Zoraptor

Grand Strategic is an old tabletop wargaming term. It's definitely the correct technical term for something at the scale of Paradox's historical games, though personally I wouldn't apply it to classic 4x like Civilisation for example as that is one layer too much abstraction.

Just reduce the ludicrous default tesselation settings and you fix AMD performance. (This comment brought to you by the phrase plus ça change)

Not wanting to be swapped is a natural extension of either saying what you think your captor wants or certain other types of self preservation- like claiming to have been 'forced' or 'tricked' into fighting instead of being there voluntarily. So seemingly every Wagner POW was tricked into enlisting or was actually keen on visiting Mali and every Russian POW loves their fellow slavs; and every Ukrainian POW is a draftee who is now saved from being sent into combat again after two days training and was in a non combat role like cook or driver anyway; which means they weren't just shooting at you and aren't responsible for your friends getting killed and injured. Can't really take any of it at face value any more than you could take someone thanking Saddam Hussein for how well they were being treated at face value or exhorting the US to stop bombing Hanoi.

Hiro was one of those people who permanently had issues due to time travel being ridiculously over powered, if he could control it properly. So for most of the time he couldn't. Ando (his non powered sidekick) got super powers at some point with some sort of shenanigans like time travel [during season 3 according to their wiki, like a +1 buff to others rather than a 'proper' power though]. I'd well and truly stopped paying proper attention by then though.

Sounds like not quite a full on anthology. I'd be pretty confident that Sylar (especially) and Peter were not meant to be full time characters but were kept around because of the audience/ network. Probably Claire too. Here I'd say that power creep was a symptom. The ultimate problem was network demands to keep Sylar around. That necessitated two things that were critical problems- yes, you had to depower him regularly but you also had to come up with reasons why he didn't get killed off by the good guys and a way for him to interact with them and not be randomly off doing his own thing. Those requirements got increasingly implausible the more they were used and often made the protagonists look like idiots. Sometimes you just have to kill off the bad guy, no matter how good he is at being the bad guy. And to be fair, Quinto's Sylar was an extremely effective villain in S1. But, well, would anyone think having Gus Fring or Trinity survive in Breaking Bad or Dexter would improve either show despite Esposito and Lithgow's great performances? That would be a pretty categorical no.

People who should know say that they're speaking Korean with a genuine NK accent and I haven't seen a single nay sayer about that. There are ways to 'fake' it- like ship in a couple of defectors who have been in ROK a while- but there isn't any evidence of that. It's enough to shift the burden of evidence. 2 POWs out of 3000 supposed casualties is certainly an 'interesting' ratio though. If you had that ratio at, say, Mariupol it means the Ukrainians would have suffered more than 5 million casualties. Ukraine admits to 8000 captured, at the same ratio that would mean 12 million casualties for them over the course of the war. If you used the same ratio Ukraine claims for its troops for NK though NK casualties would be about 120 which seems far more plausible. See, now this is a perfectly crafted Bruce post. Claim a poster said something they didn't, put in an obvious falsehood (deployed to Ukraine, since, unless you're Liz Truss, Kursk is part of Russia) to provoke a reply and frame it all as questions.

Dredge is definitively not an RNG survival game. There isn't much random about it at all, and if you die it isn't because of a bad die roll.

Further evidence? It's the first evidence which isn't just an assertion repeated multiple times in the hope it becomes proof. Whether that evidence outweighs the requirement not to expose POWs to (note: direct quote from GCIII) "public curiosity" is... an open question. One suspects that protection, as always, only applies to people we like and not those we don't. Kind of knew that the 'wants to stay in Ukraine' thing was going to get repeated as soon as I saw it. The pow is pretty clearly saying what he thinks the interrogator wants him to. Which is of course the inherent problem with interviewing POWs.

That BBC article has the actual crash at 9.03, the crash is when you'd expect the data to cut out so it is 5 minutes. They've certainly worded it somewhat confusingly though. The Indie has a less confusingly written timeline confirming the 5 minute gap. (There was certainly something odd going on, but it could have been something as simple as both engines getting hit in the same strike- like the plane that ended up landing on the Hudson in New York. Without hydraulics/ power flaps will retract 'naturally' since the aerodynamic forces will always try to push them back flush with the wing. Similarly, while gravity will try to push landing gear and its bay doors down aerodynamics will push them back up. I'd say that a reverser working and the flaps not might be unusual but while I know landing on one reverser is safe I'd imagine landing with only one wing's flaps deployed would be extremely dangerous if possible at all due to the asymmetric lift it would supply)

"Flight data and ****pit voice recorders from the South Korean passenger plane that crashed last month stopped recording four minutes before the disaster," is not surprising or suspicious so long as that isn't before the reported bird strike. Which it wasn't, supposedly the bird strike was 5 minutes before the crash. (the plane certainly seemed to be landing in an uncontrolled state- way too fast (?looked like no flaps deployed so no hydraulics?), too steep, too far along the runway plus most obviously no landing gear deployed, which suggests a very significant adverse event that could well cut off power to the tail section- iirc where both the cоckpit and data recorders are located. Seems almost certain the hydraulics were out, and if my memory of Mayday/ Air Crash Investigation is correct that system has a lot of redundancy built in to it. If i had to speculate, blown turbine disc. That's basically a big bunch of shrapnel flying off at high speed)

Don't know how either, a variation on the theme of "they're all dead" always seemed far and away the most likely end game. The 'weakness' of that particular sub genre is that people project a lot more onto it than is there, though that's also its strength since the theorising is what often attracts people and keeps them around. That does lead to disappointment when they find out the mystery box isn't as much of a mystery as they'd like though. Response wise I've always found it an interesting comparison to another controversial ending from a similar era show in a different genre; thirty second fade to black while "Don't Stop Believing" plays on the jukebox. Which was also always the most likely ending if not exactly, uh, executed as might be expected.

Panama should petition to join NATO to protect itself from its expansionist near neighbour. So should Denmark and Canada for that matter. It'd be hilarious, if Trump wasn't soon to be the most powerful man in the world. The Democrats managing to put up candidates that lost to Trump, twice, should be recognised as the monumental achievement it is.

Using dlss and related for benchmarks claims is also another way to game benchmarks. 2x the performance (due to dlss) can also be achieved by changing how the dlss quality categories are defined. Less VRAM is great for built in obsolescence though, and lets Jensen add extensively to his spatula collection. Plus while they may have more VRAM a 7000 series radeon just plain won't be able to run the next version of FSR, so it's not like it's roses on team red either.

We certainly like to pay lip service to that, but it equally certainly doesn't take much for the mask to slip. See all the people outraged about African nations not following the west's lead on foreign affairs and who think they should be OK with colonialism because it was "decades ago" and "we're sorry for it". So sorry for it they want them not to have an independent foreign policy and slavishly follow the Euro lead. Not really sorry if it's treated as an inconvenience as soon as it's, well, inconvenient. In the end it's mostly about making people feel good about themselves. (Same thing tends to happen with internal inquiries over things like abuse in care. Almost always held after the perpetrators are dead or too old to be punished, and in many cases after the victims are too; coincidentally this means that it costs less since even the low ball compensation adds up rapidly. But Something Was Done, so we can all feel good about things and know nothing similar will ever happen again; until the next time it does) Al Jazeera supports pan Turkism as an Editorial Position, and Uighurs are Turkic. So they are pretty biased. Though they are at least pro Uighur, whereas western media are just anti China. Or to put it another way, Al Jazeera would still care whoever was doing the oppression of the Uighurs; if China was a western buddy it'd be crickets from the rest.

Economics is the main factor for sure. I do have some sympathy in that (the economic) regard as China has a pretty terrible record of running massive loss leaders to force competitors out of markets then jacking up prices once the competition is limited, especially in 'strategic' areas which telecommunications certainly is. (I had a Huawei wireless modem up until a few months ago which was absolutely fine. And also wasn't controlled by a fricking phone app unlike the new TPlink one I got sent as a mandatory replacement. Seriously, what's the point of controlling a wireless modem via a phone app that connects via the same wireless? Took an hour to set up because it didn't perform as the manual said it should; the old one took five minutes tops. If the old huawei wireless went down I could control it/ troubleshoot via network cable and its IP which saved a lot of hassles given skodafone's and our electricity supply's unreliability. With the new one if wireless is down you... use the wireless from your covid vaccine microchip to connect temporarily? Nope, hard reset and go through the 1 hour set up process again. Guess it's great for TPlink/ google since they can sell your collected data and provides yet another avenue for TLA snooping though)

It's 100% the bus. They're more expensive size wise (relatively; and they get hotter) as the process size shrinks so there's always a push to keep them as small as possible and it's not trivial to change on the fly either. If you have a 192 bit bus the options come in 6GB slices or you end up with something like the 970 with it's 3.5 fast 0.5 slow configuration; you cannot change it to 256 bit. You probably could change it to 128, but that would be slower, and for no purpose.

Hah, let's see if this actually works. For anyone wondering the discussion was originally in the random video games thread. Yeah, you can't really label a security concern 'valid' just because your side repeatedly states it. It's not like a meter ticks up 1% every time and once you get to 100 assertions it becomes proven. Adage #1 always applies to such things: "That which is asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence" Easily the most important thing to remember on social media at least. (Ironically, the sort of evidence they should be providing is indisputably there for the US forcing backdoors onto the computer chips and network infrastructure that they sell to everyone else. You know, the 'essential security' of IME/ PSP that is so essential it's absent from US government computers and- coincidentally no doubt- the CIA had a hacking tool specifically tailored towards. Oh yeah, and it was essential (apart from US government computers) right up until the Russians leaked that hacking tool. That is of course quite apart from the CIA/ NSA operatives who got busted soldering chips onto Cisco network equipment. Why does it quite literally seem that every accusation is an admission? Occam's suggests the reason for the targeting of tiktok/ telegram and huawei etc is the absence of western backdoors and other control, not the presence of 'unfriendly' ones)

Yeah, you can't really label a security concern 'valid' just because your side repeatedly states it. It's not like a meter ticks up 1% every time and once you get to 100 assertions it becomes proven. Adage #1 always applies to such things: "That which is asserted without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence" Easily the most important thing to remember on social media at least. (Ironically, the sort of evidence they should be providing is indisputably there for the US forcing backdoors onto the computer chips and network infrastructure that they sell to everyone else. You know, the 'essential security' of IME/ PSP that is so essential it's absent from US government computers and- coincidentally no doubt- the CIA had a hacking tool specifically tailored towards. Oh yeah, and it was essential (apart from US government computers) right up until the Russians leaked that hacking tool. That is of course quite apart from the CIA/ NSA operatives who got busted soldering chips onto Cisco network equipment. Why does it quite literally seem that every accusation is an admission? Occam's suggests the reason for the targeting of tiktok/ telegram and huawei etc is the absence of western backdoors and other control, not the presence of 'unfriendly' ones)

I watched S2 of The Diplomat and it felt like it stopped half way through the season there as well. It used to be no ad breaks on the BBC (as you paid a tv licence which covered their operating costs) and a maximum number of breaks per hour (one per quarter hour?) on the commercial channels. Don't know if it got changed, apart from the BBC, last time I was in Brittyland a lot of tories wanted to relax the restrictions because of satellite tv not being bound by them or something. The Last of Us was at least very expensive to make. Same for Fallout to an even greater extent- that's the problem with genre shows, if you want high verisimilitude they cost, a lot. Something like Squid Game really shouldn't be all that expensive though. For much of its content it ought to have a built in excuse for, say, things looking like sets rather than looking 'real'.

More like someone asking an AI to make a summary of a Bruce post. Which would be one way to make me feel sorry for chatgpt.

Which sums up the problem really. Morale is so low they're addicted to pr0n and deserting en masse, they're rubbish soldiers suffering 1000 casualties a day when they aren't comically blowing themselves and the Russians up accidentally; yet their morale is simultaneously so high they'd rather die than be captured and of their 1000 casualties only one has resulted in a (purported) capture while the bodies from the unsuccessful assaults are being burnt by Russians (while the Ukrainians... just watch on without shooting?) I mean really, Z comes up with some odd stuff at times but that defies any rational explanation beyond wanting some reason, any reason for the lack of evidence.

Testosterone 100% gives a benefit, for most sports. It's a scientific fact and the reason why there are limits. There's a lot more moral grey area for it than for synthetics though, since it is a natural product and like most natural products is produced naturally at a range of levels rather than one consistent one per sex. So nobody with any sense thinks Imane Khalif or Caster Semenya are 'cheats' for having high testosterone levels, since it's clearly natural for them and whatever the tests say they've clearly always identified as being female. The issue is pretty much exactly as I said before: when you try to apply scientific principles to humans you run into the 'problem' that humans aren't lab mice but are people, and that scientific tests tend to run to true/ false results. If you determine the natural testosterone levels for lab mice sexes and make your standard cut off at 3sd nobody cares about the 5% that are 'abnormal'. You have to do scientific tests to work out if people are cheating- too much EPO, too much testosterone, stimulants etc- which pretty much everyone agree has to be done, and they have semi arbitrary levels below which you're fine, and above which you're not. Science by definition runs on facts not feelings so if you have to define a woman and a man for sporting events scientifically and testably then some people are going to be very very upset- and justifiably so in the vast majority of cases- at being told they're the wrong sex or have to take medication to compete, because of some arbitrary result. You do have to have that arbitrary test though, so long as you want to have men and women competing separately.

Still recursive proof even then. Ukraine says it captures him, South Korea says it has been told by Ukraine they captured him, this is used as proof that he was Korean since it's been confirmed by ROK that Ukraine had a capture after being told the same by Ukraine. Was Korean, since he has now- conveniently- died. Imagine that sequence along with claims like no bodies because Russia are burning them all (after unsuccessful meat wave assaults no less) coming from Russia to prove South Korean troops were being used. Fairly sure that wouldn't be taken seriously by the Special Kherson Cats of the world. (In some ways it would be better if it weren't true for Ukraine, since photographing injured POWs for propaganda purposes is 100% a war crime; though a fairly minor one compared to others that both sides have been doing like drone dropping on those hors de combat. And of course one that is not likely to meet any resistance from those who have staked their rep on NK troops being there)

It is a technical term. In both senses: it is, for example, used as the basis of the IAAF transgender policy and biological sex is also a recognised scientific concept. Often the people using it pejoratively actually mean 'genetic sex' instead, but biological sex is a technical term. The problem comes about because there's a whole lot of non biological stuff associated with being a person which we don't apply to other creatures. Nobody cares if you describe an albino mouse as a 'mutant', a lot of people care if you describe a human albino as a mutant- but there's no scientific difference, and the term remains a real technical term. The difference is entirely that people see being called a 'mutant' as dehumanising when it's applied to a human. Which is fair enough, and if you wander around randomly calling albinos 'mutants' you're probably a bit of a knob outside of the scientific context. But it doesn't mean the term 'mutant' is not a technical term either.

Chernobyl is a great series so long as you don't think it's a documentary. Because every time there was a choice between accuracy and D R A M A they went option 2. Which also wouldn't be a problem, except you can't really do that with impunity when your tag line is "what is the price of lies?". If that's your tagline you need to be scrupulously accurate. (eg the 'bridge of death' is debunked, completely, which the writers obviously knew since they had an incredibly mealy mouthed disclaimer about it in the end slides; Dyatlov got radiation poisoning directing the firefighting efforts and never thought the core hadn't breached, the three waste water volunteers were not volunteers, easy to tell when their names were something like Akmetov, Apraxin and Barametov; and Legasov had no problems covering everything up for years in reality. Plus a load of other minor things, like the historical minister of coal at the time being an ex miner not some apparatchik. Makes for good tele him being an MBA type instead though)