solstice

> The repurposed Mavic drones, made in China for photography and videos, are controlled on radio frequencies that Ukraine’s anti-drone systems cannot block, and are too small, too numerous and fly too low for traditional air defences to pick up.

AFAICS, the Mavic drones use 2,4 and 5 Ghz control frequencies. Why they couldn't they be blocked in a warzone?

I thought it had been phased out in 2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/un-leaded-gasoline-1.6158216

I wonder if Dmitry considered a syncing tool like MobiusSync or Syncthing to copy the pictures to a PC continuously after they are taken.

There is a python library for Wechat, but I'm having problems using it. Also, 1) getting and then 2) decrypting the Wechat database isn't easy. Because my phone is not rooted, I had to use an android emulator on my PC, transfer all my chats over there, extract the DB and all media. After installing all the fickle dependencies of the bruteforce decrypter, it took three days straight on my laptop from 2014 to decrypt, and now I can finally open it in an SQLite viewer. But that still leaves the major step of getting formatted messages out of there like in the OP. The HTML-conversion script that I used produced half-decent results, but hasn't been maintained for a while and thus chokes on certain messages so that the conversion of large chats invariably breaks down before being finished. Anyway. Maybe it is time to learn Python...

I just redownloaded PortableApps launcher after a long time and noticed their appeal for donations. I used PA a lot during school, college and my first jobs. Does anyone have some background on how they are doing?

Does this mean i can install signal on my tablet?

About 303 g according to the table in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_(unit)

The issue is that he's not going to be comparing his current circumstances to a frog, but to other humans ofc, by which metric he's probably very badly off. I doubt our stereotypical homeless person is going to find their life very fulfilling even if it is longer than a frog's.

I mean, just think how you would react if you found yourself in dire straits and someone told you "hey don't worry, at least you are not at risk of being eaten by a bird" That would be a ridiculous argument no?

We may be talking past each other and I don't follow the part about euthanasia you lay out at all.

My point is that it would be vastly more cruel to turn a frog into a human, let them live a little and then abandon them to fend for themselves after they've outlived their usefulness to me (which is how I understood your point above) than to leave the frog alone entirely. By turning them into a human you have acquired a degree of responsibility for their well being which I would argue you can't shirk under normal circumstances. (C.f. making babies.)

This logic hinges on the assumptions that 1) humans have a higher state of consciousness than animals (which might be debatable in certain cases, ok) and 2) that a frog is indifferent towards its current state of existence because it doesn't know any better.

Lastly, you write "every human life has value" but in that thought experiment in the OP, they are not humans so far so that logic doesn't hold. Just because you have the ability to elevate/create life of a higher consciousness, absolutely does not mean that you have to do so IMO and that it can be downright inhumane to do so. (Again, babies, contraception, abortions etc.)

ChatGPT looks like an interesting starting point for NPC biographies in role playing games. Hmmm

Depending on what you mean by "fully abandoning it" that doesn't seem to track with humans being loss-averse as has been shown in (I believe) many psychological studies. Meaning most people vastly prefer remaining at a low level than to even lose a tiny bit. The fate of a frog becoming human and then being discarded shortly afterwards would be judged to be much more terrible by most people than the frog never becoming human in the first place.

Edit: oof, wrong story. Sorry

You mean the redoubt at the end? Didn't they go through a portal to get there? Didn't seem to be an uploading machine. Also, why would they need fighter jets then? But it's an interesting thought...

For those wanting a short dip into this feeling should look into the chapter titled "Abstract War" of that book.

In the Magic the Gathering lore, the elves on the plane of Lorwyn could be an example of a reflection of this. They are obsessed with beauty and perfection and absolutely xenophobic. https://gamelore.fandom.com/wiki/Lorwyn_Elf

> no partial sync

That's not really true. You can specify which files you don't want synced. So, on my phone i can say "don't send me files that match the following pattern" https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

So in your example you could make a subfolder "big files" and exclude that subfolder from being synchronized to your mobile device.

I also love syncthing. I've got it set up to transfer my phone's pictures to my PC where I regularly sort through them and weed them out. And I've got a shared folder that's replicated across all my devices that contains my Obsidian vault, my KeePass file and other useful things

148 Billion euros

The paper on which this article is based: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765

Really interesting. Could you post some sources?

This sounds like https://fraidyc.at which is delightfully weird and really functional at the same time

Slightly off-topics but I'd like to know if there is some kind of turn-key solution for small business or home use which uses a Raspberry Pi with attached USB HD, that connects to other PCs via the network and pulls the files to be backed up. The idea being that the Pi and the HD themselves are never writeable from the outside and thus can't be encrypted themselves, 1) if using some suitably long retention time for older backups and 2) some kind of semi-smart monitoring system that can give warnings like "Hey, your data changed a lot suddenly. Might wanna have a look at that".

I am from Europe and know that Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America are all at least government sponsored. While I have no idea whether the original article is true or not (haven't read it yet), parent is AFAIK correct in that these media have had a propaganda function, similarly to Deutsche Welle. It's not quite "table stakes" as mentioned by parent but it's not far off either.

The combative style of your comment however makes it a bit hard to take you seriously.

"fun"...

The "note to self" has been there since I started using signal I think three years ago. Stickers are available since one and a half years, even though discovery could be better. Things have improved a lot in the last 2 years and I haven't encountered any breaking bugs.

Edit: and now with the New Groups you can send people a group link so that they can add themselves. Haven't tried that out yet but that seems pretty cool

... Not to mention the decommissioning costs

Ra and Fine Structure are both incredibly engrossing and absolutely mind-bending

I'm sorry, but most of that is nonsense (besides oxides being tough to break). Where is this "elsewhere" you're planning to grow food for the /world population/? Protecting people from heat is one thing but what about animals that most people depend on for survival? Fremen suits for them as well? What about bees, birds and the myriad living things that we are only dimly aware of yet utterly depend on and that are adapted to live only under certain conditions?

People will have to change their behavior to survive collectively. Technology is part of the solution (renewable energy, zoom calls instead of business travel...) but the idea that everyone needs a car that just sits around idly 95% of the time is ludicrous. If humanity is to survive, this sort of widespread ludicrous and unsustainable behavior needs to stop...

I'm sorry if I come across a bit harsh but your comment sounds quite defeatist. If you need an argument mir grounded in economics, have a look at the relative price of coal power: even ignoring the health and climate effects, it's getting too expensive compared to renewables (lots of asterisks on that one but the gist is true).

Long-term storability seems very desirable for certain classes of data. But a problem might be to conserve the crystal reader system which I assume needs to be well-calibrated and sort of fragile. You might have to have some sort of bootstrapping solution like very basic materials and instructions to build a simple 3D printer which then builds a more complicated assembly system which is then able to build the crystal reader.

It doesn't seem to work with mp4 or mkv containers out of the box. I tried it recently to deshake a video and it was quite frustrating to use, although I managed to do it in the end.

Oh man, i remember that. What a weird site. As if they didn't want you to download their program

Are there any geographical limits? Does this e.g. work in Europe too?