal would only detonate if it knew it'd reached its target.

The directed photon thing would require enough precision that I do question whether or not the Russians are capable of developing it properly. The speed of light would be non-negligible, you'd have to aim ahead of anything you're trying to hit. It's one thing to aim for a satellite you've been tracking for days, months, or years vs. an ICBM (or multiple) with about a 20 minute window to detect, track, and aim for. And actually, I think directed photon beams are our best chance to de-orbit space junk, which would require even more precise tracking and beam directivity 'cuz most of that shit is on the order of a millimeter. So I hope it's being developed for non-military applications (he said, knowing full well that it's already out there in military use by at least one country.

edit: now I'm thinking about an ICBM capable of little jittery movements in space to evade this scenario. You could course correct once you got back down into atmosphere thick enough to absorb most stuff up in the X-ray regime. You'd need some hella powerful impulse thrusters, though. Now that sounds like a fun project.

I think you're right, from a financial perspective, it's fine, but I wonder how it'll affect the site's content and culture.

How it went

Doesn't sound like the reddit IPO is going well, last I heard.

Finished book #1 of The Exapanse series. Pretty good physics. Another 8 books left. Daunting.

I'm down for invite-only memberships, but idk about taking the whole site private. There's some really good stuff here that should be public-facing.

SCOTUS just declined to rule quickly on the question of presidential immunity, the crux of most of Jack Smith's prosecution.

Fuck SCOTUS.

kleinbl00, my push pins are probably going global. I'll do domestic and international.

Thanks. Yeah I'm still around, just too busy most of the time to post much.

My wife is a huge sci-fi fan. She read all 9 books and wanted me steeped in the lore. She's also watched the entirety of the show, which I started with her, but backed out after an episode or two because I didn't want it distorting my experience of the literature. My wife fucking rocks, obviously.