April 8, 2026

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS ENOUGH MISSILES: US Navy seeks 1,200% increase in Tomahawk missile procurement for 2027. “In fiscal 2026, Congress granted the service $257 million for the purchase of 58 Tomahawk missiles. The Navy is now asking lawmakers to subsidize the production of 785 Tomahawk missiles for a little over $3 billion, including roughly $1.5 billion for Tomahawk missile modifications.”

Posted at 1:46 pm by Stephen Green

BACK TO THE FUTURE: The 10-Year-Old Nikon D5 DSLR Really Is the Best Camera for Artemis II.

While much of the discussion surrounding the Artemis II crew’s beautiful photos from their Orion spacecraft has focused on the images themselves, and they are fantastic shots, some of the discussion has surrounded the cameras used to capture the photos. Photographers love chatting gear, after all. While the Nikon D5 DSLR may seem like a puzzling choice as the primary camera on a prestigious space mission in 2026, it’s the best tool for the job.

Although the Artemis II crew successfully campaigned to get Nikon’s current flagship camera, the mirrorless Z9, aboard at the last minute, the crew is using the rigorously tested Nikon D5 DSLR from 2016 as the main camera. Not the Nikon D6, Nikon’s last professional DSLR that was discontinued in 2025, but the 10-year-old D5.

It’s easy to wonder why the Artemis II astronauts, who are part of an Artemis program costing many billions of dollars to operate, are using an old DSLR that, frankly, was not particularly beloved at the time of its release.

It’s all part of a theme with this mission. Unless I’m having a Mandela Effect moment, I seem to recall Ron Howard on the director’s commentary on the DVD of Apollo 13 talking about the irony of making a history movie about a Saturn V-powered moonshotecause of how dated the ’60s-era NASA technology had become by 1995. As Glenn wrote about Artemis a few weeks ago in the New York Post, that retro theme continues on this flight as well:

The Apollo program’s cutting-edge technology, in both the rocket boosters and the spacecraft themselves, advanced the state of the art in astronautics and established the United States as the leader in space exploration, bar none.

Artemis aims to be all these things, but mostly it’s recapturing Apollo’s “very risky” side.

Ironically, that’s not because it uses cutting-edge technology, but because it uses 50-year-old technology.

NASA wasn’t allowed to design the Artemis craft from scratch;  Congress ordered it to use off-the-shelf technology developed for the space shuttle, including the shuttle’s main engines and fuel tanks.

Critics have dubbed the Artemis rocket — the SLS, or Space Launch System — the “Senate Launch System,” since it deliberately preserved existing jobs for existing contractors in important states.

As a jobs program, it’s been a success.

As a moon rocket, much less so.

The Artemis II mission is late because it’s had a series of serious technical problems, including life support system woes and a persistent hydrogen leak that echoed similar difficulties with the uncrewed Artemis I launch in 2022.

You’d think this would have been fixed in the intervening three years, but no.

The astronauts’ issues with Microsoft Outlook, and their numerous unplanned homages to Stanley Kubrick’s “Zero Gravity Toilet” moment in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, all continue to provide a strangely dated technological feel to this mission.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

STILL A FEW BUGS LEFT IN THE SYSTEM: Testing suggests Google’s AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour. “Oumi began running its test last year when Gemini 2.5 was still the company’s best model. At the time, the benchmark showed an 85 percent accuracy rate. When the test was rerun following the Gemini 3 update, AI Overviews answered 91 percent of the questions correctly. If you extrapolate this miss rate out to all Google searches, AI Overviews is generating tens of millions of incorrect answers per day.”

AI is an amazing tool, but never mistake it for a trusted resource.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Stephen Green

HE WON’T FORGET AND NEITHER WILL WE:

Posted at 12:37 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IMPOTENT LION: The British government now exists solely for the purpose of importing third-worlders and giving them money extracted from its indigenous citizenry.

Starmer, meanwhile, is trying to make a virtue out of impotence.

Posted at 12:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds

EXPERTS:

To be fair, does anyone outside the emotionally unstable Bluesky hivemind still pay attention to our credentialed class?

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

THERE’S JUST NO PLEASING SOME PEOPLE:

Especially this guy:

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

NIFTY: From folding boxes to fixing vacuums, GEN-1 robotics model hits 99% reliability.

Robotic machine-learning company Generalist has announced GEN-1, a new physical AI system that it says “crosses into production-level success rates” on “a broad range of physical skills” that used to require the dexterity and muscle memory of human hands. Generalist is also touting the new model’s ability to respond to disruptions by improvising new moves and “connect[ing] ideas from different places in order to solve new problems.”

GEN-1 builds on Generalist’s previous GEN-0 model, which the company touted in November as a proof of concept for the applicability of scaling laws in robotics training, showing how more pre-training data and compute time improve post-training performance. But while large language models have been able to effectively process trillions of words collectively written on the Internet as part of their training, robotic models don’t have a similar, readily accessible source of quality data about how humans manipulate objects.

To help solve this problem, Generalist has relied on “data hands,” a set of wearable pincers that capture micro-movements and visual information as humans perform manual tasks. Generalist now claims it has collected over half a million hours and “petabytes of physical interaction data” to help train its physical model.

This is important because replicating what the human hand can do — from wielding a hammer to separating an egg — is extremely difficult. Particularly at scale and affordability, which is exactly what Tesla wants to do with Optimus.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

PERSPECTIVE:

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

THEY TOLD ME THE REPLACEMENT THEORY WAS JUST RIGHT-WING PARANOIA:

Hard to dispute this from the replies: “Oh, so cousin marriage is ok, but white people having kids with white people is not. Got ya. They want everyone to be clinically retarded.”

The Danes could use that Viking spirit again.

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green

IT’S JUST CATCHING UP TO NATO’S SUPPORT FOR THE US: Republicans’ Support for NATO Falls Sharply.

Thirty-eight percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents say the U.S. benefits at least somewhat from NATO, down from 49% last year.

At the same time, 60% now say the U.S. benefits not too much or not at all from the alliance, marking the first time a majority of Republicans have expressed that view.

The survey was conducted in late March, shortly before President Donald Trump said he was strongly considering withdrawing the U.S. from NATO.

Overall, 59% of Americans say the U.S. benefits from NATO membership, with support driven largely by Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents.

Democrats support NATO more than they did during the ’80s because the alliance — or at least the Western European members — is almost as anti-American as they are.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

AN IMPORTANT REMINDER FROM DATA R:

Takeaway line: “You cannot describe the actual mechanism through which J6 would have actually resulted in a coup or insurrection, because there was no planning at all involved. Unlike in actual color revolutions.”

Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green

TRUMP’S ENEMIES HAVE EITHER FORGOTTEN 1979, OR THEY’RE ROOTING FOR THE MULLAHS:

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll