My understanding is that Trump apparently tweeted something about how California doesn’t maintain its forests, so that’s probably what started spreading this all over.

Florida is very wet.

Southern California is semi-arid.

They had something like 100mph (161 km/h) gusts on this, as I recall from the news. You’d need an awfully large firebreak to stop a fire from jumping that.

I think that most of that is just cloud.

Here’s the NASA FIRMS fire map showing hot areas in red, where the fire is burning. Those are the “big blotches”, where there’s a collection of bright areas in infrared.

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.1,34.3,7.8z

The part that’s burning is a very small part of what’s visible on the submitted map.

EDIT: Note that the map server seems to be unusually overloaded right now, and is responding fairly slowly; the red infrared spots took a while to come in for me.

I finally dropped Lenovo last month, got a laptop from Tuxedo. No three physical button trackpad, but it does have a 100 Wh battery.

I don’t care about the Trackpoint, but I do like the three Thinkpad physical buttons on that Synaptic trackpad, which are also a signature feature going way back on the Thinkpad. Hard to find feature on laptops.

If you’re willing to use an external keyboard, the same factory that made the IBM Model M was bought by the employees when IBM sold the line to Lenovo, and is still making buckling spring keyboards off in Kentucky. Some of theirs still have a Trackpoint option.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=UB40PGA

Might also try !HomeAutomation@lemmy.world.

A lot of this sounds pretty abstract to me.

It argues that drones transmit data about use to Chinese drone manufacturers, which could leverage that data to provide an edge globally.

Okay, fine. I’ll believe that farms have models of when to spray and such, and that these models have value. And this effectively gives drone manufacturers a fair bit of that data.

But…how secret is that data now? Like, is this actually data not generally available? There are a lot of corn farms out there. Did each corn farm go carefully work up their own model on their own in a way that China can’t obtain that data? Or can I go read information publicly about recommended spraying intervals?

More radically, agricultural data could be used to unleash biological warfare against crops, annihilating an adversary’s food supply. Such scenarios pose a significant threat to national security, offering China multiple avenues to undermine critical infrastructures by devastating food availability, threatening trade and economic resilience, and destabilizing agricultural systems.

That seems like an awful stretch.

Biowarfare with infectious disease is hard to control. Countries historically have been more interested militarily in stuff like anthrax, which works more like a chemical weapon. I am dubious that China has a raging interest in biowarfare against American crops.

Even if we assume that China does have the intent and ability to develop something like a crop disease, I have a very hard time seeing as how somewhat finer-grained information about agriculture is going to make such an attack much more effective. Let’s say that China identifies a crop that is principally grown in the US and develops an infectious diease targeting it. Does it really need to know the fine points of that crop, or can it just release it at various points and let it spread?

As for food security, the US is not really a country at any sort of food security risk.

• It exports a lot of staple food. It’s the source, not the consumer.

• It has large margins due to producing luxuries that could be reduced in a wartime emergency – I recall once reading a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could provide for all of Europe’s food needs purely from the increased output without bringing any more land into production.

• It is wealthy enough to have access to the global food market. If the US is starving, a lot of the world is going to be starving first. In some cases, one can cut off physical transport access to the global market via blockade even where a country could normally buy from those markets – as Germany tried to do to the UK in World War II or the US did to Japan in World War II, but that would be extraordinarily difficult to do to the US given the present balance of power. The US is by far the largest naval power in the world. This assessment is that in a defensive naval and air war, which is what such a blockade would involve, it could alone prevail against the combined militaries of the entire rest of the world. And on top of that, a substantial portion of the other major naval powers are allied to the US. China is very unlikely to be in a position where it could blockade the US, and if we imagine the kind of changes necessary to create some scenario where it was, I’d suggest that this scenario would also very probably bring with it other issues that would be of greater concern to the US than food security.

I’m willing to believe that it might be possible to target “university IT systems” for commercially-useful data, but it’s not clear to me that that’s something specific to drones or to China. There are shit-tons of devices on all kinds of networks that come out of China. I’d be more worried about the firmware on one’s Lenovo Thinkpad as being a practical attack vector than agricultural drones.

Now, okay. The article is referencing both American national security concerns and potential risks to other places, fine. It’s talking about Brazil, Spain, etc. Some of my response is specific to the US. But I’m going to need some rather less hand-wavy and concrete issues to get that excited about this. You cannot hedge against every risk. Yes, there are risks that I can imagine agricultural drones represent, though I think that just being remotely-bricked around harvest time would be a more-realistic concern. But there are also counters. Sure, China no doubt has vectors via which it could hit the US. But the same is also true going the other way, and if China starts pulling levers, well, the US can pull some in response. That’s a pretty significant deterrent. Unless an attack can put the US in a position where it cannot respond, like enabling a Chinese nuclear first strike or something, those deterrents are probably going to be reasonably substantial. If we reach a point where China is conducting biowarfare against American crops to starve out the US, then we’ve got a shooting war on, and there are other things that are going to be higher on the priority list.

5G infrastructure is, I agree, critical. TikTok might be from an information warfare perspective. You can mitigate some of the worst risks. But you cannot just run down the list of every product that China sells and block every way in which one might be leveraged. Do that and you’re looking at heading towards autarky and that also hurts a country – look at North Korea. Sanctions might not do much to it, but it’s also unable to do much.

To quote Sun Tzu:

For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.

You have a finite amount of resources. You can use them to mitigate some threats. You cannot effectively counter all potential threats. You have to prioritize. If we want to counter agricultural drones as an attack vector, then we accept greater vulnerability elsewhere to do so. The question is not simply “does a potential vulnerability exist”, but “is this the optimal place to expend resources”?

I think that it’s kind of globally-applicable.

And I’ve wondered in the past whether the long-run for the Internet was always going to be people generally winding up with VPNs for similar reasons. I’m far from the first:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

– John Gilmore

Or does it make it more taboo and thus more appealing?

Honestly, it might be a good thing long-run to have a higher percentage of users on VPNs. They aren’t a magic cure-all, but they do help make it safer to use untrusted networks and discourage some things on the service side, like geolocating and data-mining users based on IP.

“This might address some security problems” is somewhat abstract to appeal to most users, I think. “VPN or no tits” is something that I think is more generally-relatable.

He said that he’s exhausted his drive enclosures:

The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I’m not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.

So I guess he could use eSATA and some kind of external enclosure or something, but he’s gonna need more than just throwing more drives in the desktop and adding a PCI SATA controller card to get more places to plug 'em in.

I use a USB-attached drive array for some bulk, low-throughput storage. I’ve been happy with this, except for one thing that I didn’t think about prior to getting mine: a considerable number of these, including mine, do not have the option to power on after power loss. This is extremely obnoxious if you use or have any intention of using the computer remotely and would like it to come back up after power loss. For me, it was the only component that couldn’t be brought back up automatically.

I’m in the process of switching to one that does right now, but I’d mention it to you to as something to keep in mind.

I considered a NAS as well myself, but didn’t want it for a couple of reasons:

• I am generally not happy about having a lot of hardware that can potentially phone home on a network. The drive array is isolated, and I control the PC (well, short of the BIOS/firmware/etc).

• I had an existing machine that could perfectly reasonably serve the stuff that had adequate uptime. If you’re going to be serving content to friends, you may not want to be using, say, a desktop that you use for other things, since if you need to reboot it, you’re going to interrupt their use.

• Trying to understand whether NASes have implemented things securely worries me. There are a number of cases where I’ve been unpleasantly surprised before with network transport of data (e.g. when I looked at it at one point, SMB having secure authentication but then shipping the actual data over the network in plaintext).

• Also not sure how long the NAS gets security updates.

• Also sometimes companies have been purchased by other companies or tried to get creative in figuring out ways to make more money from existing customers, like having routers insert ads in webpages. If the product can’t touch the network, the issue doesn’t come up.

One reason that I would consider getting a NAS over DAS is if you want the server to be physically distant from the storage array. USB isn’t really made to run long distances – you need repeaters, and there are distance limitations, though you can get, and I have, optical transceivers for longer runs. Ethernet is designed for this and works fine with it.

I like both of them myself, albeit Starfield more.

They did.

Fallout 76, a multiplayer game, predates Starfield, a single-player game.

I think that driverless busses are probably much less of a dramatic change than driverless cars.

If you have one person in a car driving to work and the car is fully-self-driving, then you free up one person’s time. You potentially change where parking is practical. You may permit people who cannot drive a car to use one, like young or elderly.

With a bus, the passengers are already free to do what they want. You’re saving labor costs on a bus driver, maybe getting a safer vehicle. But I’d call that an evolutionary change.

https://proxy.parisjc.edu:8293/statistics/300887/number-of-buses-in-use-by-region-uk/

In 2020/21, the number of buses amounted to 37800 in Great Britain.

Those probably get heavier use than cars. But you want scale, since driverless vehicle costs are mostly fixed, and driver labor costs variable. You’re talking about not having maybe 38k people driving. You need to cover all of your costs out of that. That’s not nothing, but…okay, how many tractor-trailers are out there?

https://www.statista.com/topics/5280/heavy-goods-vehicles-in-the-uk/

Heavy goods vehicle registrations bounced back above their pre-pandemic levels in 2021, reaching 504,600 vehicles in circulation.

If you have driverless trucks, that’s an order-of-magnitude difference in vehicle count from busses in the UK.

I’m not saying that there aren’t wins possible with self-driving busses. But it doesn’t seem to me to be the vehicle type with the greatest potential improvement from being self-driving.

I haven’t been that excited about the Framework laptops, because despite liking expandability and modularity, the actual modules offered for expansion didn’t really provide functionality that I’d actually wanted to swap in. A larger battery, a trackpad with physical buttons, those are things that I would want to upgrade. I just didn’t need an LED matrix on the side of my keyboard, and the external ports on most laptops were at least reasonable.

But being able to add more M.2 slots is legitimately something that I could use.

good d pad

D-pads are the one aspect of a controller that I wouldn’t worry about much. I’ve only ever had one controller that had a D-pad that I wasn’t happy with, a Logitech in the mid-1990s that had a screw-in mini joystick on the D-pad. That rolled to the diagonal too easily.

thinks

Maybe the old NES controllers, which had a relatively-hard, non-rounded D-pad and could be tough on the fingers for long sessions.

I guess one could prefer the PlayStation-style or XBox-style D-pad position, though I’ve never had issue with either.

Do you have something in particular that you’re concerned about regarding D-pads? I’d expect pretty much anything out there to be fine, myself.

So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated on bug trackers by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.

However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.

Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.

“We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.

As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.

The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:

• It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.

• But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. Nor does having written something on the paper. I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.

This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unusual about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the right to compel searching a landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.

I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives, however.