This is a legendary performance but, Caption writer, I have a bone to pick with you about "nothing but his voice and guitar". It's a different sound without Bryan Gibson!

Just to be clear I'm on the "Pro-wildfire-regs" side of the house. I just get frustrated by conflicting regulations. 😁

Another aspect of this is the frustration citizens find themselves in when government regulation grows to increasingly "no-win situation" levels.

You can be fined for not maintaining a defensible space that you can also be fined for maintaining, and seemingly no one cares to fix the bureaucracy.

I saw a promotional-type video a few months ago of a cybertruck off-roading, captioned "Look what the cybertruck can do" and I had to laugh, hard, because I had been on a much worse road before in a 1980's Ford brush truck loaded with 200 gallons of water.

Quote post with something good that lasted longer than the Confederacy (1861-1865)

"Breaking Bad" aired for 5 seasons.

Yep, a blue crown

Both of them just turned 25 this year 😮

How've your little demons been? :D

BOY do I have good news for you!

PSA for AI "Vuln researchers" - please do not spam our nonprofit parrot rescue asking for bug bounties for website "best practice" improvements. Unless you're interested in spray millet or colorful wooden blocks to chew on, both of us will be very disappointed in the experience.

I do not think the attackers will be laying people off because AI is cheaper. So, the defenders have two choices:

1) Use the improved efficiency AI brings to do layoffs and cost savings, or

2) use the improved efficiency to try to catch up to the newer, faster, and more flexible attackers.

Speaking for myself and not for Lesley: I think the attackers will be using AI to expand to targets that they previously didn't have time to prioritize, because the AI allows them to automate so much more efficiently that they can expand.

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I can tell you that a lot of the reason why European fire departments are able to drive smaller trucks that carry less water and use lower flow on hoses, is because their average structure fire fuel load is a LOT lower.

USA has "Room and contents" fires; Europe mostly has "Contents of room" fires.

When I got back to a computer I had some more time and thought this might help:

More to the point though, any large department is going to have different engines for different purposes whereas a small volunteer shop might have to make do with whatever engine they can get. Many volunteer departments run on hand-me-downs from nearby cities.

It's too broad a generalization to draw that conclusion from.

Rear mounted pumps have many advantages but also some disadvantages, particularly for departments that run a lot of fires on or adjacent to highways, or who need to carry and deploy a lot of large diameter hose.

You could however, still make shorter and more maneuverable engines with a mid-engine pump. If you decide you don't need to carry that much hose and convert the hose storage space to supply compartments.

That makes a lot of sense though because if you have plentiful hydrants nearby, you don't need a thousand ft of large diameter hose on the engine (which takes up quite a lot of space)

Same goes for if you put a drafting tank right behind the engine and that's where your water supply is.

I think the main thrust to that article is moving the pump to the rear gives you more compartments to store things in mid-engine, which is true, but it's coming at the cost of something. Most likely total carried hose length.

A rear mounted pump can be the same size as any other pump on any size engine. I was focusing more on the smaller nature of the Australian engine as compared to the rear mounted pump on it.

Quick Gemini math says that although NSW is 5x smaller in population than California, they have slightly more in total number of firefighters to draw upon.

Hard to tell from the photo but it looks like maybe that's a Type 2 engine for NSW

www.fire.nsw.gov.au/about-us/wha...

We could do the job with those smaller engines, we'd just need to call more of them from father away or change the staffing model to increase the number of people on duty at a time back up to what it ought to be.

Most firefighters you'd ask would *rather* have two smaller engines and 6 firefighters because it's WAY safer and easier to have more personnel on scene. But staffing cuts have ensured the bare minimum of staffing in most cities: 3 FF per engine.

That is indeed a very nice sized engine for a tight urban area!

It's likely that for American construction (primarily wood frame) to get the required GPM to effectively fight a structure+contents fire, you'd need two of those engines which means 6 firefighters instead of 3. Here's the catch:

I am now wondering whether my tech-debt problem will improve because the agent can autonomously handle step-upgrades and I won't accrue the tech debt, or whether it will worsen because to the agent it's just as easy to refactor and hot-patch as it is to apply updates.

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I asked my gemini-sysadminhelper to assess the migration path for me today for a very old FOSS tool I need to swap out to get modern OAUTH2 handling in. Instead, it hot-patched the source to handle OAUTH2 because that's easier than migrating. NGL, kinda impressed.
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Given the big PyPI, Node and Github supply chain attacks in the last month or two I am *very* curious:

Orgs who have walked far down the SBOM path - are you feeling pretty good about that right now? Is it genuinely helping you respond to supply chain attacks?

Alameda is 7x larger than my town but only up 15% in the vote count, so my town cares more than they do!

Vote for Coastside FD please. :D. No login required.

firetruckfaceoff.com

I love what Sunnyvale CA has done in the last decade. I've watched a bunch of dense apartment/condo complexes spring up with shopping underneath and housing on top and they are always within a couple hundred yards of a light rail or Caltrain station.