When the US was attacked, we sent our children to die in one of your foreign wars.

When WE were attacked, the largest war in the continent since World War II, you abandoned us - even witholding things that cost you *literally nothing*, like intel to help intercept drones and missiles targeting civilians - and switched to instead threatening to attack us as well, helping pick us apart piece by piece.

  Do not act surprised when you get seen as duplicitous snakes and we take action to separate ourselves from your levers of pressure.

O Lord of the Abyss, Prince of Darkness, Morning-Star, please hear my cry: I invoke thee, Lucifer! Turn your gaze toward the Vatican's operating rooms! Guide the surgeon's scalpel with your claws! Burn the tumors from the Holy Father's chest with the infernal fires of Hell! Cast your curses upon any bacterium that may seek to cause opportunistic infection! In the darkness I beseech thee.

Hail Satan, please save the Pope, Amen.

It's cheap and easy to audit OSS for malicious code with AI these days.

It's not really about Microsoft. Increasingly, Europe sees the US as a potential threat who blackmails allies, even a potential invader, rather than an ally.

Literally just yesterday the US shut off intel-sharing to Ukraine (which mainly helps with targeting incoming drones) and blocked all Starlink terminals in Ukraine moving faster than 100kph (e.g. terminals on air-defense interceptor drones), both in effect dramatically hurting Ukraine's ability to defend against Russia's nightly drone waves - all in order to pressure Ukraine into stopping striking Russian oil refineries while Trump seeks to buy more Russian oil and Russia keeps strikig Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

We all know that the US could do this sort of stuff to any of us. We have to move US companies out of our critical paths.

Once upon a time, when the US called for aid after 9/11, Europe stood up. More Danes died per capita fighting in Afghanistan, in a war that was not their own, than Americans did. This year, Denmark was rapidly rushing explosives and bags of blood to Greenland to prepare for firefights against invading US forces.

All of Europe got the message. We're not dining with friends - we're on the menu.

Run yourself *on normal hardware*? Yeah, there's a pretty big gulf between that and a frontier model.

I don't trust commodity-manufacturers who need to keep rapidly iterating their products to maintain profits to supply me with something intended to be affixed for the long term.

Even though Apple might do a better job than many vendors, they still release products that stop receiving updates and other maintenance long before the physical hardware is worn out. Something that's going to be with me for a very long time, like something permanently installed in my house, or something integrated into my car, is not something that I want from a commodities-supplying tech firm.

Reading his wiki entry he reminds me of Bergholt Stuttley Johnson.

It's not about the specific "BioPykrete" example, it's the technique that's interesting: using proteins to bridge dissimilar materials in composites. It's using them in a way that's sort of like how an emulsifier lets you bridge lipophilic and hydrophilic compounds

Think, say, plastic-ceramic or plastic-metal composites. We can do these today (say, Colorfabb Bronzefill 3d printing filament), but the addition of ceramic or metallic particles makes the material properties generally worse, not better. The plastic just does not bond well to the particles; you have to significantly limit the percentage of metal or ceramic in your mix, and it makes them much harder to work. But what if they *did* bound well? You could easily produce materials with significantly boosted strength, abrasion resistance, etc, but with the low-temperature workability of plastics (note: they'd probably have to be thermoset, not thermoplastic, or low-temperature thermoplastics; proteins have heat survivability limits)

And why stop at metals and ceramics? You could literally just use "dust", just ordinary mineral dusts (clays, silt, etc) as a bulk filler in plastics, yet instead of ending up with a weaker product than working with pure plastic, you'd end up with a stronger one.

Maybe you don't even need a plastic. Maybe you can do what they're doing and bridge cellulose to an inorganic material? Then you're *really* operating on waste. Ice has the advantage of a low melting point in this situation, letting you use that component as a fluid - but cellulose can be dissolved in a number of substances, so perhaps you mix a cellulose-protein slurry with metal or mineral powders and then vaporize/recover the solvent?

Or even forgetting "novel" products, what about conventional composites? If you can bridge high-tensile fibres (such as carbon fibre) better to the polymer matrix that they're in, then you can help eliminate one of the main failure mechanisms of said composites, as well as making the behavior far more predictable. Because like metals (and unlike ceramics), a protein-bridged compound shouldn't be brittle; breaking one bond shouldn't introduce a discontinuity (like a ceramic), it should just reconnect after breakage (like a metal). Such composites should have ductility.

I don't know how widely applicable this will be, but technology that helps bridge dissimilar compounds is nothing to scoff at. And today we have tools like AlphaFold to assist with the design

As for the caveats:

* The concept of coupling agents is also not new, we already use various coupling agents to bond plastic to metal particles in metal-plastic composites and the like - they're just not great at their jobs.

* The aforementioned temperature limits

* Potential production challenges (though industrial enzymes are as cheap as like $15-50/kg, so seems viable?)

* Other coupling agents may offer better advantages; it's not a static field.

I haven't looked up the history, but I would imagine that the "XL" is for the fact that it can handle images up to 1B x 1B pixels (1 exapixel).

Both lossy and lossless, and so much more.

It's this.

And on the compression side, there's a lot of really cool stuff that lets it happen. For example, it dynamically resizes the blocks from 2x2 to 256x256, and they don't even have to be square. It may apply DCT in one, AFAS in another, etc - whatever is most efficient. It uses edge preserving filters to keep the edges of features clean. It can draw in splines and clone regions from one part of an image to another. Where it has to throw away high frequency noise (film grain, noisy textures, etc), it statistically samples the properties of the noise and saves that, and then regenerates equivalent noise. In "busy" areas, like say tree bark or whatnot (where the human eye isn't good at discerning changes), it throws away more precision there, and instead allocates it to details located in fragile flat areas, such as skin and shadows, that the eye is attracted to. It works in default in XYB colour space, based on the actual interactions of the cones in the eye, so it can aggressively quantize things which the brain cannot detect. And in the choice between fast but not-great Huffman coding vs. better but slow and patent-encumbered arithmetic coding, they instead use rANS, which is nearly as fast as Huffman but as efficient as arithmetic coding, and faces no patent challenges. Which is also why you can take a legacy JPEG and rapidly losslessly reincode as JPEG-XL and get a file that's ~20% smaller - you're swapping Huffman for rANS.

(That's the lossy mode - there's also a dedicated lossless mode)

I could not speak to the cost/benefit ratio in Europe, but in the United States, 1.544Mb on a Frame Relay would cost more than 1Gb on a Metro Ethernet fiber connection. I know because I retired a Nortel Meridian telephone system using T1 links specifically because it was costing more than the 1Gb and later 10Gb Metro Ethernet L2 MPLS connection and had far, far less flexibility. We migrated over to VOIP phones and saved a ton of money on the ~75 service entrances we were taking care of, and the VOIP traffic was a drop in the bucket on that network.

The only thing I could think of after my original post would be to contract with a cellular provider for a private APN (think similar to a VLAN or VRF for a subscriber with a ton of individual cellular endpoints, doesn't route to the outside like normal cell carriers' endpoints can) and then bringing that APN into a cloud instance with firewalling to prevent unauthorized traffic from the Internet from being able to hit the APN in the first place, but that still requires IT security practices.

The annoying thing about a private APN and using cellular is when the carriers change-up their gear it becomes necessary to replace the cellular endpoint equipment. I've seen this happen with security system cellular (no private APN) where the 2G gear had to be replaced, they went with 3G gear, only for that to also have to be replaced when the carrier wanted to go to a minimum of 4G LTE.

I expect that Yandex is hiding behind statements in their contracts and Russian laws governing liability due to armed conflict to try to skate any responsibility to their customers.

Given how quickly America came to disliking datacenters, seemingly as a real grassroots thing through hatred of techbros, hatred of higher energy prices to their own households, and hatred to water scarcity, seems like any complaint that Trump would make about it would simply lead to more backlash upon him.

I could see a fire starting in an electrical distribution panel if, once the problem was discovered, someone set all of the fridges in the building back down to proper temp and the startup demands exceeded the panel's ability to supply power, but that's more of an electrical equipment fault in being faulty or undersized rather than an IT fault.