runlevel1
For example, the Big Beautiful Bill only appropriated $800M for counter-UAV systems. That's insanely low given the broad threat exposure and the fact that they've literally changed what ground combat looks like. For perspective, we spent $400M on the Qatari 747 retrofit and appropriated $400M on the hope that "naval shipbuilding autonomy and AI" might be a thing.
I agree, but it's the people I'm worried about.
I'm hearing anecdotes from all over about devs pushing LLM-generated code changes into production without retaining any knowledge of what it is they're pushing. The changes compound, their understanding of the codebase diminishes, and so the actions become risker.
What's worse is a lot of this behavior is being driven by leaders, whether directly (e.g. unrealistic velocity goals, promoting people based on hand-wavy "use AI" initiatives, etc) or indirectly (e.g. layoffs overloading remaining devs, putting inexperienced devs in senior rolls, etc).
The world's gone mad and large swaths of the industry seem hellbent on rediscovering the security basics the hard way.
1. When I benchmarked it, AFP was significantly faster than SMB. Both with SMB2 and SMB3. Even when transport encryption was turned off.
2. On SMB2+, symlinks created by the client are not real symlinks. They're "Minshall+French" links which only look like symlinks to other SMB2+ clients. To the server and NFS mounts they look like flat files with the target path encoded in them.
3. It exposes a different precision for certain timestamps. Software that uses this metadata to decide whether a file needs to be updated will see almost every file as needing a resync.
It's been a year or two since I checked the status of these. The situation may have improved since last I looked.
That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.
That repo is a fork of this project: https://github.com/johannesboyne/gofakes3
They bill it as being for testing, but it works great if all you want is a no-fuss S3-compatible API on top of a filesystem. I've run it on my NAS for a few years now to provide a much faster transfer protocol compared to SMB.
The tech industry was never perfect. It was never a charity. But there was a time, several years ago now, when people were more driven to build things that delighted others.
The question is whether they'll learn in time to do anything about it.
The indicted cops responded to an off-duty cop's DUI crash. They texted each other on their personal phones so as not to create a record. They positioned their bodycams so as not to capture the incident. At one point, one of the cops held the other's to make it look as if he was still standing there while he secretly called their supervisor. They then let the drunk cop drive away. Hours later, another officer found the car parked on the sidewalk. That officer did finally arrest him.
"These police officers did their job. We should not be here today," said union president Patrick Hendry, who accused the DA of targeting the officers. "He needs to support officers instead of going after them. Enough is enough."
To their credit, these charges came based on a referral from NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau, though it was 4 years later.
Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/nyregion/nypd-dui-coverup...
[^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...
Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7 includes "civil disorder" in its list of acts of "domestic terrorism." Its indicia of "terroristic activities" includes extremely vague language like "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism" and "extremism on migration, race, and gender" and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality".[^1]
I sincerely hope that the engineers responsible for these technologies have fully grasped where things seem headed. This country is teetering on a knife's edge. Maybe more precariously than we know. Nobody can know for sure if we've tipped too far until it's too late.
The economy cannot thrive in a vacuum of normalcy and stability. If things escalate into something akin to The Troubles... I hope that's factored into their cost-benefit analysis.
[^1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...
While knowing that can help you have compassion for them, it doesn't make listening to them any less exhausting.
Those who've only known Music.app and later iTunes versions might be surprised to learn that there was a time when iTunes actually had a clean, intuitive UI: https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/itunes-app
To calibrate your sense of time, the iPhone 15 had been released in September 2023 and that doc is dated April 2024, so ~6 months.
And just for completeness, here was the Android doc that leaked at the same time: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833831-cellebrite-...
A bunch of their software was also leaked in a hack back in 2023: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cellebrite-and-msab
*Table 1. Cost comparison of a single 40 MW cluster operated for 10 years in space vs on land.*
| Cost Item | Terrestrial | Space
|:------------------------------|:--------------------------------|:----------------
| Energy (10 years) | $140m @ $0.04 per kWh | $2m cost of solar array
| Launch | None | $5m (single launch of compute module, solar & radiators)
| Cooling (chiller energy cost) | $7m @ 5% of overall power usage | More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space
| Water usage | 1.7m tons @ 0.5L/kWh | Not required
| Enclosure (Sat. Bus/Building) | Approximately equivalent cost | Approximately equivalent cost
| Backup power supply | $20m | Not required
| All other DC hardware | Approximately equivalent cost | Approximately equivalent cost
| Radiation shielding | Not required | $1.2m @ 1 kg of shielding per kW of compute and $30/kg launch cost
| Cost Balance | $167m | $8.2m
He's confidently wrong a lot. (Even if I happen to agree with his new, more sober take on AI coding here.)
What the Sea People were to the Bronze Age, these people are to the Information Age. At least in the West.
But if the regulation is indeed oppressive or byzantine, everybody hurts and only the biggest survive.
*Social contagion effects on risk perception can be a confounding factor here, though.
> ⓘ Restricted-Access Federal Facility, Effective July 7, 2025
>
> Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. It will no longer be open to the general public. Security officers will enforce these restrictions, and your cooperation is appreciated.
That's worse than I expected.