Also the big fuckoff wave motion laser cannon thing is aimed through the ship itself.

Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in "Llama Four" and it kept saying "2" so they decided to roll with it.

there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don't work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don't work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat

the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it's not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i'm effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn't help that thiel's people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don't have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don't need to work at all. ukrainians don't have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn't work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.

this is the disruption they're cooking. invest in eastern europe or something

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 At least one of the DOGE team has a recent criminal past, which should, in a sensible world, bar him from accessing such data: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/

@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: "I never thought *my* hed would get cut off," sobs CEO of Cuttin' Off Heds, Inc.

@sailor_sega_saturn Yeah, let's start right with those who say such things!

@BlueMonday1984

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. It's a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.

@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 we should make sure he is at the head of the line...

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel could be one of those who are going to lose their head in that revolution…

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 he’s not wrong about that

@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984

I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.

their thesis might be right, their guess as to the subjects of the sentence however...

"imagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncity..."

@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I've been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they're larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren't entirely clear on the whole concept of "fiction".

We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it's told well.

"i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers"

Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypse^tm^ seems like a good place to start.

I thought you had to wait at least a few generations to start inventing bullshit evo-psych-adjacent explanations for stuff.

Also this joke was funny when XKCD did it in the alt text 16 years ago. Jesus how has it been 16 years what the hell

[Epistemic status: gas giant sized contrarianism, negative gravity]