Zoraptor

ISIS existed from 2005, it's a direct successor to Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq. Which was a separate entity which joined Al Qaeda as a franchisee so probably 2005 is the fairest time for its establishment. It became the Islamic State in Iraq, then ISIS, then formally 'Dawlah' IS as a 'Caliphate' once they reinvaded Iraq from Syria and took Mosul. Now, the rest is more interesting. ISI under Baghdadi sent support to the Syrian rebels- Jabhat al Nusra, the 'Support Front', now Hayat Tahrir al Sham and supposedly independent of Al Qaeda (now officially Hurras ad Din, in Syria)- while it was still under the umbrella of Al Qaeda, its very name tells you that it did exist before the US gave them weapons, though it was not significant at the start. They had a lot of success though since they were ruthless, got support from US allies and eventually grew. In 2013/4 JaN split along the lines of Al Qaeda and ISIS loyalties, and a bunch of other groups joined ISIS, they reinvaded Iraq and took Mosul etc then became enemy #1. In terms of support for ISIS/ JaN from the US, there was quite a lot of it though most of it was clandestine and indirect, and hence deniable. By the measure of the US itself they definitely supported ISIS- almost all the top ISIS leaders including Baghdadi were held and released by the US previously, they operated with impunity for years and were armed and trained via operations like Timber Sycamore. Ironically, these are exactly the accusations the US levels at Iran to show they support Al Qaeda... To be fair, most of the arming and training done was to 'moderate rebels' that somehow despite the no doubt careful vetting joined decidedly non moderate ISIS later, and not directly to JaN, though they certainly knew that US allies (Turkey, Qatar) were supporting JaN directly. That is also the source of the infamous 'McCain meets Baghdadi' photo, while it isn't Baghdadi the 'moderate rebels' he was photographed with went on to become senior ISIS leaders. The US never, bar one occasion, significantly bombed IS if they were attacking the 'correct' targets and infamously never targeted their main source of revenue, oil, since most of that money was going to/ from Erdogan's son. The one occasion in which they did attack ISIS on a frontline with Assad they 'accidentally' attacked Assad's troops instead, and handed ISIS the main defensive position overlooking Deir Ez Zor airport. Indeed, that attack persisted so long that the Russians allegedly only stopped it by directly threatening to shoot down the Danish and Australian planes involved, after the senior US officer on the deescalation line was for some reason absent for 45 minutes. Overall there's no doubt in the slightest that the US under Obama was at minimum fine with ISIS, so long as it was attacking Shia militia and Assad, supported those who later joined it as 'moderate rebels' and even post Caliphate declaration tolerated it, so long as it was threatening their mutual enemies. It was only when they started threatening US interests that they became an evil that had to be stopped. It's very doubtful that Obama had any direct operational knowledge of most of this, but then if you use that excuse for him you have to use that excuse for Bush as well.

The US did use the Roman Republic as a model. Invading the Capitol with a mob was a pretty established tradition there especially in the later republic when the strain was showing.

It's the RTX thread, presumably he's talking about a 30x0 Aorus Master OC graphics card. Gigabyte's naming schemes are a bit annoying now they're using the same branding for GPUs and MBs but 700 quid would be fairly pricey for an Aorus Master motherboard.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the Express thought Norway was in the EU. If they're better than the Scum or the Daily Fail it's only because they have less people reading.

Thing is many of the Nazi techniques are visible in the politics of, say, Athens in the 5th century BC- and it's pretty unlikely that Cleon invented them either, no matter how much antipathy Thucydides and Aristophanes felt towards him. They're effective techniques in times of crisis or apparent crisis, always have been. The German 1932 elections really aren't a good comparison to, for want of a better term to describe the current US polarisation, 'Trumpism'. Why? Hitler got ~37% of the vote in 1932v1 after a load of race baiting nationalistic triumphalism during a massive Depression, that is for sure. But- and it's a but Sir Mixalot would appreciate- he then doubled down on all his electoral strategies and violence plus obstructed forming a government and in consequence got... 33% of the vote 6 months later, with 2 million less votes. His strategy actively turned people off and he only got to be Chancellor with that reduced share because Hindenburg was a tired old man in failing health, and frightened of commies. If it had been an alternative conservative war hero like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck as President- or a ten year younger Hindenburg- instead Hitler would not have been Chancellor. OTOH while it isn't of absolute importance in the US system Trump actually gained 12 million votes over 2016, it's just that Biden gained 15 million over Hillary.

Some of it* definitely looks like credibility shopping. Much of the rest is pretty lol. Some of it sounds like the sort of stuff that was cut from Witcher 3- Iorveth and the plague, Wild Hunt attacks Novigrad, Devil's Pit etc- most of which seems to have been cut for a sensible reason**. The trouble is that saying it was all cool 2 years ago isn't really credible from what we know of development, the logical answer is that it was just a buggy mess, but with a larger worldspace. The counter example for cut content is probably KOTOR2. Very short dev cycle, absolute masses of cut content/ retasked content. Remember its release state and imagine if they'd tried a release with the ~20% more content of the Droid Planet still in... *specifically "There will be major departures from the studio in the coming months". That's obvious, they happen after every single major release, successful or failed. Even the basic maths of it is pretty simple, if you had 300 employees and the average employment length was 5 years then you'd be losing an average 60 people per year even without contracts for specific projects running out. Wow, 60 people leaving in a year!!! Sounds major, but it's just attrition. Even if everyone stayed a ludicrous average of 10 years you'd still be losing 30 people to natural attrition. But, if you say departures will happen then when they inevitably do you look like a genius... **cutting stuff that simply wasn't working to make time for fixing stuff that mostly was. The only real loss from Witcher 3 was Iorveth, since that was almost certainly going to lead to a elf/ human Decision as in the prior two games. The two really stupid ancillary plot points in WItcher 3 both could be easily fixed if Iorveth was there- Iorveth was involved in the plague plot so Keira taking research to him would make sense, to Radovid... not so much; and Iorveth vs BROche with Geralt input makes infinitely more sense than Dijkstra deciding potential personal combat with a Witcher was a good idea.

If they'd said Epstein had been murdered Assange probably would have been extradited. But instead he 'committed suicide', while supposedly in supermax and under suicide watch, showing they were incapable of preventing people from killing themselves. Absolutely hilarious.

Maybe they could swap him for Anne Sacoolas, who unlike Assange is responsible for actually killing someone. (The extradition has been rejected, basically due to the US having an awful prison system)

Quoting myself, but unsurprisingly it turns out Microsoft itself was directly hacked via Solarwinds as well. About as unsurprising as them releasing the news on... New Year's Eve, where it would obviously garner a lot of attention and dominate the news cycle. At the moment they're claiming that the hackers could 'only' do read only stuff like, er, download source code etc, so no biggie. As the NPR article points out, there's an awful lot of nefarious stuff you can do without being able to write to a system.

NSA checking pngs for encoded stolen nuclear blueprints, but no, it's some neckbeard's favourite Linux distro and their collection of Moria clones hidden in those cute cat pics.

Faces melting off, starvation, diseased and dying siblings; six was about the age I first saw 'Watership Down'.

Expanse S5E5

4000 series will definitely be hot and power hungry judging by the leaks, possibly even more so than Ampere is. I'd personally suspect that Hopper will slip further and it will be more than a year between them. I would have thought a 2080Ti would be fine at very least until late next year. Lovelace almost certainly wasn't planned until quite recently, so it's likely to be a bit of a stopgap. Doesn't necessarily mean it won't be a good value stopgap though.

It seems unlikely they ever went for 'genuine' herd immunity, but more 'managed infection'. The theory was that you'd have a sort of ping pong situation with lock downs where you'd lock down, the rate would drop, and then rebound as soon as the lock down ended resulting in a perpetual up/down cycle- andor perpetual unsustainable restrictions- so they wanted to smooth out the cycle while exposing only those at least risk. That would result in similar overall infection numbers, increased immunity in the overall population and less economic damage with no spikes in infection numbers that would overwhelm the health system and cause a lot of excess deaths. They got aspects right and had some unusual circumstantial situations (very rapid vaccine development) that made them look more stupid than deserved, but overall you can't really argue that the approach was a success when the death rate is considerably higher than their neighbours, and they got no economic benefit either.

kopite7kimi does seem to think that Lovelace (AD102) will be 4000 series rather than 3x50 or supers, and he's usually accurate. Probably Q1 2022 is the realistic estimate, though it would depend on how much if any actual improvement it will have over Ampere and no doubt they'd like to have them available for xmas/ NH winter as that's big season. Presumably Hopper would then be 5000 series, perhaps a year after that. Samsung '5nm' is a bit of a punt though. It's an iteration/ rebranding of their 7nm process much as '8nm' is an iteration/ rebranding of their 10nm, done because neither of the parent nodes are very good at all. Last I checked there was literally one customer for Samsung's 7nm due to teething problems, and it was Samsung themselves. If ~19000 CUDA cores, ie +80% over Ampere, is accurate that's going to be an absolutely massive chip even if they've done it by moving from doubling on Ampere to tripling up on per core resources/ dependencies, and on a hot and unreliable node. But it can't be TSMC 5nm as Apple has that booked out, and AMD is buying every available wafer on 7nm. Slightly OT, but the US government would have been far better off paying Global Foundries to make a 7nm plant in Arizona than getting TSMC to make one. Top end fabrication is now a near monopoly, and GloFo's (well, really IBM's) 7nm process was actually better than TSMC's, they just couldn't get financing for it.

Probably want a settlement. That's the problem with caving to Sapkowski's sellers' remorse when they didn't have to, shows you're an easy mark.

Yes, that's one of the things which is simplistic in the explanation. Epidemiological matters tend to be rather less exact/ precise than you'd like from scientific stuff. 'Herd immunity' itself being a prominent example, since its seldom actual immunity that is being talked about but rather protection against uncontrolled spread. The weak immune response I mentioned for respiratory viruses in general is because it's fundamentally difficult for the immune system to get at a respiratory tract infection as compared to a more general infection- epithelial cells have the 'outside' on one side, after all. So you can have a beautiful immune response to a vaccine but still get a mild infection because the immune system has difficulty reaching the infection site (and for some people it will simply be ineffective for whatever reason). There's also the dichotomy between SARS-CoV-2 as a virus, and covid19 as the effect of the virus. The most simple example would be a linear 95% reduction giving a death number around half that of annual flu, without taking into account any reduced spread due to reduced symptoms or outright immunity given. The virus itself would be present a lot more than that 95% reduction suggests, but you'd have reduced covid19 (the viruses effects) by a theoretical 95%. Practically it doesn't quite work that way of course, but the way it 'really' works is too complicated for an easy explanation- and would be well beyond my expertise level.

A vaccine usually gives better immunity over natural exposure especially for respiratory tract diseases as the lungs/ airways give poor natural immune responses. In terms of antigens, if it's an attenuated (or dead) virus the antigen is the same as natural, in the case for SC2 all the approved or nearly so vaccines use encoded pieces of the spike protein either via mRNA (Pfizer/ Moderna) or it being stuck into a different viral vector (A-ZOxford/ Sputnik) which is deliberately designed and won't (necessarily) be the specific antigen segment(s) targeted naturally. SC2 is not a slow evolver, it's a fast one. It's a ssRNA virus, they all evolve rapidly because ssRNA is inherently the most unstable genetic option- single stranded gives no redundancy, RNA is less stable than DNA. It isn't as fast evolving as its relative ssRNA virus influenza, but flu is an extreme outlier there due to the way it is assembled in segments. Spike had no known mutations for months, but the new UK variant has (iirc) 8 substitutions from the original spike, which probably explains its extra infectiousness. Since all the vaccines target spike due to it previously being stable mutations there are a big deal as they potentially reduce the induced immunity. 'Natural' herd immunity is not a viable strategy, but not because it's a slow infector. It isn't as fast as measles but again, that's a big outlier in terms of infectivity. Bit simplistic but, herd immunity works when the virus cannot find enough non immune people to continue spreading, so the R number drops, eventually below 1. That's ~65 to 70% for standard SC2, and probably a bit more for the new strain. IIRC the immunity for common cold coronaviruses lasts a few years, so using that as an estimate if something like 25% of the population was infected per year you'd never actually reach herd immunity levels because you'd not reach 75% immunity- those infected in the first year would be losing immunity as those infected in the 3rd were gaining it. That makes sense, because most viruses don't 'die out' naturally due to herd immunity, even those with 'permanent' immunity like chicken pox or mumps. They percolate in the background, occasionally flaring up when immunity levels drop enough. Vaccine based immunity should last a bit longer than natural since the immune response is stronger, but how long and how consistently long is a very open question; but with vaccines you can at least theoretically get to (effectively) 100% immunity (in this case the highest possible seems to be 95%) per smallpox and nearly polio.

It could be a red herring, though Discovery is certainly not much of a 'red herring' type show. They've occasionally done a good job of obfuscating things but once revealed they've been almost painfully linear.

So that wasn't the season finale of Discovery last week? Fricking Netflix making me look stupid. Looking forward to finding out what caused the burn, if only to see how dumb the explanation is.

No way to know with any confidence. Hopper is still a fair way out and would be expected to slip somewhat if it really is a MCM design since that's likely to have teething problems. 2 years seems to be a reasonable estimate, I'd suspect maybe a bit longer. Sub generational there's likely to be an Ampere refresh at some point maybe a year after Ampere's initial release, ie around 9 months away. That's assuming AMD is releasing RDNA3 as scheduled.

In the non EE version of Icewind Dale the key to the Yxunomei fight was choke points and using Messenger of Sseth (? or whatever that speed bow was called) well. But really, single player game, play on whatever difficulty you want and don't feel bad about it. Especially if it's the first playthrough.

Most of the international stuff on that list is neolibs/cons neolib/ conning. Dalai Lama reincarnation is to annoy China who wants to appoint its own Dalai Lama when the current one dies instead of the one anointed by the Tibetans. Sudan was bribed to recognise Israel- not at all popular, internally- and that's part of the bribe, Nepal has a border dispute with China, Ukraine has a border dispute with Russia, Cambodia is seen as a bit of an influence battleground with China (plus Pakistan, Burma, and even Tunisia). There's a certain amount of irony in things like the Sudan situation which is obviously not America first in any real respect, but Israel first, but such things are in general the cost of running an empire with the alternative being surrendering influence to others. Which may be OK with the Guard Dogs of the US, but isn't with the vast majority of the ruling classes who write the bills. Look forward to a lot more such things from Biden and Harris, since their foreign policy will be failed neolib policy after failed neolib policy, because if at first you don't succeed keep going perpetually because anything else is failure.

Expanse S5E4 (minor spoilers)