Friday
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
The UK's Office of Communications has become an international problem.
I've mentioned the UK's 'oi, bruv, can I see your porn loiscence'. Recently, I also admitted that the US beat them to it, and pondered if perhaps this was one place where the UK might not end up the embarrassingly backassward one.
We have an answer. Politico reports:
The UK’s Online Safety Act took effect Friday to shield minors from “harmful” content — not just pornography, but also material that is hateful, promotes substance abuse or depicts “serious violence.” The rules apply to any site accessible in the UK, even those based in the U.S. This means sites like Reddit, Bluesky and even Grindr now have to abide by the OSA’s speech regulations to stay online in the country.
Over the weekend, major U.S.-based platforms implemented measures to comply with the law, and promptly became harder to access. By using a VPN to simulate UK web browsing, DFD was able to confirm reports that content relating to Gaza on X and cigars on Reddit was more restricted in the UK than in the U.S. Some required verification checks necessitating a photo ID or a selfie to verify age. Other content was blocked entirely, though some X posts on Gaza were later restored. The UK law may not strictly apply to such content, but social media companies apparently aren’t chancing it. Gab, a U.S.-based platform that hosts Nazi and other extremist content, has gone completely dark in the UK to avoid financial and criminal penalties under the safety act.
Ostensibly, the law has a relatively constrained set of content service providers must block, and a larger-but-still-defined section that providers must keep away from minors. In practice, the paperwork and overhead costs are significant even if the UK never enforces the law other than to demand reports and just circular-bins them, and the banned content ranges from the steelman (CSAM) to the marginal (choking porn?) to the are we the baddies (sales of knives), and very little is well-defined ('foreign disinformation'). Media coverage of several police actions by the UK have already been restricted.
In turn, Gab (and some other targets) have provided those notices to reporters:
I attach a formal request (‘Notice’) for information under Section 100 of the Act addressed to Gab AI Inc. The Notice includes further details on the background to this information request, and Annex 1 to the Notice sets out the information we require from you. The deadline for providing the information is 11:00 GMT on 29 April 2025[...]
We acknowledge your legal representatives’ email of 26 March 2025 setting out your view that your service is not subject to the Act as you have no presence outside of the United States. We also note your intention not to respond to future correspondence from Ofcom. We would like to bring it to your attention that wherever in the world a service is based, if it has ‘links to the UK’, it now has duties to protect UK users. This includes if a service has a significant number of UK users, or UK users are a target market. These rules will also apply to services that are capable of being used by individuals in the UK and which pose a material risk of significant harm to them. As noted above, the Act only requires that services take action to protect users based in the UK – it does not require them to take action in relation to users based anywhere else in the world.
What are the penalties?
Failure to comply with this Notice may result in Ofcom taking enforcement action against you, such as requiring you to take certain steps to comply and/or imposing a financial penalty. The financial penalty could be up to whichever is greater of £18 million or, in certain circumstances, 10% of the person’s qualifying worldwide revenue. A daily rate penalty may also be applied in addition to a fixed rate penalty[...]
Other offences in relation to the Notices include: knowingly providing information that is false in a material respect; providing the information in an encrypted form so that Ofcom cannot understand it, with the intention of preventing Ofcom from understanding the information; or suppressing, destroying or altering information that is required under the Notice, to prevent Ofcom from obtaining the information or obtaining the information in the unaltered form. A person who is convicted of any of these offences may face imprisonment for a term of up to two years, or a fine (or both).
The British defense has revolved around saying that this isn't a free speech matter. Which, in turns, tells you about as much as you need to know about that 'foreign disinformation'.
This probably isn't the only reason that YouTube, Spotify, and a wide variety of other sites are spinning out age verification approaches of varying levels of credibility. But that's only because Australia's gone nuts, too.
FtSoA
3d ago
Right off the bat, let's see if you can admit a clear factual error or two. I really should have done this before writing the rest, but ah well.
Do you acknowledge that Iran's ballistic missile production facilities and launchers are not all underground? This is a very easy one.
Do you acknowledge that the volume of Iran's launches against Israel dropped off considerably? Here's a clue: https://jinsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Iranian-Ballistic-Missile-Estimates-6-26-2025-6.pdf
Frankly it's remarkable to see someone try to flip the script on one of the most one-sided wars in history, but then I suppose the Egyptians tried to pretend they had won the Yom Kippur War.
Also, both Israeli casualty reports and Qassam combat footage overwhelmingly shows the use of indigenous IEDs and other weapons that could only be manufactured locally. It would be silly for a cell based organization like Hamas to depend on imports.
Never did I say the majority of their stock was Iranian. But Iran has been a major supporter for decades.
The IDF very clearly tried to take Al-Khiam for a photo-op at the former detention center and failed.
That's not particularly relevant in evaluating the overall status at the end of the conflict, where Israel overwhelmingly kicked Hezbollah in the nuts by killing its leader, a bunch of its personnel, maimed a shit ton more of them, and also significantly reduced their missile stockpile, all while taking relatively light casualties and rendering the missile threat mostly ineffective.
Tellingly, they didn't do much to help out their pals in Tehran. Weird way to behave if actually they weren't hurting so badly. Kinda defeats the point of having an alliance.
If Iran were legitimately totally defenseless then why would Israel care about what Trump thinks?
Why would Israel care about what it's single most important ally thinks about a conflict it has been assisting with? Seriously? The stuff in Syria is small potatoes.
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
The most retarded bit of logic here is that if we, for the sake of argument, grant that you're correct about only IAF drones poking around Iranian airspace then, wow, the IAF is really capable of doing a lot of damage to buildings using air-launched missiles at scale. Also, hitting the Mashhad airport at 1400 miles strongly implies operating within Iranian airspace even with ALBMs.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israels-air-superiority-lets-strike-191600442.html
So all those photos of IAF aircraft loaded with bombs were just for propaganda purposes? Why? Who are they trying to convince? The U.S. and Iranian militaries know the reality regardless.
There's no good reason to believe the IAF is lying here, but you need it to fit your highly evidence-challenged view that actually Iran was the one winning this conflict. The real irony here is that the Iranians don't contest that the IAF was operating in Iranian airspace, they just pretended to shoot an F-35 or two down. You're doing more work than even the Iranian propagandists!
On the flipside, they had drones that were shot down so it's just as easy to imagine that Netanyahu simply didn't bother taking the risk. In this case the burden of proof that Israel was dropping bombs in Iranian airspace is on you, since basically all of the identified strikes look like the result of air launched missiles, not bombs.
Why send drones on obvious suicide missions if air defenses are not suppressed much at all?
The IAF demolished large buildings and took out at least one command bunker, we know. Hard and expensive to do that with merely missiles.
How many missiles do ya reckon this took? Would the IAF really use its fancy LORAs on a TV broadcaster?
Elbit Systems' share price rose by 5.43% in New York on Friday, and is currently up 5.94% on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-us-weapons-prove-themselves-in-iran-strikes-1001512893
There's plenty of evidence Israel dropped bombs in Iran, just none you find compelling enough that you have to accept it. You resist the obvious because your narrative collapses if actually the IAF did have air dominance and you can pretend they were going to run out of ALBMs before Iran ran out of its ballistic missiles.
Every indication is that he had no problem with Israel one sidedly bombing Iran forever, it was only when Iran started landing counterpunches that he became interested in deescalation.
Trump's change in preference came right after the U.S. strikes on the nuclear facilities, obviously. The volume of Iranian missile strikes was going down and Israel was not taking meaningful damage relative to Iran.
On the first day Israel went for a decapitation strike followed by regime change
Israel did not expect to get regime change that easily. Come on now. As far as we know, the Supreme Leader was not targeted (whether by impossibility or choice I'm not sure).
they reorganized and proceeded to return fire in sufficient volume to break Israeli AD nearly every day. They hit strategic sites at will
No, they very much did not. All those missiles, so few strategic sites hit. Blowing up grandmas doesn't win wars, even when they were able to do that.
on day 12 they were reduced to hitting a giant clock in Tehran
This is backwards logic. The IAF could afford to start hitting secondary targets on day 12 because they had been so successful the previous 11 days. It's not like they suddenly couldn't hit Tehran, as you've pointed out.
Had the war continued it would have continued to get worse and worse for Israel. Fortunately Israel was able to leverage the threat of direct American offensive involvement beyond choreographed bombings that result in zero injuries, otherwise the Iranians would have had little reason to agree to a deal.
There was no "deal" here. It was just an unofficial ceasefire. If Iran was on the verge of really turning the tide against their main enemy who did a surprise attack and killed a bunch of its top leaders and destroyed a bunch of their military and nuclear sites, why would they have stopped instead of getting even? They knew the U.S. really did not want to get drawn in beyond the attack on the nuclear sites. Why would Iran let Israel get away with it?
I'm not that cynical about BPD. As cases go, hers is far from the worst I've seen or heard of. At just about the exact same time, my best friend was having his ex throw dishes at him and breaking his MacBook in fits of rage, all while doing regular self-harm.
Neither of us were telling the other quite how bad it was, because we knew, as best friends, that we'd be obliged to intervene.
She didn't attack me with a knife, didn't steal from me, didn't cheat on me or anything remotely as bad. If she didn't provoke the fucking stupid and seemingly interminable arguments, that alone would be enough for me to accept her other failings. I'm hardly perfect myself.
I ran into some characters shortly after the breakup. I talked two people out of suicide, which really makes me wonder if they found dating apps after autocorrect switched away from doctor.
Hell, here's a rather detailed breakdown.
I meet crazy chicks inside the hospital, and crazy women outside. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if the medical definition of 'sanity' even exists anymore, or if the entire space of possible psyches has been claimed. I tell myself I've had really bad luck, and that I'm not Captain Save-A-Hoe.
(The ones who seem sane are all taken.)
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
3d ago
...Not gonna lie, you have to be really clever to come up with a genuinely dangerous thought. I am disheartened that people can be clever enough to do that and not clever enough to do the obvious thing and- no, wait, wrong script.
Regardless, thank you/fuck you for illuminating this possibility. I feel like this post is unironically a Basilisk-tier cognitohazard, maybe an even bigger one by virtue of plausibly working on any human with a heart instead of just aspies. Suddenly the lack of uh, visual imagery from my last failed LDR looks more like a blessing than an attachment-shaped hole, I would absolutely cheerily slide down the mountain of skulls to try this if I had decent material.
Although there's a second immediate thought, which I idly had before - I do have megabytes of emails and Discord logs, and did make/use character cards before, and did try re-enacting a particular typing style... hmm. Surely at this point I am too based and desensitized to AI to go full gosling.jpg, what's the worst that could happen? <- clueless
HereAndGone
4d ago
After all, few men are so much into MILFs that they would not enjoy a blowjob from a busty 16yo.
Yeah, but the allegations are not "blowjobs from 16 or 17 year olds who would be legal, depending what jurisdiction you were in", it's "Trump and Epstein raped twelve and thirteen year olds".
If it were just "sexy hot 17 year old" nobody would much care. It has to be "frightened coerced beaten thirteen year old" or nothing, because the mud has to be the blackest, dirtiest, stickiest mud to throw.
Politico, back in 2019, did an article on all the assault allegations (as of then) against Trump. While there's plenty of gross, disgusting, and immoral acts (by my sex-negative prudish religious anti-fun judgement), there's only two (unless you go by the updated definition of rape) charges of rape: 'Katie Johnson' with the Epstein allegations, and E. Jean Carroll with her Bergdorf Goodman adventure - which, let me say, I don't believe or at least do not think it proven. Read her account, replace "Trump" with "Biden" and imagine for yourself all the media articles ripping the holes in the story wide open and claiming she was trying to smear a decent man for nefarious reasons, ranging from trying to extort money to being a Republican plant.
The rest are all of the "grab 'em by the pussy" kind: groping, kissing, unwanted touching, invitations to go back to his room. Distinct lack of "I was only twelve and he raped me in the hotel bedroom" accounts:
Sixteen women have come forward with allegations against President Donald Trump, each accusing him of inappropriate conduct. The most recent, from writer and columnist E. Jean Carroll, appeared in NY Magazine on Friday.
The women’s charges range from unwanted touches and aggressive, sudden kissing to the latest accusation against Trump — that he attacked a woman in a dressing room and forced his penis inside her. Donald Trump, his campaign and the Trump White House have insisted all of the stories are fabricated and politically motivated.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
Is this a record number of comments for a Friday Fun Thread? It's >300 at the time of writing.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
6d ago
Now this is Friday Fun!
Recreational bunker shellings when?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
About a year ago, in a discussion of Ireland's rabid support for the Palestinian cause, I argued that it's primarily caused by misguided post-colonial solidarity and that "I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country".
That's a position I'm now revisiting:
A Jewish man was hit by a stranger shouting antisemitic insults on a Dublin city bus on Friday [the 18th of July], according to a video circulating on social media. The assailant shouted “genocidal Jews” and other slurs at the man.
He also said he recognized that the man was a Jew “because of his face.” The Jewish man – who recorded the incident – can be heard saying, “I get used to it; they are all like this.”...
The assailant then slapped the Jewish man in the face and tried to take his phone.
Comments on social media said the driver called the police and that the man was arrested.
An officer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it does not comment on material circulated online by third parties but confirmed that “shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, 18 July 2025, [police officers] from Rathmines responded to reports of a disturbance on a bus in Rathgar, Dublin.”
For reference, Rathgar is a very posh suburb, with houses going for €1 million at the minimum.
A few weeks ago, my dad quoted some Israeli politician (whose name escapes me) at me who supposedly claimed that his proudest achievement was drawing an equivocation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public consciousness. I accept that the two are not strictly equivalent, but I don't think anyone can dispute anymore (in Ireland or anywhere else) that the former can often serve as a cover for the latter. I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
As an aside, I can't help but marvel at how self-defeating this behaviour is. Whenever you assault someone because they look like they might be Jewish, you are precisely demonstrating Israel's entire raison d'être, the moral necessity of its existence.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I don't and I can give you a couple if you think it would help, but I tried it with 4o and o4-mini and it didn't work well. I've done hundred, if not thousands, of these manually, and I checked several that terminate at different stages of the analysis to see if any would correspond with what I determined originally. I would add the caveat that the actual algorithm would be more complex; I was writing this as I was leaving work on Friday afternoon and there were several rules that I failed to consider that came up when I ran it, most notable that if there are two conflicting months of release then use the last usual release day of the earlier month (assuming the months ore consecutive or otherwise close together or that there's no reason to believe that the earlier month is wrong). There are also a bunch of edge cases that I didn't put in, like singles that are released locally before being given a national release some months later (occasionally happened with smaller labels in the 1960s who had local hits that would get picked up nationally), and specifying which country of release to use, and a bunch of other stuff that's too uncommon to even mention. That out of the way here are the trends I found:
- The Reputable Sources: There were no problems accessing Wikipedia (duh). 4o couldn't seem to access 45Cat for some reason, while o-4 mini could. Neither accessed RYM, though I also dabbled with Claude a bit and it could. It was good at identifying other reputable sources I didn't list, like Discogs and AllMusicGuide, although these are unlikely to have anything the other sources don't.
- Copyright Data: Nothing could access this. The 1972–1978 data is scans of bound volumes that archive.org has available in various formats, but the AI couldn't access this. It also couldn't access the computerized data from 1978 onwards, even though the copyright office just created a new website that's easier to use than the old one.
- Chart Data: Both AIs could determine the date a release first charted. However, most charting releases were reviewed or advertised prior to charting, and it couldn't access this information. I suspect that's because there are various databases that contain chart information, but finding dates of review or ads requires looking at the physical magazines. There's still no reason why AI can't do this, though; all of the back issues from the 1940s onward are available online and OCRed well enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for by searching Google Books. Google is missing some issues so I sometimes will go to a dedicated archive that doesn't have a global search function, but I can still search each issue manually. Additionally, 45Cat does occasionally include a note with review or ad information, usually in the form of BB 4/17/1967 or whatever. I don't know how realistic it is to expect AI to know what this means, though it's obvious to anyone who uses the site and there's probably an explanation somewhere. There are also occasionally users who comment about release dates and chart info here. No AI was able to access the ARSA data. The website does require a free account; I'm not sure how much of an impediment this is.
- Estimating based on sequential catalog numbers: It did this occasionally but unnecessarily since every release I picked had a better estimate, and this happens rarely enough that I couldn't think of one to use off the top of my head. I didn't check it to see if it was making reasonable estimates, though they seemed reasonable.
- Last resort estimates: If I'm asking AI to make a reasoned estimate I'm not going to argue with it because at that point I'm just looking for a number to use. It got to this point pretty frequently.
Miscellaneous Notes: It made a few odd errors along the way. It wasn't able to determine a typical release day for any label and always defaulted to Monday, except in the case of British releases, where it defaulted to Friday. These were the most common release days in the 60s and 70s for these territories, but they were by no means universal, and I specifically tested it with labels that released on other days. It also made some errors where it would give an incorrect date, e.g., It would say June 18th was a Monday in a particular year but it was really a Wednesday.
Conclusion: It's capable of producing reasonable estimates that are relatively close to my own estimates, but are nonetheless almost always off. If I don't have a credible release date, almost all estimates will be derived from either copyright data, trade publication review dates, or ARSA chart dates. Since the models seem incapable of accessing any of these, they are functionally useless. They're limited to finding dates I can already find more easily without AI, and estimating release dates based on chart data. I'm not familiar with o-3 or how it compares to what I was able to use, but if you think it could succeed where the others failed, let me know and I'll give you a few to try out. I don't want to waste your tokens on a vanity project for an extremely niche application, but I understand you might be interested in how these models work. Also consider that I'm an AI skeptic who would pay for a service like this if it could reliably do what I need it to do. A lot of my skepticism, though, stems from the fact that it seems incapable of accessing information that's trivial for an actual person to access.
The Thick of It is like The Office (US version) in that it’s an idealized version of a ‘fun’ office as imagined by people from that particular culture. Leaving aside that even in the mid Blair era I doubt most of that kind of banter was tolerated all the time even from Alistair Campbell types (let alone random civil servants) there is an authenticity to it.
I would say that working in an office full of well-educated English people who like banter, at its best on Friday afternoons when everyone is comfortable with each other, has had a couple of drinks at lunch and is joking around then sure, it feels a bit like The Thick of It (at least to my foreign ears).
In the same way, Americans and some other Anglos identified with the kind of camaraderie and humor in the US Office because they experienced a lesser version of it, sometimes, themselves. The Thick of It lacks the maudlin sentimentality of most US sitcoms but a similar principle applies.
The swearing in particular seems like a remnant of the TV culture of that time, ‘The F Word’, Gordon Ramsey swearing, the growth of satellite TV without watershed, established networks being willing to have more swearing on later in the evening. This was, after all, when Little Britain was airing on BBC One. In addition, the main character is based on a notorious fan of profanity even today.
More interesting for the TV connoisseur is Veep, which while a less funny show highlights the subtle cultural differences between Britain and America by having American actors and characters speak dialogue clearly written by Brits and therefore always a little uncanny to American ears.
Succession (by much the same team) has a similar problem but skirts it by making the main cast half-English.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9d ago
I was under the impression that it was never part of psychology, but was developed by two housewives for some popular magazine or something. Like 4bpp the claims of it being like a horoscope feel like cope. If psychology has a better test, fair enough, but I'm gonna need an RCT betwwen M&B and Big Five or whatever, before I actually believe it.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
9d ago
Friday hornyposting thread.
I went to the friendly local mall yesterday to buy a bucket hat for my trip to the mountains and it looks like the fashion went full circle. Girls in their late teens now dress like they dressed when I was their age in the early 00's. I couldn't help myself and eyefucked every single one of them as I was walking from shop to shop.
Maybe all these men that suddenly married a much younger woman are victims of cyclical fashion?
P-Necromancer
9d ago
But slopes are slippery! It's the literal, physical nature of a slope (and the relationship between static and kinetic friction) that, once you start to move down one, you tend to continue. The argument is, I suppose, that a lot of things people treat like slopes really aren't... but aren't they? I'm struggling to think of a case where a political movement, having achieved its proximal objective, declares victory and goes home. Actually, I'm not just struggling; the idea is absurd. Individuals can do that; amorphous groups never can.
Victory draws interest because everyone loves a winner, and to divide up the spoils -- power, but mostly cachet -- you get purity tests, which rapidly become purity spirals. The intra-group dynamics drive the inter-group dynamics: if you don't keep pushing for more, you get pushed out. This is what we see in real life: victory only emboldens movements, and a couple decades down the line, they're demanding things their forebears' mocked as slippery slope arguments. They reach and reach until, finally, the public's patience runs out... then their opponents get a turn.
(This is just one mechanism. There are others.)
The civil rights movement, the moral majority, the LGBT movement, anti-communism, progressivism, interventionism; just a handful of the many, many examples from recent history.
To put it in concrete terms: obviously bullet point 2 makes bullet point 3 more likely. Well, I very much doubt it'll follow such a clean progression; there's generally more momentum to these things. Palestinians don't exactly hide the fact that a supermajority want the last point; how could letting them organize and regroup not make it more likely? It might still be unlikely -- not like any of the other Arab nations have proven able to enforce their will on Israel -- but I think it's very hard to argue it would become less likely.
But, you argue, isn't Israeli oppression a slippery slope too? If Palestine just lets Israel establish settlements in the West Bank (or whatever), doesn't that just make more thorough depredations more likely? Yes! Both sides accuse the other of starting down a slippery slope, and both are right!
(You frame this as 'backsliding' from the two state solution; because you think it's more fair, presumably? But why would Palestine see it that way? Backsliding would moving towards an Israeli-controlled single state. A Palestinian-controlled single state would, obviously, be continuing to slide forward down the same slope: Palestine achieving it's goals.)
In Germany, the Nazis rose in large part to oppose the communists, who were, at the time, the dominant political force in the country (not in terms of votes, certainly, but in terms of organization and political violence. Which was, after all, their stated path to victory). Then the Nazis, having achieved power, ruthlessly suppressed the communists; they would do the same to them if they got the chance, they said. Which was thoroughly borne out the moment the communists did get the chance!
So how, in this model, can de-escalation ever occur? Well, one side can wipe the other out, either literally or in terms of group membership; this is how the conflict between slave owners and abolitionists ended, for example. But true de-escalation mainly happens when both sides lose, I think. The Good Friday Agreement was a tacit admission from both sides that neither could achieve their full aims. And sometimes, when the swings are too quick and dramatic, the public can simultaneously lose patience with both.
I have another criticism of them in the link here if you would like to respond. Cowboy Bebop does not only have a substandard plot; it lacks any semblance of worldbuilding and logical consistency.
Honky Tonk Women, the episode I singled out as one of the worst of the early episodes in this regard? The entire plot relies on Spike going to that specific casino, at the same time the trade is happening, sitting down at the right table, looking very similar to the guy who is supposed to make the deal, deciding to keep one chip, bumping into the guy who was meant to make the deal and then accidentally swapping chips with him. What really gets me about this is not just the insane coincidence, it's also the fact that later in the episode Gordon offers to pay Spike for the chip and they make an attempt at swapping it again, but this time they don't faff around with any of that casino bullshit; they decide to stand on the surface of a spaceship to make the swap. It's unclear why they didn't just choose to do this in the first place, since it seems much easier to not be noticed all the way out in the wasteland of space and you don't have to cover up the transaction in a crowded venue under layers upon layers of byzantine obfuscation.
There's also the question of why they even got Faye in to facilitate this transaction as well, seeing that she's an outsider. Supposedly this is because of her quasi-mystical skill at cards, but... the guy wasn't even meant to bet the chip in the first place, he was just meant to tip her with it, so the skill that supposedly makes her a good fit for this job is not actually very useful. Then at the end Spike and Jet decide the tech hidden in the poker chip is too dangerous and decide to lose it by betting it on roulette at another casino, when it would just have been much easier and far safer to, I dunno, throw it into the sun? Smash it with a hammer? Would it not be trivially easy to destroy?
I found myself zoning out during the episodes as a result; I did so because the plot makes about the same amount of sense regardless of whether you actually pay attention or not. In addition, characters are often shallow, and the episode-to-episode emotional beats feel completely unearned because they are often trying to rush out a dramatic emotional conclusion without the appropriate space to do so. It's just very much carried by its aesthetic and style, and to me, that's not quite enough to make a show entertaining.
Then there's GitS. There's a lot of talking in that film, but I find it barely even has enough to chew on to discuss at length - the overarching plot is that an AI called the Puppet Master has been created by Section 6, it becomes sentient and demands political asylum while posing a small number of very ill-defined philosophical musings about what constitutes a mind even, and then spontaneously decides for itself that the purpose of any living organism is to reproduce and hybridise itself with other lifeforms. It's not clear why it would want this or how it has arrived at that judgement. It tries to make a poor analogy to the merits of sexual reproduction in biology by stating that a single computer virus could destroy all of its copies, but that doesn't work here; all of its copies would be modifiable and endlessly updatable in a way that the human brain currently isn't. There's also a serious lack of legibility in how the Puppet Master even thinks; you never get a good model of how its cognition works. It just comes up with wants and needs on the fly without any foreshadowing, which means the plot gets unpredictably dragged all over the place by some inscrutable god.
I was left with a profound feeling of "okay, I guess" after the film ended.
I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
No_one
13d ago
Interesting developments in Ukraine. Very unclear what's going on, but possibly US supported change of leadership within the near future. That's just a guess.
On Friday the 18th, there were two hit pieces on Zelensky, one in FT and another in Spectator. TL;DR on them is: West is disappointed with Zelensky because he appears to be using the cover of war to attack people who were fighting against corruption in Ukraine and using authoritarian means to go after politicians who aren't seen as fully loyal to him.
That's not new - Ukrainians have been muttering about precisely that for years. But Westerners are reading it now, and as has been pointed out, if you're reading it, it's for you..
There were some Ukrainian and one older Politico.EU articles with a similar tone but all much lower profile. Now the Man wants us to know Zelensky is not the greatest hero since Churchill. Why?
Then, on Saturday, in a surprising move, Zelensky called for negotiations. Here's Guardian reporting on it..
Looking at the previous round of negotiations, those were futile. Without concessions that Ukrainians, especially the nationalists find unthinkable, Russians aren't stopping. In addition last week Trump gave Russia some sort of '50 days' ultimatum.. No idea what that means- threatening tariffs on a country that has had 20 rounds of sanctions imposed on it seems odd.
The last time(end of may '25) they tried negotiating there was no agreement (Russians wanted the 4 oblasts, a little land in them they didn't have yet and ofc Crimea), which Ukraine didn't want to agree too even though they have, at present, a snowball's chance in hell of regaining any territory and are inexorably losing more at an escalating pace. Mind you, this is pretty much 'minimalism' on the Russian side. Ukrainians, just to start proper negotiations wanted an 'unconditional 30 day ceasefire', to which Russians were unwilling to agree because they thought it was just a stalling tactic to get time to build more defensive lines.
There's no reason to believe Russians are going to be in any way more amenable this time -they've taken more ground, their forces are being sustained, unlike the Ukrainian ones.
Town of Pokrovsk (~70k before war) whose supply lines have been interdicted for months now & ofc town itself has been under constant attrition is getting ever more cut off. Russians have massed forces to actually cut off the town and Ukraine doesn't have any reserves to counter that, so there's risk of the city getting wholly cut off.
So what to make of it? Seymour Hersh claims that US wants to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny. A regime journalist calls that 'Ukrainian disinformation'..
But Hersh also claims US is trying to reach an agreement with Russia while it's still possible. Russians who are confident they can see it through obviously don't want to make any deal that'd be less than full recognition of conquered territory & Finlandization of rump Ukraine. So, why even attempt to negotiate? If Zelensky were to make peace, he'd have to fight the nationalists who won't give up this easily, go against his western sponsors who don't want the war to end either. He clearly doesn't have support to end the war.
It looks like desperate flailing from Zelensky's side. Or is the army personnel/ammo situation so critical that he expects it to be close to collapse within a month? Very little is known about how bad it is for AFU (it's all secret and they rarely say anything). About the best report is this Polish one, which says Ukraine requires 300,000 soldiers to fully staff its combat formations, and that presently there are cca 300,000 men in the trenches.
birb_cromble
14d ago
Also for @Amadan, who asked in another thread.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/fairfax-county-butt-slasher-to-be-sentenced-friday/1924072/
Pimentel was arrested near a shopping mall in Peru, in January 2012. He was extradited to the United States in December.
Dean
Flairless
14d ago
'There is now way Trump will get away with [latest thing] this time!'
Not going to lie, mate, you are kind of all over the place on this. You say that this suit 'just put things into overdrive,' but your conclusion is really just jamming a lot of different concept that could be these [things].
In paragraph one, it was the survival (preferably end) of Trump's political career. In paragraph two it... could just as well apply to a thing you characterize as would have been a non-scandal if only Trump waited a weekend? Or maybe the Murdoch trap. You kind of veer from one into the other. By paragraph three, it's the terrible prospects of a disposition of a guy who (repeatedly) had (multiple) hostile prosecutions and investigations leak unflattering things for decades. Come paragraph four, it's how bad the optics will be for a guy who won his first presidential election after an audiotape of 'grab them by the pussy,' followed by a technically-not-treason conspiracy, and, well, way too many bad optics to list.
So when you throw in things like this-
But Trump is impulsive, and wasn't going to wait until Monday to file, wasn't going to give himself a chance to cool down. Get it out Friday. Now he has opened himself up to a world of hurt that he couldn't imagine beforehand.
Dude. Dude.
This is a guy who has been variously accused of rape, infidelity, insurrection, and racism in various courts for the better part of a decade. He was the target of a historically unprecedented fraud prosecution in which the largest fraud fine in New York history was leveled against him despite the victim testifying on his behalf. So many novel legal theories have been used against him that entire aspects of constitutional law have been developed to manage it. There have been multiple government conspiracies that we know about that aimed to hurt him in court.
I am going to go on a slight limb here and suggest that maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump has a better idea of the world of hurt that comes with court cases than you do.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14d ago
@fmac thinks that you (plural) would be interested in the following summary of the several mods that I've written for Victoria 3. I am inclined to think that this comment is both too narcissistic and too niche to be interesting, but whatever. Maybe I'm a bad judge and you'll find this comment more interesting than this week's court-opinion summary, which seems to have fallen rather flat.
In an effort to make this comment less narcissistic, I will emphasize that you do not need to be a 1337 h@xx0r to mod this game. It's just editing plaintext files, not compiling code like some other games.
Premise: In the vanilla game, slaves are created from poor people in countries with the Debt Slavery law, and thence are exported to countries with the Slave Trade law.
Problem: It makes no sense that countries with Slave Trade do not enslave their own low-acceptance (i. e., discriminated-against) people.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, a country with Slave Trade now will enslave its own low-acceptance people (using the same logic that the vanilla game uses to re-enslave recently-freed people when slavery is abolished and then reinstated).
Premise: In the vanilla game, a colonizing AI country will spread its focus across up to five different colonies, depending on how much population it has. Colony growth also is capped, so focusing on a single colony is detrimental.
Problem: I don't see any reason for these mechanics. Splitting focus between multiple colonies only increases the chance that multiple countries will split a colonial state, which I dislike. And what's wrong with rushing a single colony?
Solution: In a mod that I have written, a colonizing AI country now will focus on only a single colony, and the cap on colony growth is removed.
Premise: In the vanilla game, the AI will never incorporate a state that contains fewer than 100,000 people.
Problem: I'm not really a big fan of this limitation. Yes, the sparsely-populated territories of northern Canada and northern Australia are legally "unincorporated" even in year 2025. But Rhode Island barely had reached a population of 100,000 in the time period of Victoria 3. Am I really supposed to believe that Rhode Island should not have been incorporated until after year 1830?
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the minimum population for incorporating a state is set to 1—i. e., effectively removed.
Premise: In the vanilla game, several different fonts are used—Garamond, Open Sans, Noto Serif, a custom font called Paradox Victorian, et cetera.
Problem: I dislike seeing a zillion different random fonts.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the game uses only Open Sans.
Premise: In the vanilla game, in order to avoid losing its "civilized" status (as opposed to "uncivilized", like China and Egypt), the Ottoman Empire must complete four of seven available missions. One of those missions, "Tanzimat: Urbanization", requires that 75 percent of the Ottoman Empire's states be both incorporated and urbanized.
Problem: This doesn't make much sense to me. What's wrong with having unincorporated states?
Solution: In a mod that I have written, "Tanzimat: Urbanization" requires that 75 percent of the Ottoman Empire's incorporated states be urbanized.
Premise: In the vanilla game, an AI country will incorporate a state if a culture that calls that state region a homeland shares a trait (whether a heritage trait indicating race or a cultural trait indicating a non-race characteristic) with a primary culture of that country.
Problem: Under this criterion, both a fascist Britain with the Ethnostate law and an open-minded Britain with the Multiculturalism law will incorporate all European states and all Anglophone states (including the black ones in the Caribbean), with no regard for whether the cultures living there are actually accepted. That doesn't make any sense.
Solution: In a mod that I have written: The AI incorporation logic is disabled. Instead, a country (whether AI or human) will automatically incorporate a state if a culture that calls that state a homeland is accepted under that country's current laws, and will automatically disincorporate a state if no culture that calls that state a homeland is accepted under that country's current laws.
Premise: In the vanilla game, most countries start with all or nearly all of their states incorporated. It is generally expected that a country will have most of its states incorporated.
Premise: In the vanilla game, once a civilized country has acquired a bunch of land in Africa, it can organize that land into a "colonial administration" country, which is created with all its states incorporated.
Problem: These two mechanics are completely contrary to the AI incorporation logic (whether vanilla or modded) that I described in the previous section! It makes absolutely ZERO sense that the British and Dutch East India Companies have incorporated all of their states at the start of the campaign, despite having NOTHING in common with the Indian and Indonesian cultures. Also, when the mod that I described in the previous section is enabled, the complete absence of incorporated states in the two aforementioned countries causes some problems.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, if a subject country has zero incorporated states, then it is automatically annexed by its overlord. In a different mod that I have written, the colonial-administration mechanic is disabled.
Premise: In the vanilla game, up to five autosaves will be retained, and any older autosaves will be deleted.
Problem: A campaign of Victoria 3 lasts for a hundred years! If you've set your autosave interval to six months, you will not be able to look back even one decade to see how the world has evolved.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the autosave limit is set to 99999—i. e., effectively removed.
Premise: In the vanilla game, if a state region is split between multiple states that belong to different countries, a state will receive the unmodified name of the state region (e. g., "Guyana") if it includes a majority of the state region's provinces, and will receive a modified name ("British Guyana") otherwise.
Problem: If one country owns almost all of of a state region and another country owns just one or two provinces (such as a treaty port) in the same state region, it can be difficult to realize that the state is split, because the first state will have an unmodified name and the second state will be very small and unobtrusive.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the threshold for a state to have an unmodified name is increased from 50 percent to 99.9 percent—i. e., effectively never.
Premise: Several different factors affect an AI country's enthusiasm about the prosecution of a war. In the vanilla game, one of these factors is time. An AI country becomes more interested in ending a war as time passes: −100 when the war starts, increasing quickly to +0 at 10 months, and then increasing gradually to +100 at 110 months.
Problem: The quick increase in peace desire before the 10-month mark (before the battle fronts and the participants' economies have had a chance to get settled) makes sense, but the gradual increase in peace desire after the 10-month mark does not make sense (is duplicative of the factors for angry population, war-ravaged land, and high debt; often causes an AI country to make a white peace when it is on the precipice of victory).
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the gradual increase in peace desire after the 10-month mark is eliminated.
Premise: The USA starts the game with the Legacy Slavery law. In the vanilla game: If the USA experiences a civil war caused by the anti-slavery movement, then the other side becomes the FSA (Free States of America) and enacts Slavery Banned immediately (without going through the normal law-change process); and, if the USA experiences a civil war caused by the pro-slavery movement, then the other side becomes the CSA (Confederate States of America) and enacts Slave Trade immediately.
Problem: These forced law changes are unnecessarily heavy-handed. If the CSA wants to enact Slave Trade or the FSA wants to enact Slavery Banned, then let it; if it doesn't, don't force it.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the aforementioned forced law changes are eliminated.
Premise: In the vanilla game, some important countries are formed through the "major unification" mechanic. Most prominently, in order to form Germany, Prussia normally declares a "Unification War", which automatically (1) annexes all German members of its sphere of influence and (2) declares war on any non-sphered, non-former-unification-candidate countries that hold German states (i. e., France, but not Austria-Hungary).
Problem: This is disgustingly ahistorical. Historically, Prussia did not attack France for Alsace-Lorraine. Rather, Bismarck tricked France into attacking despite being weak!
Solution: In a mod that I have written, all major unifications are eliminated and must be formed the normal way (by acquiring the required states through means other than a unification war).
Premise: In the vanilla game, different still-uncolonized states in the North American frontier are claimed by different countries, and therefore are not colonizable by other countries. The USA claims Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas; Mexico claims Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; and the Republic of Texas claims New Mexico and Texas; while Nevada, Colorado, and Oklahoma are claimed by no one.
Problem: Historically, Nevada was claimed by Mexico, Colorado was claimed half by the USA and half by Mexico and Texas, Oklahoma was claimed by the USA, and only half of New Mexico was claimed by Texas.
Solution: In a mod that I have written, Nevada is claimed by Mexico, Colorado is split into two state regions of which one is claimed by the USA and the other is claimed by Mexico and Texas, New Mexico is split into two state regions of which one is claimed by Texas and both are claimed by Mexico, and Oklahoma <del>is claimed by the USA</del><ins>is not claimed by the USA (because that causes problems with premature annexation of the Indian Territory, due to the game's limited mechanics), but instead the state region of Texas is extended through the Oklahoma panhandle (as it historically was prior to 1850) and the Indian Territory is expanded to eliminate all uncolonized land in Oklahoma</ins>.
Premise: In the vanilla game, canals can be built in the state regions of Panama and Sinai, and nowhere else.
Problem: Historically, the USA actually picked Nicaragua for a canal, and switched to Panama only after getting a lower price for the assets of France's bankrupt Panama Canal Company.
Problem: Due to Victoria 3's focus on states rather than on provinces, if Colombia refuses to sell the Panama Canal Zone to a great power that wants to buy it, the great power then receives a claim, not just on the Canal Zone, but on the entire state region of Panama. The same applies to Sinai. This is absolutely nonsensical.
Premise: In the vanilla game, armies can march from Colombia proper to Panama.
Problem: Historically, this was impossible.
Solution: In the same mod (necessary due to limitations of map modding): Panama has been split into three state regions, western, central (Canal Zone), and eastern, and the eastern state is disconnected from Colombia proper in the invisible pathing system. Nicaragua has been split into two state regions, northern and southern (Lake Nicaragua), and the Panama Canal events have been copied-and-pasted for a Nicaragua Canal. [Sinai has been split into two state regions, eastern and western (Canal Zone).](not yet complete)
Premise: After the USA annexes northern Mexico, the annexed states become homelands of the USA's primary cultures. The Yankee culture gets California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, while the Dixie culture gets Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Problem: Historically, California could have been divided into a free north and a slave south. And I find it unfair that Dixie doesn't get a window to the Pacific.
Solution: In the same mod (necessary due to limitations of map modding), California is divided into two state regions, northern and southern, and the southern portion goes to Dixie rather than to Yankee after the Mexican–American War.
Premise: In the vanilla game, the Corsican culture has three traits: European, Francophone, and Italophone.
Problem: Francophone??
Solution: In a mod that I have written, the Francophone trait is removed from the Corsican culture.
The mods can be downloaded here, if anybody cares.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Welp, it finally happened. However often in the past ten years we've heard about the writing being on the wall (which were coincidentally also closing in), or the other shoe dropping, it's always turned out that Teflon Don was able to escape more or less unscathed. Even January 6th, which by all rights should have ended his political career for good, turned into something he could make hay out of, blaming Democrats for overreacting to what was essentially large-scale trespassing, and playing the what-about game. 24 hours ago I thought the Epstein thing had more legs than any of the other scandals, but I didn't see it as having the potential to end things. Trump had handled it poorly, but there was still a chance that some distraction would arise and the whole thing would blow over.
With the filing of Trump's lawsuit against the WSJ, that chance has ended. With the full understanding that I'm making quite a bold statement, I think this may be the biggest unforced error of Trump's presidency so far, that if Murdock was looking to destroy Trump he played the whole thing beautifully, and this has the potential to bring down the entire presidency (though I'm not predicting that it will). It's almost as if Murdoch set a giant, obvious trap and, spying the bait, Trump ran headlong into it without even stopping to investigate. The correct way for him to have handled the whole Epstein thing would have been to shut up about it. It was a lame conspiracy theory that his base bought into but that had little purchase among anyone important. All that stuff about binders being on Pam Bondi's desk was only news among these people, and even Elon's Tweet didn't move the needle much. It wasn't a major scandal until the DOJ published the "nothing to see here" memo. From there, Trump's totally unnecessary denials only added fuel to the fire. He could have fired Bondi and delayed the whole thing for a couple months while a new AG was confirmed, during which time the matter could have died. But he instead doubled down on her pronouncement, calling half of his base losers in the process for caring about it. The WSJ thing wasn't even particularly damaging considering what else had been out there. So Trump may have sent a bawdy drawing to Epstein containing an oblique message that could have alluded to pedophilia. The story might not have survived the weekend if Trump would have just denied having written it and moved on.
Instead Trump had to sue. Because Trump always has to sue; he can't leave well enough alone. He could have taken the weekend to consult with advisors and attorneys on the best path forward. Any kind of reflection would have made it clear that this was a bad idea. But Trump is impulsive, and wasn't going to wait until Monday to file, wasn't going to give himself a chance to cool down. Get it out Friday. Now he has opened himself up to a world of hurt that he couldn't imagine beforehand. Since WSJ's defense depends on proving that their publication of the material wasn't malicious, proving the authenticity of the alleged letter is paramount. And the best way to prove that Trump can't meet his burden is by getting as much information as possible about his relationship with Epstein. Trump will have to turn over ever email or other communication with Epstein that he has. Trump will have to sit for a deposition where he will be grilled about their relationship. He will have to turn over documents. Everything is on the table, and courts give a pretty wide latitude for discovery in civil matters. And the process proceeds slowly enough that there will be a steady drip of documents that the WSJ will gleefully publish as soon as they get them. This could drag on for years, with new stories monthly about how Trump did this or that with Epstein. I'd be surprised if they don't livestream his deposition.
Unlike previous legal issues, Trump can't claim persecution here since he initiated the proceedings. While this means he also has the power to pull the plug if things get too dicey, it doesn't take much of an imagination to see how that would look. Even now, withdrawing the lawsuit is an admission that the letter is authentic. Dropping it at a later date makes it look like he has something to hide that he doesn't want coming out in discovery. Even the best case scenario, where it is revealed that the letter was a complete fabrication, isn't that great for him, as all he has really done taken one inconsequential piece of "evidence" off of the table. It doesn't make the whole Epstein Files mess disappear. But it will be a tough case for Trump to win, and it will be any tougher for him to prove enough damages to have any effect on News Corp. Is a jury in Miami really going to buy that Trump is 10 billion dollars poorer as the result of that article? But that's unlikely since the legal standard Trump has to overcome is the high as the journalistic standards of the WSJ. Murdoch is no babe in the woods, and he isn't running Buzzfeed. If the WSJ runs an article, one can assume that it was vetted properly, especially if they ran it by Trump for comment first. I don't know how this ends, but this suit just put things into overdrive.
The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...
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