I mean... you really can't. Contracts and even people on the ground more or less reveal this real fast (and is what the OSINT community lives off of). The US and even Ukraine do the same. You can keep it a secret exactly how juicy a target is but you can't really hide that missiles or tanks or whatever are being built somewhere.

For example, a buddy of mine lives near a US facility that is near some REALLY nice climbing areas nearby. Every couple of months the army swings by and tells everyone to go the fuck away. And it does not take much brain power to realize that THAT is when they are moving whatever they don't want people to know is at that base. But any other time? You can literally watch equipment being moved from warehouse/hanger to warehouse/hanger while giving someone a belay.

Can we? Yes. Immediately sending peacekeeping forces to prevent the IDF from continuing to engage in genocide and coordination with neighboring countries to figure out whether this is a relocation situation or a proper two state solution (and what that would require).

Will we? No. Because if we cared we would have done it decades ago. The US doesn't care because we decided Israel are our allies in the region and most of NATO falls along those lines. And neighboring countries don't care because they don't actually like the Palestinian people (and actively block refugees) and mostly just want to hurt Israel through them.

It is the biggest "problem" of modern warfare. We don't fight wars of conquest anymore because that tends to actually make other countries care (because those brown people have resources!). So we attack and then leave.

It is similar to why France and England (or China/Japan/Korea) were basically at continuous levels of war for hundreds (?) of years. Because when you roll up and kill a bunch of people and maybe steal a goat? The remaining people want revenge. When you conquer them and either ethnically cleanse them to nonexistence or integrate them into your society? They forget why they were angry after a generation or two.

I very much do NOT believe the world would be a better place with more ethnic cleansing and stealing of land. But we also are in a mess where retaliation between countries just continues with no real consequences to the people who are calling for the attacks. And the civilians just get rightfully angry when their kid is permanently blinded because she was looking the wrong way at the Lebanese equivalent of a Kroger.

And then you get the keyboard warriors who hop in decades (or even centuries) into the conflict, pick a side, and immediately say THESE terrorists are good guys and THOSE terrorists are bad guys.

I mean... none of that actually helps a third party at the presidential level. Or even addresses spoilers. Going to address your points out of order to make my own

If not, the candidates with the fewest first choice is eliminated, and those that voted for them, they move on to their second choice picks.

So... the third party candidates get eliminated in the first round. Because they cannot compete with the two big parties in terms of campaign funding. Assuming it doesn't end in the first round because...

If a candidate gets the majority vote in the first choices they win outright.

So the republican wins because there is one right wing fascist running against a dozen flavors of Left wing. Or the Democrat wins because all the third parties were a negligible percentage of the vote to begin with.

I HAVE seen proposals that change the ordering so that a third party "can't" be a spoiler (I forget the specifics but basically it is removing the small percentage votes first and only comparing once you downselect to N candidates where N is usually 2) but...

People confuse the idea of making a third party candidate viable with minimizing how much you are pissing away your vote by voting for a third party in the presidential election. Ranked choice is great for the latter but it still has many of the same spoiler problems without additional changes. And, arguably, would increase the impact of third party spoilers if one party over-splits. I continue to point people toward the mess in France where basically all the Left wing parties had to unite and make a coalition to MAYBE stop the right wing fascists.

Personally? I would much rather we abolish the electoral college and just do a popular vote. That will have a MUCH bigger impact on third party candidates because it suddenly becomes viable to run a national campaign where you convince maybe 15% of the overall populace rather than needing 40% of each county just to end up on the politico map. Because the latter is what really screws over third parties at the presidential level because they just don't have the money or resources to sway enough counties to get any meaningful electoral college votes. And ranked choice alone has no impact on that.

It depends how you look at it.

Ranked Choice is not going to make a third party viable at the presidential level. Simply because the other two parties have orders of magnitude more funding to campaign and make sure people know and "like" their candidates. And, depending on the implementation of ranked choice, it may still result in splitting the vote.

At the congressional representative level? Ranked choice has a lot of benefits there. But that is also the level where third party candidates are still viable under the current model.

The reality is that most of the things people want out of ranked choice we already have out of the primary system. Wide range of candidates run in the primary on each side. Primaries exist to figure out who The People like and to let the party down select. Done right, you have what would otherwise have been "third party" candidates who suddenly have a LOT of influence within the party (see: Bernie Sanders in 2020... less so in 2016) because they get a lot of influence on the platform in exchange for supporting the candidate who has the majority of the vote and the party backing.

The key is that people need to understand they are still compromising to get some of what they want AND to engage with their local (and even national) parties to make sure their voices are heard.

project 2025 likely ends with trump and the magats. Because it is almost entirely based upon the idea of a POTUS who actively has no idea how government works and doesn't want to do anything other than get headlines.

Because under a romney or a cheney? They don't need project 2025 because steps will already be taken. Just like they have been since reagan with the bushes gradually eroding away democracy.

And... the reality is that it is inevitable that republicans will gain power again. Because The Left will pretty rapidly be at each other's throats once trump is gone (just note all the Bernie Or Bust crew who still can't shut the fuck up about the most important event in the past 8 years...). And people will lose interest in voting because they didn't get exactly what they want.

The hope is that Kamala actually acts and works to restore those checks and balances so that four years of a republican is four years of a mess for Democrats to clean up and not the first four years of Gilead.

That is very incorrect.

There is a lot of footage (some "fun" and some horrific) of pagers exploding in grocery stores and malls and the like. Because the point of the pagers was for the terrorists to be reachable outside of caves and camps.

And... there are civilians standing around in those cases. With kids who tend to have heads at waist level.

I saw unsubstantiated reports claiming there was 10-20 grams of high explosive (eg C4). Which looks pretty "right" based on the footage I looked at before remembering this would be faces of death. An energetic "explosion" coming out the side of the pager that, combined with the metal from the batteries or the interior plates of the pager, would generate a good amount of shrapnel. So high odds of death if you were looking at your pager to read the message and almost guaranteed injury and cuts otherwise. And, if you were gripping your pager on the wrong side, likely loss of fingers (like a fire cracker in the hand).

Its one reason that a big part of securing your supply chains is to actually inspect what you purchase. (Allegedly) Israel with a few hours in a warehouse overnight could swap out a LOT of pager backplates in ways that are more or less indetectable at a glance or even picking it up (20 grams is nothing). But if you were to weigh those and realize they are 20 grams heavier than all the other pagers you bought (since packaged goods are fairly consistent), that should raise a lot of red flags.

But I am not aware of even government orgs (let alone terrorist orgs) who are willing to put the effort in to do that.

And "it is already out there so they can't take it away":

swanstation is already a few versions back feature wise? But, regardless, it will rapidly become outdated as new "tech" is added to emulation and issues are found with third party libraries or code. Good software needs good support and just having a ten year old hash is almost always worse than useless.

Supply chains matter a lot and governments, let alone terrorist organizations, fail to protect them.

US centric, but far too much of policy is "Don't buy Made in China" with no thought beyond that.

For this scenario? My assumption is they ordered from their usual supply sources and nothing was hinky. But Israel (or whoever) compromised a port or fedex center along the way and installed some explosives since the only people buying those pagers were terrorists. And nobody on the hezbollah side even bothered to weigh the packages before handing them out.

As much as I like Duckstation as an emulator:

Good for him. When the response to trying to protect the project and reduce harassment is... harassment and outlets insisting that they are shitting all over open source and continuing the false narrative that code was stolen? Fuck 'em. They don't deserve the emulator and we don't deserve it for letting them be the minimally opposed voices.

The secret service are cops too.

But hey, I guess I am just angry at badges and not at increasingly militarized orgs that have no problem violating people's rights (breaking up protesters and the like) but can't even do the fucking job they are allegedly shitting on civil rights to do.

Knowing almost nothing about "Nix": I am inclined to say this is just one person who is REALLY REALLY REALLY angry that they were not properly respected and were ever told no and blah blah blah. Hence the clear vendetta and... calling the HA devs luddite terrorists...

Would genuinely love a perspective on this from someone with basic people skills who understands what the nix devs actually wanted/needed to know if that was reasonable. But all signs point to "no" and "spray them with deodorant while you are at it"

Sure Jan.

Look. I don't know much about your project or what it's goals or ideology are. What I do know is that your behavior is tainting it and making me think your entire community are assists who call people terrorists for not supporting you.

Think about that

But it is a flood of people using a project in a way that it never was intended to be used in the first place.

Yes, HA is "weird" because it is an open source project that actually has significant amounts of funding (to which I contribute). But this isn't a case of the authors and org deciding to support a new distribution platform. This is a case of a subset of community members deciding it should support that distribution platform and insisting that the project spin up knowledge and support for it.

... So did you wake up this morning and just say to yourself "I need to defend some cops"

The secret service were in charge of trump's security detail. There was an armed gunman on a roof for a ridiculously large amount of time. No matter how many punisher skulls you have tattooed on your wee wee, they fucked up. Simple as that.

Its unclear how many "moderate republicans" will vote for her. In large part because it is unclear how many "moderate republicans" there actually are and it is worth remembering that folk like liz cheney and romney largely voted in lockstep with trump and the magats outside of MAYBE one or two issues that personally impact them. And it isn't like any of the "former Republican leaders" have particularly strong support bases considering they lost to the magats years ago.

The reality is that this is just part of the republican party trying to prepare for a post-trump election. trump supported candidates consistently lost downballot and the primaries for this election were a shitshow. maga/tea party republicans die with trump so they are making sure they can go back to reagan/bush style "We are the party of decorum and church rights. You need to meet us in the middle and let us kill just a few trans folk per day"

So... the secret service did their job this time? Rather than waiting while someone was camped out on a roof taking ages to miss a shot?

That is 95% false and is the nonsense that has mostly been pedaled by the musks of the world to justify privatized space flight.

Like everything with the US military industrial complex, we split everything up to nonsensical degrees. So much of the research and designs NASA uses are based on work and spec by the Army and Air Force. Which, in turn, leads to very specific proposals for companies like Boeing (eep) and the like.

But the actual design and research and even "small scale" testing? That is generally NASA and JPL. JPL in particular being a government research lab (similar model used by the Navy and the DOE) that coordinates with in house talent as well as university groups around the country.

But as spacex and the like basically poached so much of the top talent out of NASA and JPL and universities? It stopped being "Build this rocket to these specs" and more "Hmm. That rocket you are trying to sell us looks REAL familiar but we have been told by congress we can't design it ourselves so here is your money. Say hi to Fred for us."

I mean, nationalized spacex is just NASA again. Which I am all for since spacex (and blue origin and the other one) mostly just came out of poaching staff from NASA and JPL in the first place.

Yeah... I make it a point to not handle people with kid gloves when they are looking to make me convince them it is worth the mild inconvenience to not support a product with a long history of bigotry and harassment. Because, truth be told, it will never happen. Could give you a straight up handy and that would still not be neough.

So I'll continue to make my disdain for people who knowingly use a product run by people who profit off of bigotry and harassment quite clear. Same end result but with the added benefit of making them feel slightly bad and me have a giggle.

Also, if you thought the above comment about ES-DE vs retroarch was "condescending" then... wow you are sheltered.

Which is a completely different topic.

starlink works... if it isn't out in the sun for too long. spacex works... for the purposes of what the actual contracts are for.

the issue is musk being highly likely to be compromised and openly calling for the rape and murder of people he doesn't like. Which gets back to "politics is allowed and you are the intolerant one" level responses.

Its not even that much more convenient, truth be told. Yes, just double clicking to install a core is nice but you do that basically once per computer. Contrast that with downloading the emulator you like (most of which are installers on windows/mac and flatpak/appimages on linuxes) once per computer.

At which point.. just use ES-DE. It automagically detects the majority of standalone emulators and gives you a nice controller based GUI to pick what game you want to play and so forth.

The unified control layout is nice-ish but basically every modern gamepad is "close enough" to xinput that defaults work. And for the more obscure stuff... odds are you are looking more toward a mister anyway or it is that you actually have a god awful claw for the four n64 games worth playing.

Yes, there is a lot to be said about being able to just double click to install (and I think that most gui package managers provide flatpak integration these days? So that might actually be there?). But if you don't know how to install an application then you are going to have a bad time setting up retroarch/es-de in the first place and likely also difficulty totally ripping all your cartridges and yeah...

Took way too long to find it in the actual report (page 12 of https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Essential-Facts-2024-FINAL.pdf)) but it is 63% Gen Z, 55% Millenials, 33% GenX, and 14% Boomers. Nothing is being "excluded".

And the trend makes sense. GenX and older Millenials were the tipping point where games went from "for losers" to "for everyone". But also? GenX and Millenials have families and careers. Playing a game gets a lot more difficult when you have kids swarming around whereas putting on a movie is something the whole family can enjoy. Same with just not wanting to touch a computer "of any form" (and ignoring that your streaming box is also a computer...) after a long day of work.

Yeah... spend some time actually interacting with people with clearances. They are people just like any other so you have some humans and some deranged chuds. And everyone in positions of power are either political appointees (elected or otherwise) or ladder climbers who want to suckle on the teat of those appointees.

So when you point out that someone is actively cheering for russia in a conflict with our allies or is openly calling people slurs? You get told that people are allowed to have political opinions and you are the problem. Because YOU are the reasonable person who will drop it. Whereas they will then removed and moan that someone in IT has "blue hair" and whine until a local politician runs on that and suddenly everyone has very strict dress codes.

Which, in turn, leads to people leaving in droves which just leaves the shitheads and the appeasers.

It isn't about being "evergreen". It is about having historical evidence.

Because maybe someone will do a study in 2030 and want to be able to compare to your UX research in the 2000s. If you wrote your paper properly they can reproduce your experiments (to the degree reasonable) and actually demonstrate progress.

Yeah. Its immediate gratification.

You can get into a cod or fortnite game in less than five minutes from boot to boots on the ground. You can get into a fight in an open world game in even less time. And so forth.

If you aren't into the (delightful) love story? The (extended cut) Fall Guy is 20 minutes to the first stunt and about 45 minutes to the first fight scene. Personally? I think the movie would have benefited from even more time with Ryan Gosling just crying to some t swizzle in the car but it (like Drive, another spectacular Gosling film that nobody but me likes) was marketed as an action movie and people are going to just take out their phones or their gameboys if you make them wait that long.

Its similar logic to "I don't have time to watch a 90 minute movie tonight. So instead I'll watch six episodes of a tv show"

Mentioned in the other thread but:

There is very much an "expected" source for this. Retroarch.

For those not aware, retroarch is a frontend for emulators that takes things farther than tools like ES-DE by requiring packaging and code changes to hook in to all the retroarch libraries to handle things like controller mapping, achievement servers, and hacks/cheats. The lead "developer" on retroarch has a LONG history of transphobia and other forms of bigotry toward emulator developers. REAL hate campaigns with the goal of either forcing emulator developers to specially support retroarch or to stop being developers so that retroarch can continue to claim that they have all the best emulators (even if they are years out of date relative to standalone...).

Duckstation in particular was targeted pretty heavily by them but stenzek (the lead dev) is a straight up G who fought back and refused to support the hateful shitheads. Which led to the "swanstation" fork for retroarch purposes. I haven't done enough research on the difference in the fork but it seems to be significantly behind Duckstation in terms of features while letting retroarch claim they have the best. And if the repo I found from a quick google is THE swanstation repo... yeah.

that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).

As can be seen in the article as well as the issue thread and general contributions: Stenzek did not throw any maintainers "overboard". All contributors were contacted and either agreed or their code was rewritten. That is 100% the proper procedure.

I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.

The issue is not the "maintainers" unless you count the transphobic shitstains at retroarch as "maintainers". The problem is the same thing that faces so many other emulator developers where retroarch distributes outdated and broken versions and then punts user support to the developers. Which means periodic waves of "Ugh, your emulator sucks. Why don't you have feature X?" when Feature X has been in the emulator for years at that point but the "maintainers" at retroarch couldn't be bothered to update their "core".

That said, I do expect a third license change before this is all said and done. Because, based on the linked issue, stenzek et al are still perfectly happy with developmental forks for MRs and the like and there is likely a better license that is exactly what they want, rather than "close enough".

At the end of the day: Ideology is great. But please understand the human aspect of things and maybe do some research to make sure you aren't just arguing that people should bend over backwards to placate people who run campaigns of hate to force other developers to contribute to their project with a patreon that doesn't pay out for that work (outside of rare exceptions).

Its the inherent disconnect between "News" and "Science".

Science requires rigorous study and incremental advancement. A 2023 article based on 2022 data is inherently understood to be.. 2022 data (note: I did not actually check but that is the timeline I assume. It is in the study).

But news and social media just want headlines that get people angry and reinforce whatever nonsense people want to Believe.

It is similar to explaining basic concepts. Been a minute since the last time I was properly briefed, but think stuff like "Do NOT say 'theory' of evolution. Instead, talk about how evolution is the only accepted justification based on evidence and research"

And, of course, the GOL article is written to make stenzek look like a jerk.

I like GOL as a blog a lot, but holy crap is Liam good at half-baked takes on nuanced subjects that mostly just rain shit down upon people.

More likely it is related to the years of harassment from the transphobe "running" retroarch and his horde of hateful shitheads who harass emulator developers until they work for him. Duckstation is far from the only emulator that has been targeted by this and "Swanstation" has always been incredibly sketchy for a "fork".

If you spend years torturing open source developers, this is what happens. Which... has no real impact on the "legitimate" users but will hopefully bring more eyes to why we actively should not support retroarch and their campaigns of hate. Especially when tools like ES-DE do an amazing job of just scanning for what emulators you have installed and "making it work" without demanding developers make tweaks to support their framework.

it is unclear just how much trump is angry at ivanka and jared for allegedly narcing on them.

But pretty sure even eric and don jr know they are getting dick all. He openly loathes them and it might be his only redeeming quality.

Nah. It is just the nature of being the party of gun nuts while openly failing almost all of their purity tests. We actually saw similar (just to a much lesser degree) when trump said something like "I love vaccines" and was boo'd like crazy.

He is a symptom of the rot. Not the source. And by and large he just tries to ride it as best he can.

Vance is immensely unlikable even amongst the republican base. And the past eight years have made it clear that trump can only really get trump elected. The only downside of him going to hell is that it will give republicans a few more years to figure out their post-trump pivot (which seems to be liz cheney).

And there are scenarios under runoff voting where similar can occur (e.g. two seats, 2 right wing, 4 left wing) and is where the "election theory" aspect of things that certain folk are still removed about (because that is the most important thing to have happened in the past 8 years, clearly). The party needs to take the results of the primary and downselect who actually runs to avoid splitting their own vote.

No voting system is perfect. But people should really understand what we have and what their NEED improves and fails to improve rather than just insisting "new is better".

Money is not everything. That is why I keep pointing out the time argument (and you keep ignoring it...). Gaming cafes tend to take advantage along those lines but also just look up horror stories like that couple that was so engrossed with WoW (?) they let their baby die.

At the end of the day: Warning labels and acknowledgement of what we are exposing ourselves to goes a long way. Rather than just saying "I like X so X can't be bad" until it gets to the point that people insist it needs to be illegal because they cannot help themselves.

Its the same idea. It is taking concepts that are known to prey on those with addictive tendencies and turning that into a game.

That is why I referenced games like Diablo and WoW. They were more about making people spend time but.. time is money.

And THAT is the problem. Knowingly taking advantage of the kind of stuff that rubs dopamine emitters real nice. Because a lot of us can dip in and out of a gacha and not get ruined. And others will fail out of college because they NEED that drop

And thank you for demonstrating how we got here and why the root issue will never be addressed.

"Whoa now. The game I like does none of that" is the same reason gacha is fine if it is genshin

While I definitely have a lot of issues with how fast people said "Gacha and loot boxes are okay if it is Genshin Impact", I have the same general reservations I did back when it was about loot boxes in Overwatch or nu-Battlefront 2.

Yes, it is real shitty and a great way to pad out a game into a grind. And the goal is obviously to encourage RMTs to bypass it.

But also? It is like people for got ARPGs and MMOs and the like. The common refrain among older "gamer" Millennials is something like "I almost flunked out of school because of WoW/Everquest" and the like. And a lot of us have stories about staying up all night doing Bhaal runs to get a specific drop in Diablo 2 and so forth.

And, at the end of the day, it is the same thing. It is a way to artificially increase engagement with the option to RMT your way out of it. Studios have found ways to pull all those RMTs into the game itself (so that they get a cut on every legendary sword sold) but it is still the same skinner boxes.

Not to mention games like Balatro or Vampire Survivors that take massive inspiration from casino and slot machine design and mechanics. Yes, they don't have additional purchases (DLC aside) but there is something to be said when EVERYONE owns a ten dollar game because everyone who touches it can't stop gushing about the flashing lights and bells.

And, much like with loot boxes, I am really hesitant for any "We passed some random ass legislature. Mission Accomplished(TM)". When the underlying skinner box concept is still the basis of so many games.

I genuinely don't care if someone's holy book or ancient traditions say killing yourself is fine.

I very much do care about the family and friends that are left behind to process the deaths of loved ones. As well as the lives that are cut short because someone decided the world would be a better place with them dead.

I'm not going to fault anyone for having problems with this. I definitely am not comfortable with someone who comes out of a cult that actively opposes treating mental health "replacing" Chester, a man who struggled all his life before tragically taking his own life.

But people do need to understand: The reason scientology STILL has so much power is not because tom cruise has so many thetans. It is because, like all good cults, they have MASSIVE amounts of dirt on their members. And they make it very clear that anyone who speaks out against them will be destroyed. If you thought a British PM fucking a pig's carcass was a shock... There are similar stories with every cult and secret society.

So if the cult says jump? You jump. And while I remain very very conflicted, I do give Emily credit for being openly gay (a huge no no) and talking around regretting being part of the crew that was used to try to protect masterson. I would rather outright condemnation and apologies but... that probably won't happen unless she is ready to be destroyed by the cult.

Leah Remini deserves mad props for how incredibly brave she has been speaking out against scientology. But she also is MASSIVELY "lucky" that she basically escaped while they were running massive damage control for tom cruise vanceing up oprah's couch. And by the time they "recovered" she had gone from "Weren't you on the beach episode of Saved By The Bell?" to too high profile for them to really go after. Almost nobody else is going to have that luxury.

And as purely a music fan? Not huge on The Emptiness Machine outside of that initial reveal. But I kind of loved most of the Emily covers of the hits and give mad props to the band for making it a point to change the tempo or remix the songs a bit so she isn't just singing Chester's part. Time will tell what the album versions are and if they touch some of the songs they REALLY REALLY REALLY should not touch