Do it successfully once or twice, then just start launching mass numbers of balloons when conditions are right and only put a drone on 1% of them.

The better way is to attach dummy drones made out of scrap material to all the decoy balloons. You don’t want to give them an easy way to identify which ones are decoys or not…

Juries often have one or more alternates. Those are jurors who sit in the jury box for the entire trial, but under normal conditions they aren’t in the jury room during deliberations. If a juror is unable to remain, for whatever reason, then the judge replaces that juror with one of the alternates. I sat on 2 days of a 3 day trial but tested positive for Covid the morning of the third, so I was excused. The judge replaced me with one of her alternates.

If the judge got wind that a juror was disregarding such an order then that juror would likely be kicked out & replaced with an alternate. If the transgression by the juror was severe enough the judge could potentially also refer the juror to the Attorney Generals office for investigation and possible charges.

Likely Aqueous film forming foams (AFFF) or another similar firefighting foam.

I’m a DevOps engineer (about 15 years) and in a previous life was a software engineer (15 years before that). My employer is pushing hard on AI so I reluctantly started using Claude at times. I must say that I’m fairly impressed when it comes to relatively easy tasks. We’re a large AWS user and have developed a fairly complex in-house set of python tools that encapsulate things like Terraform and Ansible. We have about 15 or so AWS sub-accounts that span logical groupings, so our IAM configuration alone was fairly complex.

I was able to point Claude at our IAM configuration and tell it to create a set of policies/roles to allow a host in one environment to access resources in a read-only manner across all our accounts. Since I’m not an IAM expert it would have taken me a few hours to figure out what it did in under 10 minutes. Two of my team reviewed the proposed changes and were perfectly fine with them.

I’ve also had it write python scripts that do things like call AWS APIs, collect JSON results, and compare it to contents pulled from a git repo of configuration data.

For relatively simple tasks like these it can be a time saver. But you still need to sanity check everything it does. I’ve seen it skip steps (like not applying IAM policies to all our accounts), and when you point it out it will apologize and fix things. But it’s that sort of failure that makes me still be wary of AI. Like why only update a subset of things and fix it only after I point it out? “All” means “all”, not “some”…

For more complex things I’m still very reluctant to trust it. When it comes to that I may use Claude to encapsulate a few API calls, but then I’ll rely on my own expertise to add in all the really important logic.

My “scam” has caused my electric bill to effectively drop below zero when averaged over the whole year. And that includes charging our EV, which means the “scam” is saving me a boatload of cash given gas prices these days.

The article says the local utility already gets 25% of its electricity from solar panels it owns, but 75% from the provider that’s shutting them off next year…

I’ve been rear-ended twice, and both times heard the other cars brakes just long enough before the impact to think “oh shit”… I can’t imagine what a school bus driver would think in this situation given all the kids…

Blinded by the Light

Written by Bruce Springsteen, but I think Manfred Mann did it much better.

Yeah, the raids are dwindling because all the key targets have been struck and destroyed or heavily damaged. Rebuild those targets and let’s see how quickly the drones reappear.

Increasingly, human operators are being supplemented or replaced by automated systems capable of gathering intelligence, identifying targets, and executing strikes with minimal delay.

Welcome to the age of modern warfare. No wonder Russia’s “meat grinder” approach is failing…

What about refrigerators?

Will it block VPNs, proxies, and Bing image search as well?

I’ve seen actors fall down stairs and over a breakaway bannister live in a Broadway show. It’s clearly highly choreographed, and I also spotted the pads one actor was wearing when his shirt accidentally came untucked. Even though it looked very chaotic, in hindsight it was more of a tuck & tumble than a random fall.

Hell, my wife’s entirely manual Jeep (manual door locks, manual window cranks, etc.) still has a sensor that warns you if the tailgate is open…

Same plan as Iran:

1. Send the US military to bomb a bunch of stuff.
2. Iran Immediately folds and capitulates to all our demands.

It’s the most bestest plan ever that only the brilliant minds of Trump & Hegseth could have come up with.

Here’s a bit of trivia (I worked for a startup that Ask Jeeves acquired back in 2000 & stayed on for a few more years):

There was a brief period of time where Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into search for porn. They went so far as to design a French maid caricature named Mimi that was to parallel the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. They even registered a bunch of domains like askmimi.com before finally deciding they didn’t want to risk damaging the Jeeves brand, and scratched the whole project.

Another bit of trivia: the CEO & executives at Jeeves when they acquired us were short-sighted idiots. One of the products my startup had developed was something we called “text ads” that let people bid on popular search terms for placement of ads along with the search results we served up. It was a fully automated system that required virtually no interaction on our part, and we considered it a license to print money. It brought in a good amount of revenue for us. After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.

The company that bought it made some improvements to it then re-launched it as Google AdWords, and Google quickly eclipsed Jeeves after that.

Hell, just find an accessible sewer cleanout and use that. No need to trick your way into a house.

Jokes on them. I have a septic system.

https://www.caspianpolicy.org/research/security/live-map-of-russian-refineries-hit-ukrainian-drone-strikes-boost-caspian-energy

Why hit them more frequently? Let Russia expend the effort to completely rebuild it and get into operation and THEN you attack again. By waiting until it’s back in operation you not only maximize the repair costs, but you also target it when it’s full of highly flammable materials. That ensures maximum destruction when you hit it again. A refinery full of oil that burns for days causes much more damage than a hunk of explosives in a drone that detonates next to an empty storage tank.