Accessory to War, strongly recommend. In many ways it's frustrating to get through for those of us familiar with the concept of where our tax dollars are spent in the US. Where if we only increased our budget for science by a couple of percentage points we could reap solutions to many of the problems that plague us.

The concept that space can be mastered and controlled by one military is laughable on its face. Yet governments around the world are trying to be "first".

That said Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang really have put together a great walk-through of history up to modern-day and the present as it relates to this on-going conflict. One take-away for me is this idea that there is a sub-section of the human species that is evolving more quickly and rapidly than the rest. It's clearly obvious if you look around and it leaves me wondering if the modern day version of a human viewed Neanderthals in similar fashion.

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

#accessory_to_war #neildegrassetyson #avislang #goodread

#Framework 16 update, still not many issues here. Wanted the aerial screensavers when I walk away from my machine for a couple of minutes but before my lockscreen activates. Usually ctrl-l and walk away even at home. However, now that i'm teaching the kids i've built a lab where they have workstations in the same area.

Pulled down a bunch of Apple's aerial screensavers and wrote a service to display after 5 mins. Using the dgpu unit to display at 240 fps gets the fans going of course, downscaled to 30fps and used the integrated unit and that's quieted them. Anything involving compiling directly on the machine gets the fans going if it's for any major length of time. There is a good thread on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/yzt3kc/thermal_paste_worth_replacing/ about thermal paste replacement. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is at 45C-55C not doing much so going to re-apply proper thermal paste myself.

My most recent purchase:

Cost of WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB NVMe SSD on Dec 4th 2025 = $253.80 USD

Cost of WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB NVMe SSD on Jan 18th 2026 = $535.11 USD

Percentage increase over 5 weeks... 110.84% increase. It's now more lucrative for hardware companies to artificially constrain supply of current consumer stock because demand from big commercial buyers is steady and returns will be high in each bucket. Unless something changes in the next year, the cost of hardware will make most consumer electronics completely unaffordable for large swaths of the global population.

Of course, I refuse to pay 110.84% extra on an ssd I just purchased a few weeks ago... It's going to be a long 2026.  

#enshittification #ram #ssd #nvme

Die hard marathon has kicked off… 80’s were great for the silencer on a hand gun sound, oversized trench coats and brutalist architecture. You had those 3 things you were doing it right 😂😂😂

Forgot machine guns shooting into the air and women screaming..

Anyone could get a machine gun in any movie during the 80’s. With oodles of ammo, no issue. My man Bruce Willis did the whole film with no shoes on…

Also rocket launchers, everyone had rpg’s at their disposal.

Also, criminals were prepared for end of times. “The cops have shotguns and tanks”… “Ok, get the helicopter with hellfire missiles in the air”. “Yeah boss but they have helicopters too”…. …. <criminal fighter jets shoot them down> “Now, let’s get out of here” 😂

Also criminals had a sense of style. Eccentric enough to be an identifiable criminal but it had to work with fight scenes.