What the world needs now is more competent men.
Joined July 2007
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“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
🤖 Made with AI
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
RustGIS vs. QGIS: which one should you use?
It's the question I get asked most about RustGIS, so we wrote a dedicated page that answers it honestly, including where QGIS is the better choice.
The short answer: RustGIS is not a QGIS replacement, and doesn't aim to be. QGIS is the mature, complete open-source desktop GIS, with 20+ years of development behind it. RustGIS is younger and narrower, but built differently.
Where RustGIS is stronger
- Tiny install: one native program written entirely in Rust, an 18-30 MB download with no Python, Qt or GDAL bundled.
- The whole app in your browser: not a viewer, the full GIS compiled to WebAssembly at web.rustgis.app, with your data staying on your device.
- Everything is a command: every button runs a command you can call from the CLI, Python, notebooks, the MCP server or the AI Assistant.
- A built-in AI Assistant that works through undoable commands, with your own model and key.
- Sandboxed WebAssembly plugins that run on the desktop and in the browser.
- Cloud-native data (COG, GeoParquet, FlatGeobuf, PMTiles, Zarr) read in place, even in the browser.
- A permissive Apache-2.0 licence, so its crates can be embedded in other software.
Read the full comparison: rustgis.app/comparison/qgis
Try RustGIS
- Web app: web.rustgis.app
- Download: downloads.rustgis.app
- GitHub: github.com/opengeos/RustGIS
#GIS #QGIS #Rust #OpenSource #Geospatial
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
Stanford University student Elsa Johnson became a target of the Chinese Communist Party in 2024.
Elsa attended a private school as a child with a heavy focus on foreign languages and became fluent in Mandarin Chinese while still in elementary school. Years later after she was accepted to Stanford, she studied international relations and researched Chinese industry and military tactics while working at the Hoover Institution on campus.
She soon came to the attention of members of the Chinese Communist Party, which has a heavy presence at Stanford and throughout Southern California. There are currently more than 1,000 Chinese students attending Stanford each year, and the university has received more than $64,000,000 in private donations from Chinese individuals and organizations since 2010.
In June 2024, a man claiming to be a fellow Stanford student named Charles Chen contacted her online. She was not initially suspicious as they had many mutual associates, and his photos and posts appeared to be centered on campus. But his questions and requests quickly put her on edge as he invited her on a paid trip to China. And he seemingly knew details about her that she had never shared with him.
When she tried to disengage with him, she began receiving threatening phone calls by Chinese speakers. Elsa contacted Stanford administrators and the FBI, who told her Charles was likely affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, had been posing as a Stanford student for years, and had targeted at least ten other female students since 2020 in a similar manner. They also told her she was under physical surveillance on campus by the Chinese Communist Party.
Elsa wrote articles in the Stanford Review and The Free Press about Chinese influence on campus, and in March 2026 testified about espionage threats on college campuses before the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
For episode 270 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Elsa about being targeted by a foreign government right in the middle of a US college campus. The episode is available now.
#stanford #college #student #china #hooverinstitute
open.spotify.com/episode/6KO…
As the former webmaster of America peppers network and prepper broadcasting, I have simple thing to say about all the hype recently on X about being prepared...
Remember Y2K?
Y2K was an opportunity to buy preps the next day the lights didn't go out. You should already be prepared for local disasters, and also be ready to take advantage of sales the next day something predicted doesn't happen...
That being said, and I am not being paid to say this, @harvestright is not only having a sale, they have something new that can go on the kitchen counter.
😇
PS: Don't tell my wife.
AWS docs say BACKUP_JOB_FAILED and RESTORE_JOB_FAILED are valid Backup vault notification events.
Live CloudFormation in us-east-2 rejected both.
No documented regional/provider caveat — just a live failure.
docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-back…
docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-back…
docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloud…
GRRRRRR......
AWS Aurora MySQL 8.4 requires require_secure_transport: ON|OFF ...
...ever hear of ones and zeroes?
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
Meet Leroy. A specially trained Search and Rescue dog in Banff.
He tracked 156 individuals, found 57 people lost in the wilderness, trekked 22 kilometers for nine straight grueling hours to rescue a 73-year-old woman missing in a snowstorm, located avalanche victims and recovered countless bodies, bringing closure to grieving families.
Parks Canada has served notice that the SAR dog program is ending.
Banff is already under the microscope for Emergency Preparedness. But this?
Thank the Liberals $145 MILLION cut to funding.
Carnage's cost saving measures WILL COST LIVES.
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
Today I am Remembering Aaron Merritt
12 years ago today, Aaron passed away at the VA hospital in Nashville, TN. He had been put on a medication that required regular blood work to monitor toxicity levels. Those tests were not done.
By the time he arrived at the VA hospital on 27 October 2014, it was already too late. He died the next day of sepsis. Had those tests occurred regularly, he would still be alive.
Merritt deployed multiple times in his Army Career, twice as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician. He was decorated twice for Valor.
He was my first team mate in EOD, and he taught me a lot. He kept me alive. When he finally exited the Army, we were all excited for him; Aaron was a magnet for combat. We were sure if he stuck around in the Army he would be killed in action.
Instead his death happened in the States, alone in a VA hospital room.
His family sued the VA. Although they never admitted to anything, they settled for 2.5 million dollars.
Aaron was a great dude with quick wit and a sharpe sense of humor.
He deserved better.
This! 👇
Recently I was talking with a friend about universal geniuses. And something struck me.
Florence, 1480–1510. Same city, same moment: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola. Raphael right behind them. They walked the same streets.
Europe, 1600–1700. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz. In two generations, we got calculus, modern mechanics, probability theory, and the scientific method.
Athens, 470–320 BC. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Thucydides. One century, one city, and the foundations of Western thought were laid.
Europe, 1890–1930. Poincaré, Hilbert, Einstein, Marie Curie, Tesla, Planck, Bohr, then von Neumann.
Always the same pattern. In every great era, the West had 15 to 20 minds of this caliber alive at the same time. People who could touch everything and push the frontier of several fields at once.
Today we have one. Just one. Elon Musk.
And Elon is an anomaly.
Not in the sense that he shouldn't exist. In the sense that the world we built is designed so that someone like him never emerges. Statistically, he shouldn't be here.
Because what forged Elon was an absolutely insane move.
October 2002. eBay buys PayPal. Elon walks away with roughly $180M. Anyone else buys an island and never works another day.
He puts $100M into SpaceX, $70M into Tesla, $10M into SolarCity. Almost everything. On rockets and electric cars, two industries no sane person wanted to touch.
2006–2008. The first three Falcon 1 launches fail. Tesla is burning cash, the financial crisis hits, investors run. He has enough left for one last launch. Just one. He borrows money from friends to pay his rent.
September 28, 2008. The fourth launch reaches orbit.
December 23, 2008. NASA awards SpaceX a $1.6B contract.
December 24, 2008. The Tesla round closes at the last possible hour. A few more days and everything collapses.
That's what a genius is. Not just IQ. The ability to put everything on the table when the entire world tells you it's impossible, and be right.
Now the real question: why do we only have one?
Because a genius needs three things. The freedom to try. The right to get massively rich if it works. The right to fail without being destroyed.
And that's exactly what the collectivist left and the technocrats have torn down across the West for the past 50 years.
They turned success into suspicion. Making a lot of money became a moral failing. Taking risks became irresponsible. Rising above the crowd became an insult to equality.
They stacked up norms, committees, permits, regulations written in Brussels by people who have never built anything in their lives. In Europe, Elon would never have been allowed to blow up three rockets. He'd have been stopped at the first form.
They want to tax capital before it even exists, cap fortunes, redistribute what others created by risking everything.
They replaced excellence with conformity. Our schools produce docile people, not dangerous ones. And a genius, by definition, is someone who disrupts. Their entire system is built to neutralize the people who disrupt.
The result: where we should have 15 to 20 universal geniuses alive at the same time, we have one.
Just one.
And you want to put him in prison.
You summon him before judges, you raid his offices, you insult him morning, noon and night, you dream of breaking up his companies. The man who lands rockets vertically and wants to take humanity to Mars.
You're disgusting.
History won't remember your names. It remembers Galileo, not the inquisitors who tried to silence him.
Hmmm... If Trump annex's Canada, and Canada is already part of the EU by then, does that mean Trump can send ICE to France?
Asking for my friends in Paris.
CMMC is on pause. Cybersecurity threats aren't.
And that raises an interesting question: Should organizations slow down their security investments simply because the government is reconsidering how compliance gets measured?
The Pentagon has paused the next phase of CMMC implementation and launched a review of the program. Now, industry feedback is raising questions about whether the real problem is the certification process or the underlying cost and complexity of implementing cybersecurity requirements.
For those of us actually building secure infrastructure, that distinction matters.
Over the past several weeks, we've been developing a repeatable hosting architecture designed around CMMC Level 2 security requirements.
Not because certification is guaranteed to remain unchanged. Quite the opposite.
We're approaching the problem from the infrastructure upward: cryptographic controls, network segmentation, audit integrity, vulnerability management, recovery testing, continuous monitoring, and clearly defined responsibilities between hosting infrastructure and the applications running on it.
The objective is straightforward: build an environment where security controls can be implemented, tested, documented, and independently verified.
If the certification framework changes tomorrow, those capabilities still have value.
There's a legitimate debate about the cost and administrative burden of CMMC, particularly for smaller defense contractors. But reducing the burden of proving security and reducing security itself are two very different things.
Perhaps the more important question isn't weather CMMC survives in its current form, but whether we're building systems that deserve to pass an assessment in the first place.
An interesting perspective on the current debate:
federalnewsnetwork.com/defen…
#CMMC #Cybersecurity #DefenseIndustrialBase #NIST800171 #SecurityArchitecture
So .... ummm ... guess who is suggesting to abolish the indian act in Canada.
Someone please stop them... not that I disagree, but my ribs hurt from laughing so hard.
To the @Conservative_BC congratulations on winning a clear majority government....
Please don't fuck this up.
I have come to realize that I have been and always will be a complete nerd.
I tend to name servers for example, over the years I've named them after US presidents, classic monsters, and fictional locations.
Recently I've been naming my AI experimental bots after fictional AI, like Guppy and Skippy...
I have no life.
If any place in Canada needs a referendum to leave, don't we need one to join the EU?
And what happens if only Ontario (71% of the voting power) and no one else? Do we join anyway?
This is mob rule folks, and why a Constitutional Republic is better.
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
‼️ Proton is hosting a map of 300,000+ Flock surveillance device locations that Flock tried to get taken down.
Researcher Joshua Michael says he pulled them from Flock's own systems via a token left open to anyone.
Proton calls the takedown "an attempt to suppress information."
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
“Do you stand with the people who pay the taxes, or with the old habit of growing government first?”
An Open Letter to Wyoming Elected Officials
Dan Wolfe 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇮🇹 retweeted
This is the best explanation between left and right I have heard in a long time! #RepublicanValues #democraticvalues