Cthel Ars Praefectus
6y
11,052
Subscriptor
odikweos said:
Wow. Not even one commenter mentioned the possibility of Chinese competition.

The real story here is exactly when cheap Chinese competition completely erodes the global demand for American launch. It's happened in industry after industry, and the state-owned "company" that handles the matter for PRC just succeeded at its first retrieval last month.

And no one apparently even has this on their radar.
That's because the US outlawed launching anything containing a single US-made component (including software) on a Chinese launch vehicle.
https://spacenews.com/u-s-itar-satellite-export-regimes-effects-still-strong-in-europe/

Massive fines tend to make the business model for launching on a Chinese launch vehicle unviable. //

Mdoug1974 Smack-Fu Master, in training
1y
18
The one and only reason SpaceX holds a monopoly as Gwynne Shotwell has stated many manby times is that all the other launch service providers have failed to provide any competition.

SpaceX cannot be blamed for its competitors failures to bring rockets to market in sufficient numbers to make a challenge.
Shotwell has in so many interviews stated that SpaceX welcoms competition because it will force them to work harder, better and smarter.
Nobody has been even able to start being competion yet. and by the time they do starship will be flying, and maybe Falcon 9 will be slowing down.

SpaceX have to fly F9 until the ISS is shutdown as they are contracted to do so, and starship willnever be cleared to ISS unless somebody(Boeing) re-calculates all the stress and mechanical loading of attaching a fully finished Starship to the ISS.

The company that is almost exclusively responsible for the dramatic increase in launch availability in the 2020s has signaled that it intends to wind down Falcon 9 operations as quickly as possible in favor of the larger Starship rocket. Some might see that as a good thing due to Starship’s enormous payload capacity. But there are growing concerns that SpaceX will largely focus on its own payloads—Starlink v3 satellites and orbital data centers—because of their potential to drive far greater profits. The Starship rocket’s PEZ satellite dispenser, optimized for Starlink, is an indication of the company’s priorities.

In financial documents, it’s clear that SpaceX views commercial launch as a rounding error compared to revenues from its own satellites in space. A majority of the company’s revenue ($4.3 billion out of $7.8 billion) during the second quarter of 2026 came from Starlink, whereas less than 12 percent was due to space services, of which commercial launch is but a fraction. This disparity is only likely to widen.

SpaceX has already moved beyond “peak” Falcon 9 operations. The company flew the rocket 165 times last year, and it will probably fly about 20 fewer missions this year. SpaceX is already making ground system changes to reflect these reductions. //

Whether or not these dates stick, it has become clear to commercial satellite operators that they can no longer reliably plan their future around the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, creating a huge pain point for the commercial space industry in the United States and other Western countries.

This is because of an inescapable reality: Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade. //

The Ariane 6 rocket made its debut flight in July 2024 and has had a nice track record. But with a production goal of ten vehicles a year, the rocket won’t make a meaningful dent in the global need for launch capacity.

Lately though, one issue that has become increasingly troublesome is the use of the word “provider” as a blanket term to cover any professional who provides healthcare. I did not go to provider school, but rather medical school, followed by 4 years of psychiatric training before starting my own practice back in 1993. I am and will remain a doctor, NOT a provider. Recently, I spoke with a friend of mine who works as an attorney for an insurance company in their contracts department. She explained that insurers use the word provider in their language as a short cut. Ok, I can see that, but the problem runs so much deeper reducing the word count in a contract.

In her MommyDoc blog, Dr. Niran Al-Agba, a pediatrician in the state of Washington writes:

“Provider” was first utilized by The Third Reich, who embraced this moniker to degrade Jewish physicians as medical professionals. The historic root and use of the word “provider” deserves our attention and reflection because if we forget the tragic mistakes of history, we may be doomed to repeat them. While the more recent movement to disrespect the education and training of physicians was the brainchild of the federal government and corporatized medicine, this disdain for medical expertise has occurred before–to Jewish physicians living in Germany in 1937, before World War II. (https://peds-mommydoc.blogspot.com/2019/02/if-you-call-me-provider-i-will-assume.html)

In their article “Promoting Trust and Morale by Changing How the Word Provider Is Used,” JAMA. 2021;325(23):2343-2344 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34047757/, John W. Beasley, MD1; Richard G. Roberts, MD, JD1; Allan H. Goroll, MD2 write:

Use of the term provider in health care originated in government and insurance sectors to designate health care delivery organizations. In 1965, Medicare began using provider for entities qualifying to receive Medicare reimbursement.1 Over the years, the use of the term has expanded to include an ever-enlarging set of individual health care professionals who qualify for payment, especially those in primary care, in addition to institutions (eg, hospitals, clinics, treatment centers) and third-party payers. As such, the term has become part of everyday language in health care delivery, for example, the popular use of the phrase primary care provider. While convenient and a source of pride for some, such use also poses risk for unintentional and potentially detrimental consequences.

I don’t equate insurance companies with Nazis, hate crimes, or the persecution of anyone considered “other.” Instead I aim to draw a line connecting the past and present and highlight the more sinister undertones of the term provider. As doctors we are being diluted and marginalized by the influx of less trained “providers.” Our field is being squeezed more and more by profit driven insurance companies, health care administration “systems,” hedge funds and private equity firms. If “provider” stands for any health care professional, where is the distinction?

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VPT230-220

Toroidal 50VA Power Transformer 115V, 230V Primary Parallel 115V, Series 230V Secondary Parallel 440mA, Series 220mA Chassis Mount

To lock your Windows PC using Command Prompt, run Rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation in the Command Prompt
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Activate the lock screen timeout setting by running powercfg.exe /SETACTIVE SCHEME_CURRENT after you set the timeout.

On Thursday, Flock announced plans to require all agencies with access to license plate reader data to use a safety tool that automatically detects abnormal activity and locks out cops who abuse their access to stalk people they know in their personal lives.

Flock’s audit assistance tool suspends access when user activity “meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior,” Flock said. The suspension can only be lifted by administrator review, with the goal being “to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread.” //

However, experts caution that there is no data to show how well the tool works to detect nefarious logins or malicious activity. In a press release, the ACLU recommended that an independent evaluator should review Flock’s tech. Until then, the ACLU warned that there is “no evidence that the tool works consistently” to address what The Washington Post found was a growing pattern of stalker cops using Flock cameras to spy on their exes. As of now, the ACLU said, “We don’t know if the tool is a real security measure or just window dressing.”

Additionally concerning—although Langley predicted to The Verge that “you are going to see more officers fired and more officers arrested for abusing police power”—experts warn that the public will only know the tool is working if agencies are fully transparent about how much abuse is found. //

“It’s very difficult for anybody outside the department to know about it, and very easy for the department to sweep it under the rug,” Boudin said. “Even with the best intentions from Flock, it’s just not enough to ensure accountability. //

All4vols Ars Centurion
11y
325
Subscriptor
Having active general surveillance is bad. Targeting general surveillance is worse. Non-regulated, non-audited, non-accountable surveillance state is worse. I thought we, as Americans, were against this. If we HAVE to have a Flock equivalent (and we don't), it should only be accessible through a signed warrant, just like any other search. Only exceptions should be for Silver or Amber Alerts. And all activity should be audited regularly the results made public.

Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience. //

Ukrainian drone teams also participated in a Swedish-led military exercise for NATO, called Aurora 26, that was also held in May. A mock mechanized assault by NATO tanks and infantry fighting vehicles allowed Ukrainian drones to take out dozens of the attacking armored vehicles, which eventually forced planners to reset the war game, The Kyiv Independent reported.

Even two-tenths of a watt matters when your spacecraft launched in 1977

Adding a few extra years to Voyager 2's prodigiously long life was the result of an effort that began more than a year ago, as engineers and managers pondered how to eke out a few more watts from the spacecraft's dwindling power supply.

"We came up with the 'Big Bang' idea probably more than a year ago now," recalls Suzanne Dodd, Project Manager for the Voyager project.

"We were looking for ways to extend the lifetime of the mission, which means really extending how long we can operate the instruments." //

"The idea behind the Big Bang… If we were to switch systems and do a lot of power switching all at once within the bus of the spacecraft, we would gain a lot of power and it would still keep the electronics warm, as opposed to when we do it serially (in a series), it doesn't provide enough of the heat input to keep the propellant lines warm."

The approach required careful power and thermal modeling. The draw of each component had been documented, but the figures were nearly 50 years old and might contain some hidden margins. "We're talking about a half a watt, or two tenths of a watt, and that makes all the difference on the spacecraft," Dodd explains.

Headscale is an open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

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If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies that are destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul.

It’s indeed depressing to imagine piles of book spines waiting to be fed into wood chippers while torn-out pages are cropped, scanned, and trashed. But that’s the cheapest and easiest way to scan books as fast as possible, and AI companies are in a race to advance their models by training on the kind of engaging, high-quality long-form texts that can only be found in books. So book lovers fear it’s likely that the practice is happening on a grander scale than is currently being reported and that some physical copies of books will be lost forever.

What makes this destruction extra painful, though, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. //

“At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book,” the tweet said. “We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way—one page at a time.” //

“The job requires keen concentration,” Zhang said, since the pages of “very old, fragile books” are “paper thin.” In the post, Andrea Mills, who helps lead the Archive’s book-scanning operations, explained that “clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages.” //

The biggest fear for people who want to see books preserved through the training process is that AI firms will callously pulp rare books that can never be replaced.

One of the reoccurring questions I hear from new DokuWiki users again and again is "How do I add some automatic navigation?" //

Fixed Navigation

I believe, for a new wiki, you're better off with no automatic navigation at all. In fact it may be counterproductive to the nature of a wiki.

The beauty of a wiki is the interconnection of the various topics. Linking might be the main property of a wiki. //

Here's how you do it. You simply create a page named "sidebar" and put a list of links in it. Of course you can also use headlines or other formatting to make it more accessible. You can influence the order of your links by reordering your list and of course you can give each link an individual name. It's all standard wiki syntax. No magic and all under your control. //

A somewhat better approach would be the navi plugin. It it allows you maintain a central list of links (using the standard list and link syntax). It outputs that list's sub lists collapsed or opened based on what page you're currently on.

You still fully control the order and titles of your links and it's still very wiki like.

The Template Approach

An alternative approach to make the navigation a bit more dynamic while maintaining full control over its content is to use a template that offers some more sophisticated navigation mechanisms.

One example would be the sprintdoc template. Again, the navigation is created using a sidebar page as described in the fixed approach above. This time however, headlines in the sidebar are treated special and automatically create collapsible sections. It even lets you add icons to make the sections more recognizable. //

Automated Listings

So what if you really need an automatic list of pages in a namespace? I would recommend looking at the simplenavi plugin. As the name suggests, it's really simple. It creates a nested list of links to the pages it found.

I would recommend not using it as the main navigation, but to combine it with the fixed navigation approach and only use it in the sidebar of deeper namespaces.

Alternatively the nslist plugin is a good way to add list of sub pages in the current namespace. This could be used to create automatic indexes on a namespace start page.

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The Trilogy Nobody Wanted¶

Let me be real about what this three-part series documents:

Part 1: A cloud provider deletes a decade of work because of a broken verification process and a Java parameter parsing quirk. Support gaslights the customer for 20 days.

Part 2: One human inside the machine fights the bureaucracy, escalates to the CEO, and restores the account. Hope restored. Faith in humanity renewed.

Part 3: That human gets fired. The systemic issues remain unfixed. The machine continues.

This is the arc of modern tech. The system breaks. A human fixes it despite the system. The system removes the human. Repeat.
The Real Lesson¶

In Part 2, I wrote: “My trust isn’t fully restored. What is restored is my faith that even in massive corporations, one person can make a difference.”

I still believe that. But I’ll add a corollary: the difference that person makes is often inversely proportional to how long the corporation keeps them around.

The people who challenge broken systems, who go off-script, who escalate when the template says “close the ticket”. Those people are threats to institutional inertia. They’re expensive. They’re inconvenient. They make leadership answer uncomfortable questions.

And eventually, they get optimized away. Just like a “low-activity” AWS account.
A Note to AWS¶

You don’t need me to tell you this, but I will anyway: Tarus Balog was worth more to your reputation than any GenAI keynote. Every developer who read my story and thought “maybe AWS isn’t so bad after all”? That was because of him. Not your PR team. Not your marketing budget. One human being who decided to do the right thing.

You’ll replace him with someone who hits KPIs and doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions. And you’ll wonder why developers keep building exit strategies from your platform. //

To AWS: You had a human circuit breaker. You removed it. Good luck with the next cascade failure.

To everyone else: Keep your backups distributed. Keep your exit strategies current. And if you find a Tarus inside your cloud provider, thank them before the system optimizes them away.

Songs of Praise
Robert Prizeman
Songs of Praise. Toccata For Organ

Remember my article about AWS deleting my 10-year account? The one where support gaslit me for 20 days while claiming my data was “terminated”?

Here’s the plot twist: My data is back. Not because of viral pressure. Not because of bad PR. But because one human being inside AWS decided to give a damn.

This is that story.

I’d done everything right. Vault encryption keys stored separately from my main infrastructure. Defense in depth. Zero trust architecture. The works.

My security posture was textbook—protect against compromise by ensuring no single failure could take down everything. What I hadn’t protected against? AWS itself being the single point of failure.

I built a hardened bunker with multiple escape routes, only to have AWS drop a nuke on the entire complex. //

You might be thinking, “What are the odds they target me?” But that’s the wrong question. I thought the same thing—with my level of exposure and contributions, surely they could just write my name down and not bother me with stupid verification requests about whether I exist.

But you’re not being targeted—you’re being algorithmically categorized. And if the algorithm decides you’re disposable, you’re gone. //

After 20 days of appeals, AWS support finally responded with this gem: “Because verification wasn’t completed by the due date, your resources were terminated.”

But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.

This isn’t a system failure. The architecture and promises are sound. AWS doesn’t lose data—they have backups of backups of backups, stored in vaults that last far longer than the stated 90 days, where no rogue AI script can reach.

What’s happening here is simpler: teams in MENA are trying to cover up a massive fuck-up. Restoring data from those deep vaults would require explanations. Incident reports. Post-mortems. “Why did we have to open the vaults?”

Their entire communication strategy screams: “He’s nobody. He’ll give up soon. We won’t have to report this up the chain.” //

Lessons Learned¶

1. Never trust a single provider—no matter how many regions you replicate across
2. “Best practices” mean nothing when the provider goes rogue
3. Document everything—screenshots, emails, correspondence timestamps
4. The support theater is real—they literally cannot help you
5. Have an exit strategy executable in hours, not days

AWS won’t admit their mistake. They won’t acknowledge the rogue proof of concept. They won’t explain why MENA operates differently. They won’t even answer whether your data exists.

But they will ask you to rate their support 5 stars.

The cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business. And when their business needs conflict with your data’s existence, guess which one wins?

Plan accordingly.

Halleluja on "Es ist uns ein Kind geboren", Kantate BWV 142 from Infinite Games. Concerto No. 1 For Piano, Vibraphone And String Orchestra
Arash Safaian

Cool URIs don’t change n’est plus respecté. Cette idée qu’une URL ne change jamais est géniale. Un contenu, accessible une fois, est accessible toujours. Et s’il change d’adresse, une redirection correcte est faite pour ne pas déranger les internautes.

C’est une bonne pratique que j’applique pour les sites d’organisations que je gère. Mais je ne me vois plus l’appliquer sur mon blog personnel.

De toutes façon, les moteurs de recherche s’en fichent pas mal de mes pages. Et la «valeur» n’en est plus une. Franchement, je ne me vois pas faire ce genre d’effort pour Google et compagnie.

Quant aux internautes, il y a plein de possibilités de conserver un contenu qui serait important:

une sauvegarde simple de la page complète par son navigateur
une sauvegarde par son agrégateur de flux RSS et Atom (par exemple Inoreader)
une sauvegarde dans la fameuse WayBack Machine (je conseille de créer un compte et d’installer une extension de navigateur ou une application)
Certes j’ai cassé un contrat, mais tout existe pour que cela ne pose pas de problème. J’assume, même si ce choix m’a fait cogiter un certain temps. Tout est sauvegardé et je peux toujours fournir un contenu précis sur simple demande. Il n’est pas impossible que je remette en ligne certaines pages utiles.

Le vrai problème, c’est que plein d’autres contrats ne sont plus respectés, par des entreprises bien plus importantes que ce bon vieux Nicolas Friedli.

What makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.

What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.

There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.

In theory, the domain name space owner owns the domain name space and therefore all URIs in it. Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name. And in theory the URI space under your domain name is totally under your control, so you can make it as stable as you like. Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running. Then why are there so many dangling links in the world? Part of it is just lack of forethought. Here are some reasons you hear out there:

We just reorganized our website to make it better.

Do you really feel that the old URIs cannot be kept running? If so, you chose them very badly. Think of your new ones so that you will be able to keep then running after the next redesign. //]

Why should I care?

When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.

When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated - emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.

Enough people complain all the time about dangling links that I hope the damage is obvious. I hope it also obvious that the reputation damage is to the maintainer of the server whose document vanished.

So what should I do? Designing URIs

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.

URIs change when there is some information in them which changes. It is critical how you design them. (What, design a URI? I have to design URIs? Yes, you have to think about it.). Designing mostly means leaving information out.

The creation date of the document - the date the URI is issued - is one thing which will not change. It is very useful for separating requests which use a new system from those which use an old system. That is one thing with which it is good to start a URI. If a document is in any way dated, even though it will be of interest for generations, then the date is a good starter.