Are you pretending to be a fresh 50-cent army recruit?

Anyone else suddenly wondering what other syslog implementations are available? Apparently the big one at the moment is syslog-ng.

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$ uname -srv Linux 6.18.0-kbal #111 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 1 10:26:08 EST 2025

Ah yes that’s all fine but the real secret is the meaning of that #111. (I only thought to find out a couple days ago — apparently I’ve done 111 kernel builds on this machine.)

As a joke it probably would’ve been more funny if it weren’t for all the reporting about how they were deporting people for posting JD Vance memes and are now demanding to see everyone’s social media accounts at the border.

Obviously loose-leaf free-range tea is a little better than tea that’s been confined to a bag, but what you really want is all the water-soluble compounds synthesized in precisely the right proportions by a properly programmed replicator for that perfect hot cuppa.

After the arrest there will be a fair trial

Will there, really? I dunno how it works over there. Here in Canada I think it’s more traditional to subject randomly arrested protesters to whatever the cops feel is an appropriate amount of abuse and then drop the charges after a day or two because there’s no way it would go well in an actual trial.

Is comparing social media to a dangerous drug over the top?

Yes. Yes it is, Paul Krugman. All media is to some extent social. X dot com is a dangerous fraud run by a malevolent madman that ought to be illegal in six different ways, but it is not heroin and it does not represent the essence of social media any better than heroin represents the nature of all drugs.

Much of it is dull or even repulsive but there’s a certain kind of erotic, sensual, wholesome porn that can tempt my eye.

Exactly, software and algorithms would be a huge part of the challenge which is one reason I think Canada would be well positioned to be the nation to advance that technology. Communication via satellite is the obvious choice, but even just sitting here casually pondering it I can think of other options that might be worth considering, involving for example laser-based mesh networks between drones somewhat like what SpaceX has between satellites.

And yes, it’s true, not spending money on that sort of thing at all would also strike me as a better option than sending so many billions of dollars to the giant American defence contractors who are the primary beneficiaries of the F-35 contract.

Unmanned makes a huge difference in many ways, surely. There are all kinds of constraints added by the need to carry around a squishy human, and evaluating what can be done without them is not something I’m going to attempt in a comment here but there are a whole lot of possibilities, many of which might not cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Starting from scratch is not necessary. Starting from the point of view of making fighter planes obsolete, rather than building the best possible one, is what I have in mind. Somebody is going to do it. Shame it won’t be Canada. Even if the attempt failed it would be a better use of the money.

I revised it down to $50 billion after posting, having looked up the actual estimate I’d seen (74 billion), but either way it’s plenty.

I suspect that requirements for the airframe design for a swarm of drones that don’t need to carry human pilots around can be made somewhat less than those for the most expensive airplane ever made.

We’re talking somewhere over 50 billion dollars. It’s not easy to do, but with that kind of money, money is not the problem. What’s more, the profits will be enormous: There’s a market for that product all over the world.

Canada should take all the money that’s going to be spent on F-35s and use it to develop an autonomous drone swarm that can hunt and destroy F-35s.

It’s a race to become too big to fail.

The Russian Federation should go first. Freedom for the people of Bashkortostan!

Every time I see another AI headline, the Gamers Nexus “AI” video starts playing in my head.

Giant mirrors in space could also focus the light to create a superweapon that could destroy cities. Critics argue that there might be some disadvantages to this idea.

Maybe it is the movie studios, but there don’t appear to be any of them on the list of HDMI Forum members, or on its board of directors. So my first guess was some combination of Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Apple. Whoever it is though, the question is how they went about convincing the HDMI Forum as a whole to take such a self-destructive approach.

They’re not fucking with AMD and Valve just because they spontaneously developed an irrational hatred of partly-open platforms. Somebody has persuaded them that they have a financial incentive to do it.