TheOtherJake
Not really. The money is going to American workers producing military hardware. Most of that is the US upgrading to new equipment and giving away the old for a low price.
This sounds like right wing fox news style nonsense IMO.
When an authoritarian dictator invades a foreign country, there is one giant overwhelming lesson about what happens when others act passively or appease the criminal. This simple fact should slap anyone a hundred miles down the road for suggesting appeasement is a sound policy. This only ends with the end if Putin, much like the Nazis only ended with the end of Hitler. Anything less will result in WW3 as a guaranteed outcome. It will be more one sided. The entire Russian GDP is less than just the state of Texas. But it will be nuclear and era ending, likely with the majority of surviving humanity in the southern hemisphere.
If anything, we should be giving Ukraine absolutely anything they want right now. Let them win before we have to go over there and start dying to stop Putin somewhere halfway across Europe. Putin has proven he will never stop trying to conquer. He is the new Hitler. He keeps power by force and what he has called ‘convenient idiots’ that follow whatever misinformation they are given. It is a propaganda misdirection scheme to talk about things out of context like saying military spending in Ukraine is somehow on the US tax payer. This is completely wrong and intended to provoke people that can’t look at an issue and think for longer than the headline.
Never forget the bribery of the criminals serving on the Supreme Court.
It is a shit show from top to bottom.
Endless Sky. The save game is a text file. Save a file on the mobile app (F-Droid), and on the PC (Flatpak), and note the last line. This is the line you must swap to transfer the save file. It is the first game I have played on both practically. The game mechanics are different between the two and you need to alter your strategy accordingly. On mobile, I travel with a ship setup for boarding pirate vessels and never target enemies directly; all of my guns are automatic turrets. I just use a fast ship and travel with a large group of fighters. It is more of a grind on mobile, but it can be used to build up resources and reserves. The game is much bigger than it first appears to be. You need to either check out a guide or explore very deep into the obscure pockets of the map.
Gimp
I won’t touch the proprietary junk. Big tech “free” usually means street corner data whore. I have a dozen FOSS models running offline on my computer though. I also have text to image, text to speech, am working on speech to text, and probably my ironman suit after that.
These things can’t be trusted though. It is just a next word statistical prediction system combined with a categorization system. There are ways to make an LLM trustworthy, but it involves offline databases and prompting for direct citations, these are different from Chat prompt structures.
I just got a Llama 2 70B LLM (offline chat AI) working on my laptop. That is a much larger (smarter) system than I thought was possible on a laptop. It takes every bit of 64GB of RAM, and it is about as fast as AOL instant messanger on bad 56k dialup, but it works.
I think I also fixed my problem that stopped me from using text to speech AI. Now I just need to figure out speech to text, get a few billion dollars, and make an iron man suit.
The best years of YT before 2017, there was an advanced maker and DIY tech culture revolving around people sharing projects and content just to share it. That died. This all pro CC thing has an up side to some extent, but it also lobotomized YT. Peertube might eventually get to the same kind of utility level, but it needs a lot of time and momentum to get there.
I find it interesting how much of a difference things like “not going” versus “no” can create just under the surface. Like we can’t really address them in-situ directly, but they do have an impact in many situations.
Just to pick on this example in hyperbolic magnified context, “not going” is like argumentative banter IMO, whereas a simple “no” is concise and respectful.
I grew up in the southeastern USA, where racism and stupidity are common. The tendency is for isolated communities and ostracism. Personally, I try my best to be aware of this so that I can avoid acting this way as much as possible.
Nearly twenty years ago I had a business relationship with a Taiwanese man. We got along fine, we even had a lot of peripheral interests in common, but the subtle cultural differences made him difficult for me to do business with. So much of business and negotiating is about reading people and subtle context. A lot of that gets lost between the language cracks with stuff like “not going” has more contextual impact.
I’ve lived in Southern California for many years now. Here Spanglish is common. Nothing stands out IMO as something worth mentioning. I’m sure there are instances. I just don’t pay much attention to it. I do notice how living in an openly mix culture makes a gigantic difference in how people tend to lean into prejudice. I haven’t been to many other cultural regions, but intuitively, I imagine this is universal; where any regional culture that tends to isolate will also display prejudice amongst the least intelligent members of the group.
I wonder if these compatibility divisions are really something deeper and related to evolutionary forces at play. Like if all complex life displays this same type of social isolationism at various levels that ultimately drives speciation. I don’t mean that in any kind of justification for isolationism or prejudice. It is just an observation of the forces that divide and maintain the division, like a social component in addition to geopolitical factors and time.
I loved Dread and Prime 2. I tried playing Super Metroid on switch, but the controls are just too poor to pull off the advanced combination moves with the slow low quality emulation. I’m disappointed that there are not a dozen Metroid titles on the switch. Everything in the Prime series should be ported.
I’m mostly referring to the long hiatus(es) before Dread, and all of the nonsense from developers other than Retro Studio. I understand they were probably in a funky position when it came to writing and coding for a new 3D engine after all of the Prime series had played out the life of the prior engine. IMO, the entire SDK for Nintendo hardware should account for key franchise titles like Metroid. These games should have story boards and plans from first light of new hardware. The plans should always include classic titles too. My biggest complaint about Nintendo is the low quality of most titles on the platform. They are too focused on recruiting developers instead of quality games. Sure there are some great games like BotW, TotK, and Dread, but I’m not going sifting through all the junk in their store to try and find anything else worth playing. I got a couple of titles that a lot of people recommended, and hated them with no recourse and they cost as much as good games. I would have paid for and played all of the Prime series if it had been ported, but Nintendo totally fails at maintaining their legacy titles effectively. It is this lack of availability now, and the stupid fumble of letting extra developers with their own forked vision into the franchise that I am calling a fumbled opportunity.
