Again, want me to get onboard with your whole "Orbital Data Centers are Good, Actually" thing?

Build a bunch on the ground. They only use solar power, use radiative cooling, and communicate using whatever radio you're planning on using. Hell, the cooling and comms should be worlds easier to do. Replace a bunch of your existing data centers with them and have them run for five years without any maintenance or service, only to switch off and degrade into harmless components that are absorbed back into the carbon cycle.

Then I will be your biggest goddam cheerleader, but until then, you're wasting money and resources and you're colossal idiots for even trying this.

Wow, suddenly it's super smokey in #SanJose. Smells a bit electrical.

Nothing on WatchDuty, traffic is a mess, so no clear trouble spot, both FlightRadar and airplanes.live aren't showing any air traffic.

Wound up pulling AlertCalifornia to see if I can spot any structure fires, but no, it's the whole Santa Clara valley that's socked in.

I'm guessing this was probably smoke from the Angel Island burn, but wow, it's thick.

(Also, LORA was pretty quiet, so guessing no HAM op was on fire.)

Privacy isn't dead, even if parts of it were murdered by folk claiming to be protecting us from people who would do terrible things with our information.

What they have is your history, not your future.

I mean, it's not unsurprising. You knew that it was just a matter of time before some brilliant fuckwad figured this out, with the added bonus that you can't just "not connect it to the internet".

Next up, teaching folk how to write their own iptables entries to prevent access to address blocks.

scratches LG from lists of monitors I will ever buy.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ads-and-tracking-infiltrated-tvs-now-theyre-coming-for-monitors/

Shall I compare thee to a summers day?
For thou are hot, sweaty, and smell of hot dog.

As part of my continuing, and ongoing unemployment, I'm looking at doing a few "estate" related things. One of these is figuring out who gets our crap once our cogs have sufficiently popped. It's an interesting question, because we don't have kids of our own, although there are nieces that could certainly use a bit of help, so that's probably going to be the plan.

I should probably note a few other things.

My parents have a lot of stuff. Not "Hoarder Level" amounts (although there's a distressing tendency in the family toward that) but a bunch of Things of Value that we've been repeatedly informed are Valuable. These are mostly decorative items acquired over lifetimes and held with high regard. It's going to be a massive pain to deal with those once the become my problem.

I do not have many of those. I mean, I have things I like, but they're not high value and to be honest, they're deeply personal. I am absolutely positive that they will probably become part of a recycling program (well, unless the memory and GPU market fail to crack in which case, they may become the most valuable things I have).

Still, I'm not one to acquire Things of Great Value. If I buy art, it's because I like it. If I buy a car, it's because I need it. Stuff is either purely functional or purely aesthetic and I'm absolutely OK with that. I don't really "get" the idea of buying things as an investment, because the level of prediction in order to do that well is far out of my expertise. I'll be honest, even the Things of Great Value that my parents have probably are not as valuable as they believe them to be. There's probably a museum that might enjoy having one or two things, but other than that, they're essentially boomer beanie babies and some generations POGs.

I'm sure that there are folk that treasure Great-Great-Gran'ma's collection of destination teaspoons, or Gran-Gran-Gran-Uncle's assortment of gas station pens, but I am not really one of those. I'd be the worst guest on Antiques Road Show, and I'm very much OK with that.

Heh, like I said before, I like to leave the campsite a bit better than how I found it, so perhaps not leaving behind a big pile of crap is part of that, but it does leave me with a pretty funny thought.

"And Mr. Conlin left you his complete library of 1600 albums and nearly 600 books" Slides a 1TB hard drive across the table

So, uh, yeah...

I am leaving mozilla

It was the best place I ever worked, along with some of the smartest, kindest people who I will miss dearly, but there comes a time when you have to leave.