Happy July 4th! For those of us around the world contemplating independence, it's a good day to think about how we came to rely on expensive cloud infrastructure for our fundamental computing needs.

With that in mind, here is my latest toy project: an open source tool that makes replicating, forking, sharing, and running container snapshots fast and easy across cloud and personal devices.

It's fun to play with, especially on bare metal hardware you run at home, or rent from a provider like Hetzner or OVH. Or, because it uses Tailscale, why not all of them in a single mesh?

There's a lot more to say but I don't have time right now. Details are in the README.

I will say this: humans and AI agents both want the same things when they're trying to get work done. Ephemeral containers aren't really it. But how about unlimited disk space, fast CPUs, an undo button, and the ability to move to whatever provider offers the best hardware at the best price? That's more like it.

Go visit thundersnap on github and tell me what you think!

Please be aware that I have the most comprehensive collection of jokes of this formation, so you cannot stump me, that's not what I'm asking. I have 100% heard your joke before. I just want to hear your best formation. Bring it.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

(satire) *[Major League Baseball] Demands Return Of All Foul Balls.*

A British appeals court sustained the arbitrary criminalization of stating support for Palestine Action.

A few more levels of appeal are possible, but Stormer's government is dead set on repression of criticism where it counts.

* Unicef analyzed young people's exposure to eight climate hazards: coastal floods, droughts, extreme heat, fires, heatwaves, river floods, sand and dust storms, and tropical storms… Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard.*

* Decriminalizing the possession of cannabis or strictly regulating access to the drug do not appear to drive up usage, but when the drug is sold commercially the number of users increases and more mental health problems are seen, a review has found.*

* The Guardian geolocated and verified images showing the Israeli military using excavators made by six companies – Caterpillar, Volvo, Hyundai, Doosan, Hitachi and Komatsu – to destroy homes, public utilities, shops and other structures across southern Lebanon.*

"Expensive electricity is killing British industry" — but subsidizing energy made from fossil fuels is killing civilization.

The UK government should look for a way to subsidize the customers for energy, but not subsidize fossil fuel or electricity made from that. We must maintain the incentive to use less fossil fuel. There are other ways to keep industrial production going.

Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran writes about how cruel tyranny engulfed Turkey, in the process of which threats of violence forced her into exile. And about what it is like to lose your country to that political disease.

Explaining how surveillance companies recruit schools, classes and teachers to pressure students and their parents into giving their personal data to the companies, and allowing those companies to track the students and parents.

I suspect that refusing to run anything from Google Prey Store or the Crapple Crap Store will keep them from tracking you. But protecting students in school calls for a law prohibiting schools from ever asking students to run nonfree programs or hosting activities that do so.

The muskrat's fabulous cars-in-tunnels "mass transit" seems to be unable to serve many people, but it is an opportunity to disregard environmental planning regulations with impunity and serve real estate owners rather than the public.

The wrecker is going all-out to increase the use of fossil fuels, but is not convincing the American public that that is safe.

*Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this.*

I don't think the wrecker cares about the danger of global climate disaster, only about rewarding the planet roasters to keep them in his corner. They all deserve to end up broke and experience living on however much support the US provides to the poor.

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) -- which is slated to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026 -- bans peer reviewers from uploading papers they referee to AI chatbots, as the practice breaches confidentiality. [...] To enforce the policy and catch illicit AI use in peer review, the event's organizers have included deliberately concealed instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review.

The instructions tell an LLM to use telltale phrases -- such as "This work addresses the central challenge" and "The claims of the paper" -- in a peer-review report. [...]

"Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on," Sören Auer, a computer scientist at Leibniz University Hannover, wrote on LinkedIn. "You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects."

But others see merits in the approach. A similar prompt-injection effort has caught hundreds of reviewers misusing LLMs in submissions for next week's 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea, according to Nihar Shah, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and scientific integrity chair of that conference.

Culture of trust, uh huh.

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down the "black chamber" -- the State Department's code‐breaking office -- on the principle that the way to make men and nations trustworthy was to trust them. As he later told aide McGeorge Bundy, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Two ICE agents harassed a poll worker on Election Day, demanding she remove social media posts they claimed threatened federal agents.

Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, said she received a phone call Tuesday from two ICE agents asking to meet with her. Not wanting to meet with them alone, she invited them into her workplace. "I've seen the news, especially in Minnesota," she said. "And I didn't want anything to happen to me at all."

The ICE agents arrived with copies of her social media posts and driver's license, and handed her a warning notice alerting her that they were investigating her for allegedly threatening ICE personnel. "They tried to scare me into signing it while I was working," she said. The agents told her to "remove and/or discontinue" the behavior, according to the notice, which Gonyea shared on Instagram. [...]

Ross, who was only placed on three days of administrative leave for shooting Good in the head, chest, and arm, faced virtually no consequences for killing an innocent woman in broad daylight. It appears that federal law enforcement now view pleas for actual justice as some kind of threat. [...]

Gonyea's experience is just the latest example of how far federal law enforcement is willing to go to silence critics of President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts. Earlier this week in Texas, a man received a 30-year prison sentence for transporting left-wing zines linked to a protest at ICE's Prairieland Detention Facility. Others involved in the protest received sentences of up to 50 years.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Over the years I’ve occasionally noodled on what might be a better working fluid for supercritical turbines than Carbon Dioxide. It turns out the main fixed parameter is the critical temperature, because there’s a strong nonlinearity in density with it going up rapidly as that temperature is approached. The other parameters of note are thermal conductivity, specific heat, and density, with more being better. There’s a very short list of possible fluids to mix which aren’t horribly corrosive, thermally unstable, or otherwise problematic. I’ve put together a tool to play with all the possible options here. You should go play with it. The short of it is that a mix of Neon and Perfluorobenzene tuned to the desired critical temperature is probably optimal, but if Perflueropropane’s decomposition problems aren’t too bad or Titanium Tetrachloride mixes with other things well then combining with some of those may be beneficial. This approach to visualization is probably equally applicable to conventional refrigerants but with the fixed parameter being boiling point rather than critical temperature. I don’t know if it’s standard there. If it isn’t it should be.

Years ago there was this insane academic idea that the isotope Thorium-229 might have a metastable isomer whose energy state is so close that it could be flipped into that state using a laser. In principle this worked on paper but so completely goes against the fundamentals of chemistry that it has to be assumed that it won’t work. Now it’s actually been made to work. It’s a little hard to convey how bonkers this is. A truly herculean effort was necessary to find out what the extremely precise wavelength of the laser has to be. The chemistry actually matters. The chemical which the Th-229 is embedded in matters for how precise the laser has to be. The laser is pushing on the nucleus, which is pushing on an electron, which is in turn pulling on the nucleus, which is pulling on the laser. This is not how chemistry works. But it does have directly applications to making yet even more insanely accurate clocks than we have currently, with possible applications to things like measuring fluctuations in the dark matter passing over the earth.

Here’s a crazy new idea of mine: It would be very convenient if there were some isotope which absorbed neutrons and then turned into something with an insanely high cross section similar to Xenon-135 but a half-life on the order of minutes. That could be left in a reactor core to to provide a passive negative feedback loop which operated on flux instead of temperature. Since flux is leading and temperature is trailing this could react more quickly and reliably. The downside would be losing some neutrons to the passive buffer. The funny thing is we have no idea if such unobtanium exists: The neutron cross sections of things with short half-lives are largely unknown and hard to predict. But we have some data already! If this process is already happening accidentally from something in existing nuclear reactors then there should be a resonance in the time series data for temperature measurements in them which is very precise and consistent across reactors. A lot of such data for many different reactors already exists. Checking for that would be an experiment worth doing.

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As with the Spencer archives, I hope this trend of people unearthing their 36-year-old VHS tapes continues...