Things are really about to hit the fan. The world has been surviving off of strategic petroleum reserves, but those are quickly hitting the bottom. The US last reported at 285M barrels[0]. There is a legal floor of ~250M, after which it is reserved for government national defense. Usage has been all over the place, but the drawdown has been somewhere in the region of 1M barrels per day. Public analyses have said that the cavern integrity becomes threatened once levels fall below 300M. Current government claims the "real" floor is at 70M, but I believe this is a transparent ploy to assuage markets.
The Saudi pipeline that was attacked had a capacity of 7M barrels per day. Gone for who knows how long. That 7MBPD that needs to come from somewhere.
Edit: Should add - the big tankers require ~month to move oil to most consumers. So, there is one month of breathing room before the new pipeline loss materializes.
> There is a legal floor of ~250M, after which it is reserved for government national defense.
There is no "government national defense floor". As far as I can tell, this originates from someone misreading the SPR drawdown laws and then a bunch of people parroting it. The ~250M "floor" (really 252.4M) only applies for SPR drawdowns that aren't required by a severe energy supply interruption or to meet US obligations under the international energy program. Deciding what qualifies as a "severe energy supply interruption" is left up to the president. Essentially there's nothing stopping the president from emptying the reserve entirely. See sections d and h here: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title%3A42+section%...
> Public analyses have said that the cavern integrity becomes threatened once levels fall below 300M.
This isn't how the SPR works. They withdraw oil from it by pumping in water (oil floats on water, so the oil goes to the top). This means that the caverns won't cave in or something if there's too little oil, since they'll have the same volume inside them. What does wear out the SPR is drawing down at all, since the water erodes the caverns. The problem is cumulative, not caused by levels going below a certain point. There's a good article that goes over how the SPR works and its current status here if you're interested: https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-106918/index.html
The problem with drawdowns is they can and have compromised the structural integrity of the caverns used in the SPR. Like oil, they're a finite resource and should be used judiciously.
Don't you mean disbelief in science? It's really weird how in Europe having a PhD in X is seen as a good thing for being the Minister for X while in the US having to get an aide to unlock your cellphone for you is seen as a good thing for the same post.
Right, that's what I meant by the problem being cumulative rather than caused by the actual amount of oil. The GAO article I linked goes into this:
> The SPR caverns that were built by DOE were designed to be geomechanically stable for up to five full drawdowns. Repeated partial drawdowns followed by refill can leach a single part of a cavern repeatedly, leading to undesirable shapes. After Congress directed DOE to begin conducting regular non-emergency mandated sales from the SPR starting in 2017 to help manage the federal budget, DOE tasked Sandia to provide a yearly update on the number of drawdowns each cavern had remaining since the caverns were being used regularly to withdraw crude oil. In May 2025, Sandia reported that the majority of the SPR’s caverns (47 of 60—about 78 percent) had at least four remaining available drawdowns as of the end of calendar year 2024, and all but one cavern had at least one remaining available drawdown.
Either way it seems the US has somewhere from 1 to 8 months before accounting for reductions due to national considerations. That's concerning no matter how you frame it.
Thanks for the link, I didn't know very much about how this is implemented and now it's much clearer. I fully expect to see the same things I've just learned on a Youtube video or cable TV news some time from now when stuff goes badly wrong and it doesn't mesh with the simple "Huge metal tank somewhere" picture of such a reserve I'd imagine the average voter has.
Like Britain's ageing gas mains this feels like a measure which should have become irrelevant just as it would otherwise need renewing, a huge saving - but of course we (as a species) will always procrastinate so that was never going to happen. For the next 5-10 years Britain will continue replacing pipelines to deliver a fossil fuel (natural gas, methane, for heating) we should have long since stopped using but didn't.
> The Saudi pipeline that was attacked had a capacity of 7M barrels per day. Gone for who knows how long. That 7MBPD that needs to come from somewhere.
it probably depends on what exactly happened to the pipeline, but normally i'd expect this to be a short term disruption, as replacing a small segment isn't really that hard.
The real question is will it be struck over and over again.
The Houthis destroyed a pumping station, you don't just plug in a new one of those in a week or two. Also given the length of the pipeline they can just take out more parts of it at their leisure.
I'd disagree, i think a single pumping station can be fixed relatively quickly. The real problem is your second sentence - if Houthis just keep blowing it up every time the Saudis fix it.
I'd love to see someone try to refute this as the obvious outcome given every decision Trump has made, especially in his second term where he has far less sane babysitters around him.
This is the "If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any" guy.
This is the guy calling for steep rate cuts in the midst of a serious inflation problem.
This is the guy that sabotages solar and wind power, intent on keeping us on oil and "clean coal" (lmao).
He's 80 years old and a malignant narcissist, he doesn't give a single fuck what happens to anyone after he's dead (and he knows that'll be pretty soon) as long as he gets what he thinks he wants today.
FWIW if I understand correctly what people say about Trump’s psychology, which if he is a malignant narcissist is a pretty complex maelstrom of instincts, he is actually at a disadvantage in imagining ever dying.
He will not be able to cope with the idea, or be able to rationally plan for it. Unlike other eighty year olds he is not thinking of a future without him in it; rather nobody else has any future without him.
So he is not acting nihilistically but desperately and grandiosely, as a way to deflect from the whole concept. I think there are many examples of this in recent months, but they are moderated by his inability to stay awake.
What a great time to start a trade war with the largest oil exporter. Think there is a shortage now? Just think what happens when canada turns off the taps. Even the threat could trigger covid-style hoarding.
The trade war was claimed to be in part kicked off by a trade deficit - meaning Alberta is simultaneously a major cause of the trade war (by moving so much of their oil south for things refinement, and contributing to the trade imbalance), and a stumbling block for Canada to effectively fight back. Tariffs on Albertan oil will be looked at (by Albertans) as the Liberal PM hurting them out of malice, instead of a cudgel to fight back against Goliath
Precisely - Carney can't tariff Albertan oil without stoking seperatist rhetoric, which Smith is using as a political tool instead of stating outright Alberta will always be part of a Canada, and shutting down the [real or manufactured] movement
If you are willing to lose GPS, maybe you could set the car's internal clock to the year 2000. This might fool a cursory data dump that is looking for "last three months of driving habits". Would obviously not stand up to any real scrutiny, but mostly painless.
GPS provides the time, so this probably won't work. If it ever reconnects it will just reset its clock. That's often one of the first things that any computer does after a long period of no power/connection.
The systems must be separate if they were able to disable some of the network connectivity but maintain GPS.
I thought GP was talking about if they had to reconnect the systems for some reason, would archived telemetry suddenly be uploaded. Which is a real possibility, so I was suggesting poisoning the data. Even if you correct the clock today, the previously recorded timestamps cannot be automatically fixed. Even better would be to reset the clock on every startup event.
Which is all still a band-aid solution - a targeted analysis could mostly correct the time-keeping. This just prevents getting scooped up in a simple drag net kind of search.
The Python cryptography library switched out C for Rust which invalidated some platforms[0]. 2021 story, so not sure if anything has changed.
...Since the Gentoo Portage package manager indirectly depends on cryptography, ""we will probably have to entirely drop support for architectures that are not supported by Rust"". He listed five architectures that are not supported by upstream Rust (alpha, hppa, ia64, m68k, and s390) and an additional five that are supported but do not have Gentoo Rust packages (mips, 32-bit ppc, sparc, s390x, and riscv).
The isolation was so good, many of the workers had no idea what they were doing. Interviews after the war with the rank and file contained quite varied speculation on what the plants were trying to accomplish. I remember one nurse who thought it was all just a cover to get blood samples.
What is more difficult, building a military missile or the software that runs it? If they are already building weapons, not sure the software to run them was the impediment.
Presumably, the world used dumb munitions without any software for a long time.
It’s the software. Definitely. We been making bombs for a while now. They used to toss them out the side of biplanes. Oddly, your second paragraph immediately undermines the first.
> Presumably, the world used dumb munitions without any software for a long time.
What do you think “presumably” is accomplishing here? Are you unsure, but willing to assume for purpose of the discussion, that bombs preceded computers?
Did those dumb bombs tossed out of biplanes lack software because the software was difficult to write or because there was no hardware in the world capable of running software? Given that missile guidance systems predate the very notion of software, and the moment better hardware exists there is software ready to take advantage of it, methinks software was not the hard part.
> What is more difficult, building a military missile or the software that runs it?
"If software was easier compared to building the a missile then Anthropic is in the clear or something." Is that the line of reasoning to protect Anthropic from any wrongdoing?
"Others do it too" is not really a counterargument when Anthropic should've stopped this. They are yelling "AI is dangerous" the loudest so the least they can do is get their own monitoring in order.
Heh, I read the title and thought this was going to be about someone porting legacy publications into Latex code. Anything from Newton's gravity to Marie Curie radium.
Which would be nice - some seminal publications from not all that long ago are only available as terrible quality scans.
This is an excellent idea. I was curious about using DeepSeek OCR for exactly this purpose. But a tricky question is if we could do some sort of looping or something "energy based" and use classical search to find optimal parameters (LaTeX settings) to minimize the error (pixel difference). Me knowing I would get obsessed with the second half is what's keeping me from the first half. Maybe a vision JEPA would be good. If I had API credits to burn, I'd copy paste our two comments and see how far Fable gets.
I just asked GPT6-Astra to transcribe a page from Newton's Principia to LaTeX. It did an amazing job outputing a XeLaTeX doc with a mixture of text and TikZ. Looks really good.
Not parent, but the web player used to be a down-graded experience from the native app. If you need Zoom for a professional setting, those functions could be important.
Do not know if this is still true, but at one point, the web player would only let you see one speaker at a time, while the app would show multiple people at once.
Well this was back in COVID, sometime fresh after the always-open-port news had surfaced. Can easily believe the experience has been improved since then.
The trailer shows nothing. Mentions a couple of factions that have previously been established from the lore and shows some Space Marine montage footage that could have been a cutscene from the prior games. It is not gameplay and just as easily could be promotion material for a Starcraft 3 RTS.
There is a clear emotional arc that the trailer tries to construct, and the article demolishes it by revealing the twist/punchline. It's disrespectful to the artists that made the trailer, the devs who were relying on it to generate excitement for the game, and the viewers like me who had their experience ruined by knowing what was going to happen.
It's a 3-minute trailer. I don't think they spoiled anything.
Sure, the artists probably put tons of effort into it, but if you are reading an article instead of the short clip, then probably you didn't care about it as much anyway?
The Saudi pipeline that was attacked had a capacity of 7M barrels per day. Gone for who knows how long. That 7MBPD that needs to come from somewhere.
Edit: Should add - the big tankers require ~month to move oil to most consumers. So, there is one month of breathing room before the new pipeline loss materializes.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...
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