I still miss my old iRiver with Rockbox... definitely been thinking about getting a proper PMP again.

I'm lucky enough to have a Kobol Helios64, but unfortunately the small company that made these shut down. It's fine for the time being but I'm going to have to pay attention to the NAS market to be ready to replace it one day... my main goal is low power, so I'm not sure if it's worth it to go to a more commercial option like Synology or if I should be building something.

As appliance NAS tend to be, the actual SBC in the Helios64 is pretty slow so I minimize what I run on it. It does have Plex server, but most everything else runs on another ARM machine that mounts from it by SMB.

Although I oppose corporate sponsorship, I would encourage you to strongly consider incorporating (probably as a nonprofit incorporation, options vary by state) as you scale upwards. This offers legal protection not only to the operators of the service but also to the users, since it allows for appropriate controls on governance and finances. Unincorporated community services that take donations are, unfortunately, notorious for corruption and self-dealing since there are few legal and organizational measures in place to prevent it.

Beehaw would most likely not qualify for federal tax exemption (but you could get an attorney's opinion). In a way that's a good thing, as the typical cost of getting an IRS letter of status runs over $1k while the typical cost of incorporating a nonprofit in most states is around $100. This is all US-centric of course, in other countries I have no idea!

Definitely. There's the old line about being indistinguishable from magic, and I think it very much applies here. Fly-by-wire and algorithmic control of aircraft allows for some incredible feats of aerobatics that are hard for humans to imagine performing. We knew this I think over a decade ago now with MIT's demonstrations of quadcopters performing sweet tricks, but for various reasons (that, personal opinion here, come down mostly to the near complete capture of military R&D by a small group of defense contractors with little motivation to perform actual R&D) we haven't really tried that hard to apply this sort of technology to military aircraft. Some of the UAP documents from ODNI have, in my reading, supported this type of hypothesis. The key phrase "unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities" in one ODNI report sounds to me like ODNI thinks they're seeing behavior that is inconsistent with our current aerospace technology but not inconsistent with physics---in other words, someone knows how to do things that we don't. It could be aliens, but...

If we assume that these orbs and other military UAP reports reflect genuine flying objects (and on the balance of the evidence I think they do), my money would be on China or Russia having invested a lot of time and effort into computational control of unmanned aircraft, probably integrating hypersonic aerodynamic research we know both countries have been performing (and have almost certainly surpassed the US on). The result, I think it's pretty reasonable to imagine, could be compact unmanned aircraft capable of some really extreme maneuvers. There are plenty of open questions with this theory, like power sources, but I feel like it's in the right balance of pushing the bounds of the possible without requiring off-planet intervention. Remember that the US fielded both low-radar-profile aircraft and extremely high altitude aircraft with a great deal of secrecy. These would have been quite UFO-like to the Soviet Union, but had perfectly rational explanations... just explanations that involved at least a decade of advanced R&D performed in secret.

More to the point, though, I think we have to be really careful with this "extreme flight characteristics means aliens" line of thinking. It's exactly what got us into the situation where claims of UAPs were viewed with such skepticism that they were suppressed within the military. We have to admit aliens as a possibility, but China is a whole lot closer, and we know that she has a sophisticated and well-supplied military R&D program. Decades of research ought to have gotten them something, and it would probably look pretty weird to those of us not in the loop.

I have sort of a particular skeptical opinion on recent UFO disclosures. I've published it here:

• https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html
• https://computer.rip/2023-02-17-something-up-there-pt-II.html

It's important to understand that we managed to get into a situation where the military performed essentially no collection or analysis of reports of unusual aircraft for nearly 40 years. I don't think we should be too surprised by a significant revelation about advanced technology possessed by foreign governments after this period of time. At the same time, it remains very possible that these reports are mistaken. I expect that recent investment in UAS-detection technology will lead to a lot more empirical evidence in these kinds of situations, and then we'll have a lot more to go on.