I know they had QC issues with their dpads on their earlier controllers

Anecdotal: I just had a trigger on an 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth fail. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a button or trigger fail on any other gamepad I’ve ever owned, so that was a bit disappointing.

rsync is a fine tool, but it’s not really for backups. It’s for unidirectionally syncing data, which is part of a backup.

There are tools that use librsync to do a backup system, like rdiff-backup or duplicity.

I have used rdiff-backup in the past, but restic supports deduping data keyed off content rather than filename, which is functionality that I rather like having. I drive a restic job from backupninja, which handles doing things like notifying you if a backup has failed.

Yesterwynde by Nightwish

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kLS9HI_R0SyA9NQpNNo16uYpKTDxhQ7yI

I do have some Nightwish, but hadn’t been aware that this was out.

My Thousand Year Old Vampire

For others who also are not familiar:

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

FWIW, Windows — assuming that that’s where you’re coming from — has a PATH environment variable too. It’s just less common to invoke things directly by executable name on Windows in 2026, or to modify it, so it doesn’t come up much. If you type echo %PATH% in cmd.com on Windows, you’ll see something similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(variable)#DOS,_OS/2,_and_Windows

I’m not personally familiar with Synology’s products, but if what’s going on is that you’re using some built-in feature of a Synology NAS to copy files from a USB drive to the NAS and seeing an error, I’d probably try copying that particular file to somewhere else on a PC, cutting the NAS out of the loop, to make sure that you don’t have, say, a corrupt filesystem where attempts to read the file contents are failing.

If one takes the position that part of the issue was that various leaders and diplomats hadn’t appreciated the degree to which military plans with fixed mobilization schedules essentially made it very difficult to back down once mobilization has started, I suppose that it’s possible that some clever people could have figured that out and started a series of arms control treaties aimed in such a way as to provide “breakpoints”, where even once mobilization had started, the move towards war could be reversed.

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

Primacy of offensive and war by timetable

See also: Cult of the offensive

Moltke, Joffre, Conrad, and other military commanders held that seizing the initiative was extremely important. That theory encouraged all belligerents to devise war plans to strike first to gain the advantage. The war plans all included complex plans for mobilization of the armed forces, either as a prelude to war or as a deterrent. The continental Great Powers’ mobilization plans included arming and transporting millions of men and their equipment, typically by rail and to strict schedules.[citation needed]

The mobilization plans limited the scope of diplomacy, as military planners wanted to begin mobilisation as quickly as possible to avoid being caught on the defensive. They also put pressure on policymakers to begin their own mobilization once it was discovered that other nations had begun to mobilize.[citation needed]

In 1969, A. J. P. Taylor wrote that mobilization schedules were so rigid that once they were begun, they could not be canceled without massive disruption of the country and military disorganisation, and they could not proceed without physical invasion (of Belgium by Germany). Thus, diplomatic overtures conducted after the mobilizations had begun were ignored.[152] Hence the metaphor “war by timetable”.

Russia ordered a partial mobilization on 25 July against Austria-Hungary only. Their lack of prewar planning for the partial mobilization made the Russians realize by 29 July that it would be impossible to interfere with a general mobilization.[citation needed]

Only a general mobilization could be carried out successfully. The Russians were, therefore, faced with only two options: canceling the mobilization during a crisis or moving to full mobilization, the latter of which they did on 30 July. They, therefore, mobilized along both the Russian border with Austria-Hungary and the border with Germany.[citation needed]

German mobilization plans assumed a two-front war against France and Russia and had the bulk of the German army massed against France and taking the offensive in the west, and a smaller force holding East Prussia. The plans were based on the assumption that France would mobilize significantly faster than Russia.[citation needed]

On 28 July, Germany learned through its spy network that Russia had implemented partial mobilisation and its “Period Preparatory to War”. The Germans assumed that Russia had decided upon war and that its mobilisation put Germany in danger, especially since because German war plans, the so-called Schlieffen Plan, relied upon Germany to mobilise speedily enough to defeat France first by attacking largely through neutral Belgium before it turned to defeat the slower-moving Russians.[citation needed]

Christopher Clark states: “German efforts at mediation – which suggested that Austria should ‘Halt in Belgrade’ and use the occupation of the Serbian capital to ensure its terms were met – were rendered futile by the speed of Russian preparations, which threatened to force the Germans to take counter-measures before mediation could begin to take effect.”[153]

Clark also states: “The Germans declared war on Russia before the Russians declared war on Germany. But by the time that happened, the Russian government had been moving troops and equipment to the German front for a week. The Russians were the first great power to issue an order of general mobilisation and the first Russo-German clash took place on German, not on Russian soil, following the Russian invasion of East Prussia. That doesn’t mean that the Russians should be ‘blamed’ for the outbreak of war. Rather it alerts us to the complexity of the events that brought war about and the limitations of any thesis that focuses on the culpability of one actor.”[154]

If someone realized the implications of these war plans, they might have either placed more weight on pre-mobilization diplomacy or had some arms control agreement that reduced some of the time pressures and didn’t turn mobilization into an escalation spiral that led to all-in war.

I am not saying that that would have happened had Franz Ferdinand not been assassinated, but I could at least imagine that time a non-assassination might have bought might have made it possible.

I wouldn’t refuse to use an LLM for coding if it were specifically requested by management. I mean, I might advise as to risks, but ultimately, if a business is willing to put their resources on the line as a business decision, then okay, their capital, their call. But I wouldn’t personally be spending time on it in 2026 on my own initiative either. Maybe for some special cases that are particularly well-suited to it, like “I need a limited amount of throwaway code in a language that I don’t know”.

Why not?

Software development has a lot of stuff that’s asserted to “change the world” come along all the time. Could be new tools, new programming languages, new paradigms, new validation software, whatever.

First, assuming that one really does take over — be it a new programming language or a new editor or a particular LLM generating code — it’s typically easier to let other people do the work of breaking the path, since whatever the thing is typically not in a fantastic state. There are problems that are going to need to be solved. Some of those may never be solved, whatever the promises or expectations. And some of the early workarounds may be unnecessary in the long term. The first-mover benefits, on the other hand, aren’t likely that big a deal (and I think that we have enough data out now to show that while there might be benefits, as things stand, they aren’t that large).

Second, a lot of the time, things that are put forward as being the future are not, in fact, the future. If you sit back and watch, then you don’t burn time heading down every new blind alley. If LLM-assisted coding becomes the norm, then five years from now, a lot of data will have been gathered showing that using them in coding produces benefits and what those benefits are, as well as drawbacks.

Specifically in the case of AI writing software, I am pretty sure that in the long run, AI will be writing software at a human level. Same as AI will be doing a lot of things. But I am not at all sure that that it’s going to be an LLM of the present form taking the present approach. Also, a lot of the workarounds to learn today to deal with present limitations of the tools may not be the ones needed down the road. Further, those limitations probably vary by tool even today; I’m not very interested in learning how to try to get Llama 3 to do something only to switch to ChatGPT only to switch to Claude.

Another issue is that most current code-generation models run on cloud services, which raises security and dependency issues.

Plus reproducibility issues. Even if I decide that, say, a cloud-based LLM of a particular version works well and the tradeoffs are acceptable and I tune my workflow to use it, then I’m spending a lot of time learning to deal with one LLM. If that particular version of an LLM later becomes unavailable — as has happened to users in the past — then it may be that all the workflow and workarounds that I’ve developed are more-or-less useless, if the provider decides to alter the revision of the available model or entirely remove it. I enjoyed using Stable Diffusion 1.5, and picked up and developed a number of techniques that work well with it. But those same techniques don’t work well with even all models derived from SD 1.5, and if one’s using a different diffusion model like Flux, then suddenly all the rules go out the window and one is starting at ground zero.

In the case of Stable Diffusion and Flux, I’m okay with that. I’m not professionally an image manipulator, so I’m not building much expertise on a foundation of sand, and I run both of them locally, so my ability to run them can never be taken away. But that’s not true when cloud services enter the picture.

The reproducibility issues might be mitigated in some ways at a business level — AI service companies could enter into some sort of escrow agreement under what an LLM is guaranteed to be available as a service for N years or something, and if they go under some other company automatically becomes a provider, but frankly, I don’t think that any benefits now warrant that level of hassle.

My expectation is that existing LLM service cloud providers — which are currently losing money — will, later on, do things like raise prices or otherwise use their leverage to make more money. That is, they are currently in a growth phase, where they accept losses to build their user base. Later, they will shift to a monetization phase. If you are heavily locked into use of that service, they can extract from you up to the cost of shifting off of their service, and you will keep using the service. My guess is that the costs of transitioning off might be quite substantial.

EDIT: Okay, one exception to the “I wouldn’t refuse” case. If (a) I were working at a startup and (b) a substantial amount of my compensation were in the form of stock options or similar and (c) I were personally convinced that use of AI-assisted-coding would be an extremely bad move for the company, then I might take a “if we do LLMs, I walk out the door” position, because then it’s my capital on the line, not just the company’s. Part of the point of equity compensation is precisely to give you a kick in the rear to get you to act as you see being in the interests of the company. That being said, I’d try to talk to whoever was involved in making the decision to use it first in a scenario like that, to try to understand our difference in opinion on the matter, see if it couldn’t be reconciled.

A legitimate victory by forfeit.

Sure, I’d like that, but I’m not going to keep personally fighting to make life better for that manufacturer’s customers. Not when there are other car manufacturers that aren’t pulling that stuff that people can be directed to.

Is the message you want to send “if you buy product from a vendor who actively goes out of their way to dick over open-source developers, it probably won’t matter for me as a customer because those developers will keep expending time and accepting legal risk to try to improve the situation for those customers”? Or do you want it to be “you probably want to look for open-source friendly manufacturers”?

I don’t really see the point. I mean, why bother to try to do something that just makes the company’s printers more desirable? Even if you “win”, the company is going to be a pain in the ass. Do you really want to waste time and financial resources on improving the company’s product?

Just don’t buy Bambu Lab printers. Don’t recommend them. And don’t support them with software.

If this was a world in which there was one 3D printer manufacturer, it’d be different, but it’s not. They have competition.

Not quite what you’re asking for, but when I first heard the phrase “balls to the wall”, I thought that it alluded to testicles. One of the Grand Theft Auto games has some radio audio that uses it satirically in this sense as well (“Lazlow, get your balls to the wall” or something similar).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/balls_to_the_wall

First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft’s engine controls (typically throttle, prop pitch and fuel mixture). Pushing these “balls to the wall” would put the aircraft at maximum thrust.[1][2] Analogous to pedal to the metal. Not related to the term balls-out, which refers to a ball governor on a steam engine.[3] Neither balls-out nor balls to the wall is connected with the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”) except via folk etymology.

EDIT: The GTA audio in question (the song itself used the phrase satirically, and the announcer does as well):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVWwG6RJrLA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balls_to_the_Wall_(album)

Balls to the Wall is the fifth studio album by German heavy metal band Accept, released in 1983. It is Accept’s only record to attain Gold certification in the US.[1] The album’s title track became Accept’s signature song and remains a metal anthem and trademark in the genre.

but it literally is just Thacker Pass.

This isn’t Thacker Pass.

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

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is a lithium clay mining development project in Humboldt County, Nevada

The location being discussed:

McDermitt Caldera in Oregon

It looks like there was some discussion that there might be lithium there a bit back, like in 2023, but this is not decade-old news.

So, visa length restrictions might be a reasonable approach for some types of illegally-operated businesses. I could buy this:

Authorities have also launched operations against foreigners accused of illegally operating bars, restaurants and tourism businesses in popular resort areas.

But…

Security concerns escalated further this month after Thai police arrested a Chinese national in Pattaya who was allegedly found in possession of a large cache of military-grade weapons, including assault rifles, explosives, grenades, Russian landmines and anti-personnel mines.

The suspect, arrested on 9 May, was charged with illegal possession of unauthorised weapons and could face up to 10 years in prison.

Like, that seems like it’s a customs problem. I mean, if you’re seeing said weapons illicitly entering the country in the first place, that seems like it’s already running afoul of most issues that you might have. I don’t think that it’s going to matter much whether it’'s a Thai native gunrunning or a Chinese national.

Alcohol and/or drugs, I imagine.

I still read a few things on Reddit occasionally, and I’ll search for answers using site:reddit.com. I just don’t log in or post.

And…let me make it even more concrete. I’d say that there are basically two scenarios:

1. We establish that AI — for some definition of AI — is simply too dangerous for humanity to have. In that case, the right path is to ban AI globally. That means that nobody gets it. Some coalition of countries is going to have to be willing to attack anyone who tries developing it. In that case, what we have is effectively an arms control restriction baked into customary international law. It is not optional to participate. And, for all the future of humanity, we need to be willing to enforce that. It means that we need a viable verification protocol to ensure that nobody is developing it, as is normally the case for arms treaties. And everyone has to submit to that verification protocol.

2. We don’t. In that case, we want to develop AI sooner rather than later.

I am certainly not willing to say that #2 is the “right” scenario and #1 is the “wrong” one. But if we decide on #1, that comes with a lot of things that we need to be doing as a species. It’s not just going to be the pre-computer-era status quo persisting, where our limited state of technology was what maintained the situation.

EDIT: I’d also add that, just as that I’m not sure that Friendly AI is a solvable problem, I’m also not sure that it’s really viable to have a verification protocol where we can prevent development of AI. Past arms control treaties where I think that verification was likely much easier — it’s hard to hide development of major warships under the Washington Naval Treaty, for example, yet there were still parties evading restrictions — were not always successful. #1 comes with its own set of hard problems too. Are parallel compute processors legal? What about their development and production? Under what restrictions are they used? Is it possible to achieve advanced AI using CPUs (my guess is that it likely is)? If so, what new restrictions will need to be placed on use and access to CPUs? How will we identify entities building production facilities to build CPUs and GPUs? Will we need to track all existing CPUs and GPUs, to try to identify entities who might be stockpiling them? How will we monitor what the great stores of those out there now are being used for?

If we go with #1, that also entails a different world from the one that we live in today.

I’ve got some pessimistic views as to long-term AI concerns — I’m not sure that aligning advanced AI goals with human goals in the long run is a viable problem to solve. We may not be able to achieve Friendly AI. I could believe that.

But I certainly don’t think that AI development is “moving too fast”. Not really anything to gain in slowing down development. I remember Elon Musk proposing a six-month moratorium on development — that doesn’t make any sense, only would be something that you’d want to do if you had an immediate milestone that you believed that there was major risk attached to. In general, either AI is something that you should ban globally because it’s too much of an existential risk for humanity, and halt all development and enforce that halt, or you’d like to achieve it as soon as possible. We are not at a point where there is a consensus that that level of unacceptable risk exists and there is a global commitment to enforcing such a global prohibition.

I can believe that there might be an excess of infrastructure development in particular, that we might not have the research side moving as quickly as need be to support that. Like, we might be doing misallocation in buying a lot of specific chips without establishing that those chips are going to provide a worthwhile return. But in terms of the technology advancing…no, can’t agree there.

• Mount a rooftop antenna if you’re into various forms of radio — CB, ham, shortwave, running a radio scanner, terrestrial broadcast digital TV, etc. Height is helpful there.

• You can probably get some kind of automated watering system, if that’s your concern with the vegetables. Maybe need to fill a tank occasionally, but outside of that…shrugs.

• Some people like rooftop beekeeping. Don’t need frequent access for that.

  

• Can throw some solar panels up there as a source of emergency power if the power goes out; if you put them above head height, then you’ve also got shade.

• I’m guessing that this is an urban environment (“access to” sounds like a multiunit building) so it probably has light pollution in the area, but if not, could maybe throw a telescope up there for unobstructed access to the sky. I’ve occasionally wondered about how hard it’d be to get some kinda motorized pan-tilt-zoom telescope-attached camera just to pan around and look at stuff on the ground on a monitor, and if you’re looking at the city, it might be fun, kinda like adding an expansive view downstairs. I have some relatives that have housing with a nice view, and they liked to have tripod-mounted telescopes to look out and check out everything. In your case, probably want something remotely-operated, but same idea.

Does Kickstarter have liability in general for Kickstarted projects? I’d kind of assume that that’s on the specific project. I can’t imagine that Kickstarter is in any kind of position to really do a domain-specific evaluation of whether a given project is in line with local regulations.