Hmm.

4:21 PM PT -- A SOURCE WHO HAS SPOKEN WITH A MEMBER OF THE SECRET SERVICE TELL TMZ, TRUMP WAS NOT HIT BY A BULLET. RATHER, A BULLET HIT HIS TELEPROMPTER AND THE GLASS STRUCK HIM BY THE EAR.

kagis

According to CBS, Trump apparently posted that his ear was hit by a bullet, but I suppose that he might also not have known what hit him:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-says-shots-pierced-injured-ear-rally-pennsylvania/

The presumptive Republican nominee said he heard "a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin." It's not yet clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or shrapnel, but blood was strewn across his ear and face as Secret Service agents ushered him offstage.

"I want to thank The United States Secret Service, and all of Law Enforcement, for their rapid response on the shooting that just took place in Butler, Pennsylvania," Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. "Most importantly, I want to extend my condolences to the family of the person at the Rally who was killed, and also to the family of another person that was badly injured. It is incredible that such an act can take place in our Country. Nothing is known at this time about the shooter, who is now dead. I was shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear. I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening. GOD BLESS AMERICA!"

Back when Reagan was shot, he didn't even think that he'd been shot, was ticked off at the Secret Service guy who threw him into the car, thought that the guy had broken one of his ribs.

EDIT: Though Teddy Roosevelt knew:

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

Schrank did shoot Roosevelt, but the bullet lodged in Roosevelt's chest only after hitting both his steel eyeglass case and a 50-page copy of his speech titled "Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual", which he was carrying in his jacket pocket. As onlookers gasped and screamed, Elbert E. Martin, one of Roosevelt's secretaries and an ex-football player, was the first to react, leaping at Schrank, wrestling him to the ground and seizing his gun.[8] A. O. Girard, a former Rough Rider and bodyguard of the ex-president, and several policemen were upon Schrank at the same moment. Roosevelt stumbled, but straightened himself, and again raised his hat, with a reassuring smile upon his face. His aide, Harry Cochems, asked Roosevelt if he was hit, and Roosevelt simply said assuredly, "He pinked me, Harry."[9]

Roosevelt, as an experienced hunter and anatomist, correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung, and he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech with blood seeping into his shirt.[11][12] He spoke for 50 minutes before completing his speech and accepting medical attention. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, "Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."[13][14][15]

Any armed security worth their salt would have snipers on roofs at large gatherings.

They did have them here; there are photos of them. The assassin was also apparently on another roof; I linked to what is a purported picture of his body on the roof off Reddit in my comment above.

I'd imagine that there are a lot of rather confused individuals in a number of countries, and when tempers run high around politics...shrugs

I don't know if the US would be particularly bad. Would need to have some kind of way to quantify that.

Trump took a bullet to the ear. He was a fraction of an inch away from the thing doing his skull. Nobody is going to intentionally have someone shoot their ear.

I assume not -- and I'd go further, say that the same is true of point defense in general, electronic or not -- but until we have an automated turret or turreted vehicle designed, manufactured at scale, and deployed, not a lot of alternatives.

I do have to give the guards points here in that in both cases, they had their jammer ready, noticed the drone in time -- it has got to be mind-numbingly boring just standing around a fuel tank or in the second case, what I assume is an electrical transformer, all day waiting to see if maybe a drone will show up. And you have to act within a couple of seconds. I'd have been expecting to see more video of people screwing around on their phone and smoking or something.

The jammer they were supplied with didn't work, but the human side actually did work. I'd have expected the reverse to be more-likely -- the jammer to work had it actually been used, but for the guards to be off screwing around.

EDIT: Well, Electrical Transformer Guard Dude might have been notified that there was a drone coming in by Russian air defense or something, because he was on his phone and looking around prior to it showing up, so guess maybe it wasn't just him being on-the-ball.

I think that that's harsh.

They obviously don't have conscious experience. They're far too-primitive in function to do that. They don't have goals or anything like that. What they're doing is a tiny portion of what a human brain does, more like just the memory component.

Right. However. Most users probably have absolutely no idea how these things function internally at all. They're just looking at the externally-visible behavior. And an LLM can act an awful lot like systems that are far more sophisticated, because what they're doing is, well, producing material that has similar characteristics to stuff that humans have produced.

It's not that someone's given an in-depth description of the mode of operation to someone and they carefully consider it and the functioning of a human brain. It's that they're looking at what the chatbot can do and comparing it to what a human might do and saying "well, this seems like the sort of thing that one would require consciousness to be producing output like this".

That is, it's not that the user has information and is so ludicrously stupid that they can't act on that information. It's that the user lacks information to make that call.

In the mid-1990s, I remember a (reasonably technically-knowledgeable) buddy who signed on to some BBS that had a not-all-that sophisticated chatbot. The option was labelled as "chat with the sysop's sister". The guy was convinced for, I don't know, months, and after multiple conversations that he was talking to a human, until I convinced him otherwise. And that technology was far, far more primitive than the LLM-based chatbots today.

They left the joint military command for a while, but not NATO itself.

EDIT: They rejoined the joint command in 2009.

I haven't looked at Julia Davis' Russian Media Monitor for a while to see what Russian state media is up to, decided it was time to see some excerpts.

Let's set Ukraine aside and look into the future. What is NATO's vulnerability? Where? In space! Nothing is protected there...after all this technology loses its eyes up above and systems of control the F-35, of which they say they have almost 150, will become the same kind of a plane as our MiG-29, because they won't be receiving information.

Well, satellite ISR is a point where the West is stronger than Russia. But reconaissance didn't begin with satellites, either. We've done atmospheric overflights since back in the Cold War. There have been many platforms used in this war. JSTARS, Global Hawks, probably other things.

And the F-35 itself isn't just a client for information; it is a sensor platform itself. I strongly suspect that it was used as such in the present conflict. We know that there were US and a few other NATO tankers flying out to the border with Ukraine and flying ovals. I know that at least one shot from a tanker of an F-35 in stealth configuration refuelling was geolocated to Poland, along the border. Those F-35s aren't shooting, and I'd guess that they probably aren't using active sensors, like radars; no reason to pull the radar reflectors then. But it's probably good odds that they are using passive sensors.

As for "almost 150 F-35s", the statement is perhaps misleading. From the beginning of the year:

https://www.sandboxx.us/news/lockheed-martin-has-now-built-1000-f-35s/

Lockheed Martin has now built 1,000 F-35s

They're currently building about 150 a year.

Jumping back a bit:

Skrabeeva: Will we shoot down American satellites?...do we have the necessary weapons in space?

Russia probably can destroy a great many satellites via use of high-altitude nuclear weapons. We did the Starfish Prime test back when there were few satellites in orbit, and it was already bad news then. We talked about Russia considering use of such a weapon recently.

But that is not a selective weapon. Russia using such a thing would also destroy satellites of many countries. That's maybe not a fantastic move if one's already a bit short on the friends list.

I don't believe that Russia has the means to selectively destroy many satellites. And as Musk recently put it, we can launch satellites more quickly and cheaply than Russia can launch weapons to bring them down.

Second, in those means of communication that lie under the seas and oceans.

I mean, okay. If your plan is to start trying to cut off intercontinental communications via taking out space-based and cable-based communication, you can probably disrupt it, but that's also a direct-war level situation. That'd no doubt disrupt business and all sorts of things, but you probably cannot cut off militaries from getting vital data back and forth via radio, and that's the kind of thing you'd need to do were things to reach such a stage.

Skrabeeva: But officially, Russia is alone. We don't have a military alliance with China, Iran, or North Korea. What we have with North Korea can't be called a military alliance. While the NATO bloc is a military alliance. They have Article 5. In this context, we are alone...Have you seen any North Koreans in Donbas? No! Have we seen them on the frontlines? No! But if a war starts that involves one of NATO members, all 32 countries will step in.

I mean, in theory you have the CSTO, but seeing as Armenia recently called and you didn't come, I'm not sure how seriously it's taken.

Also:

22:00:

One of the game companies said that they're going to have to roll back some bans. They thought some people were cheating because the state of the game client was inconsistent with the state of the game server for some people enough that they were like "we don't know what they're doing, but the game client is inconsistent with the server...we're just going to ban them"

Yeah, I'm wondering about what kinds of other nasty secondary fallout there will be. One reason that I didn't want to spend time on this further -- was willing to just eat the cost of the motherboard and a pair of CPUs and go AMD -- was because I was developing root filesystem corruption just trying to boot with multiple cores, and I didn't want to experiment on that further. It's just not worth it to me as an individual dealing with a dicked-up filesystem to try to track down a piece of bad hardware. Like, there's going to be unpleasant fallout out there with other people from data loss when a lot of CPUs are garbling data somehow.

I hit this.

I had a 13900KF fail after a few months on an Asus Z790-based motherboard; started seeing memory errors when anything more than one core was active (disabling additional cores in grub during Linux boot). Worked fine prior to that. I believe that the failures were progressive to some degree; I initially only saw sporadic errors, then saw them increasingly-frequently until it wasn't possible to even boot with multiple cores. memory testers didn't trigger it. Doing builds with many cores did consistently do so (I built Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead at -j32, was the first test case I could find that reliably failed at some random point during the build on the failing processor, though never the same point). Starting up Stable Diffusion also could pretty consistently fail. I scripted up test cases using these to investigate downclocking memory and trying to fiddle with other settings. Downclocking the memory may have helped a bit -- I didn't gather enough data to try to get solid figures -- but at the end, even having it all the way down wasn't sufficient to cleanly boot the system; you'd have errors just trying to mount the root filesystem. Tried different Linux kernels, including building my own out of latest nightly code, tried fiddling with the kernel preemption mode (on the off chance that it was a Linux bug triggered by multiple core use). Got a 14900KF to replace it, made sure to turn off the default motherboard settings that were recommended against by Intel before inserting or ever using chip, assuming that it must have been overly-aggressive motherboard defaults. Had very hefty cooling on this. At first I thought it might be voltage drops due to the Stable Diffusion startup issues (maybe the GPU drawing power was a factor) or maybe even cooling (though temps seemed fine), but no -- swapping the CPU made all the problems go away at first...and then it failed in the same way after a few months. Variety of problems, including Linux kernel complaining about hardware bugs, memory errors, kernel threads hanging, same as before. Same progressive failures that got more-frequent over time.

Never saw any problems with either CPU when running on a single core (maxcpus=1 passed to the Linux kernel), so at least I could get the system functional and stable, but obviously the performance was abysmal in that case. Using even one additional core and the problems were present (unusably so, towards the end on each CPU).

Switched to an AMD motherboard and processor. Haven't had any problems. I expect that I'll continue using AMD processors moving forward unless they put some serious lemons out.

No change in DIMMs (and in fact, used the same DIMMs just fine with the AMD processor).

At least I know that I'm not just crazy and that a ton of other people are getting this too. And the fact that this guy has been running on a different chipset and has a large dataset running within safe specs does kind of rule out the motherboard being at fault -- I didn't try running a motherboard with another chipset and another CPU from that class. The guy did say that some CPUs in his dataset just don't seem to experience the problems (I saw him say a "50% rate"), so maybe there's some sort of problem with Intel's manufacturing process rather than with their design, and whatever testing methodology they used didn't deal well with that.

And the guy is very explicit that they saw progressive degradation too, and had tests with logged times for it. 14:50:

We have datacenter logs from where these systems first went online, and with these systems first going online six months ago, they would pass these specific tests. Re-running these specific tests on the exact same hardware, it will not pass. That's wild.

naked samaritans

crazy kind of pirate guy

threatening a man with a blowtorch

This was a Tuesday. San Francisco liked to wait until the weekend to really let loose.