Zoraptor

Israel caught killing 15 medical workers. Well, it's a pretty obvious planned ambush/ execution really rather than a killing; vehicle left in middle of the road like it's an emergency, waiting until everyone has got out to open fire and coordinated firing. Not a single circumstance as the Israelis repeatedly claimed as they sped ran the Narcissist's Prayer. Actually no, the last is unfair. The Israeli Foreign Minister wasn't technically lying at least when he said "the IDF did not randomly attack an ambulance" since they deliberately attacked multiple. Kind of telling that even with that sort of evidence it only "appears" to contradict Israel's evidence, according to the BBC- Israeli evidence was absolutely explicitly that the ambulances were not properly identified and had no lights on. Ho hum. (At least one eerie- well, not really- similarity to the new Syrian government led by indicted war criminal and terrorist Al Jolani Al Sharaa (note, they are the same person. You probably wouldn't know from the press coverage though) sending sanctioned ethnic cleansers into ethnic minority areas and being astounded at their actions- the Israeli unit involved has been repeatedly accused of extra judicial killings etc by Israeli rights groups. At least this time they weren't dumb enough to post it to tiktok. Shame all the disciplining went into telling them not to publicise their war crimes rather than not to commit them though. By the way, noted orthopaedic surgeon Adnan al Bursh's body still hasn't been released by Israel despite him definitely not dying under torture)

It would take a while for the effects to be felt, if they are felt. But in theory at least elsewhere prices should drop as US prices rise and demand drops there. Though of course there are many outside the US who would like to keep the high prices even with greater supply, not least AMD/ nVidia/ Intel. Retailers would also love massive margins on greater sales numbers, hence the April 1st reference. (It's a bit of an open question how much computer stuff is going to be subject to these tariffs, though they most likely will. "Semiconductors" are specifically excluded. But, previous policy suggest that that is for the base chips only, not packaged GPUs- and presumably CPUs too. Finished GPUs were subjected to tariffs in 2024 under Biden, bringing back those imposed under Trump1, to try and force them to be assembled in the US)

I was wondering how NZ had the 20% tariffs on US goods claimed and, of course, it turns out we don't. The highest Import Duty charged is a princely 5 (five) %*, and that only on selected goods. Turns out that they count 15% GST (VAT/ sales tax) as a tariff to get to the 20%. Of course everyone here pays GST, including on stuff made here so apparently we've been accidentally tariffing ourselves for 40 years. *would have been zero on everything under the TPPA too. I will never be sad the US pulled out since all the crappy provisions that were going to be foisted on us undemocratically went with them; but still.

And one of the really obvious responses is to start properly taxing Facebook/ Google/ Apple etc instead of letting them get away with massive tax evasion, charge them for use of IP in AI training, force them to actually comply with regulations and the like. Might be a bit of bad news for Ireland if the taxes get fixed, but limited sympathy given their economy is built on filching tax revenue off everyone else. Less demand for video cards for the US due to increased prices there --> more for the rest of us --> more demand satisfied --> drop in prices elsewhere. Only 48 hours too late.

I rather liked this article from TechPowerup. Just the right amount of vaguely plausible. All those missing ROPs from the 5000 series must have gone somewhere, surely, so why not onto other cards? (Obviously in the real world Jensen would have flogged them off as 5090Ti and at a premium, so not all that plausible)

I'd say The North Water is a horror series, just not a supernatural one. Not as much so as The Terror for sure though. Took me a while to work out who Colin Farrell was playing, basically unrecognisable from his early self.

The Terror S1 is excellent. The cast(ing) is absolute god tier. I'm not sure if the more, um, stereotypical book's author elements worked as well on the screen as on the page, but that was a fairly minor complaint. (Dead City had the problem that everything after the Knock Knock scene in ep2 was a let down since it reminded you Negan didn't have to be mopey- and it followed all the old and by this point exceptionally tired Walking Dead tropes. Probably not as much as the Rick/ Michonne series, but still, opportunity lost to do something actually different. OTOH, that Knock Knock scene is absolute cinema, and New York was much improved from last time I visited. Personally I preferred the Darryl Dixon series though it too was more than a little tropey and not as interesting as it should have been, except for the scenery. Also quite hard to suspend disbelief at the Parisians' willingness to speak English)

That reads ever so very very slightly revisionist- if only the Ukrainians had just done what the US said they'd have been at the doors of the Kremlin! Some of it is extremely questionable. First time anyone had mentioned NATO wanted veteran brigades for training for the 'counteroffensive'; all the talk at the time was they wanted new units that hadn't learnt bad habits. As with everything that went wrong it was Syrsky that stuffed that up... which is just a tad convenient. There's also the rather obvious dichotomy of using a quote about "tenuously defended Melitopol"- ok, supposedly intercepted- when Melitopol was anything but tenuously defended and very very publicly not so and the whole thrust of the argument is that Ukraine needed lots of troops to break through. Indeed, if you passed that intelligence on Ukraine would be justified in thinking they needed fewer troops there; though fundamentally if 7 brigades aren't enough to break through on a twelve mile front 12 won't be either. All you'd get is a massive traffic jam and more targets for Russian airpower.

Dunno, I was kind of going to ignore the survey but now I feel like I see what's up .. They should get non completion figures, ie people who started and stopped before completion. They will also get when they stopped. I imagine they will also get some, uh, feedback in other ways on the idea. In the end, it's a bad survey and a bad idea. There is a section that let's you rate the idea more directly. That should have come before the 'pick three things five times that you think other people might like' section though for sure if they want an honest response since that section was bad. All 'imagine what other people like' sections are bad on principle and worthless statistically. Not a good approach even if you liked the idea. As it is it does rather feel like an MBA put it together to confirm the appeal of their brilliant ideas, but personally I tend to think it's just GOG being cackhanded again- let us not forget their marketing team thought saying their service was shutting down was a great idea at one point. The vibe is more overenthusiastic intern to me. A competent MBA would, of course, outsource to a controlled focus group to make sure they got the results they wanted and with minimal backlash. I do rather like them making the click through test (the question that determines whether people are reading the questions or answering randomly) extremely obvious instead of asking the same question multiple times with slightly different wording.

You may need to ask @Sven_ about that since I'm 90% sure it's KCD2 rather than 1. Sounds like it wouldn't be timed though, based on the first game. (If it's the same as the first game when there are timers they are fairly generous unless the quest is obviously urgent, ie someone is dying --> don't go off rescuing cats on the other side of the map. Meet someone though, generally not timed unless you're told to do it urgently or there's an urgent framing device eg they're going to be attacked or similar)

Right now, I'm playing Diablo IV and Control Ultimate Edition. They promote world peace and harmony much like my other hobby of ikebana. I really ought to be enlarging my mind by traipsing around medieval Bohemia instead since KCD2 is out on GOG now but no rush. That always reminds me of the story from... Thief Deadly Shadows*? about them playtesting a level with a bunch of off the street type gamers. They were told (in game) under no circumstances should they leave the party they were at. Most didn't have a clue how to progress because, of course, you were meant to ignore the guards etc and leave the party. Which lead to a load of hand holding type stuff being added because it actually was necessary. *or Dishonoured/ DXHR maybe? [from context, almost certainly was in fact Dishonoured]

I played the GOG version so never had the 'fun' of the initial release. By the time I played it it definitely had (some at least) checkpoint saves and save on exit. The lack of checkpoint saves would definitely have driven me bonkers given the general stability of the game and the reliability of its cinematics at the time.

Murdoch hasn't had a role with Sky News (UK) since 2019. It was sold off as part of/ a consequence of the Disney deal. Still owns Sky News Australia though, for what it's worth. Sky UK is owned by Comcast now, which I guess potentially does make them a globalist media mouthpiece; at least compared to Uncle Rupes.

On KCD romances.. The map in KCD has quest markers and Henry shows up on it, same as any modernish game. It also has fast travel and the rest of the modcons. It only doesn't show Henry's location (or have fast travel) in hardcore mode. Which is what I'm playing. No matter how much of a crusty boomer gamer you are you wouldn't have much fun playing KCD in hardcore mode first time through. A Women's Lot overall is a great DLC, might actually be the 2nd best I've played.

There isn't really a natural break where you're told to go off and do your own thing, beyond the occasional note about having to wait for things to develop or similar. The main story is largely the excuse for Henry to not act like a typical feudal obligate and be able to toodle off randomly for days on end. Indeed, many of the main story quests are timed in some fashion, at least after you have triggered them. eg if you're told to go off and investigate something and there's an obvious bad consequence to not doing so you can be relatively sure they don't expect you to do it instantly, but do expect it to be done in a reasonable timeframe. If you don't, typically the obvious bad consequence happens but you can still progress. Having said that, if you've done the urgent part so the crisis is resolved and all you have to do is report back with some non time sensitive information... well, sometimes that could take a while.

Pete Hegseth is just showing the administration's commitment to open government and freedom of information. Well done sir! (Would have been funnier if it had been Telegram rather than Signal though)

Sounds like a pretty ideal situation from a DOGEesque perspective though. The ideal there is that a lot of people don't turn up and get cut off so they make yuuuge savings on federal cash that they can crow about- while also assuming everyone who didn't turn up was a fraudster rather than bedridden/ sick/ uninformed about the requirement/ got annoyed at the process/ were unable to turn up etc. And yeah, using that as evidence they can then say that there was massive fraud under Biden and Obama. The only negative is that you don't really want to annoy old people since they vote, though you can at least be fairly confident that the people who vote will mostly be the ones to turn up for verification even if it is a bit onerous.

One of the methods for dealing with hardened underground facilities is a nuclear version of the bunker buster (B61m11). It's extremely likely Israel has an equivalent. Funny thing is, of course, that there was a mechanism for stopping Iran getting a nuclear bomb without the supreme irony of using nukes to do it: the JCPOA. Donald Trump should seriously consider drone striking whoever decided to renege on that deal for causing so much unnecessary threat to the world and to Israel.

Did they hit energy infrastructure anyway, only place reporting a blackout was Slaviansk which is only 15km behind the lines now. That's a far cry from previous attacks where blackouts were extensive. The art of the deal, folks.

Pretty similar- identical maybe, since neither is high on the details- to the proposal that got derailed by the Kursk incursion and then brought back by Zelensky 2 weeks ago. Far less than the US/ Ukraine proposal of a week ago though. Gotta lol at the one peculiar (not really) difference in the two readouts from white house and kremlin.

Ukraine was still getting intelligence from everyone except the US, and still had recon drones and the like. The intelligence they got from the US would also not instantaneously have become outdated, there would have been a decent lag. Further, Ukraine launched some relatively successful local counterattacks elsewhere (eg Toretsk and Pokrovsk) over the same time frame. If lack of US intelligence was immediately crucial you'd expect those to have failed and Russia to have made large gains elsewhere as well. End of the day they were in a narrow salient supplied by a single road, and that's perhaps the classic set up for failure- it was also precisely the situation the US has warned Ukraine about getting into and staying in repeatedly under the Biden admin; and which had resulted in sudden chaotic retreats multiple times previous. Default is that it happened again, without convincing evidence against. The main thing that seems to have changed on the battlefield was the number of fiberoptic drones deployed by Russia and their resistance to jamming. The Ukrainian attempt to fix that issue happened roughly 6 weeks ago, well before the Trump Zelensky meeting or intelligence freeze. It didn't succeed. (Overall, it's a classic compounding attrition scenario. You need to send in, say, 50 vehicles with supplies and replacements. Losing a few percent is fine, but if you start losing 10% it's not. Each vehicle lost has to be replaced, but so does its supplies, so you end up sending 55 vehicles in while using 110% of the previous supplies and needing 5 extra vehicles. You lose 10% of the vehicles on the way back too, so that's actually 10 per day needing replacement. But, each vehicle lost on the road makes your other vehicles more vulnerable as they have to slow or even stop because of their debris; and good luck stopping to try to recover vehicles. But if you cannot maintain that 50 vehicles your ability to resist constantly drops, and eventually everything falls apart. Numbers illustrative, obviously)

Sounds like prime cope. The pattern in Kursk was the same as in every other localised cauldron/ salient the Ukrainians have had in the war. Lose ground slowly, but steadily, then it all goes in a rush. See Avdiivka and Vuhledar over the past ~year. This is just highly prominent because Kursk had been hyped up by the press and Ukraine.

Eh, not sure you'd even get the thoughts and prayers from many of them I'm afraid. Last Trump presidency the one thing every liberal commentator and tv channel loved him doing was bombing Syria. What's the Brian Williams quote? "Today he truly became our President"? Never underestimate the ability of someone to see their groups actions as uniquely justified or to shrug their shoulders because it's all a bit too hard for them. "A liberal opposes every war, except the current one".

I am not at all surprised to hear that, he does rather seem the type. (I did wonder if he was old enough yet to get Shingles, which was a bit dumb given I knew who his father was)

He's probably just an idiot. ie Chicken Pox/ varicella infection fairly famously doesn't give you lifetime immunity- hence Shingles. Would it be ironic if Mr Kennedy got a highly painful (but non fatal) condition due to not taking the vaccine that would prevent it? Yes, and not in the rain on my wedding day sense.