Learning Paths
Step-by-step paths to mastery

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Fate Is the Hunter is a 1961 memoir by aviation writer Ernest K. Gann. It describes his years working as a pilot from the 1930s to 1950s, starting at American Airlines in Douglas DC-2s and DC-3s when civilian air transport was in its infancy, moving onto wartime flying in C-54s, C-87s, and Lockheed Lodestars, and finally at Matson Navigation's short-lived upstart airline and various post-World War II "nonscheduled" airlines in Douglas DC-4s.

That’s All, Folks!

So my conclusion is that if we’re using the frontierest of all the frontier models (Fable, 5.6-Sol) you can get a passing grade. Barely.

Now granted, if you put a spotlight on me this moment and thrust a microphone into my hand and said “tell me a joke!” I couldn’t do it. But these are supposed to be ASI-threshold models, heralding a new dawn of technological progress. Yet, a nightclub comedian who may have never finished high school can outperform them in this most human metric.

Stick to code, toasters.

Linux dominates the VPS world, and for good reason. Debian, Ubuntu, Alma, and Rocky are everywhere, well-supported, and familiar. (And yes, you can run RedHat Enterprise for free under a dev license if you want to).

Linux has a number of big advantages, but it’s not the only OS on the planet. Besides Windows, there are also the BSDs: Free, Open, and Net. I won’t get into the last two, because honestly if you want to run either of those two, you’re already thoroughly immersed in the BSDverse.

But let’s talk FreeBSD for a moment. Should you run it? There are some pros and cons.

This is the third part in our seven-part series on the BSD series of operating systems.FreeBSD is the most widely-used BSD operating system. It runs on amd64, 64-bit ARM (aarch64), i386, 32-bit ARM (armv6, armv7), RISC-V, and PowerPC. In earlier times, I thought of the three BSDs (DragonFly wasn’t around yet) as “NetBSD = runs on anything, OpenBSD = high security, FreeBSD = awesome on amd64”.

I’ve never been a big NetBSD guy. I played with it a long time ago (like 30 years ago) when I had a 68K Mac and wanted to run a Unix-like OS on it, and NetBSD was the only option. Since then I’ve fooled around with it once or twice, but I just never had a need that OpenBSD or Linux didn’t meet better.

But recently I saw that NetBSD 11 was released, and it included this brag:

New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs.

That certainly sounds cool! My home Proxmox runs on an i5-8250U which is a little earlier than that. It was released in 2017 Q3. So maybe it won’t be quite 10ms, but it should still be pretty fast. //

However, that live image doesn’t use MBR but rather GPT. So you’ll get this if you use the recipe on NetBSD’s MICROVM page.

...

At that point, I entered a ? and it gave a list of potential disk candidates. I don’t know why I remembered that trick of yore…must be some 30-year-old brain cell that didn’t expire when it was supposed to. Well you know what they say, cache expiry is the hardest problem in computer science.

Four guiding stars

• Apps, at a glance
  • Your entire library—pinned, installed, or freshly discovered—should be right there.
• Make it yours
  ** Start should feel like it grew up on your desk, featuring only what and how much you want.
• Accelerate the day
  ** Every pixel must earn its keep, shaving seconds off routine actions so creativity gets a head start.
• Honor the icon
  ** Respect three decades of muscle memory. Update, don’t upend.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and are two of a handful of spacecraft that have entered interstellar space. Two others (Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11) were launched several years earlier are now derelict and out of communication with the Earth, while New Horizons is much newer, having been launched in 2006.

The Voyager series have onboard computers that are beyond ancient by modern standards. There are a set of interconnected systems, which combined – combined! – have 32KB of memory. From this, they power an array of scientific instruments and communicate with Earth. They are custom hardware, not off-the-shelf electronics, and hold the world records for the oldest continuously-running computers, having been powered-on nonstop since 1977. The CPUs operate at about 250Khz, which is four times slower than a Commodore 64.

There isn’t really an operating system per se, but rather a set of different integrated circuits to do specific things. The design is more like a constellation of Arduino boards than a Raspberry Pi.

One interesting thing is that there’s no encryption or authentication per se.

this is a complete example / quickstart for running copyparty on windows, optionally as a service (autostart on boot)

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?

AutoCAD Foundations helps you gain the knowledge you need to understand essential features and workflows. With these foundational skills, you can use AutoCAD to create architectural, mechanical, civil engineering, and other types of designs.

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
To set the lock screen timeout, run powercfg.exe /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_VIDEO VIDEOCONLOCK <time> in Command Prompt as Admin
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.

Headscale aims to implement a self-hosted, open source alternative to the Tailscale control server. Headscale's goal is to provide self-hosters and hobbyists with an open-source server they can use for their projects and labs. It implements a narrow scope, a single Tailscale network (tailnet), suitable for a personal use, or a small open-source organisation.

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.