ewx | Reading

(h/t

hudebnik)

Two things: this is a thing that has happened, I have a read on what it is that nobody else seems to have come up with.

1) The thing that happened:

2026 Jan 16: NYTimes: "Thousands of Chinese Fishing Boats Quietly Form Vast Sea Barriers" by Chris Buckley, Agnes Chang and Amy Chang Chien

The most interesting thing here is the visualization animations, so if that link doesn't work for you:

2026 Jan 17: TaiwanPlus News [TaiwanPlusNews on YT]: "NYT: China Tests Civilian Fishing Boats in Maritime Military Operations"

Watch on YouTube

2) Take:

“The sight of that many vessels operating in concert is staggering,” said Mark Douglas, an analyst at Starboard, a company with offices in New Zealand and the United States. Mr. Douglas said that he and his colleagues had “never seen a formation of this size and discipline before.”

“The level of coordination to get that many vessels into a formation like this is significant,” he said.

Yeah, so, about that:

Watch on YouTube

It turns out that the world leader in developing systems for coordinating large numbers of semi-autonomous vehicles is China.

The way a drone show works is that the design of the show and the intended positions and trajectories of all the individual drones is calculated and stored on the coordinating computer, from which they are transmitted to the drones during the show. However, drones in the air can be knocked off course by turbulence, so they also have onboard collision avoidance and position resumption algorithms.

The drone show company in question, Shenzhen DAMODA Intelligent Control Technology Co., Ltd. brags they can control 10,000 drones from a single laptop.

There were only 2,000 ships. Well within what their system could handle.

So what this could be is a test of such a coordination technology deployed to civilian boats.

Perhaps on each of those ships was either a sail-by-wire system that puts them under remote/autonomous control, or a receiver/interface that relayed instructions to the human pilots from a drone-controller that both received orders from command-and-control and managed the specifics of positioning through the same sort of collision-avoidance and repositioning algorithm as light-show drones.

Also, I suspect the way DAMODA manages to control so many devices from a single laptop – I was not able to quickly get a bead on this, and it would be unsurprising if they were less than forthcoming about their secret sauce – is that they have been figuring out ways to offload more and more of the steering logic onto the drones themselves. There comes a point, I suppose, where the logic for collision avoidance and repositioning crosses over into what used to be called (back in the 1980s and 1990s) flocking algorithms. Perhaps this was a test of a flocking algorithm based system for boats.

In any event, this might not be an example of a lot of people doing a thing. This might be an example of a thing being done to a lot of people. I mean, it almost certainly is the latter in that the government of China's modus operandi is to "voluntell" its citizens, and one of the concerning things here is the apparent use of civilians for military maneuvers. I'm saying this might be a test of a system that doesn't rely on acquiescence to government authority.

kaberett

The context for yesterday's frivolous low-stakes question was of course indexing for Eat Your Books, where I've been stalled on my current cookbook for... a while... for ...reasons... including but not limited to needing to ask for a bunch of new ingredients to be added, and then having a social anxiety about ever touching the work-in-progress again.

And then I did touch it again! And a recipe where I'd requested the new ingredient "mixed leaf salad" had instead... been given the ingredient "mixed greens", synonymous with the base ingredient "mixed lettuces".

The cookbook in question is The National Trust Cookbook; The recipe is Goat's cheese tartlets with pickled cucumber; the headnote to the recipe includes

Serve with a home-grown asparagus, pea and broad bean salad mixed with baby salad leaves.

The ingredients for the salad, helpfully listed under the subheading "To serve", are:

12 spears of English asparagus, woody ends trimmed off 55g/2oz podded broad beans 85g/3oz fresh or frozen peas 70g/2½oz mixed leaf salad with rocket leaves 3 tbsp extra virgin rapeseed or olive oil 1 tsp runny honey

So I am reassured that the breakdown of opinions falls almost entirely along side-of-the-pond lines, suggesting that the reason I'm going "this is neither of these two things??? if EYB told me I needed mixed greens for a recipe and turned out to mean mixed leaf salad I'd be extremely annoyed??? if a recipe told me I needed mixed greens for a recipe and turned out to mean lettuces--" because, yes, I think "mixed greens" are a thing that need cooking (probably referring to brassica but I only roll my eyes a little at pre-packaged bowls that decide that various forms of pea, broccoli, and leek also count), and "mixed lettuces" is a strictly narrower category than "mixed leaf salad".

I had absolutely no idea that this might be a point of US/UK confusion, and thank you all for providing me with Data!

ceb posting in

qec

* Fitz visit (inc picking up new card)
* carved a couple of blocks to try out speedycut (not a fan)
* trimmed blackcurrant bushes
* cleaned out nest box
* took a limb off the sumac tree

ewx

email saying 'The name “R. Kettlewell” was mentioned in an Aesthetics paper uploaded to Academia'

Well of course it was!

(On the other hand, the less said about the mention in a Copper Slag paper, the better.)

purplecat

Black and white photo. There is a lot of foam, including some kind of vaguely weed-like foam covered thing standing to one side. Two mean stand on a raised platofrm in one corner. Another stands before some kind of foam covered console.

Ah! The BBC Foam machine. For a brief period, it figured prominently in Doctor Who.

jack

Ultimate edition of Innovation (photo on FB), with tweaked rules and all the expansions. I didn't know there were *any* expansions.

I assumed the expansions would be more variety of base cards, but no, instead they're *all* add ons which add a new sort of card to each age. The cards from each expansion are drawn in a different way, and act differently, but can be melded into the player board somehow like base cards.

So far the extras only come up every so often, but matter when they come up.

I can't believe the new edition added a new age, age 11, prudence, after age 10, the information age. But it *does* seem to fit. More powerful than age 10, but less wildly accelerating. I guess they can add a new age every 15-20 years when real world society has moved on far enough...

This game was with cities. I *again* relied on mathematics to skip through ages, but this time managed to score just enough to get the achievements first rather than second as I went. The game ended when I got computers, internet, and a couple more cards that meld and execute a card from age 10, catapulting my board into three age 10 cards, one age 9, and one age 1.

kaberett

Today's frivolous low-stakes question is: if following a recipe, to what extent do you consider "mixed lettuces", "mixed greens", and "mixed leaf salad" synonymous?

siderea

This was it. This was the week that America admitted America is going fascist – which is to say has gone fascist, i.e. has had its government seized by fascists with broad fascist support for imposing fascism which it is now doing with zeal, i.e. has an acute case of fulminant fascism.

I've been watching this bear down on us for a half a century, so it's slightly dizzying to finally have everybody else come into alignment. One of the basic exigencies of my life has been moving through the world being reasonably certain of a bunch of things that I knew the vast majority of my fellows thought were insane to believe. Over the last ten years, more and more people have been noticing, "what are we doing in this handbasket and where is it going?" but – as evidenced by the behavior of the DNC over the last year – it's taken the secret police gunning Americans down in the streets (since I started writing this: and throwing flashbang grenades at or into (reports vary) passing cars carrying little kids) for the greater liberal mass to come around.

Obviously, it would have been nicer for the realization It Could Happen Here to have not required It Happening Here to be the conclusive rebuttal of their pathological skepticism. But one of my favorite sayings is, "There's three kinds. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves," (Will Rogers) and this is why. Clearly America needed to piss on the electric fence for itself. I try to be philosophical about it.

I just felt, if only for myself and posterity, I should note this long-in-coming nation-wide realization has finally been attained.

I'm not getting too carried away, though. It's hard to be too jubilant when the problem that brought us here is still very much with us, by which I don't mean the fascism itself, I mean the terrible mentality on "my" "side" that causes that pathological skepticism and other catastrophic thinking faults that brought us to this pass and lead to the fascists getting away, quite literally, with murder.

siderea

This is blackly hilarious and absolutely worth a read.

Leftist journalist Laura Jedeed showed up at an ICE recruiting events to do scope it out and write about what she found. What happened next is... eye widening.

2026 Jan 13: Slate: "You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof." [Paywall defeater] by Laura Jedeed:

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.

[...]

I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.

“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”

As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.

And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”

The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.

Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.

Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Click through to read the whole thing.

purplecat

A single standing stone. Straight edges and a diagonal at the top. Field, sea, hills beyond in the background.

A Stone of Stenness, Orkney

kaberett

Expanding on one of the things I mentioned yesterday: for Pain Project reasons, I'm interested in knowing what you learned about atoms at school, and roughly what age you were. I'm especially interested in whether (and when) you were exposed to the Bohr model (there's a nucleus, with electrons orbiting around it at fixed distances) and the current consensus model (electron orbitals defined as regions where an electron is most likely to be found).

( Read more... )

siderea

2026 Jan 14: NYT: "Renfrew Christie Dies at 76; Sabotaged Racist Regime’s Nuclear Program" by Adam Nossiter. "He played a key role in ending apartheid South Africa’s secret weapons program in the 1980s by helping the African National Congress bomb critical facilities."

Renfrew Christie in 1988.

Renfrew Christie, a South African scholar whose undercover work for the African National Congress was critical in hobbling the apartheid government’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Cape Town. He was 76.

The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Camilla Christie said.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa paid tribute to Dr. Christie after his death, saying his “relentless and fearless commitment to our freedom demands our appreciation.”

The A.N.C., in a statement, called Dr. Christie’s role “in disrupting and exposing the apartheid state’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” an “act of profound revolutionary significance.”

From the doctoral dissertation he had written at the University of Oxford on the history of electricity in South Africa, Dr. Christie provided the research needed to blow up the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; the Arnot coal-fired power station; the Sasol oil-from-coal facilities that produced the heavy water critical to producing nuclear weapons; and other critical sites.

The explosions set back South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion, Dr. Christie later estimated.

By the time the bombs began going off, planted by his colleagues in uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the A.N.C., Dr. Christie was already in prison. He was arrested by South African authorities in October 1979 on charges of “terrorism,” three months after completing his studies at Oxford, and spent the next seven years in prison, some of that time on death row and in solitary confinement.

“While I was in prison, everything I had ever researched was blown up,” he said in a speech in 2023.

Terrorism was a capital offense, and Dr. Christie narrowly escaped hanging. But as he later recounted, he was deliberately placed on the death row closest to the gallows at the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. For two and half years, he was forced to listen to the hangings of more than 300 prisoners.

“The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the hanging, to ease the terror of the victims,” Dr. Christie recalled at a 2013 conference at the University of the Western Cape on laws regarding torture.

Then he recited the lyrics of an anti-apartheid folk song that reverberated in the penitentiary: “‘Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What have we done? What have we done?’ It was the most beautiful music on earth, sung in a vile place.”

Watch on YouTube

“At zero dark hundred,” he continued, “the hanging party would come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a long pause. Then — crack! — the trapdoors would open, and the neck or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering, presumably of nails into the coffins.”

In an interview years later with the BBC, he said the “gruesome” experience affected him for the rest of his life.

Dr. Christie acquired his fierce antipathy to apartheid at a young age, growing up in an impoverished family in Johannesburg.

Many of his family members fought with the Allied forces against the Germans in World War II, and “I learned from them very early that what one does with Nazis is kill them,” he said at a 2023 conference on antinuclear activism in Johannesburg. “I am not a pacifist.”

At 17, he was drafted into the South African Army. A stint of guard duty at the Lenz ammunition dump south of Johannesburg confirmed his suspicions that the government was building nuclear weapons. “From the age of 17, I was hunting the South African bomb,” he said at the conference.

After attending the University of the Witwatersrand, he received a scholarship to Oxford, which enabled him to further his quest. For his doctoral dissertation, he chose to study South Africa’s history of electrification, “so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium,” he told the BBC.

From there, it was possible to calculate how many nuclear bombs could be produced. Six such bombs had reportedly been made by the end of apartheid in the early 1990s; the United States had initially aided the regime’s nuclear program. Thanks to the system of forced labor, South Africa “made the cheapest electricity in the world,” Dr. Christie said, which aided the process of uranium enrichment and made the country’s nuclear program a magnet for Western support. (South Africa also benefited from its status as a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union.)

Dr. Christie turned his findings over to the A.N.C. Instead of opting for the safety of England — there was the possibility of a lecturer position at Oxford — he returned home and was arrested by South Africa’s Security Police. He had been betrayed by Craig Williamson, a fellow student at Witwatersrand, who had become a spy for the security services and was later granted amnesty by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

After 48 hours of torture, Dr. Christie wrote a forced confession — “the best thing I ever wrote,” he later told the BBC, noting that he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage Koeberg and other facilities.

“And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth” straight to the A.N.C.

Two years later, in December 1982, Koeberg was bombed by white A.N.C. operatives who had gotten jobs at the facility. They followed Dr. Christie’s instructions to the letter.

“Of all the achievements of the armed struggle, the bombing of Koeberg is there,” Dr. Christie said at the 2023 conference, emphasizing its importance. “Frankly, when I got to hearing of it, it made being in prison much, much easier to tolerate.”

Renfrew Leslie Christie was born in Johannesburg on Sept. 11, 1949, the only child of Frederick Christie, an accountant, and Lindsay (Taylor) Christie, who was soon widowed and raised her son alone while working as a secretary.

He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and was conscripted into the army immediately after graduating. After his discharge, he enrolled at Witwatersrand. He was twice arrested after illegally visiting Black students at the University of the North at Turfloop, and was also arrested during a march on a police station where he said the anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela was being tortured.

He didn’t finish the course at Witwatersrand, instead earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cape Town in the mid-1970s before studying at Oxford. At Cape Town, he was a leader of the National Union of South African Students, an important anti-apartheid organization.

On June 6, 1980, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison under South Africa’s Terrorism Act, with four other sentences of five years each to run concurrently.

“I spent seven months in solitary,” Dr. Christie said in the 2023 speech. “Don’t let anybody kid you: No one comes out of solitary sane. My nightmares are awful.”

After his years in prison, he was granted amnesty in 1986 as the apartheid regime began to crumble. (It officially ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president.) He later had a long academic career at the University of the Western Cape, retiring in 2014 as dean of research and senior professor.

In addition to his daughter Camilla, he is survived by his wife, Dr. Menán du Plessis, a linguist and novelist he married in 1990; and another daughter, Aurora.

Asked by the BBC whether he was glad he had spied for the A.N.C., Dr. Christie didn’t hesitate.

“I was working for Nelson Mandela and uMkonto we Sizwe,” he said. “I’m very proud of that. We won. We got a democracy.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

– Pete Seeger

rmc28

I am currently ill with my third cold since November. This is very boring, I am blaming uni open ice on Monday with all the students returned to Cambridge from all over the world. I am trying a radical new approach of "stop working, go to bed, do nothing but rest and hydrate and breathe steam at regular intervals". Attempting to push through the last two colds this winter just led to being subpar for days on end and missing a lot of hockey practice, and I really, really don't want that again.

The one hip bruise healed up enough by Saturday night that I could return to sleeping on that side, phew; the other is still making itself known, and is going a truly remarkable range of colours. (me to fanf: do you want to see my epic bruise? fanf: absolutely not)

Our trusty Pointer standard bike (not the cargo bike) failed catastrophically in December. fanf took it to the bike shop for assessment: minimum £350 to repair, it cost £500 new, lo these many years ago, a new bike of similar quality would be £700 now. We thought about it for a bit, and eventually I said Vimes boots theory also applies to bikes and so we'll order the good bike and hope it lasts at least another 15 years.

Warbirds (or Tri-Base 2 I guess these days) had a game in Peterborough Saturday night, and my teammate who lives nearby kindly drove me up, and gave me the cultural experience of visiting a huge Eastern European supermarket near the rink. We lost, again, but the bench atmosphere was good, the opponents were fun to play against, and I was reasonably happy with my play.

I joked in the car about Tony buying an expensive bike as soon as I left the country, and teammate said "uh, can't you use Cycle to Work?" and it turns out yes I can, and in fact the whole process was very straightforward. So now we'll pay for this bike in ten monthly instalments from my salary which brings tax savings but is also way easier to budget. The actual bike hasn't arrived yet, which is leading to some interesting logistics around work and school and who is where with what bike, but this too shall pass.

I may, or may not, be playing a game on Saturday for the uni. It's a challenge game against UCL, with players from both Womens Blues and Huskies, but there are way more players available than needed and the roster is still not out (eh, students). I hope I can kick this cold by then; if I'm not playing I'll do game ops as usual.

jack

Smoke LARP festival in London for two days.

Game 1 about dysfunctional committee running a large LARP event. This was hilarious and cathartic for a lot of people. Everyone had a character, the auteur overcommitted to the vision, the overly emotional over verbose writer, etc, etc who are over the top. And it's so easy to run with -- whenever someone asks "We can tear the fittings down for extra costumes?" you can say "Yes, obviously!"

Game 2 about Superheros matching Nemeses speed-dating style on a reality TV show style. The characters were all hilarious.

Game 3 about the Greek Gods running a gameshow, spiralling slowly out of control. 13/10 for Binney as the overworked madcap Hades. My favourite moment was seeing Hades getting increasingly many semi-anonymous requests handed over from the GM, and as Poseidon writing out a note in the same style and handing it over. And not discovering until the end that Hades had just taken it on board and "More death! Put Hecate in charge! Don't trust Odin! MORE SQUID!!!" had blended in perfectly with all the other notes and he'd gone on to do all those things. And second favourite when hades was waving the post-it representing the necronomicon for an unspecified plan, taking it and helpfully tearing it up before handing it back.

Game 4 Canterbury Tales. Set just before the End of the Wars of the Roses when the tales had just been printed. I had to leave early, with my fate hanging on the outcome, when we'd just heard a rumour that Henry had been slain and Richard captured by Henry's forces. It turned out later that Henry's widow and a putative Edward V Prince in the Tower had both proclaimed themselves, potentially leading to turmoil. But I'm pleased they both had a good chance, and that probably removed the problems hanging over my character from the previous politics 🙂

jack

TIL more about VeggieTales. I had heard they avoided depicting Jesus as a vegetable. But apparently they specifically (a) will not show Jesus as a vegetable and (b) do not show the vegetables as having a redemptive relationship with Christ.

The show shows some vegetables living on a kitchen counter. Those characters then morph into a Christian-friendly story, either an old testament bible story, or a contemporary "someone learns an important lesson about goodness" story. So you have Larry the vegetable transplanted into a Biblical Joseph role. In the story, God exists. But the plain vegetables aren't Christian. Because the creators think that Jesus died for *humanity* and any other intelligent species was not fallen (like Angels) or not been saved (like Demons) or had its own relationship with God (like Narnia).

And even in the story, none of the characters are ever Jesus, because that would seem disrespectful. What does happen in the later series is that the characters portray nativity plays, where a unnamed non-Christian baby vegetable acts as a non-Jesus baby human character, who is pretending to be baby Jesus. Also in the early series there's a couple of nativity stories with a crib, but you only see golden light from the crib. Or sometimes a swaddled form, but not whether it contains a doll, vegetable, human and/or god :)

https://justinkuiper.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the

ceb posting in

qec

* sorted out Fitz membership
* made up ebay parcel
* msgd B

siderea

Heads up, locals! Observers report evidence of ICE/DHS activity preparing for an operation in MA, imminently.

2026 Jan 13 5pm: u/rarelighting in r/Boston: Boston quietly prepares for an ICE surge, points at:

2026 Jan 13: Axios: Boston quietly prepares for an ICE surge by Mike Deehan

Discussion at Reddit:

OP:

While listening to the Sam Seder podcast today, someone sent in a report about increased activity at the Burlington ICE facilities. Stay alert folks.

u/Neat-Beautiful-5505 • 4h ago

Another Reddit post showed three 18-wheel trucks hauling several new SUVs each to the Burlington ICE facility.

u/_still_truckin_ • 4h ago

Two dozen white Ford Explorers. They’re the same Interceptor models that real police departments use. You can spot them by the searchlight mounted to the driver side A-pillar and lack of tracks for roof racks. Saw them in the parking lot of the Burlington ICE building.

u/ThePirateKing01 • 4h ago

Shoutout to @BearingWitnessBurlington on YouTube and TikTok

To those who say protesting peacefully doesn’t amount to much, this person has been both protesting and monitoring the facility almost 24/7. Without people like this we wouldn’t have the heads up that we do now

u/minilip30 • 4h ago

“The bottom line: While no operation has been officially confirmed, Boston is not waiting to find out — it is mobilizing now.”

Good!

Remember, ICE needs a warrant to enter any private residence or business. Business that aren’t fascist supporting should have signs that they will not allow ICE entry without a warrant.

u/beanandcod • 4h ago

A judicial warrant, signed by a judge

u/Pnoman98 • 4h ago

A lot of police presence at Alewife& Gov Center

u/cccxxxzzzddd • 4h ago

The Rindge / fresh pond apartments at alewife are home to many immigrants, particularly Ethiopians

This is not good

Edit: not good that ice is there

u/mysteriousfrittata • 4h ago

Saw a car full of them parked outside of MGH yesterday evening. All wearing DHS fatigues etc. Naturally the assholes were parked in an ambulance parking spot. I called to report a strange vehicle parked there.

u/HolyMoleyGuacamoly • 4h ago

they appear to be staying at that marriott right next door. was by there for a bit and saw a ton of activity in and out of there of single white men in suvs with beards

Happy_Literature9493 • 3h ago

Copied and pasted from Safari reader mode [the Axios article:]

“Boston quietly prepares for an ICE surge Mike Deehan Boston City Hall is privately getting ready for a potential spike in Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity.

Why it matters: Even without a confirmed federal operation, the city is "planning for the unthinkable," according to Mayor Michelle Wu.

Escalating tensions and violence in other cities are deepening anxieties within immigrant communities and worsening the friction between sanctuary communities and federal authorities. The latest: Wu confirmed on WBUR this week that she is discussing enforcement scenarios with Boston Police leadership.

Her goal is to establish clear protocols to ensure local police resources are not co-opted into federal immigration efforts. Wu maintains that Boston police will not leak information to ICE, a stance she views as crucial to maintaining community trust. The big picture: Boston isn't alone in bracing for federal action.

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has stated plans for a larger presence in Boston, promising more agents following disputes over sanctuary policies. Past initiatives mobilized large-scale enforcement across Massachusetts. Zoom in: Unverified but persistent reports from residents and activists note a delivery of SUVs to the Burlington ICE Field Office last week.

Advocates interpret the arrival of three car carriers hauling SUVs as a sign that the local ICE branch is staffing up. What we're watching: If federal enforcement accelerates, pressure will mount on public-facing institutions and communities with sanctuary policies.

Courthouses are typically a flashpoint for arrests. City community centers and schools will need to know how to respond if agents appear at their doors. ICE likely won't limit large-scale enforcement to Boston. Municipalities with large immigrant populations like Chelsea, Everett, Lawrence, Revere and Lynn could also be in the crosshairs. Threat level: Activists have staked out the Burlington ICE office for months and will likely be among the first to know of any major rollout.

Expect throngs of Massachusetts residents to demonstrate against ICE if a surge happens here. The bottom line: While no operation has been officially confirmed, Boston is not waiting to find out — it is mobilizing now.”

fanf

https://dotat.at/@/2026-01-13-http-ratelimit.html

There is an IETF draft that aims to standardize RateLimit header fields for HTTP. A RateLimit header in a successful response can inform a client when it might expect to be throttled, so it can avoid 429 Too Many Requests errors. Servers can also send RateLimit headers in 429 errors to make the response more informative.

The draft is in reasonably good shape. However as written it seems to require (or at least it assumes) that the server uses bad quota-reset rate limit algorithms. Quota-reset algorithms encourage clients into cyclic burst-pause behaviour; the draft has several paragraphs discussing this problem.

However, if we consider that RateLimit headers are supposed to tell the client what acceptable behaviour looks like, they can be used with any rate limit algorithm. (And it isn't too hard to rephrase the draft so that it is written in terms of client behaviour instead of server behaviour.)

When a client has more work to do than will fit in a single window's quota, linear rate limit algorithms such as GCRA encourage the client to smooth out its requests nicely. In this article I'll describe how a server can use a linear rate limit algorithm with HTTP RateLimit headers.

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kaberett

On the one hand, it is sort of obvious why I've decided I want to have another go at working out how Continental knitting works for a project that involves reversible cables and ribbing on DPNs.

On the OTHER, this feels like a bit of a trial-by-fire given that my problem has historically been tension...

purplecat

A large blanket on a double bed. The blanket is made from various crochet sqares in predominantly purple and orange colours.

This is the 2025 Mooglycal blanket. I was still attempting to use up the stash which, it transpired, had mostly orange and purple wool in it - not the most auspicious combination but there is now at least a lot less of it than there was and all that really bright orange has gone. The general concept was vertical stripes of red/orange and purple/pink with the darker colours at the top and lighter colours at the bottom. It didn't really work, in part because there was just so much of some colours. Anyway, I have decided to actually have a colour scheme next year since the stash is now under control (well at least that bit of the stash that involves the wool I use for making these blankets).

Richard Kettlewell

The Chinese fishing boats maneuvers [war, curr ev]

[eyb] you continue magnificently helpful!

Done

academia.edu

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Ultimate edition of Innovation

you are all magnificently helpful - thank you <3

Well, we're finally here [me, pols]

Slipping on into ICE [curr ev, pols]

Random Neolithic Stones on a Friday

What were you taught about atoms?

Sohlangana ezulwini (How can I keep from singing?) [in memoriam, hist]

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VeggieTales

Done

Massachusetts is next [Ω, MA/US]

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I know why, but: why

2025 Blanket

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January 2026

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