activescott's Notes

U.S. military investigators think American forces likely were responsible for a strike that killed dozens of children at a girls elementary school in Iran, a U.S. official said. The investigation hasn’t reached a final conclusion, the official said.

Cool infrared heater and thermostat that works with mini splits.

Overnight, one Israeli operation in a town in the eastern Bekaa Valley - a focal point of the rising hostilities - saw at least 41 people killed and 40 injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Three Lebanese soldiers were among the dead, and locals listed the names of civilians, including children, they said had been killed. The focus of the operation in Nabi Chit was recovering the remains of an Israeli military airman who went missing in Lebanon 40 years ago.

Witnesses told the BBC that the Israeli soldiers had arrived disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization. The Lebanese army chief later confirmed this to local media, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not respond to BBC requests for comment about this allegation.

drive enclosures,

The honest take: Setup time is real. This isn't a weekend project — it took weeks of configuring, breaking, and fixing. But now everything runs 24/7, I own my data, and the monthly cost is basically just electricity (~$10-15/month).

The biggest win? Immich. Having Google Photos-level search (face recognition, location, object detection) on hardware I own, with zero cloud dependency — that alone justified the build.

Video (full build walkthrough): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cET4sfqdlE&t

I'm a plumber by trade who fell into self-hosting, so if I can set this up, anyone can. Happy to answer questions.

Israel has cut off the entry of all food and other goods into Gaza in an echo of the siege it imposed in the earliest days of its war with Hamas. The United Nations and other humanitarian aid providers are sharply criticizing the decision and calling it a violation of international law.

“A tool of extortion,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said. “A reckless act of collective punishment,” Oxfam said. Key mediator Egypt accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon.”

Hunger has been an issue throughout the war for Gaza’s over 2 million people, and some aid experts had warned of possible famine. Now there is concern about losing the progress that experts reported under the past six weeks of a ceasefire.

Israel is trying to pressure the Hamas militant group to agree to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government describes as a U.S. proposal to extend the ceasefire’s first phase instead of beginning negotiations on the far more difficult second phase. In phase two, Hamas would release the remaining living hostages in return for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and a lasting ceasefire.

Last year, the International Criminal Court said there was reason to believe Israel had used “starvation as a method of warfare” when it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. The allegation is also central to South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

On Sunday, Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, said Israel as an occupying power has an “absolute duty” to facilitate humanitarian aid under the Geneva Conventions, and called Israel’s decision “a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy” that led to the ICC warrant.

Under the October ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, Israel agreed to allow 600 trucks of aid into Gaza a day.

However, Israel’s own figures suggest that an average of only 459 trucks a day have entered the Gaza Strip between Oct. 12, when the flow of the aid restarted, and Sunday, according to an AP analysis. COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of coordinating aid entry, provided the figures.

President Donald Trump’s military strikes in Iran have likely cost American taxpayers over $1 billion using cursory estimates—with hundreds of millions lost on lost aircraft over the weekend—with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.

Sure it's a tutorial on how to tie a survival paracord bracelet, but it's also a great introduction into why you might even want to bring one. Essentially, this is a fun basic skill to get you into working with paracord and if you have kids, it's a great thing to do with them.

As Congress returns to session this week amid a new conflict in the Middle East, a crucial question hangs over Washington: Who gets to decide when America's military can be sent to war?

The Constitution says that only Congress has that power, with limited exceptions. In the four days after hostilities began, the Trump administration has struggled to articulate whether any of those exceptions apply to this situation. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has called this a "war," undermining the argument that it's a different kind of military action that doesn't require congressional authorization. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others have said the strikes against Iran were in response to an imminent threat against American troops in the region—only to later back down from that claim. President Donald Trump has made overlapping and contradictory claims about the conflict's aims, and on Tuesday seemed to claim responsibility for initiating Saturday's attack.

It is useful to read the commentary and translation of the Holy Quran without any doubt, each Muslim should do it...

Having said that, we encourage you to gather your family and sit down to listen to the Qur’ān and its meaning attentively and take benefit from it. It will also be ideal for you to educate your family about these etiquettes as well. Please read further on these etiquettes at : http://www.askimam.org/fatwa/fatwa.php?askid=5d2746eda63e83151d673632cbb81d4a

The translation and commentary of the Quran can be listened at computer provided it is from any reliable and authentic aalim of Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jamat (since listening translation of any person of false belief will cause misguidance instead of guidance). But, it is necessary to listen it attentively, it is against the honour of the Quran to listen it while engaging oneself in some other activities.

You can extract it as a function:

import { camel, mapKeys } from "radash"; import { z } from "zod";

export const camelCaseSchemaDef = (schema: T) => z .record(z.any()) .transform((x) => mapKeys(x, camel)) .pipe(schema) as T;

Use it like:

export const summarySchema = camelCaseSchemaDef( z.object({ isArticle: z.boolean(), summary: z.string(), introduction: z.string(), terms: z.array(z.string()), }) );

type Summary = z.infer // type Summary = { // isArticle: z.boolean(), // summary: string, //. introduction: z.string(), //. terms: z.array(z.string()), // }

summarySchema.parse({ is_article: true, summary: "abc", introduction: "abc", terms: ["abc", "bca"], })

While that last sentence may be true, it appears sharing was on by default when it came to Ring’s own cameras. That Flock Safety never got a chance to participate is good to know, but “Search Party” has apparently been active since its implementation last year, even if it was limited to Ring devices.

And while Ring claims the Search Party feature can’t be used to search for “human biometrics,” that’s hardly comforting when it appears Ring definitely wants to add more of this kind of thing to its existing cameras.

On top of this, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass-surveillance network suddenly seems very small.

Ring insists this is not another mass surveillance tool, but rather something that attempts to recognize who’s at any user’s door when sending alerts, in order to differentiate friends and family members from strangers who might be within camera range. Again, there’s some utility to this offering, but the tech lends itself to surveillance abuses, especially when law enforcement may only be a subpoena away from accessing images and recordings captured by privately-owned devices.

While that last sentence may be true, it appears sharing was on by default when it came to Ring’s own cameras. That Flock Safety never got a chance to participate is good to know, but “Search Party” has apparently been active since its implementation last year, even if it was limited to Ring devices.

And while Ring claims the Search Party feature can’t be used to search for “human biometrics,” that’s hardly comforting when it appears Ring definitely wants to add more of this kind of thing to its existing cameras.

On top of this, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass-surveillance network suddenly seems very small.

Ring insists this is not another mass surveillance tool, but rather something that attempts to recognize who’s at any user’s door when sending alerts, in order to differentiate friends and family members from strangers who might be within camera range. Again, there’s some utility to this offering, but the tech lends itself to surveillance abuses, especially when law enforcement may only be a subpoena away from accessing images and recordings captured by privately-owned devices.

It does, kinda, matter that Hegseth turned a simple contract dispute into an attempted corporate death sentence, weaponizing a supply-chain security designation that was clearly designed for tech the US government fears could be infiltrated by hostile foreign nations.

Yet, under Hegseth’s order, Chinese AI models would technically be more welcome in America’s military supply chain than Anthropic’s. The “supply chain risk” designation is now being used to punish a domestic company for having safety guidelines. DeepSeek, with its direct ties to the Chinese government, faces fewer restrictions than a San Francisco company that committed the cardinal sin of asking for human oversight on killing decisions.

One source familiar with the Pentagon’s negotiations with AI companies confirmed that OpenAI’s deal is much softer than the one Anthropic was pushing for, thanks largely to three words: “any lawful use.” In negotiations, the person said, the Pentagon wouldn’t back down on its desire to collect and analyze bulk data on Americans. If you look line-by-line at the OpenAI terms, the source said, every aspect of it boils down to: If it’s technically legal, then the US military can use OpenAI’s technology to carry it out. And over the past decades, the US government has stretched the definition of “technically legal” to cover sweeping mass surveillance programs — and more.

In the years after 9/11, US intelligence agencies ramped up a surveillance system that they determined fell within the legal limits OpenAI cites, including multiple mass domestic spying operations (along with apparently highly invasive international ones). In 2013, National Security Agency intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of some of these programs, such as reportedly collecting telephone records of Verizon customers on an “ongoing, daily” basis, and gathering bulk data on individuals from tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple via a secretive program called PRISM. Despite promises of reform from intelligence agencies and attempts at legal changes, few significant limits to these powers were enacted. Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt, said online that OpenAI’s deal “absolutely does allow for domestic surveillance. EO 12333 is how the NSA hides its domestic surveillance by capturing communications by tapping into lines outside the US even if it contains info from/on US persons.”