Defense

• F-35C bumped from four to six internal air-to-air missiles – The story does not, as far as I can tell, indicate what the mix is.
• Ominously-named Skyborg program to provide perfidious drone wingmen to F-35, F-15EX as the aerial wing of the AI uprising
• Russia’s big UCAV might already be playing sidekick
• Loren Thompson on the NRASM – Loren Thompson is the biggest DoD shill who regularly makes an appearance in these pages, but the articles are still usually fun. (Also, if DoD shilling pays, is there a signup sheet somewhere, or do they come to us?)
• Flooding in Oklahoma refloats USS Batfish – The old girl’s looking pretty good. Unlike Pittsburgh’s own USS Requin, Batfish appears to have a WW2-appropriate cut-down sail.
• A drone you can shoot out of a 40mm grenade launcher – It can move up to 10km from the launch site or loiter for twenty minutes, and it can carry all kinds of payloads, from the ever-popular camera to a variety of bombs.
• Sig’s next-gen squad weapons – Their 6.8mm cartridge is just a 6.8×51.
• On the M-1A2C – Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a built-in Easy Eight-style nickname.
• Steam catapults by presidential decree? – I’m pro-electromagnetic-catapult, given the advantages. I also think the fact that Donald Trump has an opinion on aircraft catapults is amusing and humanizing.
• Poland buying 32 F-35As

Science and Technology

• Artificial general intelligence is hard to define, much less build – The key insight is that when people talk about machines driving The Singularity, they’re talking about artificial general creativity. We have an awful lot of non-artificial general intelligence already, and much of it goes unused.
• Used IBM mainframe buyer’s guide – In case you’re looking for a fun hardware project. All you have to do is spend about as much as you would on a cheap new car, and be prepared for an extra $170-some per month in electricity¹.
• Arm2 is the latest to suspend business with Huawei – That’s terrible for Huawei, given that they do a lot of ARM-architecture processors.
• Google stored unhashed G-Suite passwords for over a decade – It’s fixed now, but this is your weekly reminder that even the big players in tech are actually terrible at their jobs.
• Offset graphene sheets superconduct at -25C – Also, about a million times atmospheric pressure, but what’s a megabar or two among friends?
• SpaceX succeeds on another launch – This one to deploy the first 60 satellites in their proposed, uh, 12,000-strong Starlink constellation. They stuck the landing, which means they’re up to 40 of 47 on landing attempts.
• No link for this one, because I forgot to pop it into our chat, but given how many Starlink satellites are planned, the FCC’s standard satellite-hits-someone-or-something calculation suggests that it’s even odds after six years that reentering debris will bonk something more important than dirt.

Baseball

• Breaking balls in MLB break more than ever before – FiveThirtyEight with its typically excellent nerdy sports coverage.
• It’s not the movement, the Washington Post retorts, but the miles… – Per hour.

Grab Bag

• France is a late-stage aristocracy – According to a French guy on Twitter, anyway.
• On the deeply comic-book-inspired animation of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – Which is up there with Homecoming in the ‘best Spider-Man movie’ category. It’s a twelve-minute video, and absolutely worth your time.
• Recent entrant to the PC game storefront thunderdome Epic suspends accounts for buying too many games during a sale – Why? Because Epic does not have a cart, and repeated small transactions look suspicious to fraud monitoring systems.