Mom, I want an aim bot!

But we have aim bots at home.

The aim bots at home.

This is like a ton of things with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO is required to conduits audits and report failures to Congress. It’s then up to Congress to hand out punishment. The problem is that the US Congress routinely lacks a spine to do anything.

But this is also why DOGE is seemingly redundant here. Everything that DOGE did is basically the same thing the GAO does. The difference is the GAO reports to Congress and DOGE reported to the President. That said, the President cannot unilaterally cut spending to anything as the Constitution indicates that power belongs to Congress. This is where a lot of challenges to DOGE come from.

However, those challenges mostly ended when Congress passed public law 119-28 which basically said all the cuts DOGE made were cool. However, there’s still challenges about those order of operations there, in that DOGE can’t have made the cuts until Congress said they were cool. And only on the date that Congress said they were cool with the cuts can they actually be cut. So money has to be spent for the in between time from when DOGE made a cut and when Congress said it was cool.

Liquid is good if the entire purpose of the rocket is to do something other than go up only and have no care about the down.

Like SpaceX’s Merlin engine is liquid. That’s because it matters for that whole boosters landing thing. So the whole coming back down matters so liquid is really worth the complexity.

Compare to say the Space Shuttle’s SRBs. They went up, got jettisoned, and then just basically fell back down into the ocean to be recovered later. The whole down part wasn’t that important.

So you can see why things like ICBMs went solid. The whole down part isn’t a big concern, well it is but for a different reason than what you would use liquid for.

EDIT: And to be sure, there’s more to it then this. Reasons to go solid vs liquid. But for the whole ICBM discussion, solid is better for many reasons, being less complex and cheaper factors into thing requiring going boom later on.

Yeah the injector plate is a bit of distance up the ass end of a Titan II. We’re seeing the walls of the ablative skirt of the engine on the side and it gets fuzzy as it comes closer to the camera, I would assume.

You can see what I mean better from a side view from Wikipedia.

. The injector is roughly where the skirt meets the metal tub looking thing.

Better headline, Pentagon has failed 100% of their audits since being required to have them.

If this thing was in the ON position, you would be very warm right now.

Also, if I remember correctly, the smaller holes are fuel and bigger holes are oxidizer.

And for those wondering what any of this means. The more surface area of your fuel, the better the combustion. So the fuel is sprayed out of these holes with the oxidizer and that’s what burns. But these holes aren’t like a shower head, the flow doesn’t come straight out because then you would have streams of fuel and oxidizer in parallel flows dropping into the giant fireball below and it would be highly reliant on that fireball’s turbulence to do the actual mixing.

Instead the pair of holes are kind of angled at each other. So that their streams that they spray form a V. This causes the fuel or oxidizer to start spraying, which increases surface area, which increases combustion. They played with all kinds of designs with these, because maximizing the combustion is critical to getting as much energy out of the burn as possible.

So that’s why you see a pair of holes all the way around. They shoot fuel or oxidizer at the other fuel or oxidizer coming out of the other hole of the pair. And the arrangement, size of hole, angle of the hole, etc, were all characteristics that were basically the secret sauce of rockets back then. This arrangement is a like pair impingement injector. That is, there is a pair, they shoot the same thing out each hole (like), and the holes are angled to form that V I talked about (impingement). Unlike pair, and unlike triplets were also other types of designs. Unlike pairs are a bit more complex because the oxidizer (dinitrogen tetroxide) has a bit more mass than the fuel (Aerozine-50), so the spray from the two jets hitting each other would cause the atomized molecules head off in an angle biased AWAY from the thing with more mass’ hole. So you compensate by changing the angle of one of the jets by an amount that would put the spray to atomize evenly.

More complex designs also had to start adding baffle plates to reduce fuel sloshing. The baffles break up the waves of force pushing the fuel out of the intended direction. There’s also pogo oscillation where the wave of force pushing the fuel begins to hit a frequency that matches the fuel’s natural slosh frequency. This would lead to a feed back loop that if unchecked would begin producing pressure waves into the rocket’s structure that can start to match the resonant frequency of the material used to build the rocket.

The rocket is flying up, fuel and oxidizer is flowing down. So the fireball moves down as the speed of the rocket moves up, the rocket is starting to leave where the fireball was at. But that allows more mixing (since the fireball and the fuel source are further away) causing stronger combustion, causing the fireball to slowly move back up into the rocket because now the fireball has more power. This pushes the rocket faster causing it to get away from the fireball, rinse and repeat. That up and down motion (longitudinal) is where these waves of force are coming from.

And all of this is why solid rockets became way more popular. There’s way less of these things to consider in a solid rocket design.

SlimPajama-627B Likely has pirated material in it, for sure. However, the case will likely end with Adobe just settling with a licensee of whatever copyright material.

I’m very doubtful that RedPajama or SlimPajama went through the trouble to nix Books3’s deliberate pirated material.

That said, the material and what’s outside of license is slowly whittling away. Bartz v. Anthropic saw $70B in license settle for $1.5B It’s likely going to be roughly the same for Adobe. Meta’s lawsuit I’m sure will go the same way.

But in all these settlements, the company at the other end becomes a licensee of the material and it solidifies their model in a legal sense. And if the actual value of copyright can be settled for roughly 2% the actual cost. Adobe will be sitting pretty very soon.

But my guess is the class action will go ahead till they have a list of who is looking for payment, run the books through to see which claims are valid, and all those writers get a nice check and Adobe makes their LLM in the clear.

Good on you. I hope all the games find a good home.

That’s super underselling it. Open Financial Exchange OFX is still the go-to for markets and banks to exchange information with various end user devices. ISO 20022 is a standard used in banking that is XML based. Fedwire, the platform that moves money between the central banks completed transition to XML in July… of this year.

Credit reporting agencies, insurance agencies, hospitals, medicare, medicaid, massive amounts of the entire global logistics industry are heavily using XML with no plans in the near future to move off of it. Like the network that handles auto insurance claims and reporting them to people like LexisNexus is all XML.

Like it’s impossible to cover just how much of this planet runs on XML.

She can’t resign from a job she never legally held.

That’s like this kind of interaction in a race:

I’m sorry sir, we’re disqualifying your car from racing today. It seems to have a jet engine attached to it and we don’t know how that got by inspection. But it’s not allowed in the rules.

Oh well that’s easy to explain, I just didn’t take my car by inspection. I just drove it out here and told everyone I’m here to race. It’s a race, correct? Well I’m here to race with the best of them.

That doesn’t sound like you’re an actual participant in this race then. You should not be here and I’ll have to ask you to leave.

Leave? Perish the thought. I officially withdraw from this race. scoffs Clearly you are not ready for innovative takes on race car design.

Well it seems you weren’t in the race to begin with, but by whatever means, please see your way out.

That is what this whole thing summarized is…

The leaders behind EPIC City have engaged in a radical plot to destroy hundreds of acres of beautiful Texas land and line their own pockets

— Texas AG Ken Paxton

That’s really odd for a State that has regularly written off all the various pollution Musk does over at his launchpad. And of course that ignores the obvious anything and everything that has anything to with oil production there.

For those just wanting a summary. Nobody is updating the price tags on the shelf. So when you get to the register, it rings up at a higher price. And if you never look at your receipt then you’ll never know you over paid.

It a lot of states it’s easier to pay the fine than to hire someone to come regularly update the price tags. Error rates in most states are capped at 0.5% to 2%. However, in the example store they talk about in the story, the error rate was 23%. Which is wild. But given that the fine is just $5,000 per inspection, they’re likely making more money in the long run.

“Device hoarding”

The only hoarding going on is the money the C-Staff of these companies keeps hoarding.

We don’t have to make a trillion iDevices if everyone is being paid good wages.

Don’t worry I do the same thing a lot.

For the purpose of sections 203, 205, 207, 208, and 209 of this title the term “special Government employee” shall mean an officer or employee of the executive or legislative branch of the United States Government, of any independent agency of the United States or of the District of Columbia, who is retained, designated, appointed, or employed to perform, with or without compensation, for not to exceed one hundred and thirty days during any period of three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days

— 18 USC § 202(a)

Highlight is mine, but yes. There’s a limit of 130 days.

Mike Johnson accused Democrats of “cherry pick[ing] three emails out of 20,000 documents” to “try and imply that the president was guilty.”

Buttery emails anyone?

A lot of the Epstein files has been released. However, there are some things not released. Something I’ll refer people to HR 4405

Now in that, let’s look at section C of that bill:

would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary

This is a big deal, because Judges ordering things to not be release CAN NOT be released no matter who says so. This is a separation of powers thing. A lot of things are withheld from the public because it’s part of various legal cases. The most recent one I can think of is JP Morgan paying out that $290M to victims and there was like some amount paid to the Virgin Islands.

Now the stuff that’s wrapped up by the Judges, if someone leaks any of that, they are going to prison. And the people who are handling those files are very well aware of the consequences of if they say peep about what they’ve seen.

This is the part where people are like “what if Trump destroys some evidence?” Well a lot of that evidence was turned over to the courts during Biden. So if the DoJ suddenly made things start disappearing, it’s not going to match up with what the court already knows about.

Many people already know what’s in these files. They know what’s going to be brought in legal cases. They also know what would happen to them it if they leaked anything they’ve already seen. And a lot of this information has been steady released to the public.

So this brings up, what the fuck is Congress bitching about then? What Congress is attempting to do, is code into law a requirement for the information to released to the public no matter what might be contained, WITH A FEW EXCEPTIONS AS NOTED IN SECTION C. What this law would do, is not just ensure that justice if done but also ensure that the public is aware of all the details behind the case.

You know how like some court cases will happen and not everything presented in court is released to the public? Well this would codify into law the requirement to release all of that to the public. Of course, AFTER any kind of trial it was used in, if it wasn’t released before a trail began.

Most aren’t up in 2026. So don’t forget this.

The Government’s argument, I shit you not, “Congress has not given explicit permission to do this.”

Invade cities with ICE, bomb boats in the body of water formerly know as the Gulf of Mexico, literally start a war with a sovereign nation, tariff the fuck out of everyone… BUT OH NO! Feeding kids, that’s Executive overreach.

Man, I’m not religious, but holy fuck I really do hope there is a hell.

The 300% increase is because of Republican cuts from OBBBA. Republicans continually do things to reduce the quality and deliverablity of care from these markets. That’s the thing, every “failure” can be traced back to Republicans enacting law that greatly affects the overall success of the program.

What’s even more interesting is how flexible the market has been in spite of Republican meddling. But the ACA has offered new avenues for people to have insurance when their situation wouldn’t have qualified them for such. This has provided a much needed peace of mind to a large segment of the population.

For all the things that Republicans tend to throw to deride the program, it continues to provide coverage for people in ways that lawmakers don’t always foresee. And that has provided care to people who usually would not have care. Allowed people to go on to make small businesses that would not have otherwise taken the risk. Allow people to get regular checkups and routine care that would have otherwise gone without.

Republicans have a funny definition of success in the medical domain. Once that circles around dollars to care, when the goal should be amount of care. Or at least in my most humble opinion, we should look at the amount of care we provide to the population as a metric of success. To then toss dollars on top of that metric really begs the question of what is the worth of a person’s life? Yes, the ACA lacks a single provider negotiated benefit. Republicans have sought to never allow that to happen. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a very clear loss for the ACA program, but again, that’s at the behest of Republicans.