I think it was because of Putin, at least with the timing. Importing drugs into the US? Fine. Working with Russia and China to undermine our interests? Not so fine. You can excuse doing it on the holidays to get the entire family and the strike was so perfect it must of been planed months in advance.

As for occupying the country....eehh... We have a really bad history of fucking that up. Its easier to support all the exiled politicians and let them cook. I do hope this is designed as a message to the powers that be that we will interfere if we want/need to. After all these years of Trump though, its more of a wish however.

I think its more because of the alliance Maduro signed with Putin and that the holiday's were the best time to capture the whole family. Hell, for all we know, the intelligence might of thought the whole family were going to Russia for "asylum". It would also take at least a month for planning something like this to have it work so perfectly.

  Oh I am 100% sure he also did it for the distraction, don't get me wrong. You can have your cake and eat it too and Trump is just woofing it down.

I think most Americans think capturing him is a good thing. I just think the reasons to do so NOW is the of the problem. I WANT to believe it was because Maduro singed up with an alliance with Russia 3 months prior that made it a step to far. A way to poke at the bear without making it suicidal. Even if the excuse was shallow (Drug running? Really?), you can't just say "We don't want an in for Russia" while walking that tightrope with Ukraine might end up bad. We want to show Putin that don't fuck with our interests.

I mean people argue about the timing, but really Christmas/New Years is the time to do it. I am sure they had intel on where all his family were going to be during the holidays since the got most of them. I get that people want an "American First" and rather ignore international politics, but we live in an International Society now. Some times you just have to poke a bear to let him know your carrying a rocket launcher.

For reference, I neither like or dislike AI tools for making content. At the end of the day, it just comes down to how lazy you are. The recent Coke/McDonalds ad's were just lazy. The tools are fine and they HAVE to have conventional video editing tools so they "could" of fixed many of the issues in post. If you ever played with LLM workflow you can control how content is generated and then generate a shit ton of sets to get what you want. Even if you get the odd 6 fingered Santa you COULD go in and touch it up with conventual tools. Especially in a simple 30 second advertisement. The reason its called "slop" isn't because the LLM is bad at its job, its because the people using it is bad at theirs. Then they blame the LLM because it can't fight back.

The whole thing translates to, "Stop using LLM's in half baked content with no thought or even basic proofreading! I don't want this bandwagon to stops but most of you idiots don't even bother to look at the output before you ship it! Even though the Zune was a market flop, ATLEAST it was competently deigned. For the love of god, when you type "Make an MP3 player" in Copilot, make sure it IS an MP3 player. Don't make the rest of the industry look like you!"

You know, it makes me wonder how well LLM's can translate corporate speak.

He would use his Costco card to pay a large donation to their current charity, write off the donation as a tax write off AND get that 5% back. Though I am unsure where you would put that 5% back in a tax form? Would it be a gift back from Costco itself? I am betting he just gave his receipt to his accountant and never thought about it.

That said, I do kind of like how Costco handles donations. Its not just one charity but they are fairly open on giving out donations to people in need.

Eh you don't even need AI to do this. There have been filters in premier that have been doing that for decades. Even plenty of opensource software. Not saying AI would be better or worst, just that you can get away with saying "I used a filter!" even if the filter was by AI:P

Honestly this is a bit scary. I am sure the person who committed the fraud thought it was easy money and didn't think to deeply about it. I am worried about a more experienced actor making a partnership with the knowledge to make it work. It wouldn't be to hard to send keystroke batches to fix the input lag. It could be as simple as sending a batch of 50 or so characters, with one mistype where the mouse moves and fixes the mistype and goes back. During that second or so you could send another batch of keystrokes.

I think this is more of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Monotype is the parent and it seems they only license these fonts to websites or individual users per year. They have something about the amount of advertisements you can get off websites using their fonts?

What might of happened is the Japanize company Fontworks LETS sublicensed the fonts from Monotype with a custom license to sell them to game makers, and some reason the licensee expired or maybe it wasn't profitable. Just a guess though. Nothing on Monotype's website seems even remotely interested in game licensing. Only per office user or per click.

All we have to do is convert Slashdot to Wordpress host! Easy fix!

As one comment said, "It also shows that even Russia cannot block the terminals from its citizens" Besides, the Starlink network isn't a "military" network. Ukraine using it is because they were never prepared for this kind of attack. The Russians... well, honestly, don't they have sats and jamming networks?

Also we don't know how the uplink/downlink works. It could be there is a large transmission area with overlapping sats that don't triangulate individual radios on the downlink. Maybe the radios hit multiple satellites and reassemble the data on the uplink. I would rather Starlink says they cannot pinpoint an antenna. I think ALOT of governments would love to know exactly where each box is, not just Ukraine.

God. It was like I was seeing the future back then. Being in high school, knowing the people who were on it. The hook ups, the really bad breakups. The slander. All on a 64 phone line BBS. Everyone would be talking about a thing for a week, then everyone drop/forget about it.

It might just end up being like BBS started on the internet. Just some random forum, people in the know, chat with. All somone needs to do is set up a WordPress account and let the school drama unfold like its 1998.

The whole thing is a political and foreign ownership blues. They found some of their tech in the missiles Russia was using in the war a few months back, there was the ransom attack the year before, and now the order the US having an export ban on any American companies that are more than %50 owned in China.

It looks like in October 4, China did its own export ban on "select materials" and on the 7th the Netherlands government pushed out the then CEO Zhang Xuezheng because of mismanagement and the accusations made in the press releases are just jarring. The open letter on Nexperia's site is really telling. I am betting they haven't been able to get a hold of anyone in Wingtech's side. The day after they "officially" halted all exports and accused Nexperia, in my opinion, of going behind their back to find new suppliers. I am guessing Wingtech did this for barging power rather than admitting its because of the trade war.

What is really telling is if the interim CEO cannot get a hold of anyone on Wingtech's side. To take such drastic action as an open letter, in a public company, is either incompetence or desperation. Being the current CEO has only been there for a a month, I am betting the latter.

Is the court and the government getting the runaround as well? Is overreaction from Wingtech because they think they can bully the Netherlands courts to do what they want or is it because they got what they need from Nexperia and can cut them off at anytime, regardless of the consequences? Is China just pushing its trade war and Wingtech is just in the middle of all this or is Wingtech mismanagement so bad that the China branch jumping ship without anyone knowing?

The only thing you can trust from news sources or even my wild guesses is actions. The Netherland court turned over Nexperia to an independent governance because of apparent fraud. Wingtech halted exports either because of retaliation or because of new export controls. The only way anyone will know what's really going on in Nexperia will be the earnings call.

PS - The press releases are a hoot.

Generally, at least I think, forcing kids to memorize a bunch of things at a young age is better for them in the future. Even if they don't 100% understand why, once they move up to high school and have to start thinking (aka book reports, algebra, etc), they don't have to go back to using fingers or manually doing multiplications. Sometimes you get that "ah hah" moment when you realize you have all that information already in your noggin and can apply it.

Of course you also end up with kids who skip a grade or move to a different school it throws it all to wack. I got experience in that front.

People has been buying stuff like this for century's. Yea my mom could use the same yarn and put it together in about a day, but fashion is fashion. Think of it as a way to meet people. You start off with a conversation about it and go on to other small talk. Personally, as somone who is paranoid going outside now a days without some kind of recording device on myself makes this great way to have a body cam without it seeming intrusive.

That said, $5 of yarn is enough to make one your own. Its just a scarf with some stitching. I am good enough to make scarfs so I am thinking of making something similar for presents. The question is should I go with the same colors or make it goth.

Its really more of a cost issue than anything. Steam uses a custom WiFi 7 adaptor (or "router" as they call it) to avoid the issue of people having a sub standard WIFI hub. Considering at 6Ghz it can stream at 20Gbps, it should work just as well as a wired connection. With Foveated streaming it also should help with better rendering. Of course these are all "should" and no one has put their hands on the thing.

In reality it all comes down to price. There are wireless dongles you can get that work with DP ports but the chips are very expensive and short range. Also Steam doesn't have the decade of experience that Oculus had in camera tracking. That said I feel like this is the old Google vs I-phone back in the day. It looks like the Steam device has a port you can use to make custom devices and I am betting there might even be a way to make your own hand controller's latter. Like it or not, Oculus has been held back by being a toy and it looks like Steam is trying to make their device more flexible at the start.