Ukraine just got a €90 billion loan from the EU. That's enough to cover their financial needs for another 12-18 months. They're starting to sell their designs to Western manufacturers, too, who are intensely interested in cooperation. Ukrainian companies are starting joint ventures outside the country, so that's another cash lifeline, albeit a smaller one.

It is up in the air whether Ukraine gets much territory back. Ukraine is not, however, on the verge of collapse. (Neither is Russia, for that matter, but more later.) Pokrovsk is likely to fall, true, and Ukraine holds only some outskirts, but when I look back to January 1, 2025, Russia was 5km from Pokrovsk, and a year before that, Russia was 35km from the city. Looking at the wider map, the battle lines have not changed that much in two years. Russia has made some advances south of Kupiansk and is contesting Kupiansk itself. If these small cities with pre-war populations of 60,000 and 30,000, respectively, give Russia so much trouble, what is going to happen when they try to take Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, with their pre-war populations of 150,000 and 110,000, if they can even get there?

Russia is not on the verge of collapse, either, but it is on the verge of desperate measures, and may already be in them. It's selling gold internally to take rubles off the market in a bid to both strengthen the currency and provide rubles to redistribute without printing more, with the National Wealth Fund selling off over half its 400 tons of gold to oligarchs. There's still almost 2000 tons of gold left inside Russia, but any significant dip into that is going to cause even more economic problems. A combination of Trump's bumbling and Sunni Arab OPEC states upping their output has resulted in a drop in the price of oil (WTI is trading around $57 today while Brent is around $60). Russia sells at a discount from the market price, and its budget is based on being able to sell oil at $70+ per barrel. It's getting $50ish now, and that may drop even further. Ships are becoming less likely to take on Russian contracts due to the increased activity by the US Navy and attacks by Ukraine. On top of that, while the Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian petrochemical plants isn't decimating the output quite like some think, it is heavily impacting refining capabilities such that Russia put a moratorium on refined products exports, further squeezing their foreign cash income, and they've put limits on internal distribution, which is raising prices, especially outside the major cities. Enlistment bonuses are dropping as local governments run out of money to pay them, with even the relatively wealthy St. Petersburg reducing or delaying bonuses. The federal government is lavishing at least some veterans with education and health benefits as well as some financial benefits, but that appears to not be universal. This is causing a complex situation resulting in high inflation (officially around 7%, probably much higher). The only reason that Russia isn't in hyperinflation right now is tight controls and high core interest rates (16% now, down from 25% because it was absolutely strangling growth). And Russian defense contractors are filing bankruptcy at alarming rates, putting key supply chains at risk.

Despite its population advantage, Russia does have a manpower issue. They're largely not sending conscripts into battle. By law, under the current circumstances, only contract soldiers can be sent to fight (there may be some exceptions, but this is the overwhelming majority of Russian forces fighting). They don't have the money to pay the big bonuses to keep the contract force up, and as veterans return missing limbs and living with severe PTSD, more people are becoming aware of what it's like at the front. Criminals whose sentences were commuted are also returning from the front lines (journalist Emily Hoge has been following this for some time, including the results when hardened criminals become hardened soldiers and return to the streets), pushing up crime rates. Escalating to legal war conditions to allow conscripts to be sent into battle would be an enormous political gamble for Putin.

Russia's problems aren't a lack of physical production capacity (they have that in spades) or people (they have many more they can conscript if necessary). Their problems are that they're running out of money to spend on the war and men they can legally send to fight. Changing the circumstances on the ground requires changing significant political positions inside Russia that have a very strong chance of provoking political backlash, regardless of what levels of control Putin has been able to exert so far.

Maybe Russia can force a ceasefire or even a peace, though it's hard to see what terms would work in such a way that both sides would accept, as both have become skilled at finding something the other side absolutely will not accept, so the war continues. Maybe Ukraine can eventually push the last Russians out of its territory, possibly even out of Crimea, though that, too, is a tall order. Then again, it seemed in the early 1980s that dislodging the USSR from Afghanistan was a tall order. Right now, there's not enough information on either to hazard an educated bet.

The name on the Kennedy Center is slightly longer than that:

"The Donald J. Trump and
The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts"

Restoring the name just involves removing the first line.

Our internal training has shifted entirely to passphrases, to the point that we had to write our own internal training video because every training video we looked at talked about traditional ways of creating a complex password. We found that when people were encouraged to come up with a sentence, they usually came up with something in the range of 25-35 characters, well past the minimums.

Microsoft seems to be doing these kinds of migrations lately.

I think their old ways of poorly documenting things even internally came back to bite them. I've seen some things written by people who were at one time Microsoft devs working on Windows 7, 8, and 10, who said that a lot of removed functionality came because trying to figure out what the old code was supposed to be doing was nigh impossible, and figuring it out sometimes just didn't fit the schedules or budgets. If a feature didn't seem to be widely used as a percentage of the userbase, then it often got dropped.

Maybe some rewrites are being taken too far, but anyone who has dealt with code that goes back potentially more than 30 years is almost certainly going to find some really bad and/or confusing implementations.

NIST SP 800-63 has formalized this. Specifically, look up Section 3.1.1.2 in SP 800-63B-4, released just this year. Minimum length 15, max length at least 64, but no other requirements, including complexity or regular rotation. Unicode is supposed to be accepted, normalized against a standard process (that one I don't remember, but it's documented), with one code point counting as one character. Filtering for known bad passwords or patterns is strongly encouraged.

I pushed through an implementation at our company last year, explaining why, showing the NIST draft. A bunch of people protested because it was different, but the CIO told them to live with it because their entire argument was "but we've done it this way for 30 years!" Some critical vendors complained when we started pushing them to comply (or at least implement SAML), but we only have a couple of vendors not complying now, and they should be compliant soon. Users are largely happy with the change, and they complain a lot less when we see suspicious activity and force a rotation.

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Just looking at the technical side, the cost to the end-user of streaming that much data would be exorbitant. Compressed video or even once-per-second snapshots would eat up all the mobile data, and the battery life would be measured in single digit hours.

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells.

There are no sunk costs around the turbines. The existing turbines will be replaced. From TFS:

In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

They're reusing the land and part of the existing structure on it. Almost everything else is getting replaced.

Modern combined-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than that. Most new installations now get around 60% efficiency if not better, and the current record is 64.18%, set by a Siemens turbine at Keadby Unit 2 Power Station in the UK. The end result won't be 68%, but it also won't be 34%. Given the losses associated with electrolysis, the net is likely to be around 50%, which still makes it a bad idea.

If you're afraid of spreadsheets in the financial industry, you should probably just keep your eyes closed. The entire industry is built on them to a very large degree. I've been in IT for almost 30 years, and over most of that, I've seen Excel spreadsheets used throughout the various accounting departments of companies ranging from small operations of a couple of dozen people up to multinationals with tens of thousands of employees, with some banks in there. Some of those spreadsheets are enormous and are doing complex calculations across sometimes a couple dozen worksheets, where changing one number can take several seconds to recalculate everything even on a reasonably modern computer.

Unlock all interactions? No. Unlocking a specific interaction? Maybe.

For common uses (like the public web), the most likely approach to decrypting a specific interaction is to break the RSA (cert-based) on the outside and then the Diffie-Hellman (ephemeral per-transaction) on the inside, then recover the symmetric encryption key to decrypt the rest of the conversation. But this is not trivial, and it requires more work than to just toss the transaction into the quantum computer.

The ephemeral layer is where things get harder. Even if you can derive the RSA key on a regular connection, you've got the first layer, but the DH layer is redone for each new connection. (Some sites don't use DH, or are vulnerable to downgrade attacks where DH isn't used, but DH is pretty widespread.) Every ephemeral negotiation has to be individually cracked. Tor uses DH or x25519 on all connections, so each has to be individually cracked. It is expected that breaking an individual 2048-bit RSA or DH encryption would take several hours if one had a quantum computer of sufficient power. Cracking 3072- or 4096-bit RSA/DH will take even longer, if it's even possible on the same systems. However, we appear to be a long way from such capabilities, and the NSA isn't likely to use it to break arbitrary Tor connection encryption, saving it instead for much more practical items. As soon as the NSA has practical quantum computing, it's going to have decades of backlog to go through just for the international signals, and getting anything moved up in line is going to need a damned good reason.