"The U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve is a series of vast, subterranean salt caverns in four different sites in Louisiana and Texas. Many are enormous -- the average cavern holds about 10mn barrels [...] This network of tunnels, grottos, pumps and wells can in total hold about 715mn barrels of oil, or enough to supply the entire U.S. with all the oil it needs for over a month" -- but those salt caverns were only designed to be drained and refilled five times.
The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern's ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that "catastrophic structural damage," including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk. This could mean, among other things, that the reserves can no longer be drained in their entirety, as "a minimum level of oil... must be kept in the salt caverns" to avoid this fate, with the result that the reserves' effectiveness in a time of future national emergency will be reduced.
Of course, this could also mean that someday the caverns will simply collapse.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Age-checking in Australia is pushing adult internauts away from the sites that are banned for minors, because they fear the tracking that is a side effect of the age-checking systems.
A study observed bullshit generators encouraging delusions in some patients.
The Israeli army has dropped charges against soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner.
The grounds given for dropping the charges are that (1) the prisoner had been released to Gaza and (2) *the conduct of senior officials had affected the chance of holding a fair trial.* To me, this says that (1) they are exaggerating to create an excuse and (2) high officials created an excuse and have suffered no punishment for it.
*ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study.*
Any kind of skill fades if a person stops practicing it.
Local cops of some US towns regularly search license plate cameras to help the deportation thugs to track immigrants.
More about this.
In a class-action lawsuit against the deportation thugs, some of them testified about their arrest quotas, and the digital tools whose vague output often leads them to arrest people who are present in the US lawfully.
Violent practices, such as breaking car windows with only a hint of an excuse, seem to be systematic. They figure they will nearly always get away with it, and for typical victims (whether unauthorized immigrants or authorized immigrants or citizens), the expense of repair will create hardship. Releasing a person hundreds of miles away from home can make it very difficult to get home.
The officials in charge of deportation agencies have the duty to stop these practices, but it is clear that they are not really trying.
A facial recognition system falsely identified a suspect as Angela Lipps, and she was jailed for 6 months; then, when she was brought to a courtroom in another state, the court noticed that the criminal could not be her. Meanwhile, she had lost her home and her car.
False identifications will always occur. Although this one used digital face matching, recognition by human witnesses makes mistakes too. But I think that the main mistake here was to wait 6 months before noticing her alibi and without granting her bail.
*Israel's Deadly Blockade Traps 7 U.S. Doctors in Gaza.*
George Monbiot: *Rightwing politicians, Tufton Street junktanks and the billionaire press tell us our energy security will be enhanced and our bills will fall if we abandon net zero policies, ditch renewables and reinvest in North Sea gas. These claims are not just a little bit wrong. They are the exact opposite of the truth.*
A henchman threatens to shut down broadcasters for saying things that the bullshitter chooses to call "hoaxes".
This is a threat of arbitrary censorship, and I'm sure the TV news broadcasters understand it as such. Many have already bent the knee to the bullshitter; they have nothing to worry about. But the rest will now face another kind of threat.
I’m releasing Manyana, a project which I believe presents a coherent vision for the future of version control — and a compelling case for building it.
It’s based on the fundamentally sound approach of using CRDTs for version control, which is long overdue but hasn’t happened yet because of subtle UX issues. A CRDT merge always succeeds by definition, so there are no conflicts in the traditional sense — the key insight is that changes should be flagged as conflicting when they touch each other, giving you informative conflict presentation on top of a system which never actually fails. This project works that out.
Better conflict presentation
One immediate benefit is much more informative conflict markers. Two people branch from a file containing a function. One deletes the function. The other adds a line in the middle of it. A traditional VCS gives you this:
<<<<<<< left
=======
def calculate(x):
a = x * 2
logger.debug(f"a={a}")
b = a + 1
return b
>>>>>>> rightTwo opaque blobs. You have to mentally reconstruct what actually happened.
Manyana gives you this:
<<<<<<< begin deleted left
def calculate(x):
a = x * 2
======= begin added right
logger.debug(f"a={a}")
======= begin deleted left
b = a + 1
return b
>>>>>>> end conflictEach section tells you what happened and who did it. Left deleted the function. Right added a line in the middle. You can see the structure of the conflict instead of staring at two blobs trying to figure it out.
What CRDTs give you
CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) give you eventual consistency: merges never fail, and the result is always the same no matter what order branches are merged in — including many branches mashed together by multiple people working independently. That one property turns out to have profound implications for every aspect of version control design.
Line ordering becomes permanent. When two branches insert code at the same point, the CRDT picks an ordering and it sticks. This prevents problems when conflicting sections are both kept but resolved in different orders on different branches.
Conflicts are informative, not blocking. The merge always produces a result. Conflicts are surfaced for review when concurrent edits happen “too near” each other, but they never block the merge itself. And because the algorithm tracks what each side did rather than just showing the two outcomes, the conflict presentation is genuinely useful.
History lives in the structure. The state is a weave — a single structure containing every line which has ever existed in the file, with metadata about when it was added and removed. This means merges don’t need to find a common ancestor or traverse the DAG. Two states go in, one state comes out, and it’s always correct.
Rebase without the nightmare
One idea I’m particularly excited about: rebase doesn’t have to destroy history. Conventional rebase creates a fictional history where your commits happened on top of the latest main. In a CRDT system, you can get the same effect — replaying commits one at a time onto a new base — while keeping the full history. The only addition needed is a “primary ancestor” annotation in the DAG.
This matters because aggressive rebasing quickly produces merge topologies with no single common ancestor, which is exactly where traditional 3-way merge falls apart. CRDTs don’t care — the history is in the weave, not reconstructed from the DAG.
What this is and isn’t
Manyana is a demo, not a full-blown version control system. It’s about 470 lines of Python which operate on individual files. Cherry-picking and local undo aren’t implemented yet, though the README lays out a vision for how those can be done well.
What it is is a proof that CRDT-based version control can handle the hard UX problems and come out with better answers than the tools we’re all using today — and a coherent design for building the real thing.
The code is public domain. The full design document is in the README.
Four years ago I asked whether "Google Pass" was a thing that I needed to give a shit about and consensus was, "no, nobody uses that." But I have heard anecdotally, recently, that this might no longer be true. Thoughts?
The goal here is, "reduce the amount of time it takes for someone standing in front of my nightclub to wave their QR code at the door staff." On iOS, Apple Wallet supports that goal very well.
Note: I don't use Android and know as little about its ecosystem as possible, so please use small words.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Configuration Tiers: Three Levels of InfractionTIER 0, "The Pamphlet" ~$6
Minimum viable violation. A bootable Linux device with a display, network connectivity, and an app store. No battery, no keyboard -- just proof that this constitutes a regulated device under AB 1043. Good for bulk handout at conferences (50-100 units).Legal status: Arguable. The 128×64 display introduces fuzziness. The AG could claim it's a dev board. That's fine -- ambiguity is instructive too.
TIER 1, "The Computer", ~$12
An unambiguous general purpose computing device. Color display, keyboard, WiFi, Linux, app store, user setup. The core product. There is no interpretive gap between this device and the law's definitions.Legal status: Unambiguous. This is a computer with a color display, keyboard, WiFi, Linux, and an app store. It does not collect age data. It is handed to a child. The maximum fine is $7,500.
TIER 2, "The Appliance", ~$18
A self-contained, battery-powered pocket Linux computer. The educational device angle -- a modern descendant of the Acorn BBC Micro and the original Raspberry Pi.Legal status: Beyond unambiguous. A pocket computer with a color screen, keyboard, battery, WiFi, 8GB storage, and an AI accelerator. It costs less than a large pizza. It fits in a child's hand.
Every tab on this site is gold:
How Distros Are Responding: We track how Linux distributions are responding to age verification mandates, and we provide tools to undo whatever they implement. If a distribution adds an age collection prompt, we will publish a script that removes it. If it ships a D-Bus age verification daemon, we will publish a package that replaces it with silence.
How One Bill Becomes Every Bill: AB 1043 was not written in isolation. It is a template. ICMEC published the model text as a ready-to-introduce statutory draft, and its Global Head of Policy presented it directly to Virginia's Joint Commission on Technology and Science. The same organizations that drafted the model bill are now deploying it in state legislatures across the country. The companies that benefit from the compliance moat fund the advocacy organizations that draft the bills that create the compliance moat. [...]
The Door That Stays Open: AB 1043 requires only self-declared age -- a birthdate field, not government ID or biometrics. Industry analysts have described this as "an initial implementation designed to get the door open." Self-declaration today. Biometric verification tomorrow. The infrastructure is the same; only the input changes. Once every operating system has an age collection interface and a real-time API for transmitting age data to applications, upgrading from a text field to a face scan is a configuration change, not a new law.
Penalty Comparison: Cost of Giving a Child a Computer:
Cost of one Ageless Linux device: $12-18
Maximum combined US penalty for one device given to one child: $46,000
US penalty-to-cost ratio: 3,067:1
Brazil penalty for one violation: up to 522,222:1
On the need for a censorship API for legal compliance reasons in some countries and U.S. states
From: FloofyWolf <debian-devel-list@floofywolf.net>
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2026 20:38:08 -0800
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Cc: xdg@lists.freedesktop.org, ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com, debian-legal@lists.debian.org, legal@lists.fedoraproject.org, devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: On the need for a censorship API for legal compliance reasons in some countries and U.S. statesRecently, a proposal has been made to implement an API for a new California censorship regulation, "On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states" by Aaron Rainbolt. I believe the approach outlined to be very short-sighted, in that creating a bespoke API for each of the hundreds of government censorship requirements that debian will presumably now be following will result in much duplication of effort and an unreliable user experience in which important censorship restrictions may be missed and not implemented. As such, with people now supporting the idea that debian should implement government censorship requests, even creating new standards if needed, I propose the creation of a censorship framework to speed implementation of current and future censorship regulations. [...]
Systemd units will be created for every desired censorship function, and will be started based on the user's location. For example, a unit for Kazakhstan will implement the government-required backdoor, a unit for China will implement keyword scans and web access blocks (more on this later), a unit for Florida will ban all packages with "trans" in the name (201 packages in current stable distribution), a unit for Oklahoma will ensure all educational software is compliant with the Christian Holy Bible, a unit for the entire United States will prevent installation of any program capable of decoding DVD or BluRay media, and a unit for California will provide the user's age to all applications and all web sites from which applications may be downloaded. As can be seen, multiple units may be started for a given location. [...]
To prevent users from bypassing censorship requirements, debian will need to switch to being a binary-only distribution with signed binaries, signed kernel, and signed kernel modules, with mandatory secureboot, and controls to prevent any non-signed software from being installed, written, or compiled, as any foreign sources of software may fail to query systemd-censord or may fail to respect the permissions it returns.
By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more) we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licenses on GitHub. Which licenses? A set of 11 popular open-source licenses that all require attribution of the author's name and copyright, including the MIT license, the GPL, and the Apache license. (These are enumerated in the appendix to the complaint.)
In addition to violating the attribution requirements of these licenses, we contend that the defendants have violated:
- GitHub's own terms of service and privacy policies;
- DMCA § 1202, which forbids the removal of copyright-management information;
- the California Consumer Privacy Act;
- and other laws giving rise to related legal claims.
Phillips spoke "on multiple podcasts" about being teleported against his will, which he has described as "evil." As director of the Office of Response and Recovery, Phillips oversees billions in funds, and is deeply involved in rapid response efforts in the aftermath of disasters.
"Teleporting is no fun," Phillips said last year. "It's no fun because you don't really know what you're doing. You don't really understand it, it's scary, but yet so real. And you know it's happening but you can't do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."
Phillips in the same interview described "teleporting" to a Waffle House 50 miles away. "I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," he said. "And I ended up at a Waffle House -- this was in Georgia and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was."
Now, do not mistake Phillips description for something like a medical episode or a black out of some form. He insisted that he was traveling from location to location without experiencing the passage of time. When his friends asked him where he was, he replied that he was at the "'Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.' And they said, 'That's not possible, you just left here a moment ago.' But it was possible. It was real."
Phillips also claimed that he had once felt his car "lifted up" and teleported forty miles to a ditch near a church. [...]
At FEMA, Phillips, who lacks any sort of professional experience related to disaster response, has been successful in the sense that his lack of qualifications fall in line with the Trump administration's apparent goal of kneecaping the agency.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
McMurry recalls plenty of discussion about adhering to any 'real' physics if that event actually happened. "There was a very fun debate about what would happen if the center broke. Some people said, 'Well, these towers, since they're under stress, they would just go immediately back out this way.' We did some tests but then we said, 'Well, that looks stupid.'" [...]
"We were always scaling things up and down, cheating gravity stronger or weaker, just to make everything feel like it had the right scale but wasn't too slow to maintain the excitement. The destruction simulations were tweaked just to look good. They're not based on any mechanical analysis of material strengths."
"The bridge attack is one of the biggest cheats in the whole show," adds Knoll. "The nominal size for the Kaijus and Jaegers was around 250 feet tall, and we tried to stay around that where we could. The roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge is around 230 feet above the water, so the Kaiju in those shots is cheated up to around 700 feet tall!" [...]
Godzilla's interaction with the bridge -- despite ultimately breaking through it -- remains somewhat low-key. "In the movie, notes Bonami, "the cables are grabbed, shaken and cut. In reality if one of those cables were cut, the bridge would swing and if Godzilla were to walk thought it the effect on the bridge would be devastating. Our challenge was therefore to downplay the physics but also to try and maintain realism."
"It's known by Minnesotans as a place where executives and CEOs live," Parr told 404 Media. "Famously Walter Mondale is from North Oaks, but also like United Healthcare executives and Target executives."
North Oaks has managed to largely stay unmapped on Street View because of the way the city handles its streets. In almost every city and town in the United States, property owners give an easement to their local government for the roads in front of their homes (or don't have any claim to the roads at all). In North Oaks, homeowners' property extends into the middle of the street, meaning there is literally no "public" property in the city, and the roads are maintained by the North Oaks Homeowners' Association (NOHOA): "the City owns no roads, land, or buildings." [...]
"Technically, if you launch your drone from public property, which anyone can do if you're a registered drone pilot, you can fly it straight up and above private property," Parr said. And so Parr stood at "six or seven different spots" directly outside the boundary of North Oaks and flew his drone around. "I just pulled my car over onto the shoulder and popped my drone up and flew it over," he added. [...]
"According to North Oak's ordinances, you can go like, visit a friend, or if you're a contractor working on a house, you can go into the city, but you have to be an invited guest," Parr said. "I made a Craigslist post asking for somebody to invite me and I got an absolute ton of responses."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
"It's up to you to figure out what you're comfortable sharing back with Tinder," Tinder Head of Product Mark Kantor told 404 Media. Still, users can't pick individual photos they want analyzed or ignored. [...]
Tinder has already leaned heavily into AI. Kantor told 404 Media that artificial intelligence is writing more than half the app's code these days.
Planet Debian upstream is hosted by Branchable.