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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I’m really not sure there are any shortcuts here, he is such a uniquely awful human being that any comparison will fall short. He’s not the most evil person in the world, he’s not the most racist, or the most homophobic, he isn’t the thinnest skinned and he’s not the most selfish or vindictive or vain, but he only loses out in any category by the smallest of margins. I fear that trying to find a yardstick to measure him by that encompasses all of the negatives is a vain errand, and in future he will be the yardstick we measure others of such a veanal and contemptible nature.





  • They may well be looking at how much the EU holds in Saudi assets, seeing those at potential risk of being seized and deciding tge write-down on dumping the bonds would be worth it. Long term, I don’t think it would have an effect on prices, but short term it may well do, depending on how concentrated their holdings are.

    From what I can see, normal trading volume in bonds is about 500% per year, or about 2% per day assuming 250 trading days per year. If the 130bn you mention is spread across all government bonds across the EU then it accounts for about 4% of the total, or about two days of normal trade. Dump all of that in one go and it’d definitely have a short term effect. If their holdings are more concentrated they could have an even bigger effect on the bonds they hold.

    Bonds tend to be issued on a regular basis, so even a short term drop in price could be timed to affect an auction. That has the twin effect of reducing the amount the government in question raises, and also tying them into effectively higher interest rates, potentially for decades to come.

    I’m no expert trader either, so I could be barking up the wrong tree, but I assume that they would have a clear expectation of the results before making that threat, and I can’t really see any other effects it could be expected to have.



  • The price moves with supply and demand on the secondary market. Normally, yes, that’ll tend to vary to balance yield with the prevailing interest rates, however, the threat seems to be to dump bonds onto the secondary market, presumably without a minimum price. The glut would mean buyers could purchase them below that balance price, giving them a better yield. This would have (at least) two knock on effects, firstly it would make it harder for governments yo raise funds through bond issues as they’d effectively be competing with the cheaper ‘dumped’ bonds and so would need to offer an equivalently high yield, and secondly may allow ‘undesirable’ governments or groups to amass significant amounts of European debt, which potentially gives them more political leverage than European governments might like.




  • If you’re talking about being able to regain access with no local backups (even just a USB key sewn into your clothing) your going to need to think carefully about the implications if someone else gets hold of your phone, or hijacks your number. Anything you can do to recover from the scenario is a way an attacker can gain access. Attempting to secure this via SMS is going to ne woefully insecure.

    That being said, there are a couple of approaches you could consider. One option is to put an encrypted backup on an sftp server or similar and remember the login and passwords, another would be to have a trusted party, say a family member or very close friend, hold the emergency codes for access to your authentication account or backup site.

    Storing a backup somewhere is a reasonable approach if you are careful about how you secure it and consider if it meets your threat model. The backup doesn’t need to contain all your credentials, just enough to regain access to your actual password vault, so it doesn’t need to be updated often, unless that access changes. I would suggest either an export from your authentication app, a copy of the emergency codes, or a text file with the relevant details. Encrypt this with gpg symmetric encryption so you don’t have to worry about a key file, and use a long, complex, but reconstructable passphrase. By this I mean a passphrase you remember how to derive, rather than trying to remember a high entropy string directly, so something like the second letter of each word of a phrase that means something to you, a series of digits that are relevant to you, maybe the digits from your first friend’s address or something similarly pseudo random, then another phrase. The result is long enough to have enough entropy to be secure, and you’ll remember how to generate it more readily than remembering the phrase itself. It needs to be strong as once an adversary has a copy of the file they jave as long as they want to decrypt it. Once encrypted, upload it to a reliable storage location that you can access with just a username and password. Now you need to memorize the storage location, username, password and decryption passphrase generator, but you can recover even to a new phone.

    The second option is to generate the emergency, or backup, codes to your authentication account, or the storage you sync it to, and have someone you trust keep them, only to be revealed if you contact them and they’re sure it’s you. To be more secure, split each code into two halves and have each held by a different person.


  • I was more suggesting that it might be a bit eldritch, but sometimes humor doesn’t come across quite right/

    The linked paper is focused on studying the ‘perforation-type anchor’ they use to hold the tissue to the mold as it grows, rather than keeping it alive afterwards. During growth the tissue and mold were submerged, or partially submerged, in a suitable medium to keep the cells healthy, and it was only when the resulting models were tested that they were removed (although one test did seem to involve letting it dry out to see if the anchors held). Growing the various layers of cells seems to be a solved problem, and I suspect that includes keeping them supplied with nutrients and such, so the authors aren’t examining that. What’s not solved is how to keep the tissue attached to a robot, which is what the authors were studying.



  • I guess you could, although the gripper would add a bit of mass to the drone. You still lose some energy from the round into the yeeted barrel, but not as much as having an open breech. Depending on the mass of the projectile vs the mass of the barrel that could be a worthwhile trade-off.


  • I don’t think that’ll do it. The propellant deflagration is so quick that the momentum of the drone means it can’t be accelerated backwards enough to significantly reduce the force on the airframe. Even if it did, that would just end up applying the acceleration to the internals such as the batteries and motors/engine instead. I think you would need a spring damper that would allow the weapon to recoil quickly and dissipate the energy more slowly, and I’m not sure you could make obe effective on something the size of a drone.


  • I was thinking about those, but I understand they tend to suffer from inaccuracy due to even slight imperfections in the manufacturing of the jet openings.

    I think something more like a conventional round, with a heavier casing and more propellant might work. The casing gets ejected backwards and the projectile forwards, without imparting momentum to the barrel. You do need more propellant to get the same muzzle velocity though.


  • I’d imagine the shock loading into the drone’s structure would soon damage it if it was powerful enough to flip it. You’d need a significant damper to spread the shock out over a longer period. Alternatives are either recoilless rifles as suggested or something more akin to rockets, basically a tube that’s open at both ends, with a round that has enough propellant to fire without the need for a breech, and electronic ignition.


  • notabot@lemm.eetocats@lemmy.worldHave pity on him
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    2 months ago

    I think that might be geographic dependent, for instance there’s nothing around here that would predate cats, which would suggest they are, locally at least, apex by default.

    There aren’t many wildcats left here though, maybe if there were we’d see larger predators move in and push cats down the food chain, so I can see the mesopredator argument.



  • While I agree with most people here that finding a keyboard and screen would be the easiest option, you do have a couple of other options:

    • Use a preseed file A preseed lets the installer run completely automatically, without user intervention. Get it to install a basic system with SSH and take it from there. You’ll want to test the install in a VM, where you can see what’s going on before letting it run on the real server. More information here: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

    • Boot from a live image with SSH Take a look at https://wiki.debian.org/LiveCD in particular ‘Debian Live’. It looks like ssh is included, but you’d want to check the service comes up on boot. You can then SSH to the machine and install to the harddrive that way. Again, test on a VM until you know you have the image working, and know how to run the install, then write it to a USB key and boot the tsrget server from that.

    This all assumes the target server has USB or CD at the top of its boot order. If it doesn’t you’ll have to change that first, either with a keyboard and screen, or via a remote management interface sych as IPMI.