Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

The revolution will be supervised.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

We’re not going back!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

In after Baud. Damn.

We still have time to mess this up!

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

This fight is for everything.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / War for Ukraine Day 208: We’re Experiencing Technical Difficulties

War for Ukraine Day 208: We’re Experiencing Technical Difficulties

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This post is in: 

TaMara here! After a quick phone call and messages from Adam, it’s been determined that tonight’s post will have to wait until tomorrow.

From Adam:

My computer just rebooted. While all my data is there, for some reason it thinks it is New Year’s Eve 2021. I can’t get to anything on the internet on any browser. So I don’t know if the update post i was almost done drafting and had spent the past 35 minutes on has been eaten because I can’t access the dashboard. I’m going to shut my computer down and just let it sit over night.

I did ask him to send me some Patron, so we could at least have that tonight.

And his Tik Tok:

@patron__dsns Патрон-батон 😁🥖 #песпатрон #патрондснс ♬ оригинальный звук – kakish

I’m not going to say I warned Adam, but I did mention to him earlier today that between Hurricane Fiona, the typhoon in Japan, and the 7.5 earthquake that struck off Mexico’s Pacific coast, the universe might just be sending us a message today and we should probably all just hunker down and hope tomorrow is a better day.

This is an open thread

Reader Interactions

51Comments

  2. 2.

    Alison Rose 💙🌻💛

    Yikes! Hope Adam’s tech issues are cleared up soon.

    Also, as a middle-aged happily childfree woman who was told approximately 12,000 times in my 20s “You’ll change your mind one day!!!!!!”, I hear you, Patron. I would’ve liked to bite some of them too.

  3. 3.

    Scout211

    The earthquake off the coast of Mexico was upgraded to 7.7.
    Link

    The quake’s magnitude was initially reported by the US Geological Survey (USGS) as 7.6. Mexico’s national seismological agency later updated the magnitude to 7.7 in a press conference on Monday.

  4. 4.

    dmsilev

    My computer just rebooted. While all my data is there, for some reason it thinks it is New Year’s Eve 2021.

    Do we know for sure that Adam hasn’t fallen through a wormhole into the past and his computer is valiantly trying to warn him not to step on any butterflies or anything?

  5. 5.

    bbleh

    …the universe might just be sending us a message today and we should probably all just hunker down and hope tomorrow is a better day.

    My moderately demented 95-y/o mother agrees — “I hated today!” — but she’s tucked in now, which plan I intend to follow myself shortly.

    Could be worse!  Joe is still president …

  6. 6.

    Gin & Tonic

    I don’t know if Adam’s post would have included this tidbit, but it’s tasty:

    The Wagner website has been hacked:
    “Ukrainian IT Army here. We now have your website personal data. Welcome to Ukraine. We’re waiting for you 😈” pic.twitter.com/iPOSNW6TVe
    — Illia Ponomarenko (@IAPonomarenko) September 19, 2022

  7. 7.

    hueyplong

    I was just thinking it would be nice if the Russians had technical difficulties far in excess of Adam’s.

  9. 9.

    Poe Larity

    Upgrade already. I run PrinceOS, and it’s always New Years 1999

    Mykhailo

    A new word for human chew toys. We need more Ukrainian words to be mainstreamed.

  13. 13.

    Bill Arnold

    @dmsilev:

    his computer is valiantly trying to warn him not to step on any butterflies or anything?

    Doesn’t take so much. A single atom an angstrom out of place cascades through collisions to wildly different gas/liquid states. Then Brownian motion causes different spermatozoa to win sperm races (maybe in one’s follicle mites, the dominant human-associated multicellular animal species), or any etc that involves random molecular interactions. (Over a liter of vodka I might tell a tale about Brownian Motion.)
    Adam is a Mac guy right? I’m not aware of any Russian malware that alters the date/time on a Mac. :-)

  16. 16.

    Grumpy Old Railroader

    the universe might just be sending us a message today

    In related news from Northern California we went from a record breaking 112 degree drought last week to a 65 degree downpour with more rain coming. Next week the Sierra Nevadas may get some snow. Fingers crossed

  17. 17.

    CaseyL

    I hope Adam’s computer wakes up from its induced coma and recovers completely.  Sending good thoughts!

    This has been a crazy news day.

    And I need to take a Covid self-test tonight – less than one week after getting the latest booster.  If I’ve gotten Covid now…..(*shakes fist*)

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    2021 isn’t bad. My J has an ancient lab PC that is still running Windows XP and it thinks it is 1998 or something. Winders doesn’t like the clock being that old, so pretty much nothing works. Resetting the time fixes it, until it needs to reboot again. (It needs a new motherboard battery.)

    Maybe something similar is going on with your Mac?

    The engineer genes I’m cursed with compel me to post: On the off chance that you haven’t seen this behavior before, here’s a Reddit thread in case it doesn’t start working for you soon.

    Good luck!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  20. 20.

    wombat probabilty cloud

    @Bill Arnold: I’ve read that quantum-level changes potentially can affect computation, but haven’t seen any macro-world stats on how often this may occur. Not kidding.

  21. 21.

    dr. luba

    News from the eastern front:

    On September 16th individual Russian units from two separate brigades got into a deadly friendly fire shootout around ​the settlements of Novodruzhevsk, Shipylivka and Zolotarivka after one accidentally fired on the other it escalated.
    21 soldiers were killed and 53 wounded.
    — WarMonitor🇺🇦 (@WarMonitor3) September 19, 2022

  23. 23.

    Another Scott

    @wombat probabilty cloud: Dunno about computation (there are lots of error-correcting things going in in PCs (RAM especially) behind the scenes).  But “single event upset” is a real thing and a real problem.

    USGS.gov:

    A Single Event Upset (SEU) occurs when an energetic particle travels through a transistor substrate and causes electrical signals within the transistor. This known phenomenon often occurs in spacecraft passing through the Van Allen belts, especially the northern and southern auroral zones (> 60 degrees north or south latitude) and over the South Atlantic Anomaly. SEUs have been observed on almost every low-earth orbit satellite system, even as far back as Explorer 1 in 1958, which discovered the presence of the Van Allen belts.

    Way back in the olden days when 16kbit memory chips were big, there was suddenly a huge issue with Intel’s chips. It turned out there was a high enough (but still very low) level of some radioactive element in the encapsulating plastic to cause SEUs.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  33. 33.

    Urza

    @Another Scott: Random bad material is always going to affect computer hardware.  Radioactive element is obviously a bad one.  Working in the cloud, I see a new type of piss poor manufacturing that no one thought of at least once a month, causing massive amounts of performance issues and replacements.  Its actually getting worse the larger the cloud is.  Granted we have a problem with anything greater than .4% failure.  1% failure means at least $10s of millions.

  34. 34.

    BeautifulPlumage

    I thought this was a good analysis of the reasons behind the poor Russian showing in the recent UKR offensive. Below is the first tweet: https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1571255027775291392?cxt=HHwWgIC-4e6HnM4rAAAA . Apologies if it has already been linked, it’s from 9/17/22

    @ian_matveev, who’s one of the smartest Russian-language commentators on the Ukraine war, has posted a very interesting and detailed thread discussing the reasons for Russia’s defeat east of Kharkiv. An English translation, with his permission, follows (LONG thread ahead!).

  36. 36.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @Gin & Tonic: Oooooo, nice, hadn’t seen that yet. I did see that the Wagner telegram channel had it’s like emoji swapped with the Azov symbol yesterday.

  40. 40.

    Redshift

    @Urza: A guy I used to work with went to work at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which had a massive in-house IT operation at the time, maybe still does. He liked to tell about how Mean Time Between Failure was not a random statistical concept there; they had so many hard drives that one would die on that schedule nearly like clockwork.

  41. 41.

    redactor

    While we’re contemplating natural disasters, spare a thought for the indigenous people of western Alaska, who are getting hammered with storms that would look more at home in Florida.

  42. 42.

    Redshift

    @Another Scott:

    2021 isn’t bad. My J has an ancient lab PC that is still running Windows XP and it thinks it is 1998 or something. Winders doesn’t like the clock being that old, so pretty much nothing works. Resetting the time fixes it, until it needs to reboot again. (It needs a new motherboard battery.)

    For a while, there was a rogue or maybe just defective cell tower near the grocery store I go to. If I was in there or if my car was stopped at a traffic light next to it, my phone would suddenly think it was several years in the past, and all kinds of stuff wouldn’t work, because it can’t make a secure connection if the clocks on the two ends don’t agree. It was really weird; I felt sorry for the people who lived around there.

  43. 43.

    RaflW

    Since this is an open thread: This is about as perfect a Connor Friedersdorf tweet as one can imagine. (And I’m reminded that we probably can no longer call him ‘young Connor’, though his semi-dazedness persists).

    Conor Friedersdorf @conor64
    Wait, I somehow missed that they were flown *from Texas to Florida* before being flown from Florida to MV.

    Sawyer Hackett @SawyerHackett
    The San Antonio sheriff is launching a criminal probe into DeSantis’s kidnapping operation:
    “What infuriates me most in this case is that we have 48 people who are already on hard times, they are here legally…and I believe they were preyed upon.”

    10:26 PM · Sep 19, 2022

  46. 46.

    Another Scott

    KyivIndependent News Feed just now:

    ISW: Russian proxies’ urgent calls to join Russia causing panic. The Institute for the Study of War said Russian proxies’ calls to immediately annex Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts “is panicking proxy forces and some Kremlin decision-makers.” As Russia does not control the entirety of either oblast, annexing proxy territories would mean Ukrainian-controlled areas would be “by Kremlin definition partially ”occupied” by legitimate Ukrainian authorities and advancing Ukrainian forces,” the ISW said. This would “place the Kremlin in the strange position of demanding that Ukrainian forces un-occupy “Russian” territory, and the humiliating position of being unable to enforce that demand,” according to the ISW.

    [ womp, womp ]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  47. 47.

    randal sexton

    @Another Scott: and some of the dynamic programmable FPGA chips were sensitive to this as well.   The FPGA company I worked for managed NOT to capitalize on this — even though our technology was NOT susceptible to SEU issues.

  49. 49.

    Jinchi

    @Another Scott: ​
      I think it’s funny that the boundaries of the Oblasts are apparently considered sacrosanct, even though the boundaries of the nations around them are not.

  50. 50.

    Carlo Graziani

    @BeautifulPlumage: That’s an excellent thread. Thanks very much for highlighting it.

    I didn’t know that  — and don’t understand the reason for believing that — the train line from Belgorod stopped at Kupyansk, instead of continuing to Izyum. Other reporting has described Izyum as a rail node.  But from in-context reading of Matveev’s thread, he seems very knowledgeable, so filed under “untidy details”.

    The other thing that came to mind while reading it is that the infighting between warlords such as Prigozhin and Kadyrov and their conflicts with the regular army under Putin are quite reminiscent of the situation in wartime Nazi Germany, with warlords such as Goering and Himmler at each other’s throats and diverting substantial amounts of vital resources away from a unified war effort for the sake of defending their own empires, while also fighting off the Wehrmacht, while Hitler looked on benevolently — no doubt thinking that the infighting would prevent the emergence of a strong rival.

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