Zoraptor

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)

That is kind of what happened historically here on earth though. Lots of voyages planned in completely misplaced confidence on the assumption nothing (substantive) would go wrong and in the expectation that everything will just work itself out once you were going. Let's not forget the greatest voyage of discovery here was Kupe Leif Erikson Chris Columbus confidently looking for a new route to India. Anything other than wide eyed optimism tends to mean you don't go at all.

Most surprising thing about AM4 was how good the MB manufacturers have been about BIOS updates since there's no point having new CPUs if the BIOS never gets updated to recognise them. Indeed, my 7 1/2yr old MB last got a BIOS update in September, ie 3 months ago. (with a few exceptions. think the pretty expensive asrock Taichi x370 went eol after only a couple of years)

Yep, and personally I wouldn't call it terrorism either, despite the method. That does mean it isn't terrorism when Russia does it either though. That seems pretty standard, for war, and the complete lack of any statistics beyond an age range is telling. That always suggests the absolute number is low. You'd have been better off quoting their most recent report about sexual mistreatment of POWs. Even then, the same thing is happening right now in Israel, and was very well documented as happening with the US as well. So there's an excellent case that's just par for the course for warfare but being highlighted here primarily because it's the bad guys doing it. Most of the claims of rape being systemic still resolve down to one single Ukrainian official- who got sacked for lying too outrageously.

Kursk is definitely the biggest graveyard for western weapons as Ukraine has mostly used their best units there and they're mostly armed with western weapons. (The only weapon system that is 'dominating' in Ukraine are $1000 chinese drones. The vast majority of everything else on both sides has massively underperformed in both absolute terms and in terms of expectation. In terms of the video things like the Strid122 are dominating so much that Ukraine are down to 2 (two) operational vehicles... and barring a couple of artillery strikes they've all been got by those cheap drones)

Well sure. IMO neither sides' conduct in Ukraine meets the threshold of being systemic though, for those two crimes.

The official USA position is rather too, uh, flexible to be of any use. Node #1, and thus by far the most important, in the flow diagram of actually determining whether something is 'terrorism' is "is the entity doing it friendly to us?" So this wouldn't be terrorism for the US, nor is Israel blowing up Iranian scientists or Lebanese medics who obtained pagers from HezB; but blowing up an Israeli or Ukrainian scientist would be, and AlQ blowing up a US military vessel (USS Cole) definitely is. If it's a friendly doing it (USS Liberty/ USS Stark) it's just a tragic mistake. State actors blowing up a civilian vessel also isn't always terrorism- see the Rainbow Warrior- nor is blowing up civilian infrastructure like nordstream. Of course that's node #1 for basically every country's definition of terrorism. Russia blowing up the head of Ukraine's nuclear program wouldn't be terrorism to them, but almost certainly would to the US and Ukraine. Ukraine trying to blow up the Kerch Bridge is terrorism*; Russia trying to blow up the Zatoka Bridge isn't etc. *for that the method most definitely crosses the threshold by any objective measure. Can't get much worse than using a civilian as an unwitting delivery mechanism. But even then node 1 applies for the vast majority in the west. The difference is that that happens in every war, and the more realistic types tend to acknowledge that that is inherent human nature. Give some people guns and a feeling of impunity (or utter fright/ anger/ hatred) and that's the way they react. People like to pretend otherwise and that their side is just inherently more civilised, but the more realistic know there hasn't been a conflict in history where rape and murder doesn't happen. The 'terrorist' attacks are 'worse' because they're a lot more deliberative. Someone sat down to plan the Moscow attack, someone sat down to plan the pager attack- and knew that a lot of them had gone to Lebanese medics as well as HezB.

Yes, though it isn't as bad as it sounds and does serve some purpose other than padding out the plot/ trying to humanise the characters. That's there to show that the jackal and his chief pursuer (Bianca) are different sides of the same coin- and ironically it completely fails to humanise Bianca. Who in many ways is a better Jackal than he is. Said it before but I'll say it again, their parallel lives stuff is very blatant. The bigger problem is probably the action sequences which make the Jackal look crap at his job and unbelievable that he'd be either undetected or uncaught for more than a few months at most. My overall rating for it improved quite a lot after the last episode. It was pretty obvious what was broadly going to happen if you had some meta knowledge but one thing was pure lol. Wouldn't be an unqualified recommendation by any means, but as someone who wasn't particularly invested in the previous material and wasn't expecting much I enjoyed it/ Just rather more in the way that I enjoyed 24 or The Night Agent rather than the way I enjoyed Thief/ Hitman (games, though I didn't actually hate the movie).

You could start with ordering some lovely nuclear submarines, maybe. For added sass make them Le Triomphant class. (Guess Denmark is glad he's moved on from buying Greenland)

The only thing definitely worse than having Ciri as protagonist would be bringing back Geralt as one. (Really though, I take some issue with the dev comments. The CDPR Ciri certainly wasn't very layered or amazing as a character; and wouldn't even be an option in half (? 2/3? since I can't remember the exact end conditions) the endings they wrote themselves, ie not in the Empress/ Bad endings. It's like writing TW1 with options then when TW2 comes around insist that Geralt could only really romance Triss. If that's the case, write it that way from the outset and don't give the option)

Russia has 100% been assassinating people in Ukraine, and outside- the guy who stole the helicopter and murdered his comrades who got popped in Spain in February for example. They (generally) haven't publicised it nor admitted it was them, and as with pretty much everything war related it's illegal for Ukrainians to report on those that happen internally without the approval of the Censor.

Saw a thumbnail and thought it was our finance minister who had resigned. Would have been a lovely Christmas surprise. (Too much to hope for I guess, we'll get two more years of brunette Liz Truss wondering why the reality of a country's economics doesn't match her excel spreadsheets. Yes really; she's easily our worst fm since Muldoon nearly 50 years ago and exactly what you'd expect some someone with a degree in english whose only work experience has been in PR and politics)

Ultimately the problem there was limited fab space, which was not really an AMD problem per se since the only realistic way it might not have been a problem would be if they'd held onto their fab arm (now Global Foundries). But then they may have gone bankrupt trying to hold onto it. Without a valid competitor everyone bar nVidia/ Intel was squashed onto the limited TSMC capacity, which they had to book a year in advance based on what they thought might happen. Since there was limited fab space and more or less unlimited demand it was always a question of what would make AMD more money; and that was CPUs. You can simply make a lot more of them per wafer than a GPU, and at top end the profit margin for them compared to a consumer GPU is massively greater in profit/ die space terms. So when they did acquire extra capacity it went into satisfying the CPU demand. The situation where AMD could have done better GPU wise was one where they could up production exactly how they pleased. Then the relatively low margins would have been fine since there would have been no intra AMD product competition for space. If nVidia was really limited by Samsung's capacity/ reliability they could have taken significant share.

At least they were better than the equivalents in TW2. Having to play some random dude with a claymore and no skills/ powers for a bit was not exactly the single greatest idea mankind has ever had.

The aim of youtube (or facebook/ other sm) isn't to give you content you like, it's to drive engagement which is a rather different thing. It may not work on you personally, but it works in general and on a lot of people, and outrage bait drives engagement massively which results in the vicious circle of more of it being made. As for the complaints themselves... there isn't much point dealing with the fringe ends on either side. In general though, there are few complaints about well written characters. People don't complain about Princess Leia in SW, or Sarah Connor in Terminator; or playing femshep or Lara Croft or Cassandra from AC: Odyssey. Indeed, they tend to get complaints from the other side ('designed for male gaze' or whatever). As for what the more reasonable people tend to complain about, well, I can only really use the same example I did last time something similar came up. Basically no one complains about Omar Little from The Wire being gay. Because he's a well written character with realistic (or at least having verisimilitude/ consistency enough that you can easily forgive the very occasional bit of dramatic license) motives and behaviour who happens to be gay as well. Then you compare him with someone who did get a lot of flack for being gay: Anthony Rapp's character from ST: Discovery. I watched four seasons of that ending only months ago and I cannot remember his character's name, as his only character trait was... being gay and an engineer. His husband's only trait: gay doctor. They're extremely easy to dislike as characters as a result. It's not really a result of them being gay, it's a result of that being all that they are. If it's youtube or facebook that tends to be a bit too subtle a distinction.

You might not Bruce. Ciri is at least technically bisexual. It's mostly people taking the mickey out of those who object to playing the 'wrong' sex etc. Most of the people objecting to Ciri aren't doing it because she has ovaries. Ciri is a ludicrous choice for a protagonist canonically, and was quite possibly the least interesting character in the entirety of W3. Albeit W3 had an exceptionally strong cast of characters, with maybe two other misses though for different reasons than being uninteresting*. I'd be a lot happier if it were Triss or Phillipa if they aren't going to have character creation. It's kind of a perfect storm: Ciri should be massively overpowered, she isn't very interesting and they managed to, for once, write an almost perfect ending for a protagonist which there's a decent chance they're going to retroactively mess up now. *Witcher 3 spoiler

Some eastern european indie have released a trailer for their upcoming RPG. Guess it might be of some interest? (Ciri --> meh. Though it being Witcher 4 always made that choice more likely)

I suspect it's going to be hard to actually get hold of since the pricing is- compared to currentyear nV and AMD- certainly aggressive. You also have to wonder how many they'll make given it's not likely to have much of a profit margin due to the aggressive pricing. (The entirety of NZ's preorder stock sold out in minutes which is either an excellent indicator for demand, or rather a bad sign of supply) Hopefully enough for Intel to stick with their consumer offerings despite their current managerial etc issues.

The Whispered World: SE currently a giveaway.

Mr Bates vs the Post Office is excellent. I have been watching Day of the Jackal (up to e8, so two to go; doubt my views will change much though). In many ways it's very good, but it all rings a bit hollow. It has the trouble you always get when the script calls for writing a very intelligent/ competent person (well, two here really) of it being far more easy to describe someone as very intelligent and have people say he/ she is than to show it. The demands of the drama require him to do pretty stupid stuff in order for there to be a plausible set up for him potentially being caught; yet his chief pursuer still has to have extremely specific knowledge and make huge and implausible leaps to get close. Fortunately it isn't quite enough to be outright implausible, but it runs a very narrow line. It's also deeply unsubtle with its parallels between the lives of the Jackal and his chief pursuer and how they're same coin, different sides. OTOH, I've seen people flabbergasted when the comparison is pointed out, so it clearly wasn't too unsubtle for some. Eddie Redmayne is very good? in the role. The question mark is because you're always aware that it's Actor, Acting, whenever he's on screen; but that is how you'd broadly expect an assassin to act. The rest are functional, with Charles Dance being a bit wasted. None of the characters get much beyond archetypes and caricatures but this is, ultimately, higher brow 24 with pretensions so that works fine in context.