My “scam” has caused my electric bill to effectively drop below zero when averaged over the whole year. And that includes charging our EV, which means the “scam” is saving me a boatload of cash given gas prices these days.

Blinded by the Light

Written by Bruce Springsteen, but I think Manfred Mann did it much better.

Yeah, the raids are dwindling because all the key targets have been struck and destroyed or heavily damaged. Rebuild those targets and let’s see how quickly the drones reappear.

Increasingly, human operators are being supplemented or replaced by automated systems capable of gathering intelligence, identifying targets, and executing strikes with minimal delay.

Welcome to the age of modern warfare. No wonder Russia’s “meat grinder” approach is failing…

What about refrigerators?

Will it block VPNs, proxies, and Bing image search as well?

I’ve seen actors fall down stairs and over a breakaway bannister live in a Broadway show. It’s clearly highly choreographed, and I also spotted the pads one actor was wearing when his shirt accidentally came untucked. Even though it looked very chaotic, in hindsight it was more of a tuck & tumble than a random fall.

Hell, my wife’s entirely manual Jeep (manual door locks, manual window cranks, etc.) still has a sensor that warns you if the tailgate is open…

Same plan as Iran:

1. Send the US military to bomb a bunch of stuff.
2. Iran Immediately folds and capitulates to all our demands.

It’s the most bestest plan ever that only the brilliant minds of Trump & Hegseth could have come up with.

Here’s a bit of trivia (I worked for a startup that Ask Jeeves acquired back in 2000 & stayed on for a few more years):

There was a brief period of time where Ask Jeeves seriously considered getting into search for porn. They went so far as to design a French maid caricature named Mimi that was to parallel the Jeeves butler that was their brand back then. They even registered a bunch of domains like askmimi.com before finally deciding they didn’t want to risk damaging the Jeeves brand, and scratched the whole project.

Another bit of trivia: the CEO & executives at Jeeves when they acquired us were short-sighted idiots. One of the products my startup had developed was something we called “text ads” that let people bid on popular search terms for placement of ads along with the search results we served up. It was a fully automated system that required virtually no interaction on our part, and we considered it a license to print money. It brought in a good amount of revenue for us. After Jeeves acquired us they shut our text ads down and sold the service off to another small company. The Jeeves CEO at the time infamously said “we’re in the question answering business, not the advertising business” when this was sold off.

The company that bought it made some improvements to it then re-launched it as Google AdWords, and Google quickly eclipsed Jeeves after that.

Hell, just find an accessible sewer cleanout and use that. No need to trick your way into a house.

Jokes on them. I have a septic system.

https://www.caspianpolicy.org/research/security/live-map-of-russian-refineries-hit-ukrainian-drone-strikes-boost-caspian-energy

Why hit them more frequently? Let Russia expend the effort to completely rebuild it and get into operation and THEN you attack again. By waiting until it’s back in operation you not only maximize the repair costs, but you also target it when it’s full of highly flammable materials. That ensures maximum destruction when you hit it again. A refinery full of oil that burns for days causes much more damage than a hunk of explosives in a drone that detonates next to an empty storage tank.

I’m not an expert by any means, but every commercial solar install I’ve seen over public parking lots has included steel beam construction mounted on reinforced concrete footings that extend 2+ feet above ground. The concrete footings appear to be designed not only to support the structure but to be able to absorb the impact of cars that might otherwise dent/bend the steel supports. A few examples:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/fcQ9PUoWp68c21n57

https://maps.app.goo.gl/QqbmVsphByzN5Xi56

https://maps.app.goo.gl/n3wUKkYZLMCpzVTz5

The electrical infrastructure to support these is also significantly more than a residential solar setup. I have 44 panels on my roof, and I counted around 488 on one of these carports. I can generate around 85 kWh on a clear day, so one of these can probably generated 1000 kWh or more. You’ll need good electrical infrastructure to safely manage that and feed it into the grid. I didn’t need any infrastructure changes when my solar panels were installed other than a new utility meter. These all likely required a lot more than that.

The infrastructure to build a load-bearing roof over a parking lot is significantly more than the concrete footings and supports needed to hold ground-based solar. There are some public lots near me that have solar roofs over them. When I park there I almost feel like I’m pulling into an underground parking garage.

None of our family would impersonate her.

https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-patented-ai-die-keeps-posting

These articles claim Facebook has no plans to use this patent, but this is very mich like what I’m seeing.

A cousin of mine died about a year ago, after a long struggle with cancer. “She” still posts on Facebook. It makes me sick.

I have a “prosumer” internet setup at home for various reasons. It’s UniFi gear, which is highly configurable, and configs are centrally managed. They provide a pretty robust web UI to manage it all, but the configuration all resides in plain text files that you can also hand edit if you want to do anything really advanced.

While troubleshooting an issue recently I came across a post on their support forum from somebody who had used Claude to analyze those config files and make recommendations. Since I have access to Claude through my employer I decided to give that a try. I was pleasantly surprised with the recommendations it made after it spent a few minutes analyzing my configuration.

I wonder if Russia is purposely keeping the larger tanks empty in the hope that Ukraine might simply target them based on size…