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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)VO
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  • CALL. YOUR. REPS. AND. SUPPORT. THIS.

    Tell them you want Schumer out. Tell them you want a real progressive in charge. Tell them you want a progressive party that fights like hell for the people. Tell them that you will personally work to help primary them out if they don't grow a fucking spine.

    Raising your voice costs you nothing, so just fucking do it.

    I don't give a fuck about your magical third party that's going to manifest from the ether. You can still do that, no one is stopping you.

    But right now you have an opportunity to capitalize on this outrage and possibly make a real, meaningful change.

    You miss every shot you don't take.

  • Also worth noting that;

    1. We trained those Ukrainians
    2. Only one of those Canadian kills was recorded by our special forces. The others were just regular recce snipers. In the Canadian military, those guys are considered plain Joe average rank and file. My wife was literally doing range with guys like that today.
  • I've never had any luck finding anything open source / self hosted that actually works reliably. The best I came up with was an Nvidia Shield, which at least allows to you to run stuff like Kodi, Jellyfin, and Smart Tube Next (ad blocking YouTube client).

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  • Sorry, you're correct, that was a typo, I'll edit.

    The point of comparison is still correct, about it being equal to the total compute of London. I just wrote the number wrong.

  • There has to be some kind of direct connection between the communications systems and the flight critical systems for any of that to even be remotely plausible. That kind of connection is basically impossible to hide, and simply would not exist in a well designed piece of military hardware. It's existence would be immediately obvious to the people buying the plane, and the people tasked with maintaining it.

    Show me one single military analyst with worthwhile credentials who believes this is a serious concern. Not articles like this one where they take a quote wildly out of context and use it to backup an entirely fabricated claim. I mean an actual certifiable expert stating clearly and unambiguously that the possible existence of this killswitch is something we have to be worried about.

  • At which point you would roll back to the previous firmware, because of course we're going to keep copies. This sounds like a horrifically ineffective plan. We're certainly better off having fifth gen fighters with that incredibly minimal risk attached than we are with fourth gen fighters that are completely outclassed.

    And again, if we're at the point where potential hostilities are close enough that a one month timebomb could matter then we're at the point where we're not loading any software the US sends us.

    The far more meaningful risk here is that they can simply stop giving us new parts and software updates. That's actually a real and valid concern.

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  • If AI was actually going to replace every human worker on earth, even with huge efficiency gains you'd still want to build out absolutely ungodly amounts of compute capacity.

    Also, it should be noted that while Deepseek has demonstrated that its possible to substantially reduce the compute requirements for transformer based models, doing so relies heavily on a "Good enough" approach that moves the results further away from being enterprise capable. It's not a cut and dried solution to the backend costs of running these models at the scale that investors want to see them running.

  • Honestly, it mostly just sounds like more fear mongering about the F-35, which has been going on for ages, and is mostly a Russian disinformation campaign. Pierre Sprey - the originator of all the F-35 criticisms that routinely get handed around - is very regularly a paid guest on RT and other Russian state controlled news outlets.

    Basically Russia is really scared of the F-35 program and would much rather their enemies keep flying upgraded fourth gen fighters. If the US was selling the F-22 to the rest of the world you'd be hearing all the same noise but about that plane instead.

  • There's no such thing as a "zero day backdoor". You're conflating "backdoor" with "zero day exploit" which are entirely separate things.

    And its not a question of whether or not the NSA is capable of doing that. It's whether they're capable of doing it in a way that they would absolutely 100% certain could never be discovered.

    But more importantly, as I pointed out elsewhere, in order for it to even be possible for such a backdoor to exist, the entire aircraft would have to be designed in a way that was hilariously, outrageously and inconceivably unsafe to operate. You simply do not link mission critical system to external communications systems that are in operation while a vehicle is airborne. Such a design flaw would be immediately obvious to the people whose job it was to approve the purchase, because there's no way you connect up systems like that in secret. While the US might supply the parts, it's still our guys who maintain them and integrate them into the vehicle.

  • Try to think about what you're actually describing. It's one year from now. Tensions between the US and Canada have steadily and rapidly escalated. US troops are massing on the Canadian border under the guise of "training exercises"... And some guy in the RCAF is like "Shit, better not forget to run that new firmware update that the Americans pushed for us, and absolutely no one else." Is that the scenario we're envisioning here?

  • The problem here is that any serious debunking of the myth basically goes the same way; "No, that's stupid, no one would do that."

    It's the proving a negative issue. The internals of the F-35 are not something that anyone is at liberty to discuss, so anyone who wants to wildly speculate about what could be in there is free to make up whatever they want, and anyone in a position to prove them wrong is legally unable to do so.

    But the idea simply does not pass the sniff test. You're talking about handing these weapons over to advanced nations with access to serious technical know how, and just rolling the dice that none of them ever discover it before you get a chance to use it. And that's assuming the idea is even plausible. It's not like you can just ping this thing like a fucking router. It's not flying around advertising its IP address. It was built to be a stealth aircraft; that means, among other things, removing all extraneous external communications. And there's literally no reason to connect any part of the critical software to the external comms and every reason not to, given that the US' enemies are pretty damn good at cyberwarfare. That would be a crippling vulnerability for a weapon system like that.

    Basically, the reason no serious commenter believes a killswitch exists is because we simply do not build combat aircraft in a way that would allow a killswitch to exist.

    But please feel free to show me an actual quote from someone with serious defence tech credentials saying otherwise. So far, I've not seen any.

  • Yeah, my feeling is this one will fail. While they can paint the backlash against Tesla as the "radical left", the adoption of electric cars more broadly is still very much seen as a lefty, pro-environment kind of thing. Since they're still very much against all those things, I think it'll be hard to square that with the idea that Teslas are suddenly great.

    Plus, even his base don't really seem to love Elon all that much.

  • You care about stealth when defending your country because stealth is how you win air to air combat now.

    Dogfighting is as meaningful to modern air combat as the horse and lance are to modern ground combat. Fighter planes work like submarines now; the goal is to detect and kill the enemy before they can detect and kill you. Kills happen from outside of visual range.

    A defensive aircraft without advanced stealth can be shot and killed by an aggressor before they ever have the ability to target that aggressor.

    To put it another way, do you think that our soldiers only wear camouflage when they're planning a sneak attack? Do our troops wear hazard vests and strap road flares to their helmets when they're defending a location to make sure the enemy knows exactly where they are? Or is it, in fact, always beneficial to see your enemy before they see you?

  • Nothing in the article backs up the headline claim. The closest it gets is their quoted expert saying that he worries about the US doing to the F-35 what they're doing to Ukraine. He's almost certainly referring to the fact that parts and software updates are produced by the US, who could choose to withhold them, just like they're withholding aid from Ukraine.

    Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.

    Consider; if an F-35 kill switch did exist, any buyer of the craft could invest the resources required to go over every inch of circuit and line of code and find it, and then deactivate every US F-35. It would be more of a liability for them than it is for us. And, equally, our experts could simply patch around the killswitch on our planes. Nations like Canada and Germany are not lacking in technical expertise.

    This bonkers notion seems mostly to be rooted in the broader fear that the F-35 is somehow "too advanced", an idea that largely springs from the diseased brain of Pierre Sprey (seriously, if you chase down every bad thing said about the F-35, odds are ridiculously high that Sprey said it first). Sprey also believed that the ideal design for a modern attack fighter has a machine gun, no missiles, no computers, and no radar.

    I'm not joking, not even slightly. Pierre Sprey wanted the modern world to fight Russia with planes that had no radar.

    There are valid concerns to be raised about the idea of adopting a craft whose supply chain is centred on the US. That's a discussion that NATO partners should be having. But this "killswitch" nonsense just derails that important discussion into paranoid conspiracy theorist nonsense rooted in the deranged ramblings of a self-aggrandizing madman.