Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Satelitte images gif showing the exceptional drough this summer in France (and around) compared to the past two years.

Reply in thread

having spent my life in the American West and now being in Europe I'm very aware of deserts and droughts. having toured and studied the dams, canals, and infrastructure for water in the west I also know how tenuous urban human life is when imposed on environments which over leverage aquifers, rivers, and agriculture to sustain people living in delicate ecosystems.

bitch about Australia turning brown every year is fair, as it has for an epoch or more. France hasn't. The AMOC, jetstream, and geography have given it an incredible angriculture belt which predates the industrial revolution and more.

environments are fascinating, systemically. The earth is the only one we have, and I like to understand it.

Comment on

Satelitte images gif showing the exceptional drough this summer in France (and around) compared to the past two years.

Reply in thread

https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-updates/potentially-historic-el-nino-come-analysis-shows-humanitarian-toll-2026-06-15_en

Potentially historic El Niño to come, analysis shows humanitarian toll

It is expected that in the coming months the El Niño climate phenomenon will occur and will worsen drought, flood, heat, and storm conditions across many regions of the world

Comment on

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome's own per-profile state, Chrome's runtime feature flags, and Google's component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user's disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.

Comment on

*Permanently Deleted*

https://nriglobe.com/news/global-nri-news/nri-commentator-pinesap-fired-after-defending-fascism-in-viral-jubilee-debate-with-mehdi-hasan/

The Jubilee episode pitted British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan, renowned for his incisive debating style, against 20 self-proclaimed far-right conservatives, including Estelle. The discussion tackled divisive issues such as U.S. immigration policies, President Donald Trump’s leadership, the role of the U.S. Constitution, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Estelle, using his online persona “Pinesap,” emerged as a lightning rod when he unapologetically embraced fascist ideologies during a tense exchange with Hasan.

...

Estelle further advocated for autocracy over democracy, arguing that the U.S. Constitution should be amended or ignored when it “fails to serve us.” When challenged on whether Democrats could similarly disregard the Constitution, he replied, “Absolutely not,” exposing inconsistencies in his stance. His comments, coupled with his refusal to unequivocally condemn antisemitism, fueled widespread condemnation online, particularly among NRI communities who viewed his rhetoric as a betrayal of shared values.

In the wake of the episode, Estelle announced on X, under the handle @FeelsGuy2003, that he had been fired from his role at VeUP Ltd, a tech firm with operations in the U.S., UK, Europe, and the Middle East. Claiming his termination was due to “political discrimination,” he launched a GiveSendGo fundraiser to support himself, alleging financial hardship. However, investigations by online sleuths have cast doubt on his narrative. A Threads post alleged that Estelle’s employment history was fabricated, with no verifiable evidence of his role at VeUP Ltd. The post further linked him to white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ network since 2022 and a fringe group dubbed the “Remilia cult,” purportedly connected to Elon Musk under the alias “Timeless Martian.” These unverified claims have intensified scrutiny of Estelle’s motives

news

Comment on

U.S. Navy Minesweepers Assigned To Middle East Have Been Moved To Pacific (Updated)

It's really worth reading: https://hntrbrk.com/demining-hormuz/ which TWZ references regarding the demining.

The ending is below as I just had to shake my head and slap my face.

The Washington Institute estimated years ago that clearing the Strait of Hormuz of mines could require “up to 16 MCM vessels.” The Navy has seven. Iran has an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 mines and, according to U.S. intelligence in conversations with CNN, still retains “80% to 90% of its small boats and miners.”

The brief covered a recent MCM Advanced Tactical Training program, the final pre-deployment mine warfare assessment for LCS crews. 

Some key findings: 

Unreliable unmanned systems. Each Fleet-class USV mission requires over four hours of “pre-mission maintenance” and “1.5 hours of GPS/sonar calibration once launched,” according to the presentation. Multiple hunt missions were conducted where the sonar simply failed to record data — and crews didn’t know until the post-mission analysis. This is especially damaging during reacquire-and-identify missions, exactly the kind of work needed to clear a minefield. 

Operators have responded by shortening mission times, which defeats the purpose of using unmanned vehicles in the first place. One pre-deployment exercise with the USS Tulsa off the coast of San Diego resulted in a runaway MCM USV near Mexico’s territorial waters that could not be recovered by the mothership LCS. “Literally, the practice minefield I use is 1 mile north of the US-Mexico maritime border, and there’s a good chance that that UUV drifts or decides to go off on its own. I’m going to get demarched by the Mexican government,” said the leader of the U.S. Navy’s Mine Countermeasures Technical Division. The USVs themselves act as a handicap to minesweeping, with a short bandwidth range forcing the mothership LCS to operate near or inside minefields to maintain visual range to the USV’s antennas. 

Visual identification doesn’t work. U.S. MCM doctrine requires a camera to visually confirm mines — the AQS-20 has to drive directly over a bottom mine. But even the relatively clear waters off Southern California have defeated this approach. In the turbid, shallow, current-swept waters of the Persian Gulf, the problem would be far worse. The officer’s conclusion: The Navy needs to adopt high-granularity sonar identification, as other navies already have. 

Critical single-point failures. The platform lift between mission bay and hangar, the BIT test laptops for the USV/ALMDS/AMNS, the twin boom extensible crane, and the payload handling systems are all single-point failures with no spares or redundancy aboard. If any one of these breaks, operations stop. When describing the deployment arm, the Navy mine countermeasures lead said, “It is a troubling system. It is highly complex for what it does, and when it breaks, I’m out of a job, I’m out of a mission.”

Multi-mission dilution. The LCS was designed as a multi-mission platform. The addition of Naval Strike Missiles and pressure to support visit, board, search, and seize operations means crews have less time to build and maintain MCM proficiency. “So now my ship with an LCS mission package may not necessarily be practicing MCM.” The LCS platform is also being experimented on as a long-range strike platform. The director’s own conclusion: The LCS will always struggle to match a dedicated MCM vessel.

news

Comment on

Government Reopening Hits a Snag After Rand Paul Throws a Wrench in Shutdown Deal

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) made the stakes clear Monday morning. There is only one “objector” to speeding up Senate consideration of the government funding package — Paul. The senator wants to strip a section from the bill that would prevent the sale of hemp-derived products like Delta-8 at gas stations, corner stores, or online without federal regulation.

Paul defended his stance as part of his duty to Kentucky. “Just to be clear: I am not delaying this bill. The timing is already fixed under Senate procedure. But there is extraneous language in this package that has nothing to do with reopening the government and would harm Kentucky’s hemp farmers and small businesses,” he said in a statement posted on X. “Standing up for Kentucky jobs is part of my job,” he added.

Comment on

NOAA reported that Saildrone was inside Hurricane Milton & it recorded wave heights of 28.12 feet and wind gusts up to 75.95 mph, while being 40 nautical miles from the storm's center

Reply in thread

Saildrones aren't intended as a hurricane monitoring platform. The marine work I am most aware of them used for is multibeaming the seafloor, so my reaction as a seafarer on a research vessel is, "it survived?!?!?" (Also which model?). That's a sea state 7 and Beaufort of 9.

Which should answer your question that yes, there are not much in the way of other data points like this. There might be some other NOAA floats, buoys, and some vessels with weather station data which can report, but having an unscrewed vessel like Saildrone is just starting to be used. Marine research doesn't have the military budgets to just throw things at storms.

Comment on

Just your usual map of Europe

Is this a contiguous connection between claimed territories (e.g. Antarctica) and islands part of the EU (e.g. Reunion's DOM, and French Polynesia's COM)?

Interesting, but as a seafarer kind of silly as the EEZ and 12 mile limits don't create any sort of contiguous existence.

The freedom of navigation and international waters make for some interesting viewing though.

Comment on

In Asia, the global oil crisis is turning into an everything crisis

That strain is now spreading into every corner of the consumer market as prices rise for materials like plastic, rubber and polyester. The impact is so far most evident in Asia, which accounts for more than half of the world’s manufacturing and is heavily reliant on imports for oil and other commodities.

In South Korea, where people have been panic-buying trash bags, the government has encouraged event organizers to minimize use of disposable items. Taiwan has started a hotline for manufacturers that have run out of plastic, while its rice farmers told local media they may hike prices because they can’t get vacuum-sealed bags.

In Japan, the oil crisis has sparked fears that patients with chronic kidney failure won’t be able to get treatment due to a lack of plastic medical tubes used in hemodialysis. Malaysian glove manufacturers say a dearth of a petroleum byproduct needed to make rubber latex is threatening global supplies of medical gloves.

world

Comment on

The ‘Fourth Successor’: Iran’s plan for a long war with the US and Israel | US-Israel war on Iran

“Mosaic defence” is an Iranian military concept most closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), particularly under former commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, who led the force from 2007 to 2019.

The idea is to organise the state’s defensive structure into multiple regional and semi-independent layers instead of concentrating power in a single command chain that could be paralysed by a decapitation strike.

Under this model, the IRGC, the Basij, regular army units, missile forces, naval assets and local command structures form parts of a distributed system. If one part is hit, others keep functioning. If senior leaders are killed, the chain does not collapse. If communications are severed, local units still retain the authority and capacity to act.

The doctrine has two central aims: to make Iran’s command system difficult to dismantle by force, and to make the battlefield itself harder to resolve quickly by turning Iran into a layered arena of regular defence, irregular warfare, local mobilisation and long-term attrition.

That is why Iranian military thinking does not treat war primarily as a contest of firepower. It treats it as a test of endurance.

Comment on

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

Reply in thread

More difficult to remove than install. Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, (c) navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome AI feature [5]. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.

This is 5: https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/

Obviously only windows focused, so how other platforms stop would require more searching.