Others have tried to evade the spirit of the ban, using other digital devices sich as older iPods, or bringing walkie-talkies to school.

I’m not an advocate of smartphone bans, but necessity is the mother of invention, and I suppose that if some kids start cobbling together packet radio solutions to talk with their friends and reach the Internet, it’ll probably be an educational experience.

My kneejerk reaction was “it’s not going to do much” too, but I’ve kind of mulled it over and I’m kind of inclined to feel more charitable towards the Portland stuff.

What did the Trump administration want when it was sending National Guard out? Images of conflict, material that they could use to show that there was some dire threat and dangerous criminality that the administration was handling. They got footage of a frog air-humping and some nude bicyclists that’s basically useless for that.

Looking at Fox News’s front page, they have:

• Emergency flights diverted from Portland hospital amid ‘laser party’ threats at ICE facility: report

and

• Portland mayor orders removal of police tape despite federal demand for perimeter at ICE facility, report says

Which I think even the most die-hard MAGA fan is going to have a hard time getting too worked up over.

And it did accomplish some of the goals that a protest in that it helped build make visible that there were people who did object to what was going on.

I’m not sure that it was the absolute, optimal thing to do, but it might have been reasonably-canny.

I’ve never played either the original or the remastered version of Oblivion. I got into Bethesda games via the Fallout series rather than the Elder Scrolls series.

I think I did see a friend, who was a big fan of Daggerfall, play that. And I went back and played Morrowind with the open-source GemRB engine. But I never did Oblivion.

EDIT: Sorry, via the open-source OpenMW engine. GemRB was for the Infinity Engine, and I also did those games.

EDIT2: I’ve also never played Elder Scrolls Online, as I wasn’t really interested in an online experience. I did play Fallout 76, which is online, but that was only because Fallout 5 wasn’t coming out any time soon, and the most that was going to be available for a long time was Fallout 76.

I mean, yelling at UPS seems kind of unreasonable. Trump put the new system into place without a lead time for getting shippers to set up a system to handle all this, and I saw plenty of parties saying that this was going to lead to chaos. Sure enough…

I remember reading some articles about people waiting for their Framework Desktop machines shipped via Fedex getting frustrated at them being held up in customs too.

I don’t see any official announcement of cancellation, but honestly, between its development not going well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil_2

The game was originally announced at Ubidays 2008, with almost a decade of silence before being re-revealed at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, although no release window or target platforms have been mentioned.

Its development was characterized in the media by uncertainty, doubt, and rumors about the game’s future, and has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[1] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development period of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.

And Ubisoft as a whole having problems recently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft

…my bet would be against it coming out. Or, even if it does…I mean, people who wanted the game want it because the original Beyond Good and Evil was a solid game. That first game came out in 2003, 22 years back. That’s a long gap in time, technology, and people. Someone could probably sit down and try to come up with a list of examples where you had one very successful game in a series and another that far down the road, and my guess is that in most cases, the next game doesn’t live up to the original.

tries to think of an example where someone’s managed something like this

I like Carrier Command 2. That came out 33 years after Carrier Command, though it certainly didn’t meet with the same level of relative success, and there was an (unsuccessful) remake of the original between the two releases.

Starfield was very stable for me.

Fallout: New Vegas was unstable, especially near the end of a run. And I’d swear that it was worse on the XBox than on the PC. Not just longer load times, but plenty of times that the thing would die when loading an area.

My impression from playing both was that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were pretty solid when you started playing a game — well, okay, if you get the post-release patches in place — but that the game became less-stable over the course of a run.

The loading times also got a lot more painful over the course of a run. Fallout 76 and Starfield did much better in that respect.

As much as I hate the idea of remastering all their games instead of just making another fucking game,

I would pretty happily buy the 3D Fallout games remastered for the Starfield engine. Higher texture resolution. Use some of the features that were added to their engine in the years subsequent to release. Capable of being rendered at frame rates that modern monitors can display. Eliminate some of the weird ragdoll stuff they used to have. Modders have improved the models a lot, and I’m sure that that’s doable. Another popular change for Skyrim modders was doing things like opening up the world (because you didn’t need to load towns separately from the outside world on modern computers), adding more foliage and other things that computers couldn’t handle back at release, adding modern shader effects, and all that.

I mean, sure, I’d also like to have Fallout 5, but I suspect that the cost of doing a remaster is a lot less than a new game, and the earlier games are getting old enough that they’re kinda hard to recommend. I mean, if they release Fallout 5 in the early 2030s, the last game in the mainline series will be Fallout 4, 2015, and before that, Fallout: New Vegas from 2010 and Fallout 3 from 2008. That’ll be a huge gap, if you hope to get players to play the series. If you rewind a comparable 15 years from Fallout 3, you’re at 1993. That’s the original Doom release. That’s a pretty enormous gap.

Skyrim got the LE->SE (well, and AE) path, so it got updated to be more-playable over the years. The Fallout games are still running on the old stuff.

Ehhhh. I mean, I broadly agree that tariffs are not a good idea, and for China, even untargeted tariffs. And end of the day, this is bullshit political theater.

However, it’s not crazy to decouple from China, particularly for a number of important goods. It’s probably not a wildly-unreasonable expectation that economic pressure will be used more in future conflicts than in the past, given the global nature of the economies and the longer supply chains. Like, concerns over that aren’t something that Trump just pulled up.

All that being said, if he actually goes through with this and holds this in place, I think that it’s going to be interesting to see how well the public takes it. These are effectively large consumption taxes. Sure, that’s great if you’re wealthy, because those are regressive, but they’re going to suck if you’re poor, and a major part of the reason that the public voted for Trump was because of upset over inflation under Biden.

So, this is from a couple months back, talking about his earlier tariff packages:

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/15/nx-s1-5467331/trump-tariffs-low-income-households

President Trump has argued that his “America First” trade policy is intended to balance what he feels is an unfair global trade scheme that hurts U.S. workers.

As things stand, there’s a 10% tariff on almost everything the U.S. imports, though there are some exceptions. On goods from China, there’s a 30% tariff rate. Last year, China was the third largest source of imported goods to the U.S.

Tariffs are a kind of tax that hit poorer households more than higher earning ones

Tedeschi said most U.S. taxes, especially federal taxes, are progressive.

“That means that they pinch higher income families more than they do lower income families,” Tedeschi said. “Our income tax is a great example of that. When we run the numbers on tariffs, we find that that’s the opposite.”

According to the Budget Lab’s analysis of Trump’s tariffs, prices would rise by more than 2%. Tedeschi said that could lead to an almost 4% drop in purchasing power of lower-income families, costing them about $1,500 annually.

I mean, you ramp tariffs up, you’re ramping up taxes on the poor. Okay, sure, Trump has worked at framing this as “China paying taxes, not you” or “standing up for America”. But you can’t hide the prices that people wind up paying in stores.

And I’m pretty sure that consumer good prices are — though not obviously linked to taxes — pretty visible, because we look at them a lot. Like why gasoline prices matter a lot, because there are signs with them all over. If you pay a tax at the end of the year, you see a number once. If prices are up, you’re constantly looking at higher price tags.

I kind of suspect that it’s not safety driving his concern — this isn’t exactly something that would warrant state-level concern — but I do think that it’s a bad precedent to be modifying street markings for political reasons.

• I doubt that this particular incident is likely all that risky, but if it becomes normalized to modify street markings, someone sooner or later is going to do something that they think is clever and really does muck up drivers.

• This stuff goes both ways. If you have the left modifying street markings and it’s let stand, it’s not as if streets are some sort of left-exclusive forum. You can be pretty sure that if this sort of thing is let stand, then the right is going to do so too. I’m pretty confident that if someone started painting anti-LGBTQ markings on streets, plenty of people here would be pretty unhappy. I don’t really want political discourse to wind up being who is willing to throw more graffiti down.

It should be possible to find plenty of places in Austin that are okay with putting up signs or murals — things that aren’t street markings — that are pro-LGBT messages. That avoids the whole issue that they’re arguing over.

kagis

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/08/inclusive-church-turns-hateful-graffiti-into-pride-mural-we-make-beautiful-things-out-of-the-dust/

After an LGBTQ±inclusive church in Austin, Texas, was vandalized on Thursday, the community came together to transform the act of hate into something beautiful.

The vandals tore down the Pride flag at Life in the City UMC and graffitied “Pride was the 1st sin” on the front of the building. Afterward, volunteers joined the church for a “creative restoration project” to transform the graffiti into a mural featuring two Progress Pride flags flanking the church doorway.

I really think that this is a better approach if one wants to put out a message.

EDIT: Also, on purely-pragmatic grounds, I suspect that the road surface is probably about the most wear-heavy place to paint something. Like, paint something on a wall, and it doesn’t have vehicle tires tearing it up and requiring frequent repainting to look decent.

EDIT2: You can even see a mural on a building about ten feet behind the rainbow crosswalk in the article’s picture. Which one looks in better condition to you, the crosswalk or the mural?

Be interesting to see whether they manufactured stuff going to Ukraine. If it turns out that this is Russian intelligence, this has considerable shitstorm potential.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion

The Black Tom explosion was an act of arson by field agents of the Office of Naval Intelligence of the German Empire, to destroy U.S.-made munitions that were about to be shipped to the Allies during World War I. The explosions occurred on July 30, 1916, in New York Harbor, killing at least 7 people and wounding hundreds more.[1] It also caused damage of military goods worth some $20,000,000 ($580 million in 2024 dollars).[2][3] This incident, which happened prior to U.S. entry into World War I, also damaged the Statue of Liberty.[4] It is one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in history.

This attack was one of many during the German sabotage campaign against the neutral United States, and it is notable for its contribution to the shift of public opinion against Germany, which eventually resulted in American approval for participating with World War I.[4]

They appear to make military explosives.

TRINITROTOLUENE (TNT): A VERSATILE ENERGETIC COMPOUND

At Accurate Energetic Systems, LLC (AES), we specialize in the manufacture and supply of Trinitrotoluene, commonly known as TNT. Renowned for its stability and reliability, TNT is one of the most widely used explosives in both military and commercial sectors. Our high-quality TNT formulations meet stringent safety and performance standards, making them ideal for a variety of applications, from demolition to munitions.

TNT’S ROLE IN AEROSPACE AND DEFENSE

TNT has been a staple in the aerospace and defense industries due to its excellent balance of explosive power and safety. It is frequently used in munitions such as artillery shells, bombs, and grenades. At AES, we provide pure TNT as well as advanced compositions, including Tritonal and Torpex, which combine TNT with other materials to enhance blast effects and performance characteristics.

looks further

Yup. They made 155 mm artillery shell filler.

https://www.aesys.biz/supplementary-charges

Accurate Energetic Systems, LLC (AES), a prime contractor to the US Government, specializes in the production of high-grade supplementary charges for military applications. Our extensive experience and advanced manufacturing capabilities allow us to supply top-quality explosive products, including TNT and PBXN-9 Supplementary Charges, primarily used in 155 mm artillery systems.

EDIT2: I’m going to cross-post this to a few other potentially-relevant communities.

EDIT3: Cross-posted to !ukraine@sopuli.xyz and !europe@feddit.org. Note that Russian intelligence did blow up munitions storage depots back in 2014 in Czechia that were being used to ship munitions to Ukraine, but if this is them hitting a production facility in the US, it’d be a pretty serious expansion.

"With respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology president wrote in a letter.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WithDueRespect

With Due Respect

“Why is it that whenever someone says ‘with all due respect’, they really mean ‘kiss my ass’?”

— Ashley Williams, Mass Effect 1

Currently near the top of !nottheonion@lemmy.world:

Alabama senator wants anyone practicing sharia law immediately deported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Qatar

Sharia is a main source of Qatari legislation, according to Qatar’s constitution.[7][8] Sharia is applied to statutes pertaining to family law, inheritance, and several criminal acts (including adultery, robbery and murder). In some cases in Sharia-based family courts, a woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s and in some cases a female and male testimony is not accepted at all if the witness is not deemed reliable.

https://patch.com/idaho/boise/idaho-most-hateful-state-us-analysis-hate-map-shows

Idaho Most Hateful State In US, Analysis Of Hate Map Shows

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2018 Hate Map shows growth in alt-right white supremacy and anti-Muslim groups.

I can but imagine the delightful interactions to come.

EDIT: Well, maybe the people in question will stay on-base. Germany had some facility at another USAF base that they used for training that IIRC they shut down due to military spending cuts a few years back. I dunno if the people there stayed on-base or what. If you figure that Qatar will probably do something similar, maybe give some idea of the model.

kagis

A facility at Holloman AFB, in New Mexico. Germany closed their facility in 2019, and another at Fort Bliss, from said military funding cuts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holloman_Air_Force_Base

In March 2013, it was announced that German Air Force units at Fort Bliss will transfer to Holloman later that same year; this was to end the German Air Force presence at Fort Bliss dating back to 1956.[19] In 2015, due to funding constraints on the planned new facilities in Europe, the German Air Force Air Defense school was to stay open at Fort Bliss until 2020.[20] On March 13, 2019, after 27 years in southern New Mexico, the German Luftwaffe ceased flight training at Holloman AFB.[3]

If you’re confident that a given company is overvalued by existing investors, you can sell it short, make money off that assessment.

That being said, if you’re wrong, you can lose money doing the same.

In the US, gun is the most-common route.

kagis

https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

This says 55.33% of suicides in the US are with a firearm.

I once went digging through death statistics on suicides. In Japan, firearms are hard to get, but there are tall buildings all over. Firearms deaths are down, but deaths by falling are way up.

It’s very much a locational thing.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has filed a lawsuit against the City of El Cajon, accusing its police department of repeatedly violating state law by sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with law enforcement agencies in more than two dozen states.

I mean, this was kind of guaranteed to happen once ALPRs rolled out. Legal or not. If you don’t want that information to get out, probably want to avoid having ALPRs.

Well…it depends.

First, I don’t know if she was under oath.

Second, there is executive privilege. That doesn’t mean that she can apply it in this case (or that she was even trying), but it’s not a blanket “Congress can demand all communications, period”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_privilege

Executive privilege is the right of the president of the United States and other members of the executive branch to maintain confidential communications under certain circumstances within the executive branch and to resist some subpoenas and other oversight by the legislative and judicial branches of government in pursuit of particular information or personnel relating to those confidential communications. The right comes into effect when revealing the information would impair governmental functions. Neither executive privilege nor the oversight power of Congress is explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution.[1] However, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that executive privilege and congressional oversight each are a consequence of the doctrine of the separation of powers, derived from the supremacy of each branch in its area of constitutional activity.[2]

That being said, Congress is expected to perform oversight of the Executive Branch, and you don’t get to just invoke executive privilege every time they require you to provide information, either. I imagine that one could wind up with court cases and more case law finding the limits of the privilege if it comes up, especially if — as I assume will most-likely be the case — the Democrats take the House in the midterm elections and then start promptly use control of the House to start sticking their nose into everything Trump’s been doing.

There are some existing video games that incorporate LLMs or diffusion models. So in one sense, that’s probably very doable.

But I think that it’s probably going to be a slow process. There are probably going to be dead ends. I kind of suspect that early games, even if they’re technically-novel, probably will suffer the same problems that past video games did before they matured. End of the day, a video game needs to be fun, and just throwing a new technology like a powerful graphics card or a fancy natural-language parser or whatever at it doesn’t get you to that fun game. I think that it’s going to take quite some years of game developers iterating to incorporate generative AI stuff well.

That being said, there are some things I’d like to see tried.

• My guess is that it’s probably possible to create to develop some sort of social-media-based video game that generates a choose-your-own-adventure style video game, remembering story branches generated by other users to take advantage of human-assisted creation, and trying to show “top” story forks. Like, make the bar low, use voting or link tracking or something to determine what story branches people like, and show those.

• I’d like to see some kind of system for tracking world state that isn’t purely based on having an LLM look at the entire preceding text for context. That’s a pretty inefficient way to store world state, and implementing game logic at the LLM level is, I think, going to be problematic. Think of something like, oh, a game system like Inform/TADS/glulx-based interactive fiction. You have objects and properties and a game engine that handles tracking them and their interactions. But you try to get an LLM to generate text for those objects.

• There are some games that use diffusion models, either statically or at runtime, to generate illustrations, where the number of permutations would be impractical for a human artist. The ones I’ve seen have been adult-oriented; I don’t know how the field has developed, and there may well be a lot more out there now.

• One thing that I think could be done today is to start using procedurally-generated voices. Generative AI can do pretty decent voice synthesis. Video games are good at doing procedurally-generated text, but if you do that, you don’t get voice audio. That’s not really a game genre, but it’s a way in which one could provide some neat added functionality. I think that to really take advantage of this, there’d need to be a training corpus of text annotated with emotional information and such, but I’ve seen people doing this in a usable form for game mods.

I don’t think that that’d be very analogous. He explicitly said that he wasn’t going to do the Hyperloop himself, just proposed it as an idea that someone else could implement.

That being said, you could dig up something that Musk had said that he would do that he didn’t. considers FSD on Tesla vehicles is probably the prime example.

They may not be paid promptly, but I kind of suspect that if back pay is not forthcoming, there’s probably going to be a class-action lawsuit or similar, and they may wind up not just wages, but with with interest on said wages.