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Edge - Can an Optimus climb through the jungle? Is it designed to walk over a’a?
That's when they probably haul out the AI D9 Killdozers to clear the way. If we coordinate properly, could probably kite those along and get the PMAR cleared on the cheap! Of course that would require them to have self-driving capabilities, which is still (and always) 18 months away so may have to wait yet longer for that alternate route.
A larger drone of that type would probably require a high value target. Probably nothing like that in Puna.
Does make one wonder - maybe PGV? (drones seem to be attracted to energy infrastructure lately). Each segment of $10-million-a-mile pavement on 130? Puna Kai?
Hey randomq - any chance you can get your off-grid (and safety-fence-free?) AI to provide a likely list of strategic drone targets in Puna, so we know for the future rounds of Robot Wars? I'd ask the online models, but don't want the Feds or Dario accusing me of trying to entrap their precious and sensitive Haley-Joel-Osment-esque creations in something shady and unbecoming.
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Getting a good chuckle out of this floating idea of possible drone strikes on Hawaii, perhaps targeting PGV or grossly priced per mile roads, and potentially being launched from the mainland Continental United States and all controlled by AI.
How much more "Puna-esque" can it get??
This could be a verbatim script of conversations overheard at the Natch dining tables or the Malama Market checkout line!
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From the AI:
- Puna Geothermal Venture (Kapoho/Pahoa area) — the obvious one. 38 MW, the only geothermal plant in the state, often cited as supplying roughly a fifth of the Big Island's electricity. It's on the books as critical infrastructure and is a single point of failure for the East Hawaii grid. The usual risk conversation there is lava (it was overrun in the 2018 eruption and offline for about two years), but anyone thinking about asymmetric threats would land on it immediately — knock it out and HELCO has to make up the difference with oil-fired generation, which depends on fuel barged into Hilo.
- The grid itself. The island runs on a few big transmission spines along the coast, and much of Puna is fed from the Hilo side. The towers and lines out that way are remote and slow to reach, so the grid is arguably more the story than any single building.
- Just over the district line (South Hilo): Hilo International Airport, Hilo Harbor with its fuel depots, and the oil-fired plants around Hilo. The whole east side of the island depends on that harbor for fuel, so it matters to Puna even though it's not in Puna.
- No military facilities in Puna at all. The Big Island's military footprint is Pohakuloa Training Area up on the saddle between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea — a big training range with ammunition storage, but not in Puna. If an adversary were serious about Hawaii, the real list is elsewhere anyway: Pearl Harbor/Hickam/INDOPACOM on Oahu, and the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
For what it's worth, the December 2024 mystery-drone wave was mostly an Oahu thing; I don't remember reports of any over the Big Island.
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Thanks for the response - both interesting for PGV being the obvious highlight, but also how quickly it skips outside of Puna to find other possibilities (I said "in Puna" bot, make no mistakes! ;) As for the electrical grid, that breaks down on its own on the regular, no drones required.
Seems planning for drone strikes in Puna apparently is much like planning for daily life in Puna in which electricity and other energy sources are fragile, distant, and unreliable. Who knows, maybe the drone strikes have already begun and the albezia and other junk trees are just catching strays! (Something for the next Natch picnic table discussion - yeah man, they're trying to blame it on the trees so we cut them down, man, the machines want us to make more room for their data centers, man... ;)
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the machines want us to make more room for their data centers, man... 
Maybe if we had data centers, our billionaire overlords would make sure the grid was functional!
I remember immediately after 9/11 standing in line at KTA in Hilo, overhearing two women in front of me discussing how Hilo might be the next target, after NY and the Pentagon. Those New York-Paris-Tokyo-Pahoa bumper stickers took on a whole new unintended worrisome meaning
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I said "in Puna" bot, make no mistakes!
I'd say the chances are far far better that if Puna's infrastructure was to be attacked in a form of terrorism, it would be domestic versus that of any foreign actor(s), most likely even home grown right here in Puna as well!
“I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap”
-DJT
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10-23-2026, 05:07 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-23-2026, 05:39 PM by ironyak.)
Just a quick thank you gift to randomq for indulging us with his "AI" knowledge and homegrown, solar-powered "AI" responses. Anybody else with some programming experience may be amused as well, but may be a bit "inside baseball" stuff for others. Something to enjoy between patching up php (thankfully which is very outdated and no one really uses anymore, except like https://punaweb.org/forum/newreply.php , forumdisplay.php, showthread.php, etc... ;)
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"inside baseball"
Yes, speaking of baseball, how about those Milwaukee Brewers!
“I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap”
-DJT
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(10-23-2026, 05:07 PM)ironyak Wrote: Something to enjoy between patching up php (thankfully which is very outdated and no one really uses anymore, except like https://punaweb.org/forum/newreply.php , forumdisplay.php, showthread.php, etc... ;)
Thankfully the only forum I am still in touch with is written in Perl.. we never "upgraded" to that new fangled .php format.. so haven't had to take that ride.
But I have gotten a fairly lengthy notice from the server farm we lease our domains space from, and after reading through it all I hope whoever manages the back end of PW is on it. Maybe it's an upgrade of MyBB? Or nothing.. just let the server side deal with it. But by my reading it all depends on what version of php a site is run on, and as such would be concerned about PW, at least to the point of reading the fine print.
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I grew up on Perl; love it and miss it... It was the first programming language I actually grokked, after bashing my head against C++ and Java. PHP early in my career, though I would not want to look at my spaghetti code from back then. These days I mostly code in vanilla Javascript, SQL, bash, and Go, letting AI handle the Kotlin.
FYI for anyone playing along at home, the Qwen 3.8 Flash Next LLM is a beast, if you have the [V]RAM for it. Its use of "engrams" also reduces RAM and compute requirements, which may be a little bit better for the environment, and a little more realistic for running SOTA on solar.
Speaking of solar: All these companies investing in data-centers are going to go broke waiting for power availability. If only they would adjust their usage like we do off grid, they could probably power them with solar and wind today. Personally I wouldn't even ban data-centers on the Big Island, just put them somewhere away from residences, require them to operate on sustainable non-polluting energy, use ocean water in an environmentally friendly way for cooling, and require that they are a net-positive benefit to the county (no tax breaks or shady accounting tricks, create local jobs, contribute to local education, etc.)
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