I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

Nigeria is not “the West”

I didn’t say it was. I’m just indicating wherevthe floor is.

Age of consent to sex, not marriage.

https://www.ageofconsent.net/world

According to this, it looks like the closest country to this age of consent is Nigeria, at 11.

If you want age of marriage, in the US, looks like four states will let you marry at any age, but require special conditions like parental approval or court approval:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States

California, Utah, Oklahoma, and Mississippi.

At the time of the K-T extinction, we looked like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatorius

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event,[a] also known as the K–T extinction,[b] was the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth[2][3] approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kg (55 lb) also became extinct, with the exception of some ectothermic species such as sea turtles and crocodilians.[4]

Omnivores, insectivores, and carrion-eaters survived the extinction event, perhaps because of the increased availability of their food sources. Neither strictly herbivorous nor strictly carnivorous mammals seem to have survived. Rather, the surviving mammals and birds fed on insects, worms, and snails, which in turn fed on detritus (dead plant and animal matter)

Luckily, great-grandaddy squirrel-critter was a survivor and had a taste for insects:

It is thought to have been rat-sized (6 in (15 cm) long and 1.3 ounces (about 37 grams)) and a diurnal insectivore, which burrowed through small holes in the ground.

It’s been fine for me too. That said, I don’t eat there that often.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

I remember commenting a couple months back on one of those “Arab-Americans not voting for Harris” posts, something along the lines of “it’s your vote, but I think that you’re going to find that you’d rather have Harris than Trump” and listing some past policy moves like the embassy in Jerusalem, and then someone downvoting and responding something along the lines of “identical candidates”.

In a city, maybe, though some Australians live on pretty remote farms. Going to be hard to set up a LAN with your buddies down the street.

kagis for discussion

https://flemmingbojensen.com/2007/08/07/the-australian-outback/

Stations (Australian for a ranch/farm) in the Outback are absolutely huge and the nearest neighbor is usually hundreds of kilometers away. People stay in touch through satellite phones, internet, cb radio and kids get their education long distance through the brilliant School of the Air.

xev also works in Wayland via the X11 support, so either will be fine.

watches video

What the heck is that gigantic thing attached below the barrel of that rifle?

kagis

Hmm. Apparently about a decade ago, North Korea was showing off a helical magazine. Dunno if the video footage DW is using is current, though, so no idea if it’s still in use.

The North Korean military uses a 100- to 150- round helical magazine in the Type 88 assault rifle.

https://armamentresearch.com/north-korean-helical-ak-magazines/

Damn, that must be heavy as hell, moves a bunch of the weight on the rifle way forward.

looks further

It sounds like they aren’t using them in this deployment, though, that Russia has provided arms:

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/first-north-korean-troops-come-under-fire-1730706704.html

According to Defense Intelligence data, Russia has equipped the North Korean military with:

• AK-12 assault rifles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-12

Well, someone’s gotta pay for all the bandwidth somehow.

considers

Honestly, maybe that’d be a way for instances to provide some kind of “premium” service. Like, provide larger upload limits for people who donate. I assume that the instance admins don’t have any ideological objections to larger images, just don’t want to personally pay out-of-pocket for huge bandwidth and storage bills.

goes looking

I believe that this is the backend used by Lemmy, pict-rs:

https://github.com/distruss/pictrs

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/from_scratch.html

Lemmy supports image hosting using pict-rs. We need to install a couple of dependencies for this.

It looks like it only has one global size setting, so probably can’t do that today.

Could also host one’s images on an off-site image hosting thing, but then you don’t benefit from integration with the uploading UI. I guess another option would be for Lemmy to provide some sort of integration with an off-site image-hosting service, so that a user could optionally use all the Lemmy features seamlessly, but just have your client or browser make use of your off-site account.

Also, I tried to upload pictures but kept getting an error.

If lemm.ee supports image uploads – which they don’t have to – they may have size restrictions; my understanding is that the size restriction can be customized on a per-instance basis.

EDIT: They say in their sidebar:

https://lemm.ee/

• Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation
• Image upload limit is 500kb per image

Your account was created in 2023, so it’s not the 4 week limit, but you’re probably exceeding their (relatively low, as Lemmy instances go) image size limit.

Be kind of interesting to expose that data and let lemmy.fediverse.observer display limits per-instance.

EDIT2: I think that the largest image I’ve uploaded on lemmy.today is this high-resolution scan, which is 8 MB.

The timeframe is pretty short.

That might be doable down the line if there were serious aims at long-run cooperation, but I’ve also read some articles making a case that due to divergent interest, Russia and NK probably won’t stick tightly together post-war.

Guess we’ll see.

I’m guessing that they’re gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.

I expect that it’s some degree of problem, no matter what.

One element that’s kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is a decision-making model developed by United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Booda+site%3Amil

The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they’re still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases – think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time – it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.

Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.

In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea

The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.

Unfortunately, these didn’t use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn’t work in English.

As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would – assuming no extra relays were involved, which would involve more decoding and encoding – hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.

One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that loop.

These projects would hinder Sweden’s defense by disrupting radar, sensor systems, and submarine detection, important for NATO’s newest member given nearby Russian threats.

Hmmmmm. Haven’t seen discussion on the radar or other sensor implications there. Be interesting to see The War Zone or similar run an article.

If one can viably use offshore wind farms as radar cover, that seems like it might be something to look into developing counters for more-generally, because those are probably going to become more widespread.

That’s probably especially true for Europe and some places in Southeast Asia, as they’re surrounded by shallow seas, where there may be a lot of offshore wind infrastructure showing up.

EDIT: Going the other way – China might be building offshore wind, and we probably have an interest in having subs be able to operate without being detected in the South China Sea, I wonder if it’s possible to synchronize submarine prop RPM to turbine RPM or something to maximize stealth.

EDIT2: For radar, might be able to use aerostat-based radars, see over turbines. Won’t help with microphone arrays or whatever, though. Could maybe stick sensors on the wind turbine bases, though. Add some cost, maybe, but then instead of a veil obscuring your view, you’ve got a lot of eyeballs.

EDIT3:

V Adm Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of Nato’s allied maritime command (Marcom), told the Guardian in April: “We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy through cables, internet cables, pipelines. All of our economy under the sea is under threat.”

Yeah, that’s a whole 'nother ball of wax. As I pointed out back during discussions around Nord Stream 2, there is literally not even legal protection for pipelines, as things stand.

The only protection for cables today is a treaty negotiated in France in the 1800s intended to cover telegraph cables (like, they weren’t running HVDC lines then).

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Submarine_Telegraph_Cables

That does not limit coverage just to data cables (despite the phrasing in the WP article I link to).

Dates to 1884. That’s the state of the art legally in the world in 2024, which is kinda mind-blowing.

My guess is that the US never had a strong reason to drive this, because the US is mostly surrounded by deep seas and doesn’t have anything important nearby across water, so not a whole lot of reason to build submarine infrastructure in relative terms or for it to be really critical for US security.

But the legal status is probably a lot more important for Europe, which has the Scandinavian penninsula, is mostly made up of penninsulas surrounded by shallow seas, has Africa across the Med, stuff like that. I think that there’s a good argument for the EU to have internal legal rules, like, Brussels-level powers to facilitate things like building pipelines and power lines overland rather than submarine. You had Spain trying to build critical infrastructure submarine around France to link the Iberian energy island to the rest of the EU rather than through France because France didn’t agree, which is a clusterfuck, but even if they do that, there are still some inescapable geographic realities – they’re probably going to still have more incentive for submarine infrastructure. So my suspicion is that Europe is likely to drive any change in the legal situation.

EDIT4: Potential areas of improvement might include:

• Legal requirements on where ships, or maybe large ships, can anchor. Anchor-dragging, “accidental” or not, can damage lines.

• Some mechanism for providing legal protection for infrastructure in international waters, especially pipelines.

• Some mechanism for quickly detecting and localizing damage to infrastructure. Possibly also detecting mechanical disruption, like dragging.

• Possibly the means to defend infrastructure. Part of the problem is that you can take out a lot of infrastructure at the depths they’re talking about with a COTS UUV from a surface ship that, last I looked around the Nord Stream 2 thing, was like $20k. That means that counters to something like a submarine, like lining your infrastructure with the equivalent of CAPTORs, isn’t gonna be economically effective; you can’t counter a group of 10 of those showing up at some point along the infrastructure. I have no idea if it’s even possible to reasonably counter attacks using current technology, even if they can be detected. Being able to attribute attacks to an attacker and deter them might be more realistic.

I dunno if it’s the worst relative to historical stuff for Lahore and Delhi, but India tends to be at about the back of the pack globally when I look at AQI maps.

kagis

https://waqi.info/#/c/6.168/6.699/3z

They’re gonna have some pretty hefty smog going on.

.io is especially popular because it resembles the computer term “input-output.” It is huge with start-ups and IT companies.

Well, those companies should also have the technical chops to know better.

I still think that most of opening up the TLD space was a mistake, not just the two-character stuff. Very few new TLDs have actually provided a lot of use, but they have created a “brand tax” on companies that don’t want confusing use of similar registrations and who then go register the equivalent domains.

.biz vs .com is a great example.