Hmm. I haven’t been following it, but was Hezbollah really that centralized? It seems like a super-bad idea if you’re aiming to fight guerrilla war.

EDIT: This says ~300:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-09-28/ty-article/these-are-the-command-centers-and-buildings-attacked-by-the-idf-in-beirut/00000192-385f-dc91-a1df-bedf69f10000

The Israeli army carried out an airstrike on Hezbollah’s central command in southern Beirut on Friday, killing its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with approximately 300 people, including other members of the group.

I mean, that’s obviously still a really successful strike, but you’re talking maybe an order of magnitude fewer people.

I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.

https://viewer.weather.noaa.gov/water#layers=42904+40090+42133+41707+41708+41709+41631&x=-92.96832&y=40.68848&z=8.4&panel=legend

Has kind of a nice visualization of the flooding and related information.

I’d guess that they mean that they reliably show up in an assortment but aren’t many people’s favorite.

Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons license.

$100 crude target

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that that probably wasn’t a number resulting from a bunch of economists and computers spending a long time crunching numbers to try to produce an optimal target for Saudi Arabia anyway.

I’d probably be a softie here and just pick something obscure that would cause a minimal ripple. There are songs out there that I don’t like, but if they get much play, it’s because there are people who do like them, and they should be able to listen to their favored music.

For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired some time later in the plot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVlHCGPpGCc

I don’t know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it’s not like those are exactly open. And they weren’t pressurizing it.

Hydrogen

This says that hydrogen isn’t just a problem, just helium:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/669763/why-is-a-mems-device-affected-by-helium-but-not-hydrogen

It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.

Hmm.

That seems like it’d open a lot of potential abuses.

I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they’re exposed to helium?

I’d be fine with hissy fits if they were about something real.

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

In April 2022, it was reported that Just Stop Oil’s primary source of funding was donations from the US-based Climate Emergency Fund.

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

Aileen Getty is an American heiress and activist. She is a member of the Getty family, the granddaughter of J. Paul Getty. She co-founded the Climate Emergency Fund in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Paul_Getty

Jean Paul Getty Sr. (/ˈɡɛti/; December 15, 1892 – June 6, 1976) was an American-born British petroleum industrialist who founded the Getty Oil Company in 1942 and was the patriarch of the Getty family.[1] A native of Minneapolis, he was the son of pioneer oilman George Getty. In 1957, Fortune magazine named him the wealthiest living American,[2] while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records declared him the world’s wealthiest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approximately $8.6 billion in 2023).[3] At the time of his death, he was worth more than $6 billion (approximately $25 billion in 2023).[4] A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th wealthiest American who ever lived (based on his wealth as a percentage of the concurrent gross national product).[5]

So she assuages her guilt for having a huge oil inheritance by donating some of it to encourage other people overseas to go to jail protesting other people doing what her grandfather made his money doing. Great.

He fought to keep his job on First Amendment grounds.

looks dubious

One of the exceptions to “the government cannot restrict your right to speech” is the government acting in a “government-as-employer” role. There, they can act like any other employer, and don’t have special constraints just because they’re the government. Employers can normally let people go because they think that they’re bad for their image, and that’s what the article said happened here.

…university leaders said he sullied the school’s reputation and had to go.

https://www.nyclu.org/resources/know-your-rights/speaking-out-public-employee

Different rules apply if you are making these comments in your personal time as a private individual. Generally, your statements about topics that are of general interest to the public, including current events, are protected by the First Amendment. However, a public employer in New York may discipline you if your comments either disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job.

Now, I suppose you can ask whether the professor publicly releasing porn videos of himself is actually damaging to public perception of the university, but the rationale they used is a legit rationale.

Apparently, the guy in question is also named Orbán, and prime minister Orbán has said that prime minister aide Orbán is talking nonsense, so there’s that.

https://apnews.com/article/orban-ukraine-russia-invasion-d788a2e58bdd162a3a30532bf33e8633

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary always has and always will defend itself against foreign attacks, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday after one of his closest aides provoked controversy by suggesting that Hungary wouldn’t have fought against a Russian invasion as Ukraine has done.

Speaking to state radio, Orbán sought to downplay the remarks by his political director, Balázs Orbán, which stirred outrage among many in Hungary and led to calls for his resignation.

Prime Minister Orbán called the comment “an ambiguous statement, which in this context is a mistake.”

He emphasized that Hungary has “always defended itself, it will defend itself today and will continue to defend itself in the future by all possible means.”

Also, the names don’t seem to stop there.

On Thursday, Hungary’s most prominent opposition figure, Péter Magyar, called for Balázs Orbán’s resignation by Oct. 23, the 68th anniversary of the revolution.

Isn’t “Magyar” Hungarian for “Hungarian”?

checks Google Translate

It is.

So we’ve got the Hungarian opposition lead Hungarian criticizing Hungarian prime minister Orbán and calling for Hungarian prime minister Orbán’s aide Orbán to resign.

?

Plastic recycling isn’t fake. It’s often not been economical, so it often doesn’t make any sense to do it. But you can recycle plastics.

They are worried about social decline, war, or not being able to find a home. The result is noteworthy because the job prospects for young people in Germany have not been this good in years due to the baby boomers reaching retirement age.

I don’t think that there’s any country that doesn’t have media trying to run doom-and-gloom appeals aimed at the young, and I don’t think that that’s a new phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a song written by American musician Billy Joel. The song was released as a single on September 18, 1989, and later released as part of Joel’s album Storm Front on October 17, 1989. A list song, its fast-paced lyrics include brief references to 119[3] significant political, cultural, scientific, and sporting events between 1949 (the year of Joel’s birth) and 1989, in mainly chronological order.

Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”. The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.[4]

And making an argument that Germany needs more economic strength is hardly in line with also targeting less immigration:

With provocative messages such as “Germany is going bankrupt,” or proclamations that the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz “hates you,” they play on fears that many young people have. And then they immediately offer a solution: the AfD.

Plus, is this sending my data to HP to be processed remotely as a cloud service, or is this AI stuff being run locally? I don’t especially want to have the contents of my print jobs being sent to HP.

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@28.85,45.33,14.00z

NASA FIRMS shows two detected fires in Izmail.

Assuming that these were the targets – and not all heat signatures that FIRMS pick up are:

• One is at “Dunaysudnoservis”, which is apparently a Ukrainian shipyard; Google Maps has an image with a ship in drydock there.

• One is at a small commercial area to the northwest of a solar farm, or possibly in a adjacent residential area; the resolution isn’t good enough to determine. “Barakholka”, a secondhand store, and a carwash are in the commercial area.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in early September that his government must create the conditions “so that having many children becomes fashionable again, as it used to be – seven or 10 people in a family.”

Getting back up to a sustainable TFR of 2.1 hasn’t been achieved by a number of countries that have tried. I don’t think that there’s any chance that Russia is going to hit between 7 and 10 via trying to control the information enviornment.

But we shall see.