“With Amazon DTS (drone time-sharing), it could be all the above! Using the same logic as AWS, we realized that there were savings to be had in making hardware shared at scale!”

I mean, human environments are intrinsically made for humanoids to navigate. Like, okay, we put stairs places, things like that. So in theory, yeah, a humanoid form makes sense if you want to stick robots in a human environment.

But in practice, I think that there are all kinds of problems to be solved with humans and robots interacting in the same space and getting robots to do human things. Even just basic safety stuff, much less being able to reasonably do general interactions in a human environment. Tesla spent a long time on FSD for its vehicles, and that’s a much-more-limited-scope problem.

Like, humanoid robots have been a thing in sci-fi for a long time, but I’m not sold that they’re a great near-term solution.

If you ever look at those Boston Dynamics demos, you’ll note that they do them in a (rather-scuffed-up) lab with safety glass and barriers and all that.

I’m not saying that it’s not possible to make a viable humanoid robot at some point. But I don’t think that the kind of thing that Musk has claimed it’ll be useful for:

“It’ll do anything you want,” Musk said. “It can be a teacher, babysit your kids; it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries; just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.”

…a sort of Rosie The Robot from The Jetsons, is likely going to be at all reasonable for quite some time.

I don’t know if there’s less UPS shipping done by Amazon, but Amazon sales are okay.

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/stats/amazon-north-america-sales

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It sounds like it’s more to do with the fact that Amazon built out its own delivery infrastructure and had been giving the less-desirable deliveries to UPS.

https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/7-words-explain-why-ups-is-cutting-amazon-loose/91145555

For Amazon and UPS, the relationship started to change during the 2013 holiday season after a meltdown of the UPS shipping network led to millions of gifts not arriving in time for Christmas. The debacle spurred Amazon to accelerate the build-out of its own delivery network to reduce its reliance on third-party shippers like UPS.

Estimates suggest that Amazon has spent well over $100 billion to build out its own network. As a result, it delivers the majority of orders itself, leaving outside carriers to deliver less profitable packages.

I am personally rather skeptical about the commercial viability of humanoid robots in 2026, but I suppose that we shall see.

Even aside from the whole Russia angle, an oil tanker running aground is bad news, just from an “huge oil mess potential” standpoint. I wonder if it was empty, seeing as the article didn’t mention oil spill risk?

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Doesn’t sound like it was empty.

https://uawire.org/french-forces-escort-seized-russian-shadow-fleet-tanker-grinch-to-marseille-hand-over-to-prosecutors

On January 25, AFP published video provided by the French Armed Forces General Staff. The footage shows a military helicopter hovering above the tanker as armed French personnel fast-rope onto the deck, make contact with the crew and conduct an inspection.

The Insider reviewed the AFP video and noted the tanker was riding low in the water — in places the waterline was barely visible due to waves. Such draft typically indicates the ship is carrying a full or near-full load.

Oh, “grounded” here must be some kind of bad translation. I suspect that they mean “impounded” or something like that.

If the United States government wants to use ChatGPT on sensitive information, I’m pretty sure that it can come to some kind of contract with OpenAI to set up their own private cloud thing dedicated to that.

I get that maybe this guy just wanted some kind of one-off use, but then arrange to have something set up for that.

EDIT: To clarify, set up for that sort of thing, not this specific use. Like, have a way to throw up secure, temporary setups for particular users who just need one-off stuff for sensitive material.

I imagine that if you wanted to organize your own anti-Trump protest instead of attacking someone else’s, you could.

He previously added badges to his profile pictures to show his support for Ukraine.

The Trump administration also really isn’t what I’d call a strong proponent of Ukraine.

An order had been issued on Friday prohibiting British activists from gathering for a planned “stop the boats” protest nicknamed Operation Overlord in the departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais.

They named a protest aimed at stopping boats from crossing the English Channel…after what was probably the largest crossing of boats across the English Channel ever?

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

Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful liberation of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation was launched on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) with the Normandy landings (Operation Neptune). A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June, and more than two million Allied troops were in France by the end of August.

I just am not sold that there’s enough of a market, not with the current games and current prices.

There are several different types of HMDs out there. I haven’t seen anyone really break them up into classes, but if I were to take a stab at it:

• VR gaming googles. These focus on providing an expansive image that fills the peripheral vision, and cut one off from the world. The Valve Index would be an example.

• AR goggles. I personally don’t like the term. It’s not that augmented reality isn’t a real thing, but that we don’t really have the software out there to do AR things, and so while theoretically these could be used for augmented reality, that’s not their actual, 2026 use case. But, since the industry uses it, I will. These tend to display an image covering part of one’s visual field which one can see around and maybe through. Xreal’s offerings are an example.

• HUD glasses. These have a much more limited display, or maybe none at all. These are aimed at letting one record what one is looking at less-obtrusively, maybe throw up notifications from a phone silently, things like the Ray-Ban Meta.

• Movie-viewers. These things are designed around isolation, but don’t need head-tracking. They may be fine with relatively-low resolution or sharpness. A Royole Moon, for example.

For me, the most-exciting prospect for HMDs is the idea of a monitor replacement. That is, I’d be most-interested in something that does basically what my existing displays do, but in a lower-power, more-portable, more-private form. If it can also do VR, that’d be frosting on the cake, but I’m really principally interested in something that can be a traditional monitor, but better.

For me, at least, none of the use cases for the above classes of HMDs are super-compelling.

For movie-viewing. It just isn’t that often that I feel that I need more isolation than I can already get to watch movies. A computer monitor in a dark room is just fine. I can also put things on a TV screen or a projector that I already have sitting around and I generally don’t bother to turn on. If I want to block out outside sound more, I might put on headphones, but I just don’t need more than that. Maybe for someone who is required to be in noisy, bright environments or something, but it just isn’t a real need for me.

For HUD glasses, I don’t really have a need for more notifications in my field of vision — I don’t need to give my phone a HUD.

AR could be interesting if the augmented reality software library actually existed, but in 2026, it really doesn’t. Today, AR glasses are mostly used, as best I can tell, as an attempt at a monitor replacement, but the angular pixel density on them is poor compared to conventional displays. Like, in terms of the actual data that I can shove into my eyeballs in the center of my visual field, which is what matters for things like text, I’m better off with conventional monitors in 2026.

VR gaming could be interesting, but the benefits just aren’t that massive for the games that I play. You get a wider field of view than a traditional display offers, the ability to use your head as an input for camera control. There are some genres that I think that it works well with today, like flight sims. If you were a really serious flight-simmer, I could see it making sense. But most genres just don’t benefit that much from it. Yeah, okay, you can play Tetris Effect: Connected in VR, but it doesn’t really change the game all that much.

A lot of the VR-enabled titles out there are not (understandably, given the size of the market) really principally aimed at taking advantage of the goggles. You’re basically getting a port of a game aimed at probably a keyboard and mouse, with some tradeoffs.

And for VR, one has to deal with more setup time, software and hardware issues, and the cost. I’m not terribly price sensitive on gaming compared to most, but if I’m getting a peripheral for, oh, say, $1k, I have to ask how seriously I’m going to play any of the games that I’m buying this hardware for. I have a HOTAS system with flight pedals; it mostly just gathers dust, because I don’t play many WW2 flight sims these days, and the flight sims out there today are mostly designed around thumbsticks. I don’t need to accumulate more dust-collectors like that. And with VR the hardware ages out pretty quickly. I can buy a conventional monitor today and it’ll still be more-or-less competitive for most uses probably ten or twenty years down the line. VR goggles? Not so much.

At least for me, the main things that I think that I’d actually get some good out of VR goggles on:

• Vertical-orientation games. My current monitors are landscape aspect ratio, and don’t support rotating (though I imagine that there might be someone that makes a rotating VESA mount pivot, and I could probably use wlr-randr to make Wayland change the display orientation manually) Some games in the past in arcades had something like a 3:4 portrait mode aspect ratio. If you’re playing one of those, you could maybe get some extra vertical space. But unless I need the resolution or portability, I can likely achieve something like that by just moving my monitor closer while playing such a game.

• Pinball sims, for the same reason.

• There are a couple of VR-only games that I’d probably like to play (none very new).

• Flight sims. I’m not really a super-hardcore flight simmer. But, sure, for WW2 flight sims or something like Elite: Dangerous, it’s probably nice.

• I’d get a little more immersiveness out of some games that are VR-optional.

But…that’s just not that overwhelming a set of benefits to me.

Now, I am not everyone. Maybe other people value other things. And I do think that it’s possible to have a “killer app” for VR, some new game that really takes advantage of VR and is so utterly compelling that people feel that they’d just have to get VR goggles so as to not miss out. Something like what World of Warcraft did for MMO gaming, say. But the VR gaming effort has been going on for something like a decade now, and nothing like that has really turned up.

Have a limited attack surface will reduce exposure.

If, say, the only thing that you’re exposing is, oh, say, a Wireguard VPN, then unless there’s a misconfiguration or remotely-exploitable bug in Wireguard, then you’re fine regarding random people running exploit scanners.

I’m not too worried about stuff like (vanilla) Apache, OpenSSH, Wireguard, stuff like that, the “big” stuff that have a lot of eyes on them. I’d be a lot more dubious about niche stuff that some guy just threw together.

To put perspective on this, you gotta remember that most software that people run isn’t run in a sandbox. It can phone home. Games on Steam. If your Web browser has bugs, it’s got a lot of sites that might attack it. Plugins for that Web browser. Some guy’s open-source project. That’s a potential vector too. Sure, some random script kiddy running an exploit scanner is a potential risk, but my bet is that if you look at the actual number of compromises via that route, it’s probably rather lower than plain old malware.

It’s good to be aware of what you’re doing when you expose the Internet to something, but also to keep perspective. A lot of people out there run services exposed to the Internet every day; they need to do so to make things work.

I think that there’s some pretty heavy lifting done by self-segregation into news sources. There are a relatively-small number of Republican-leaning sources.

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2025/06/10/the-political-gap-in-americans-news-sources/

Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to both use and trust a number of major news sources. These include the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), the cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, major public broadcasters PBS and NPR, and the legacy newspaper with the largest number of digital subscribers, The New York Times.

Republicans, meanwhile, are much more likely to distrust than trust all of these sources. A smaller number of the sources we asked about are more heavily used and trusted by Republicans than Democrats, including Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network and Breitbart.

Fox News only really has competition on the further right for TV news, from Newsmax and One America News Network. I’m actually kind of surprised that there hasn’t been a challenger from the center-right side.

I was commenting a year or so back on the decline of the titles-released-per-year of VR titles on Steam.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/?tagid=21978

That’s been going on for some time, not looking really healthy.

I was going to wince at a US publication not doing European geography, but no, it’s actually the British The Independent, of all places.

Over the summer, Mr. Rubio said in a video commemorating huge anti-Communist protests in 2021 that many Cubans had found it “easier” to “abandon” the island than stay and fight the regime.

That seems kind of ironic.

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

Rubio asserted that his parents intended to return to Cuba in the 1960s.[5] He added that his mother took his two elder siblings back to Cuba in 1961 with the intention of living there permanently (his father remained behind in Miami “wrapping up the family’s matters”), but the nation’s move toward communism caused the family to change its plans.[5] Rubio said that the “essence of my family story is why they came to America in the first place and why they had to stay”.[14]

It sounds like the federal government can move cases involving federal law enforcement agents performing their duties to federal court.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1442

28 U.S. Code § 1442 - Federal officers or agencies sued or prosecuted

(a) A civil action or criminal prosecution that is commenced in a State court and that is against or directed to any of the following may be removed by them to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place wherein it is pending:

(1) The United States or any agency thereof or any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or of any agency thereof, in an official or individual capacity, for or relating to any act under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress for the apprehension or punishment of criminals or the collection of the revenue.

I think — and I may be wrong — that in a case in federal court, it’d be up to federal prosecutors to prosecute. I don’t know if the Trump administration actually has to prosecute them in that scenario.

Not something that I’ve read up on before, though. I imagine that there are probably articles out there with various lawyers chiming in.

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https://poracldf.org/blog/supremacy-clause-immunity-for-federal-officers/

In short, subjecting federal officers to state criminal sanctions for carrying out their federally appointed duties could make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the federal government to function. Even the most dedicated federal servant would be reluctant to do his job conscientiously if he knew it could mean prison time in the state penitentiary. Seth P. Waxman, What Kind of Immunity? Federal Officers, State Criminal Law, and the Supremacy Clause, 112 Yale L.J. 2195, 2230-31 (2003).4

In carving out the contours to the federal immunity defense, the courts have established a two-part requirement, adopting in part the Neagle language: “a state court has no jurisdiction if (1) the federal agent was performing an act which he was authorized to do by the laws of the United States and in (2) performing that authorized act, the federal agency did no more than was necessary and proper for him to do.” Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Long, 837 F.2d 727 (6th Cir. 1988).

Significantly, in analyzing the second “necessary and proper” factor, particularly in the context of an agent acting under exigencies, the courts have applied a broad view of the reasonableness of the conduct, focusing “on the intent of the officer and not the actual legality of his action.” Colorado v. Nord, 377 F. Supp. 2d 945, 951 (D. Col. 2005) (emphasizing “a federal officer is still entitled to immunity when he acts in good faith within the general scope of his duties as he understands them;” id. at 950); Clifton v. Cox, 549 F.2d 722, 728 (9th Cir. 1977) (federal officer seeking immunity need not show that his action “was, in fact, necessary or in retrospect justifiable, only that he reasonably thought it to be”). Just as Neagle involved a murder prosecution, the nature of the state prosecution is not the controlling factor; rather, the only consideration is the intent of the officer in enforcing his federal responsibilities. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes emphasized, “even the most unquestionable and most universally applicable of state laws, such as those concerning murder, will not be allowed to control the conduct of a marshal of the United States acting under and in pursuance of the laws of the United States.” Johnson v. Maryland, 254 U.S. 51, 56-57 (1920).

As five Ninth Circuit judges agree, not only is the federal immunity provision construed broadly but great leeway is given to a federal agent, so long as the agent is not acting with an evil intent: “when the federal agent is acting reasonably within the broad contours of official duty, and without malice, the courts have employed the Supremacy Clause to protect the agent from prosecution.” Idaho v. Horiuchi, 253 F.3d 359 (9th Cir.) (en banc), vacated as moot, 266 F.3d 979 (9th Cir. 2001) (Hawkins, dissenting).

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Okay, it sounds — and this is just from the phrasing in an article that’s arguing in favor of state charges for one of the ICE situations — like state prosecutors can prosecute even in the case that the prosecution is moved to federal court:

https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

The history of state prosecutions of federal officials goes back to the War of 1812, when some New England states used state statutes to prosecute federal customs officers who seized goods that were under a trade embargo. Often, they are used to resist a federal law that states don’t like, such as the Fugitive Slave Act.

But numerous states have indicted, charged, and arrested federal law enforcement officers for conduct that exceeded their official duties. In 1898, Virginia charged a federal tax collector posse with shooting and killing horses and cattle during a shootout. The federal posse claimed they were ambushed while attempting to collect taxes.

More to the point, in Findley v. Satterfield (1877), Castle v. Lewis (1918), Oregon v. Wood (1920), Smith v. Gilliam (1922), Maryland v. Soper (1926), and many more, states alleged that federal officers committed murder or attempted murder while engaged in law enforcement activity. Almost always, the federal response was that they were performing federal duties, that they acted in self-defense, or both. Often, these cases were removed to federal court, but the state prosecutors maintained the case. (Federal officers have the right to move cases to federal court, but not the unlimited right; they have to assert some plausible federal defense to the charges.)

EDIT: Well, or what they’re actually saying is that they’re trying to continue the case in state court. I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to dig into this really deeply, because I suspect that there are going to be various legal commentators with a lot more expertise than me talking about this in short order if there are charges filed. But at least I wanted to highlight one issue likely to come up if there are attempts to prosecute in state court.

EDIT2: Yes, state prosecutors do retain control of the prosecution if the case is moved to a federal court. Here’s a better source (talking about the Good shooting, but same issue):

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/minnesota-can-prosecute-jonathan-ross-but-it-may-not-be-easy

Finally, whether Supremacy Clause immunity applies will almost certainly be decided by a federal court, even though any criminal charges would first be filed in Minnesota state court. That is because federal officials are able to remove both criminal and civil cases from state court to federal court if those cases involve actions taken “under color of” their federal office. If charged, Ross would almost certainly choose to remove the case. Even in federal court, however, state criminal prosecutors would remain in charge of the prosecution, and any conviction would be a conviction under state law. And the president cannot pardon a state law crime.

Plus, I mean, unless you’re using a Threadiverse host as your home instance, how often are you typing its name?

Having a hyphen is RFC-conformant:

RFC 952:

1. A "name" (Net, Host, Gateway, or Domain name) is a text string up
to 24 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), minus
sign (-), and period (.).  Note that periods are only allowed when
they serve to delimit components of "domain style names". (See
RFC-921, "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule", for
background).  No blank or space characters are permitted as part of a
name. No distinction is made between upper and lower case.  The first
character must be an alpha character.  The last character must not be
a minus sign or period.  A host which serves as a GATEWAY should have
"-GATEWAY" or "-GW" as part of its name.  Hosts which do not serve as
Internet gateways should not use "-GATEWAY" and "-GW" as part of
their names. A host which is a TAC should have "-TAC" as the last
part of its host name, if it is a DoD host.  Single character names
or nicknames are not allowed.

RFC 1123:

   The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952
   [DNS:4].  One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the
   restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a
   letter or a digit.  Host software MUST support this more liberal
   syntax.

   Host software MUST handle host names of up to 63 characters and
   SHOULD handle host names of up to 255 characters.

I imagine so. I don’t use Boost, but I posted about the behavior to the Boost community, so hopefully they’ll get it straightened out.

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I mean, there are a number of cases in mythologies where you can find common elements. I’d buy that in some cases, there might be common elements causing it, but I don’t think that it’d need to be a common hallucinogen.

Off-the-cuff, some examples:

• Dragons

• “Hybrid” animals that are a conglomeration of different animals.

• Ghosts

• Mermaids.

• House spirits

• Sun gods