No. It was more a statement that the LED flares are basically one use only… unless you are spending every night on the side of the road. Their shelf life is more or less the same as a chemical flare in that case.

As for “improved visibility”: The goal of a flare is not to make everyone see you and to let you see what you are doing. The goal is to say “Hey, something is over here. Be careful”.

But also: You do realize that your tail lights/brake lights are more or less the exact same LEDs, right? So unless you duct tape flares to your car and roll around Fury Road style, I think you are fine there. Even on a foggy day.

Which gets to the other aspect: “Visibility” is bad when it is extremely bright lights at night. There is a reason that headlights (you know, those things people ignore in favor of the high beams) aren’t actually insanely bright. They are bright enough and angled enough that you can see where you are going. You pulse your high beams if the way is clear to see farther. If the way is not clear? Then the other headlights on the road provide extended visibility.

And… I am not sure if you have ever had to drive on a country/mountain road with asshole trucks with the high beams on. But it more or less renders you blind for a few seconds until they pass and you just have to rely on maintaining your lane. And if there is a curve? You either risk a header or you slow down and let them by first.

Which is why, as nice as it sounds to have a daylight flare right next to your car on the side of the road, it actually greatly increases the danger to you. Same reason you never use high beams in the fog (even though people do…) and actual fog lights are angled very differently.

Not sure what the current best guidance is but: Please do not use “real” flares unless you have no other choice.

First and foremost: They are horrible for night vision of you and everyone around you. It is basically like you are blasting your headlights into the eyes of EVERYONE who goes near that stretch of road.

Also, a lot of people don’t know how to properly extinguish them. Which results in random ass flares left burning or a hesitance to use them at all.

And cost/space wise? They are horrible. Quick check of amazon says three flares are about 30 bucks. 3 LED flares are about 20. And the road flares are meant to last 15-30 minutes (your mileage may vary). The LEDs last until you turn them off because they are LEDs.

Cops love them because cops are raging assholes who want to make everyone else understand they are doing cop things in the vicinity.

But as a driver? You are better off with the LED flares in basically every single situation.

And, as an aside: Driving back from the airport usually involves going past a stretch of interstate where it seems people can’t NOT explode tires on a daily basis. And it is not an exaggeration to say that random ass flares burning in the middle of the road or in the ditch between directions is a nightly occurrence.

I guess I don’t mind this as much as most since I tend to subscribe for a month at a time to watch two or three shows/movies. And considering I would rather buy a blu-ray in every situation, 15 or even 30 bucks is not that bad.

But… I really do wonder how this maths out. Obviously netflix has the data. But I have a standing crunchyroll/funimation subscription because it is dirt cheap and I basically need to watch one show a year to justify it. I do not have a standing netflix and I only subscribe when they do a few things I care about. Same with Disney and Hulu. And, sample bias but, talking with friends: they do the same.

And I really do wonder how they are coming out better with “more for a month or two” rather than “nobody ever cancels their netflix”

Just to check: Vilifying deepfake porn and child porn is “not a positive moral outcome”?

Holy shit. Most libertarians at least say the quiet part quiet.

The vast majority of vehicles on the road still have them so, again, unless you are truly in the middle of nowhere you can generally flag someone down while you watch Clover be a metaphor for 9-11 and remember “oh yeah, Lizzy Caplan was in this”

And as cars move away from AM/FM: Then we have alternate emergency solutions. Which, again, weather radio in the emergency bag that you just leave in your trunk until you sell the car. And we work to improve the coverage and resilience of emergency broadcasts that phones pick up (speaking of…).

Which gets back to all of this being a “sneaky” way to insist phones need headphone jacks. Since you need an antenna for FM and that is usually a speaker wire. Which… is extra useless and increasingly dangerous if you are trying to hold up your earbuds (because we all still have wired earbuds…) while driving through The Mist.

… which also highlights why a phone is a bad emergency radio. Since plugging in earbuds will generally cut off the phone speakers. But you also need to hold up the earbuds to get enough reception to get a signal. Or you are driving with earbuds in which lowers your awareness during an emergency.

Again, emergency/weather radios. They are cheap, a lot of them have backup hand cranks, and you can just put it in the roadside emergency bag right next to the electric flares/beacons that are basically one time use because, if you pull that tab, the batteries WILL have corroded ten years later when you need them again.

Is this the latest “sneaky” way to insist all phones need headphone jacks?

Because from an emergency standpoint: Most (all?) cars still have analog radios and it is generally encouraged to have a “weather radio” in any emergency kit. Hell, many building emergency kits will have one (even if it is just the shitty radio the rent a cop uses to listen to The Game in the booth). And in the event of a disaster, you really do want to group up. If only because it makes you an easier target for satellites and rescue flights.

So, from an emergency preparedness perspective, this seems like an incredibly niche situation where people are completely isolated, don’t have a car, but still need to tune in to an emergency radio broadcast to figure out where to go and it is not “go to the nearest population center that is not a smoldering wreck”.

If your bad faith requirement is complete eradication, sure.

If the goal is to vastly diminish the amount of content out there by preventing monetization and providing a legal means to pull said content? As well as to vilify the concept? Then yeah, it works.

Considering the internet is already a hellscape of deepfake porn, let’s not take the libertarian approach to this, 'kay?

Also, there are two major issues at hand that you are conflating.

People aren’t doing AI recreations of Robin Williams because they love the way he said “zucchini”. They are doing it because of the novelty of hearing Robin perform their material or making him say “Happy Birthday Fred” or “Jewish Space Lizards Control Kansas” or whatever. Much like with deepfake porn, the appeal is using someone against their will for your own pleasure.

The other aspect, and what the SAG and WGA strikes have been about (and which Robin famously preempted over twenty years ago), is training data. It is the idea of using past footage and performances to make a super actor (similar to what Square tried with FF The Spirits Within). So you might have Tom Cruise’s gait coupled with Ryan Reynolds’s chin and Hugh Jackman’s nipples and so forth. And, that is still a huge mess.

No. Heruistics/“fortune tells” are 100% what is required for good security.

Because if all you are doing is flagging known threats? Then that means you are perpetually vulnerable and exploited.

False positives are a thing. In fact, flagging a device that intercepts and routes all traffic to weird random ass servers is a very good thing.

The answer is to note the false positive and then release an updated list that permitlists it.

At the best of times, moving steam games is a mess as more and more games use third party download systems.

But also? Going from Windows to Linux is an extra mess.

What I ended up doing to migrate from windows to linux for gaming without taking a poo on my data cap was:

1. Enable LAN transfers of games in Steam
2. Install/login to Steam on my linux laptop. If you don’t have a spare PC, this can largely be replaced with a raspberry pi with a big ass external drive attached.
3. Install the games I want to preserve. Steam is smart enough to realize it is the same files between windows and linux in this case
4. When that was done, reformat my desktop
5. Basically do the opposite direction and have my desktop stream the game files from my laptop.

Stuff like warframe was still a full redownload. But helped a lot.

And that data is still being shared with advertising firms. It is just that instead of “Jack Smith is User 12345” it is “User 12345 who is probably someone named ‘Jack Smith’”

Facebook does the same shit.

But you are assuming they stop collecting that data if you opt out of personalized ads. So … wanna buy a bridge?

Genuine question:

Ignoring the legality (because dystopic present), why is this a big deal? It isn’t like they are not collecting that data if you toggle personalized ads off. And if I am on a permitlisted site, I would rather see ads that are at least somewhat related to me instead of the most generic stuff imaginable.

The collection of data is an ongoing and fucked up part of our dystopic present. But… toggling personalized ads does nothing about that.

Mostly just a matter of stalling until the housing crisis gets bad enough that people want to remove those pesky laws about living spaces needing windows and proper insulation and so forth. Then we’ll see retrofitting

I can’t speak for the european market, but in the US we are already seeing how this plays out.

Insurance and mortgage companies increasingly are not interacting with Florida (and to a lesser extent California). Which means the people with houses there are just fucked if there is a disaster. Maybe they can sell for a massive loss to someone even dumber than them but… yeah

And when it all goes to shit? The banks will bleed them for every penny and then move on.

Generally speaking: There won’t be a crash.

The reason everything went to shit in the 00s (I think? Time has no meaning) is because of banks and predatory lending. We are increasingly seeing that with the current interest rates and house prices but there is a big difference.

When the market crashed then? The banks were stuck with a shit ton of houses nobody wanted.

Now? Plenty of people have been saving up and will gladly buy the houses at a slight discount. And real estate firms and increasingly corporate hellscapes will buy them at slightly lower discounts.

That is more or less what we saw over the few years of “the good old days”. House prices kept exploding and pricing more and more people out. But those people continued to save and would then start trying to buy a smaller house or take advantage of a better interest rate and so forth.

As for those interest rates:

Yeah, it is fucking insane right now and I am REAL glad I got in while the getting was good. And this is a big issue in me waiting to get an EV.

But… the real insanity was the past few years. Check any website that tracks rates over time. The late 10s and early 20s were an anomaly. The current rates are a lot closer to the historic rates.

Which just gets back to pricing and… again, companies and people with inheritances will keep paying that.

No, that is almost all incompetence. With the last step coming from some fairly simple technology that we already have.

Let’s just go through your bullet points:

• They are effective because they can pop up at the least expected of times.: They can be deployed anywhere the enemy can get troops within a fairly short range of your troops. Snipers could already do that. So could sappers. I am going to address this below in “overextended”
• Can easily be deployed near or even on the frontline. : Almost exactly the same as above but I’ll add: if you are near the frontline you are near artillery. And… okay, actually, I think our modern high precision laser/satellite guided artillery shells might be MORE expensive than a dji mavic. But that speaks more to military overspending and would apply once we have “military drones” in this role.
• They are much much cheaper than the intended target. So you can send dozens of drones to destroy one parked plane or docked ship.: See below on “Phalanx”
• Paraphrasing but “Shooting drones is hard”: See “Phalanx”
• How do you protect from multiple low profile unmanned boats laden with explosives coming at your warship in the dead of night on a moonless night?: The exact way you do so now? You have sentries supported with computer vision to detect anomalies. You have lights positioned behind said sentry to improve visibility. And so forth. This is literally “russian soldiers are horribly untrained and undisciplined”. Again, scouts/snipers are a thing and have been since WW1 (goes back a lot farther, but that is more or less where the modern concept was born)
• Make no mistake drones are a game changer. They will not outright win the war, but they bring many advantages to a battlefield. Even just the live feed updates that can allow commanders a birds eye view of the battlefield in real time will change maneuver warfare.: Which is not the topic at hand. Increased surveillance is nice and we already see cheap (by military standards) drones being used to augment a soldier’s awareness. It gives infantry a limited “satellite” with minimal paperwork or coordination. The downside being that they are generally pretty detectable by a trained force but it still helps a lot. But this discussion is about their offensive capabilities. ** I haven’t even started on 6th Gen fighters with fighter drone integration:* Which are also a LOT more expensive and get back to that “What if we could fire a hellfire missile into a nursery without needing to risk a pilot?” territory

• Overextended: The vast majority of this boils down to the failed blitz at the start of the war. They had no front line and had to have long logistics and reinforcement convoys going through the entire country. This made them INCREDIBLY vulnerable. That is why they fell really fast from the isolated cities but it is taking time and effort to drive them out of their current fortifications. Because now they… sort of have a frontline. Which means you have a good idea of what direction an attack will come from and can set up defenses. And convoys will be closer to “a tank and a couple APCs” rather than “fifty trucks carrying moldy bread”
• Phalanx: This is literally a solved problem. The US (and I think also russia?) and their allies already have missile defense systems like the Phalanx CIWS. The idea being that the position of a missile is tracked and a massive spray of bullets are sent in its direction. Comparable to flak back in the day but with computers. Drones are a MUCH slower target so you need even less warning. Just set up a few raspberry pis and cameras (or, if you have an overinflated military budget, through a few Corals on there) and use the same gun mount some kid made that every tech youtuber likes and you have an anti-drone turret. For… not much more than the cost of those dozens of drones. Add in some microphones that listen for quad copters and you have an early warning system that will tell people during an offensive to close the hatch of their APC. And, because these are drones and not missiles, you can duct tape said camera mount to a light machine gun.

Just to make it clear: Drones will revolutionize war in the same way that night vision has. And they already have been doing this. Drones for surveillance have been getting deployed with recon units for years now. And… just go ask Iraq and Afghanistan how they feel about drones for the offensive capability. But the use of consumer grade drones with grenades and c4 attached (because clearly Ukraine are big fans of I Did A Thing) are more or less an anomaly with a lot of other explanations. And against a military that is not being actively constrained because other nations don’t want this war to end too quickly: We would be seeing laser guided munitions doing MUCH more damage in the exact same situations. And if russia were… let’;s just say competent? The drone based attacks would largely be isolated cases (which they already may be. Propaganda is hard)

But, much like with night vision: There is a limited window of dominance. Their takes are often times very questionable and naive, but Task and Purpose’s youtube channel has touched on this a lot. There was a time where the US and its allies were more or less unstoppable at night because of NVGs. We could shoot anyone we wanted and nobody could stop us because nobody could see us. Then… even consumer grade night vision has gone a long way toward stopping that. Maybe aiming is hard. But those handy dandy beacons we used to not kill each other? Those stick out QUITE a bit to a sentry with the cheap goggles and that is usually enough to turn on the flood lights and alert the camp. Same with thermal vision being rendered MUCH less effective by a freaking space blanket.

And, because I am having fun, it is anecdote time. A year or two back I went out into the woods with a couple buddies and a few of the interns we were working with. Using open source computer vision and anomaly detection libraries (the same stuff that Frigate and other event detection solutions for home security cameras runs on) and a webcam we wanted to see how “real” “sniper school” was. Trained on some photos we had taken over the years and maybe an hour in the field. Then we went to go place a few objects somewhere on a mountain side.

When we turned on the camera? it freaking detected some of the twigs we had broken while walking off the trail. Like, almost instantly we had the trail and could even see where I had slipped on the trail itself after scrambling across some class 3 (okay, more like 4…) terrain to place an object.

ALSO detected a lot more trash that we picked up on the way back up to grab our shit.

Exactly.

If this were a DCS and someone were insisting that the jet they flew for a few years actually has a secret vectored thrust system, I could sort of understand.

But this is “Here are twelve top secret documents. This tank should have 0.1 more points of armor on the left side”

A reaper drone is listed as 30-64 million USD

F35 is 100 to 400 million

F16 is very misleading for a lot of reasons, but is listed as between 12.7 and 80 million.

But also? Pilots are REALLY expensive. And the only risk to a drone pilot is carpal tunnel… and getting the shit beat out of you by the rich dude who wanted you to cuck him? I still don’t know what was going on with that.

Drones are a lot less effective against even a slightly trained military. And, hardware aside, China doesn’t seem to be slacking on that.

And computer vision makes that even easier. Set up a few cameras with raspberry pis taped to them and you can detect and deal with “slap a brick of C4 on a quad copter” level drones. Same with just having a few mics rigged up to the frequency of quadcoptor motors. Similarly, even just having mesh netting over air fields and supply depots goes a long way toward stopping grenades.

The fact that this continues to have any meaningful effect on the russian advances mostly just speaks to how incredibly untrained and undisciplined they all are.

The other side of drones is the “Fuck yeah, America” style death from above that kills small children in their homes. And those are more or less just cheaper fighter jets.