And Dick Wolf is a dipshit who actively villifies public defenders and any form of defense attorney.

Regardless

Or is it pretty much the bottom of the barrel for defense and compensation?

THIS is being a dick. Do better.

If you can afford a private defense attorney, you probably should. Their case load will be considerably smaller.

That said? Public Defenders tend to be some of the hardest working and most passionate people out there. You generally don’t get into that unless you believe in justice (even just being a corporate lawyer who rubber stamps paperwork tends to pay significantly more) and they obviously have a LOT of experience in whatever you just did. And they tend to have a solid rapport with most judges because they see them potentially multiple times a week.

So… how about you not be a dick to the people putting the work in?

There are two general cases where drones are useful (for combat, not just surveillance): Swarms and tactical/targeted strikes.

For a swarm? It is literally any other artillery barrage. You either find shelter or you die. It is just a case of the attackers spending a lot more money so that they don’t have easily detectable artillery pieces (or man portable mortars) to lug around

For targeted strikes? The advantage there is that quadrotors (et al) aren’t easily detectable by humans when they are high up in the air (shockingly easy for the kinds of mics that are already used to triangulate gunfire though… and there is some university research to amplify specific frequencies for “tactical” headphones). This means that an operator can essentially hover even 20-30 feet up above a target and then either drop the payload or fly it in.

At which point it is literally the same defense as mortars. The fancy kind of netting to reduce the effectiveness of airburst munitions (and prevent drones from reaching the juicy bit). Trenches/foxholes to minimize the damage caused by any one detonation. And… just closing the damned door on the APC.

What you are describing is something we mostly only see in video games and the Drone Racing League. The idea that you get above your target, swoop down, and do a trench run through the hallways to get to your high value target.

First? That pretty much gets stopped immediately if people just close doors and windows.

But more importantly? You need to be a DAMNED good pilot to do that at speed so that you can’t be stopped in time. And you need ridiculously effective real time intel. Because if that HVT walked down the hallway to inappropriately flirt with Private Pyle? Your ace drone pilot is now blowing up a few random admins and not the Super General or whatever.

Which more or less becomes the same issues as mortars but with an added bit of snipers: “Important” people don’t stand near windows.

Drones, like mortars, are still pretty effective at harassing infantry and breaking up (poorly) entrenched positions. One of the most infamous examples of this is the Benghazi embassy attack. Most reports (so grain of salt) put the contractors as being REALLY good at shooting back. But when the attackers did a bit of math (allegedly weeks earlier…) and dropped mortars on their asses, it basically collapsed the defenses.

And… obviously drones are super effective at going after civilian targets. Same as mortars (or high angle grenade launchers, according to a certain nazi running for the Senate in Maine…).

But this is also something we “solved” back in World War 1 and 2. Which… is a big chunk of why the war in Ukraine is a lot closer to a WW2 battlefield than not.

And… people are now wondering just how fast Bitwarden can speedrun late stage capitalism with recent changes. And realizing just how much data Bitwarden Corp actually has.

We go through cycles of this. Company A is bad but Company B is good… and it is almost always based on marketing. Google used to be AMAZING because “do no evil” and “they gave me a bunch of gigs of email storage!”.

Hell, some of us might be old enough to remember when Spideroak was the bee’s knees and totally secure… until people started realizing there were issues with what they were saying. They have no copies of your encryption key… but you can recover your password. And then there was the brief debacle where people realized they could download any file they had the hash for. But hey, they weren’t Dropbox!

I don’t think a company being involved inherently makes it bad. I don’t even think a company that keeps keys on their servers are inherently bad. Data… gets murky but that is more because of the logistics of what that means for hosting and operating costs.

But it IS important to actually assess a product before using it and to understand the risks. Every year or so people lose their shit at Protonmail when they find out that, contrary to widespread belief, Proton Corp isn’t going to serve a century in a black site for their customers. And every single time, people point out that Proton never said they would. They are VERY upfront about what they do and don’t provide and… the reality is that most of the privacy oriented benefits of that service are in that they don’t require any kind of authentication to create an account. Which… is akward when you realize it is better to NOT pay if privacy is your concern.

But what makes a random start-up with no meaningful (professional) footprint “a more trusted option than Google”?

A “privacy product” inherently involves a lot of trust. When the creators are academics with little to no professional footprint, you need to assess things based on what information they do provide you. Whether that be code (yay open source) or customer interactions (forum posts).

I know we all yearn for the days of “Use Google. Their motto is ‘do no evil’ so you know they are our friends!”. But… that was a much stupider time.

Like, even if you suckle at the teat of Saint Capitalism, you should at least want a good product. And… this looks like enthusiast code with minimal maintainability but a heavy emphasis on marketing.

Never going to not smirk at the israelis getting an L.

But be wary of media coverage of these kinds of drones. If you listen to The News, they are the greatest paradigm shift ever and you should totally give the military industrial complex even more trillions of dollars to find a solution!

The reality is that they are a lot closer to mortars than not. Comparatively short range and low payload weapons that are ridiculously cheap. Against an entrenched position with minimal defenses, they are devastating. But, ironically, most of the same defenses against mortars apply here too. They just tend to be ridiculously effective in Ukraine due to a mix of propaganda and how incredibly undisciplined russian conscripts are (see also: the idiots falling off of aircraft carriers in the us military). And… we aren’t THAT far off of basically connecting small arms, sensors, and simple motors up to shoot drones out of the sky in areas where we don’t care about collateral damage from falling bullets.

Don’t get me wrong. Cheap drones have very much changed the battlefield. But… closer to “affordable” night vision gear equalizing things rather than the initial advent of (good) night vision gear basically turning rich (read: US) militaries into invisible killing machines.

Fair enough. I’ll still say that is bad engineering but acknowledge that starts to get into the realm of taste.

Either way, in the past 24 days you have MR commits on 8 of those and April looks similar. The code is generally poorly documented and skimming the closed MRs, I am not seeing much discussion or review in any of them. So I stand by

At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

From a quick glance at the repo?

The commits generally come hot and heavy. Going back to the earlier 2025 commits and the messages mostly look like what you would expect from folk raw dogging main. Arrdalan in particular looks “real”-ish. Whereas jkaczman is already showing signs of the kinds of commit messages that claude et al generate, but those ARE based off certain style guides.

Roll up to 2026 and I can see 11 commits on May 17 alone, they all look like claude messages, some are outright just arbitrarily changing magic hashes, and there are little to no comments.

Not gonna fully call this ai slop but, it is REAL flipping sus as it were. At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

What a world we live in where a street near the white house is as dangerous as a kindergarten classroom.

I already have lifetime but there have been increasingly more and more yellow/orange flags recently.

For you jellyfin folk: Is there a good solution to being able to cache/download episodes/movies ahead of time for “offline mode” with any of the android clients yet? Last time I checked that was a pain point and most solutions boiled down to “just download the file and use VLC”. At which point… why am I running a media server when I can just mount a samba share at home?

So if I am understanding this correctly:

The judge allowed evidence obtained during a subsequent inventory of his backpack at the police station, but said evidence found during an initial search of Mangione’s backpack during his arrest at a McDonald’s restaurant must be suppressed, including a gun ammunition magazine, cellphone, passport, wallet and computer chip.

The things the cops pulled out at mcdonald’s is inadmissible. But once the backpack was more thoroughly searched after he had been read his rights and taken into custody are still good. So I assume one zipper pocket versus the other?

I ANAL (and am not a lawyer) but it mostly looks like this is just going to hurt attempts to claim he was planning to fleet the country (which already seems unlikely since he was sitting in a mcdonald’s days later rather than already on a non-extradition treaty beach).

This… definitely feels bullshit. But I suspect it also doesn’t matter. Because… you know how everyone is starting to realize flock cameras are bad? Yes, those have exploded but they (and similar) aren’t particularly new and NYC already had a LOT of traffic cameras and the like. Odds are there is already a full timeline of camera footage tracing A Guy What Looks Vaguely Like Luigi to and from the site of the alleged shooting and then all the way to mickey d’s. Having the ghost glock and the manifesto just means the prosecution/government doesn’t have to fully disclose the rest.

Luke was the son of the evil warlord who single handedly changed the fate of not just The Rebellion but also The Galaxy (and yes, I know the EU expanded on that to make it less the case). Was he the one in the prophecy? No. But from a narrative/trope perspective, he was 100% The Chosen One.

TLJ is what I think gave the sequel trilogy… hope.

TFA is very much a nostalgia grab re-tread of ANH. Which is the point. Evil has come back and something something it rhymes.

TLJ is all about breaking the cycle. The hero? She isn’t a chosen one. She is a random unhoused garbage goblin. The reluctant hero? He isn’t coming back for selfish reasons (wanting to bang Leia) and is instead realizing that he is part of something bigger than him. The confident scoundrel? He got told quite definitively that he is a childish moron who gets people killed and to do better.

And Luke? if he was really The Chosen One… why did everything repeat? The stories of our parents aren’t gonna solve things so let’s try something new. Let’s democratize force powers. Let’s ACTUALLY fight against tyranny.

And then China allegedly got pissed and Disney had JJ come back to undo everything in the first 30 minutes of ROS. And only really succeeded in making a movie that EVERYBODY hates.

That said? Rogue One and Andor were somehow snuck in there and those are very much a Star Wars made for people who grew up watching the prequels. And it is amazing for it.

Clearly those cowards in the military can’t protect him. So he’ll call in ice to do it instead. And if they happen to run a reign of terror in the process? Boys will be boys.

People vastly overestimate their accuracy with a firearm. I want to say military doctrines/history generally show 100-300 meters as “the sweet spot” for a military rifle… with independent studies tending to put that at closer to 10-30 for an individual. Optics CAN help that (it stops being “line up your sight picture” and instead “pull the trigger when the dot is on the thing you want to kill”) except that… most people don’t have the time or resources to actually zero those properly.

This is why the vast majority (to the point I would almost say “all”) of political assassinations are either a full on military hit squad… or a lone gunman at point blank range. Lincoln, Reagan, Abe, even the dude what looked vaguely like Luigi. Which… there are a LOT of reasons people are so suspicious of the murder of JFK to this very day.

that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information

Do they?

Let’s use Nintendo as the example.

First and foremost, how much did they change the price of the switch 2 based upon tariffs? More specifically, how much can you prove they did? Should a company that chose to eat the costs of the tariffs themselves be penalized and forced to lose even more money over NOT raising the price every time fuckface did? What about the specific case of the Switch 2 where they intentionally waited a week or three to announce the price after revealing it to factor in expected tariffs?

Also, what about the units they had stockpiled ahead of Liberation Day? Do they now owe “the customers” money based on the date of sale rather than the date of import? Or does Baby Jane Doe get less because her gameboy’s serial number corresponds to a unit imported in March rather than May?

All of which ignore that Nintendo weren’t doing direct to consumer sales in the vast majority of cases. They went through intermediaries like Best buy and Amazon. Many of whom ALSO were playing the same math regarding stockpiled units and ordering more supply from Nintendo.

Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).

The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months… or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.

Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day… which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were “low”. Others would eat the cost because they didn’t want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.

And… people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.

So… it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would “pass it on” to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but… this is a case where the problem isn’t the corporations: it is the government.

Symfonium on my phone (so also android auto and just connecting to a bluetooth speaker while I cook) and Feishin on my desktop. Still need to verify that scrobbles are propagated correctly for discoverability purposes (so far it looks like ratings in Feishin aren’t propagated to the server).

I could probably have gotten away with just mpd but figured “why not?”.

And there have been a lot of discussions over the decades over artists/“aritists” who overly sampled a song and became orders of magnitude bigger than the original artist.

Its a balancing act. Most people aren’t going to get too annoyed if someone uses generative AI to help build a backing track or a beat to go with their song.

The issue is that so much of this slop is “make a song like this” from scratch. And while there is a lot to be said about manufactured acts and the role of major labels… one of the few good things about spotify et al destroying the music industry is that it has become so much easier for smaller independent artists to get a foothold.

And all this does is add more slop to push them back out. And the difficulties with detecting slop will mean people will be a lot less likely to ever check out a smaller band when they can instead listen to whatever the latest major act that beyonce et al vouched for is.

This (moreso for youtube music, since Deezer seems to not have a lot of East Asian labels signed) is a huge part of why I’ve been building out a selfhosted Navidrome.

Obviously there is the old school way of getting music. But Bandcamp is WAY more beneficial to the artists and ebay and Half Price Books are also awesome for grabbing music.

And combine all that with musicbrainz for scrobbling and discoverability of new bands.