All I know is that targets[0] returns "FV107 Scimitar" for some reason, and anytime I try to purge that entry from the array it throws an error.

My wife is in the "they're false-flag psyops" camp, whereas my position is "the ourobouros is eating its own tail."

You can be smart and evil, but at this point it's pretty hard to be a conscious human engaged in society and not have an opinion either way.

For what it's worth, there's been talk that they're really having to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find true undecided voters willing to go on TV and be part of these panels. That's unfortunate in the sense that it suggests there aren't many actually-persuadable voters out there, but these clowns aren't especially representative of the general electorate, either.

Given how many women he's knocked up, and the way he talks about it, I'm about 95% sure he's got a breeding kink that he's using his fame and money to act it out in real life. 🤮

TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal... except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error -- type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.

I had quite a bit of fun with it for a few weekends with my friends, but ultimately the lack of a system for mechanical progression left it feeling a bit shallow (ha!). As a primarily PvE game with light PvP it's in a weird place where it doesn't have quite enough RPG-like elements to hold my interest on the PvE side, or enough player-on-player combat to make it a gripping contest of skill.

It's still a fun game to hop into from time to time, but it's never been appointment gaming for me

From the industry journal I linked in another comment -- it's literally just an off-the-shelf Mireo Plus B. That's it. The only thing Tesla about it is that it's serving a spur line connecting Tesla's factory to the existing Berlin light rail network, and was presumably financed by them for the PR benefit of not having the workers at an electric car factory arrive by diesel train.

I did a little digging and it seems like there's a tiny kernel of fact at the core of this giant turd of a hype-piece, and that is the fact that they electrified this little spur line from Berlin to the new German Tesla factory by using a battery-electric trainset. Which is not a terrible solution for electrifying a very short branch line that presumably doesn't need frequent all-day service, even if it's a bit of a janky approach compared to overhead lines. But hand that off to the overworked, underpaid twenty-two-year old gig worker they've got doing "editing" at Yahoo for two bucks an article, and I guess it turns into "world-first electric wonder train amazes!"

For a second, though, I read the headline and wondered if Musk and co. had finally looped all the way around to reinventing commuter rail from first principles after all these years of trying to "disrupt" it with bullshit ideas like Hyperloop and Tunnels, But Dumber.

That's at least more cultured than my brain shouting "MULATTO BUTTS! (Mulatto butts!)" at me

Right now Intel and AMD have less to fear from Apple than they do from Qualcomm -- the people who can do what they need to do with a Mac and want to are already doing that, it's businesses that are locked into the Windows ecosystem that drive the bulk of their laptop sales right now, and ARM laptops running Windows are the main threat in the short term.

If going wider and integrating more coprocessors gets them closer to matching Apple Silicon in performance per watt, that's great, but Apple snatching up their traditional PC market sector is a fairly distant threat in comparison.

In his defense, telling AI to smile more in order to make sure it isn't unhappy is probably better than what I assume would have been his other suggestion, telling it that it's black to prevent it from gaining sentience.

( /s, of course, but holy shit how was that not a career-ender for him)

Do you think he capitalized "LAW & ORDER" like that because it's how it looks in the TV show title sequence?

Rotovap on a flytrap.

Doubt it. "RuPaul" and "Lachluster"are too clever to have emerged from the dishwater-soaked, infected sponge sitting on top of his spinal column where a real human would have a brain.

10

Lindsey Graham is a piece of shit, but he's an entertaining piece of shit. Not to mention, he's like the yappy little Chihuahua that barks bloody murder at whoever the bigger dog he's hiding behind doesn't like -- I'm pretty sure I could get him on side to shit-talk Thomas to his face for at least the last half of the flight.

The rules of evidence place a lot (honestly an unreasonable amount) of weight on the value of eyewitness evidence, and contemporaneous reports made from the same. The question for the courts will be, does an AI summary of a video recording have the same value as a human-written report from memory?

I agree that this is good use of AI, but would suggest that th courts should require an AI report to basically have the body cam recording stapled to it, ideally with timestamped references in the report. AI transcriptions are decent, but not perfect, and in cases where there could be confusion the way the courts treat these reports should allow for both parties to review and offer their own interpretations.

Somewhere a philosophy undergrad just sat bolt upright and shouted, "A TROLLEY PROBLEM! I must go, the world needs me!"

neighboring Nebraska

Kansas: "Am I a joke to you?"

Lies! The only way to participate in political discourse is to demand rigid adherence to every point of dogma promoted by my idealized conceptual political system of choice -- only by maximizing ideological purity can we achieve a world worth living in!

Quite sure -- and given that one game I've been playing lately (and the exception to the lack of shooters in my portfolio) is Selaco, so I ought to have noticed by now.

There's a very slight difference in smoothness when I'm rapidly waving a mouse cursor waving around on one screen versus the other, but it's hardly the night-and-day difference that going from 30fsp to 60fps was back in Ye Olden Days, and watching a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object doesn't make up the bulk of gameplay in anything I play these days.

The old one and the new one are literally side by side on my desktop, don't know what to tell you...

At launch the 360 was on par graphically with contemporary high-end GPUs, you're right. By even the midpoint of its seven year lifespan, though, it was getting outclassed by midrange PC hardware. You've got to factor in the insanely long refresh cycles of consoles starting with the six and seventh generations of consoles when you talk about processing power. Sony and Microsoft have tried to fix this with mid-cycle refresh consoles, but I think this has honestly hurt more than helped since it breaks the basic promise of console gaming -- that you buy the hardware and you're promised a consistent experience with it for the whole lifecycle. Making multiple performance targets for developers to aim for complicates development and takes away from the consumer appeal

Eh... Consoles used to be horribly crippled compared to a dedicated gaming PC of similar era, but people were more lenient about it because TVs were low-res and the hardware was vastly cheaper. Do you remember Perfect Dark multiplayer on N64, for instance? I do, and it was a slideshow -- didn't stop the game from being lauded as the apex of console shooters at the time. I remember Xbox 360 flagship titles upscaling from sub-720p resolutions in order to maintain a consistent 30fps.

The console model has always been cheap hardware masked by lenient output resolutions and a less discerning player base. Only in the era of 4K televisions and ubiquitous crossplay with PC has that become a problem.

Might just be my middle-aged eyes, but I recently went from a 75Hz monitor to a 160Hz one and I'll be damned if I can see the difference in motion. Granted that don't play much in the way of twitch-style shooters anymore, but for me the threshold of visual smoothness is closer to 60Hz than whatever bonkers 240Hz+ refresh rates that current OLEDs are pushing.

I'll agree that 30fps is pretty marginal for any sort of action gameplay, though historically console players have been more forgiving of mediocre performance in service of more eye candy.

It was a pretty milquetoast acknowledgement of Israeli war crimes, without even mentioning them by name as the perpetrators. I would have hoped for at least something along the lines of:

The children of Gaza deserve better than to be trapped between a terrorist regime and an Israeli military, that, by their actions, shows that they do not value Palestinian lives as worthy of protection.

But I guess even that would have been too spicy for the pro-Israel lobby within the Democratic party. That said, I'll take any public acknowledgement and push for a ceasefire over the current status quo. Much as I wish it were possible, I don't think we're ever gonna get a major figure in any political party to come out and say, for example "Israel is an deeply unjust nation that must reckon with the status of Palestinians if it wishes to become a true, legitimate democratic state."

If Kamala and Walz are my neighbors, we're gonna bully the shit out of Walz about spice levels at the next neighborhood cookout and have a grand old time.

Conversely, I'd probably go bankrupt from bullshit lawsuits over the maintenance of my lawn if I was stuck between the other two.

I've looked into it, but in the sense of "tiny island in the middle of a freshwater lake where I can become the local cryptid living in a spooky shack." Does that still count?

Deepfake exploitable, if nothing else

This seems an... overly-vitriolic response.

Also you're wrong. :P

Look at it this way: in the context of the data being shown here, the relevant reference points are 0% and (arguably) 100%, or at least a point somewhere equidistant from the top of the line as the ~30% low point of the line is to zero. Casually glancing at the chart, a viewer who doesn't take time to look at the scale and the labeled points would take away:

A large majority of college-age men used to binge drink, and now almost none do!

Instead of what the data is actually showing, which is

Half of college-age men used to binge drink and now only three in ten do, while about a third of college-age women have consistently binged.

I don't think the chart designers are being intentionally misleading, but cutting out half of the 0%-100% range means that the graphics are telling a different story than the labels are, and outside the context of a scientific paper not everybody is going to take the time to scrutinize the labels. Omitting the high and low ends of the range also exaggerates the difference between the two lines, since the graph coincidentally cuts off just below the relatively flat line for female binge drinking right after the line for male binge drinking crosses it on the right.

Besides which, for the purposes of the story showing at least the range from 0%-60% wouldn't obscure the overall trend -- there's not a lot of noise in the data, and barring the odd spike in female binge-drinking between '14-'15 -- that critically, doesn't appear to be the subject the of article this comes from -- there aren't any smaller-scale trends or oddities in the data that demand scrutiny. Squashing the Y-axis a bit to tell a truer story about the absolute values of the data wouldn't obscure the message of the graph in any meaningful way.

I've found myself taking a paradoxically accelerationist stance about it, for this exact reason. At the moment, those on the right agitating for violence are a minority, and those that are actually prepared to act consist primarily of a few thousand militia LARPers and an even smaller number of actually-capable fighters. These groups are gradually accruing malcontents while the right wing's filter bubble casts their ideas as acceptable, but the sooner those chuds decide to go loud, the more lopsided and emphatic the beatdown will be -- provided that the armed forces are under the command of non-authoritarian President. Afterwards the public condemnation of insurrectionists will effectively choke off recruiting. Conflict feels almost inevitable at this point and giving the violent authoritarian fringe more time to plan and recruit only makes that conflict deadlier.

It's only showing the range from 60% to 30%, which makes the 20% drop in male binge drinking rates look more like an ~80% drop to near-zero unless you pay close attention to the scale.

Key line right here, sneakily hidden below the fold:

Collectors who view artworks as financial assets have flinched at the rising costs of doing business and the diminished ability to get favorable loans to buy paintings they hope will appreciate in value.

Like everything else in the world, ghouls financialized the art market and have been buying art on fucking margin as though an object of creative expression can be treated like soybean futures. In truth the art market has been the subject of an absurd speculative bubble. The fallout of the bubble popping is going to be hilarious for the wealthy assholes who've been inflating it for years, but it is gonna suck for artists too, and I do feel badly for them.

Rather, I'd say there are many immigrant groups with culturally conservative values (think Hispanic Catholics, BJP-aligned Indian immigrants, conservative Muslims, etc.) as well as certain more religious and patriarchal Black communities, that have a lot in common with the Republicans on social issues, and might be willing to overlook their racism if they find the Democrats' stance on those issues unacceptable. Think also of expat communities that came to America on the heels of Communist revolutions in their home countries and have a reflexive hatred of even vaguely left-ish politics.

In a sick way, we're lucky that the GOP's embrace of racial hatred pushes as many people away as it does, because if they'd let that go they'd have a much broader base amongst minorities.

Only by giving massive amounts of no-strings-attached government money to Smithfield and ConAgra while lightly scolding them about shrinkflation can we address high grocery costs!

Alas, I was so looking forward to hearing them parrot the talking points of acclaimed Leninist... (checks notes) ... JD Vance.

They're sure leaning hard on (white-coded) suburbia, aren't they? Gotta make Josh and Keighleaigh afraid that the libs are coming for their 3000sf builder-grade single-family house on half an acre that's an hour's drive from any sort of center of employment or cultural attraction.

Conservatism is about preserving a historical social order, rather than existing conditions generally. Acknowledging an environmental change and altering the structure of the economy to prevent it threatens the social order that allows oil companies, chemical companies, and auto manufacturers to be some of the wealthiest and politically powerful entities in the world.

Further, in the short term, ignoring climate change preserves the status quo for the wealthy and powerful. In the long term, though, it only really becomes an existential threat to those who are not positioned to profit from it -- look at Nestle attempting to take control of water supplies for an early example of what this might look like. Cataclysm is a life-and-death issue for the masses. For the powerful, it's an opportunity.

Semi-credibly, I'm watching to see if the offensive pivots east to cut off attackers north of Kharkiv, but it seems like they went over the border along ways away from that area if that was their goal.

New Ukrainian strat just dropped: attack everything with a vague phonetic similarity to Will Griggs:

• Kerch Bridge
• Kursk (is)
• (Saint Peters)Burg (is)
• Il'pryskoye? Sure, why not open a front in Kamchatka