Dave’s AI plays Tempest
Tempest Levels 1-96 played by AI
Good resources for monitoring wildfires
Wildfires are a thing. They will be increasing as some areas of the country dry out – and due to over-protective conservation efforts that have led to unhealthy, overforested public lands.
Watch Duty gives live updated maps based on satellite hotspot monitoring. It can sometimes see hotspots that aren’t there due to smoke covering, but nothing is faster and more updated than live satellite data.
Zoom.earth gives you live satellite imagery if you want to see how smoke is blowing and up-to-date images.
Global Economy
Warfare is going drone: cheap to produce, fast to make in quantity, and disposable
Northrop Grumman’s answer was to build something that spends most of its working life parked on the ocean floor with nearly everything switched off. It is called Manta Ray. It can be transported anywhere in the world in five shipping containers, gets bolted together on a dock in two days, swims out by pumping seawater through itself instead of turning a propeller, then anchors to the ocean floor and sleeps there until someone wakes it.
The big problem with drones almost always comes down to the battery – especially underwater where it is nearly freezing. Instead of spinning a propeller, this drone acts like an underwater glider. It pumps seawater in to get heavy and sinks. It then pumps water back out to get light and rise. To move forward, it uses it’s wings convert all that vertical rising and falling into forward motion.
Additionally, to extend mission time, they have also been experimenting with ways to attach to the sea floor and passively collect energy to recharge batteries and extend total mission time.
It’s uncertain how well all the trials went, there’s been no further information since May 2024. The drone the Navy actually keeps ordering in volume is a 10-foot tube called Lionfish.
Cheaper, Faster, Simpler
I made Marble’s Marbles in less than 2 months and in the first month of sales it has a gross of over $30K!
Here is the steam page for the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4137920/Marbles_Marbles and a short video of his Reddit posting.
Again, this seems to echo getting things done fast, simply, and focus on the fun is the way to go.
Story of Priests in Alaska
1 in 4 jobless are long-term unemployed
The hires rate today looks a lot like the hires rate did coming out of the Great Recession. You pretty clearly see that the labor market softened over the years. We saw that payroll employment growth slowed pretty substantially.
Currently one in 4 jobless workers are considered long-term unemployed, meaning they have been looking for work for more than 27 weeks, the highest rate since the pandemic.
PSU forecasts over ten thousand less children in Portland over the next 10 years
PSU just made a shocking claim. It forecasts Multnomah County is likely to have more than 17,000 less school-aged children in the next decade.
Combine that with decades of fiscal mismanagement that prioritized failed performative social justice activities over student safety, educational failure (Oregon is dead last in reading), and it’s no wonder Portland schools are ranked some of the lowest in the country and are now facing the need to close up to 20 schools.
This on top of being one of only 6 major US cities that had year over year shrinking populations since 2020.
CVE rates are exploding
After Nicholas Carlini’s famous talk at Black Hat conference this year, his predictions have become shockingly real. Critical bugs are being found at an alarming rate. This means patches are also coming at a never before seen rate – and system developers and software engineers must now deal with this historic flood of patches. How many? Most companies would release in the low double digits of bug fixes in a given period. Now we’re seeing hundreds – in mere days.
- Over 600 CVEs were identified in the Security Updates Guide across all of Microsoft’s products for July 2026 alone.
- Oracle dropped 1449 security patches in one week.
- 432 Linux kernel CVE’s were published in just one 24 hour period
None of this appears to be slowing – and we have AI to thank for it. AI is able to find bugs at a rate never before seen. It’s a reminder to the software development world, and especially security specialists, that they have been leaving a LOT of bugs and issues in some of the most secure software (BSD) that was undiscovered for decades.
Now people are talking about how to deal with astronomical numbers of patches coming out every week. It’s definitely something your production pipeline must be prepared for – because this will likely be the new normal for the rest of this year.
Lazy? Anxious? Take the first step
“I find if I’m stressed about something it’s usually because I’m not doing anything about it. I’m listening to my body as a signal that something is wrong, and I find that the stress goes away the second I take the first step.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in 2017 during a visit to the Museum of Flight in Seattle.