TKarney

#DailyDickhead

Giving billions and power to people who aren't trusted to rent a car

I met my wife at my girlfriend's wedding.

I met the Girlfriend on Lj (and probably because of Bear).

Don’t let mega-constellation-building billionaires steal your night sky Satellites are wonders of modern technology that have improved all of our lives. But having more than a million of them in orbit could destroy our view of the heavens and seriously damage our planet

Elon Musk has already started plans to launch a million satellites.

Yes. A MILLION.

This is a colossally bad idea, and it's not too late to make your voice heard. I explain everything:

www.scientificamerican.com/article/ramp...

🔭 🧪

So...I was just diagnosed with a Methylisothiazolinone allergy, which means I'm probably allergic to all my paints and my paper 🙃 I've emailed every manufacturer I use to ask if they use this chemical, but do any of my fellow traditional artists have paint-allergy advice? Do gloves work?

I love watching people use LLMs in public. They’ll reply to a breaking news article and say “@grok is this true?” Babe where do you think it’s about to pull its answer from

And we've seen professsionals who use chatbots to "assist" getting themselves flattened because they weren't attentive enough to spot basic mistakes *in their field of expertise*.

So the person who comes to get help when they are ignorant are very much at risk.

If licensure is to protect the recipient from being given bad advice, then making a machine which doesn't have the ability to discern; which can't contextualise; which has no experience in the field (e.g. a therapist who detects evasive response) is a problem.

I don't see it that way (see some of the other lawyers chiming in as to what the statute does/doesn't say).

If I have an employee, say a paralegal, who isn't licensed to practice, MY speeech isn't constrained by saying, "They can't give legal advice".

Every Accusation is a Confession, Great Replacement Edition.

I found it really effective in DA:O and think part of what made a lot of the folks who hated it hate it was they didn't like how the personification made them feel about making hard choices.

If it were doing that in The Witcher... I'd be noping out; because that doesn't benefit the underlying story

Geology specimen photo

A piece of opalized wood from The Comet opal mine in Koroit, Australia.

📷 Gene McDevitt

#minerals #geology

Strategic assessment during conflict. Source: The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1. nllp.jallc.nato.int/iks/sharing%...

Google data center water estimates go public, residents in Roanoke and Botetourt react A proposed Google data center campus in Botetourt County could use between 2 million and 8 million gallons of drinking water per day, according to an executed agreement between the developer and the W...

one google data center in virginia

two million gallons of water per day

information only released under court order & risk of contempt

Crud, I miswrote, "Don't ever insert" was the actual phrase.

And yeah; When he said that is when I washed my hands of him; and (though he will probably never realise it) the moment he broke up with my wife.

You don't have to like me, but you she won't let you put that shit on her.

I don't recall, (I was a babe in arms) but my first live show was in a pub, The Clancy Brothers, and Tommy Makem

I grew up on "Irish Songs of Drinking and Rebellion".

They're baked into my bones.

(I was once asked "Doesn't that describe all Irish songs? "No," I replied... "we also have laments")

So, are y'all asking for DEI or what?

Once again weirdly delighted that somehow I've developed a real side gig being a DJ for the nerds.

(And yes, I'll be doing a dance at this year's Worldcon as well)

Drone Dominance: Pentagon to order 30,000 one-way drones in 'next few days' - Breaking Defense The DoD is about to choose the winners from its "Gauntlet" unmanned exercise and provide successful systems to military units "over the next five months," a DoD official said.

One wonders how the Pentagon is going to square the circle of “only wanting to spend $2K each on an essentially disposable drone platform” and “Blue UAS compliance without Chinese parts.”

While lawmakers were largely complimentary of the Drone Dominance program, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., criticized the Pentagon for not more directly engaging with Ukrainian drone makers. "You're talking about six months as being expedited scheduling," said Shaheen, who recently visited Ukrainian drone producers in Odesa, Ukraine. "What they were talking about in Ukraine was iterating those drones every two weeks because of warfare. I don't know how we think we're going to compete if we're talking about an every six month schedule, and we're looking at our adversaries who are iterating on a weekly basis."

Jeanne Shaheen is right about this: you need to be working at a rate of two week refresh/iteration cycles to be competitive in modern drone warfare (which the Ukrainians have mastered), not a six month one.

What she doesn’t mention: you’ll also need cheap Chinese parts to realistically do this.

There is no requirement for submarines to "render aid and assistance".

That was resolved in Nuremburg.

There are a lot of issues around this, and I don't think sinking the Dena was justified.

As to War Crime... I think so, but the case can be made it wasn't.

I guess it's a blanket dismissal

Turkey-PKK conflict: Life inside Iraq's 'Forbidden Zone' Turkey has been building military bases on Iraqi territory, the BBC finds, raising fears of an occupation.

From April 2025, sadly highly relevant in early 2026: advocacy groups reports that civilians inside Iraq’s “forbidden zone” have been killed by drones. Locals report consistent harassment by drones.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

It's the "I'm a better debater than he is" to my wife which is the interesting tell.

Because, as I said, we've not had any debates; and yet that was on his mind.

People are weird.

This was the second time a conversation went somewhat sideways, so the already tenuous progress of the relationship was fatally injured, but yeah.

I don't know what the initial frictions are; it's not as if I felt threatened by him; but he certainly seems to feel threatened by me in some way.

The U.S. Is Launching a Regulatory Assault on Drone Users New restrictions try to shield ICE from being watched from above.

MAGA is trying to claim the sky for itself - which means that other legitimate drone users, including journalists reporting on ICE abuses, are being shut out.

My latest for Foreign Policy:

foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/12/u...

THREAD #OTD March 6, 1857 SCOTUS ruled in the Dred Scott v. Sandford that the US Constitution did not extend citizenship to Africans in America, considered the worst SCOTUS decision of all time.

Don't know about the Dred Scott decision?

Glad you asked.

Of making a daily cartoon in the style of a cartoonist he really likes, and then giving him a three person podcast backgrounding how/why that cartoon was made.

I don't think that it getting him off twitter is actually doing him any good.

And I get the impression (from all else my wife says about how the evening went) that Claude has been fucking him up. His idea of "using it reasonably" apparently includes having it read the news to him in one of his partner's voice...

The odd thing is he's been convinced (for I don't know, a year?) that I don't like him. Which isn't true. I've been on the friendly side of neutral; he's reasonably interesting, has informed opinions about film, etc.

But I get the impression he thought we were in competition.