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  • Any succession plan for a dictator is a mess. That is why they are very rarely "concrete" in the sense of being formally announced.

    But a significant percentage of those who would have had a claim have likely agreed already. Allegedly this was a big effort last year.

    Whether the chosen successor is any better is... very questionable. But, like with any regime change, we are either looking at ramped up atrocities or a reprieve for the populace as the successor keeps their head down for a few years.

  • Part of that has been that:

    Under Biden, we were worried about actually going to war with russia and needing them ourselves. Under fuckface, we are worried about them being used against russia.

    But a big part of it is that... patriot missiles fucking suck. So does the Iron Dome. Intercepting even "normal" velocity missiles is really hard. Let alone high velocity ones. It is just that israel has a lot of reason to shape propaganda to pretend they are insanely effective (for their own military industrial complex needs) when it is mostly about getting people into bunkers the second you think there is incoming fire. And then you just don't really report on why so many construction contracts just hit the market.

    And you see this when we deploy patriot missiles elsewhere. Off the top of my head, I want to say the official numbers put the Iron Dome at closer to 80% effectiveness. And patriot missiles... there have been engagements where that number might be closer to 0% than not. With recent use mostly juicing things up with aircraft and drones (MUCH easier targets).

    And considering that Ukraine's government benefits from reminding people how evil russia is? They aren't going to be pretending the anti-missile tech is better than it is.

  • You have WAY too much faith in anti-missile defense systems.

  • The sad/ironic thing?

    Much like with Iraq and Afghanistan, there actually ARE very good reasons to intervene. Iran has been murdering protestors by the thousands for the past year and a LONG history of human rights abuses before that.

    But the plight of Brown People(TM) doesn't sell to the Left or the Right. So instead we focus on "uranium enrichment".

    And then we see the same shit as with Venezuela where the complete lack of empathy for non-caucasians results in all the tankies deciding that anyone who actually IS happy that an evil fascist is gone/dead is too stupid to understand how things work.

    And, of course, we have the republican chuds who similarly need to focus on this being about protecting white people rather than just... caring about human rights.

    Of course, it is also hard to do that when you have two pro-genocide governments involved. But... we got how many decades out of thinking that The Allies actually cared about The Jews and The Romanis and so forth when we went to war with Germany?

  • Like with ANY kind of science (and, like it or not, that is what "AI" research and products are), the money comes from governments. Real Genius is one of my all time favorite movies (and has influenced my life WAY more than it should) but... anyone with an advanced STEM degree can tell you that the reality is you 100% know where your money is coming from. And you are either a naive moron or you figure out why the US (or UK or FR or RU or CN or...) government is so interested in your work to rapidly generate connections between social media posts and your buddy's really efficient graph search algorithm and...

    I am all for shitting on openai/chatgpt for immediately bending over backwards for the us government. Let's not pretend anthropic/claude are paragons of virtues and privacy.

  • You can add as many compliance officers as you want to. Hell, you can grab ALL the cops who hang out at high schools and sexually harass/assault kids and make this their job.

    It won't matter if they actively choose not to resist. Which is what almost always happens with stuff like this.

    I like Mamdani's messaging a lot. Stuff like this... reminds me about how worried I am about his ability to act on that messaging. But, "fortunately", the christofacists are more focused on attacking Minnesota and Illinois than New York so this might not have to meaningfully be tested.

  • Finally, dynamic language support should make it easier from here on out for Beamdog to add new translations to the games without the need for a full patch "on most store fronts". Instead, the developers anticipate being able to drop in new languages "on an ad hoc basis". Speaking of, patch 2.7 adds community-made Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, and Ukrainian translations to Baldur's Gate 2, plus Hungarian and Japanese ones to Icewind Dale.

    THIS worries me a lot. Either the language packs become DLC (good) or they are going to be streamed from somewhere and the game lasts as long as the content server does.

    Still, awesome. People shit on the Beamdog releases because "I can just run this with these forty mods and hacked binaries and a syncthing server and...". But they are incredibly competent remasters/ports.

    Just a shame Icewind Dale 2 is still in the "forever lost" state source wise. The Twins were actually a really fun set of antagonists.

  • I mean... people using Firefox are doing it because of all the shit Google is shoving down chromium. Firefox has a LOT of room to fuck up before that is going to impact that demographic.

  • Hopefully this helps.

    But there is a LONG history of progressive legislature to minimize harm that cops just actively refuse to enforce. And considering this would require them to stand up to people in tacticool gear with a track record of murder...

  • Nah nah nah nah. THIS campaign of hit pieces where apparently EVERYONE hated her and she is singlehandedly the cause of all the world's problems is legit. Obviously.

    Don't get me wrong. She and Spencer are grade A assholes and should rest in piss for all the damage they did to the games industry and all the jobs that have been destroyed. But holy fuck is it depressing how quick The Internet is to leap on "Yeah. Absolutely everyone hated everything she did".

  • Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.

    But it also doesn't change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.

    Like... it doesn't take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and...

    I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn't involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.

  • And why would you trust your own ISP more than reputable VPNs?

    1. Define "reputable VPN"? There is little to no meaningful third party auditing and mostly all we have to go on is if they are on the record for having "cooperated with law enforcement"
    2. The point is you need to actually understand what you are trusting who with. You want to watch AEW for cheap? Cool, whatever. You want to masturbate to porn without providing your ID? Maybe think about who is more likely to get a call from what orgs. And if you are doing something truly sensitive? That is when you need to learn a WHOLE lot more about what privacy and personal security actually are.

    The point is that people just say "linus rogan had a promo code and this solves all my problems".

  • Heh.

    Our IT department is so incompetent that... let's just say I have made it a point to leave a paper trail in my inbox of me highlighting issues and complaining because I can't rule out a full investigation.

    Last year we had a "technical all hands" which basically means IT have fucked up to the point that engineering/platform are now responsible for untangling the mess from first principles. And we actually were allowed to look at the logs and were seeing "attacks" from all over Western Europe. I suspect IT would still be trying to call the FBI for help if one of our PSEs hadn't sighed and said "how much of our staff are running VPNs?". And then we had to explain what those are... to the people who actually manage the VPN we use to remote in.

    STILL not sure if I am more horrified that they didn't understand that VPNs exist or that they had just not noticed that much mystery traffic until that day.

  • From what I can tell... that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don't care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub...).

    I dunno. I've been in far too many Internet Arguments (TM) with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt's ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says "John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark".

    And while I wouldn't trust microsoft at all for... anything? Do y'all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren't collecting your data?

  • You don't need to watch the whole video. Mostly it just highlights why FreeCAD is VERY capable but not a great First CAD Tool.

    And Fusion 360 is the best, period. But OnShape actually might be better for a purely FDM workflow. Most of Fusion, and FreeCAD, strengths are in being able to simulate stress and strain and having ways to design a part to incorporate the cuts that a CNC/Mill would be doing. And OnShape is fully browser based for good and for bad.

  • One of the games is Police Quest: SWAT 2 which is just delightful.

    Half of it is copaganda of the highest level as presented by one of the evilest cops to ever live (seriously...). Like... a LOT of the LAPD's reputation for police brutality and corruption can be tied to him. But it was a solid, for its time, squad tactics game that I do wish more modern takes on the genre would adopt. Having a "slice the pie" button is just so nice.

    But what makes SWAT 2 so good? There was the SWAT campaign where you go through a series of police calls relating to an evil terrorist cult. And there is the Terrorist campaign where you play as the cult and are taking people hostage, indoctrinating them, and otherwise attacking SWAT. And the best tactic to even out the campaign (because you are up against the poster children for militarized police over spending) is:

    On the second mission you do a home invasion where you take a family hostage. Take a LOT of explosives with you. While you are leading the cops on, plant explosives on the walkway to the house. Let negotiations fizzle out and when the swat teams come to raid? Blow them the fuck up. Double tap any survivors. Wipes out the LAPD which translates to an insane amount of money to equip your crew for the rest of the missions.

    Back in the day? SWAT 2 was one of those "if you know you know" games across the late stage usenet/early stage gamefaqs discussions.

    I desperately need some kind of an Oral History on how the fuck that game got made.

    Also, as a bonus: My dad was annoyed I was playing too much XCOM and JA2 (mostly once he figured out I used female mercs in that...). So he got me a nice manly game about how great cops are.. and boy howdy did he whup my ass when he realized I was mostly playing the Terrorist side and popping cops left and right.

  • Incorrect.

    Only a subset of tariffs were ruled illegal. Mostly because of the method they were declared with.

    Others are, as of now, perfectly legal and will remain in place. And expect many of these to just be declared in a different manner to maintain them.

  • Do yourself a favor: Learn on TinkerCAD/Fusion 360 or OnShape. No, they are not open source and both have some REALLY nasty caveats for free users. But both of those are THE most user friendly CAD tools out there and you'll be able to google anything you need. Learn the fundamentals and the language first.

    Once you have that down? FreeCAD is surprisingly not horrible these days and I think I even actually like it. But FreeCAD is still heavily restricted by being "for users, by coders" as it were. So operations that might take one step in every other tool could take three or four because that maps a lot better to the underlying math libraries. And you'll need to constantly translate between what everyone else calls something and what FreeCAD calls it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a very good video comparing the two (just watch it at like 1.25x because Deltahedra has a very very very slow speaking cadence...). But they key is that if you know what you are trying to do in the language everyone else speaks, translating that to FreeCAD becomes super easy. Rather than not even knowing how to ask for help in the first place.

    OpenSCAD is REALLY nice for building something in a vacuum where you know every dimension you want and have very clean (or nonexistent) interfaces to existing geometry. But, odds are, the vast majority of what you are going to be doing is matching to reference images or even reference parts.

  • On a warm and dry day? Maybe?

    But if it is cold? Some printers have built in heaters. They aren't strong enough to handle that. And if it is moist? You ACTUALLY will be someone who needs to dry your filament and good luck.

    As for fumes and microplastics? That is the other big advantage of the enclosures (that I tend to try to avoid mentioning because people are fucking stupid). Even with no filter you are going to be getting a lot of benefits from the residues and the like hitting the walls first. And most of the CoreXYs can trivially add an actual filter to the vent... many that you print yourself.

    It isn't the same as a proper exhaust system but.. ain't nobody doing that.

  • Technology @lemmy.world

    iFixIt announce FixBot: Your AI Repair Helper

    www.ifixit.com /go/fixbot
  • Technology @lemmy.zip
    Locked

    Linus Tech Tips Embraces Kiwi Farms

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.world

    Sell me on Faugus Launcher

  • Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world

    The Men Who Stare at Goats

  • politics @lemmy.world

    Graham Platner’s claims that he didn’t know tattoo was Nazi-linked undercut by new evidence | CNN Politics

    www.cnn.com /2025/10/24/politics/graham-platner-nazi-tattoo-evidence-kfile-invs
  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Best Practices For PS3?

  • Videos @lemmy.world

    Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck

  • Games @lemmy.world

    Dying Light 2 Removes Stamina from Parkour System

    store.steampowered.com /news/app/534380/view/516344319031902984
  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.world

    Good blogs or youtubes for peripherals on Linux?

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.world

    Native Linux Games/Applications with HDR Support?

  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Current meta for direct download sites?

  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    So what ARE the current "good" VPN services?

  • News @lemmy.world

    FBI launches Tesla threats task force: 'This is domestic terrorism'

    www.cnbc.com /2025/03/24/fbi-tesla-elon-musk-task-force-threats-trump-doge.html
  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Guide to Removing DRM From Amazon Kindle E-Books

  • Videos @lemmy.world

    Posted without comment

  • 3DPrinting @lemmy.world

    Model archiving and organization?

  • Selfhosted @lemmy.world

    Preferred RSS/Newsfeed Reader Solutions?

  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

    Sites For and Experiences With tabletop miniature STLs?

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.world

    What gamepad?

  • Selfhosted @lemmy.world

    Selfhosted alternatives to Goodreads?