https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/special-series/orban-le-pen-international-nationalism.html

The Rise of the International Nationalists

I just use lgogdownloader, which is open-source, or for a single game, the web browser.

Honestly, it might be better to just do a new, similar game in the same genre and theme. NOLF is pretty long in the tooth now. Hard to compete with current shooters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Forever

The Operative: No One Lives Forever (abbreviated as NOLF) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Fox Interactive, released for Windows in 2000.

That’s a quarter-century ago now.

It was followed by a sequel in 2002, entitled No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way.

Almost as long.

I mean, I don’t think that the actual IP from those games is necessary to make a similar game to scratch the itch.

While that’s true, GOG also is intended to let you download an offline installer. If GOG dies, you still have the game, as long as you saved the installer. If GOG changes the terms of their service or software, they have little leverage.

There are ways to archive Steam games, but it’s not the “normal mode of operation”. If Steam dies, you probably don’t have your games. If Steam’s terms of service or software changes, they have a lot of leverage to force new changes through.

Some other wrinkles:

• Some games on GOG today have DRM, though at least it’s clearly marked.

• I also agree that Valve has and continues to do an enormous amount to support Linux gaming. I used Linux as my desktop back in the days when Valve wasn’t doing Linux, and the gaming situation on Linux was far more limited. It’s hard to overstate how radical an impact Valve’s support has had.

all

Note that according to current polls, over 30% of the UK’s population intends to vote Reform in the next election.

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

It’s a hell of a lot.

Article title:

Top US Army General Says He’s Letting ChatGPT Make Military Decisions

Body text

“I’m asking to build, trying to build models to help all of us,” he said, adding that he’s using ChatGPT to help make military and personal decisions affecting the soldiers under his command.

These are not equivalent statements. You can take input from a subordinate, or from a military history work, doctrine manuals, or Google, or ChatGPT in making a decision without having them make that decision.

This is a serious news story and happened. You want !NotTheOnion@lemmy.world.

EDIT: It’s already up there. Thought I saw it there yesterday.

https://lemmy.today/post/39904084

Top White House official selling Arlington home after activists write chalk messages on sidewalk | ARLnow.com

I’m not looking at what was proposed, but honestly, Trump’s tariffs might exceed the effect of a carbon tax on shipping emissions, in terms of making shipping more-costly than would have otherwise been the case. Doesn’t mean they reflect them exactly, mind — distance isn’t a factor with tariffs, and it is with any fee — but…

kagis

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/imports-seen-well-below-average-for-rest-of-2025

U.S. imports seen well below average for rest of 2025

NRF says frontloading, tariffs to squeeze container volumes.

The fact that some of that is frontloading is fair, and that doesn’t produce a longer-term reduction in shippings. Like, companies moved as much product as they could into warehouses prior to tariff enforcement going into force, to limit their impact. But over time, stocks in those warehouses are going to become exhausted, US tariffs at borders will start being passed on, and you’ll have higher prices and less purchasing of products with a higher price elasticity of demand.

Monthly import volumes through major U.S container ports are expected to slip below the 2 million TEU mark through the remainder of the year, according to Global Port Tracker data report released today by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

“This year’s peak season has come and gone, largely due to retailers frontloading imports ahead of reciprocal tariffs taking effect,” NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said in a release. “New sectoral tariffs continue to be announced, but most retailers are well-stocked for the holiday season and doing as much as they can to shield their customers from the costs of tariffs for as long as they can.”

The trade group said October is forecast at 1.97 million TEUs, down 12.3% y/y, and November at 1.75 million TEUs, down 19.2%. December volume is forecast at 1.72 million TEUs, a decline of 19.4% and the slowest month since 1.62 million TEUs in March 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B%2B

N++ is a platform video game developed and published by Metanet Software. It is the third and final installment of the N franchise, which started with the Adobe Flash game N. It is the sequel to N+. The game was initially released for the PlayStation 4 on July 28, 2015, in North America, and July 29, 2015, in Europe, and was later released for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems on August 25, 2016, and December 26, 2016, respectively. The Xbox One version was released on October 4, 2017.[1] The Linux version of the game was released on May 31, 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B

N+ is the console and handheld version of the Adobe Flash game N, which was developed by Metanet Software. N+ for Xbox Live Arcade was developed by Slick Entertainment and published by Metanet Software. Unique versions of the game were also ported separately to the PlayStation Portable[1] and Nintendo DS[2] by developers SilverBirch Studios and Atari.[3] Metanet Software licensed their N IP for this deal, provided single player level design for both versions, and consulted on the project.

The Xbox Live Arcade version was released on February 20, 2008, and three expansion packs were released later that year on July 23, September 10, and October 15.[4] The handheld versions were released on August 26, 2008.[5][6] N+ was followed by N++ in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_(video_game)

N (stylized as n) is a freeware video game developed by Metanet Software. It was inspired in part by Lode Runner, Soldat, and other side-scrolling games. It was the first of the N series, followed by N+ and N++. N won the audience choice award in the downloadables category of the 2005 Independent Games Festival.[1]

Release: WW: March 1, 2004

This is the original article. Note that it is from 2013.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/british-public-wrong-about-nearly-everything-survey-shows-8697821.html

although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.

Maybe get ALPRs to start logging bumper stickers. :-)

Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.

If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.

IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.

kagis

Nope (or at least, not by the metrics chosen here), but I’m close.

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republicans-democrats-american-politics-jeep-2024-10

To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.

According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.

The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.

EDIT: To be fair, the article author is probably partly talking about Musk’s association with Trump and the Cybertruck coming out about that time, and he’s talking about the 2024 election specifically, but I think that the Cybertruck is maybe high-media-visibility, but doesn’t have all that much to actually do with voting Trump.

I mean, I’m serious. Like, it’s a big CRM platform that people use and I understand has an ecosystem of software that integrates with it, is well-established.

It’s like, someone may not like Photoshop. Frankly, I avoided it in favor of Gimp since the early 2000s, and I really don’t like the fact that it’s SaaS now.

But you can’t just say “Photoshop sucks, artists use charcoal sticks now”. You have to have that alternative, like Gimp. And even then, people are going to have some loss in experience and loss in integrated software (like plugins and stuff) in a switch.

I don’t do CRM. But my understanding is that it does matter and that that ecosystem matters, and “just throw one’s hands up in the air and tell people not to use a CRM platform” is probably not going to fly.

kagis

I thought that SugarCRM was open-source, but it looks like I’m a decade out-of-date — it started as an open-source project, but apparently the company founded around it took it proprietary. And I bet that it doesn’t compare in size in terms of people with experience with it or software that integrates with it.

kagis

https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-ecosystem/

The Salesforce ecosystem is an absolute behemoth. Salesforce employs around 70,000 people and is the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. They also have a market cap of a quarter of a trillion – pretty impressive, right?

However, when you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, there are 15M people involved in Salesforce’s community who work as end users, in consultancies, and for app companies. The Salesforce economy is also predicted to generate revenues of six times that of Salesforce by 2026.

Like, you’re not gonna move that overnight.

It could be that Salesforce sucks on a technical level as a platform. I don’t know, haven’t used it. But what I’m saying is that I suspect that for a lot of users, they aren’t in a great position to plop in an existing replacement overnight.

EDIT: It sounds like there’s a continuing open-source fork of SugarCRM, SuiteCRM. This is the first I’ve heard of it, though, so I kinda suspect that the userbase isn’t massive.

Is there a comparable CRM alternative?

Inclusion of Erowid in the training corpus had initially seemed like a good idea.

For cords, IIRC you can make them taste bad.

hits Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Cord-Protector-CritterCord-Protect-Hazardous/dp/B000EH2I5O

Maybe it’d be possible to make something similar for phone cases.

The prediction comes from OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who claims AI will “reach or exceed human capacity” by 2027.

I suppose that it depends on the metric you’re using. There are some tasks at which humans are outperformed now.

But I am pretty comfortable saying that come January 2027, the great bulk of things that humans do will continue to not be able to be done by existing AI.

We aren’t going to just tweak an existing LLM somewhere slightly, throw a bit more hardware at it, and get general intelligence.

keep portable charging devices out of pets’ reach

Realistically, I suspect that a smartphone battery is enough to start a fire. I doubt that there is any chance that every dog owner is going to keep smartphones out of pet reach.

I have, in the past, kind of wished that settings and characters could not be copyrighted. I realize that there’s work that goes into creating each, but I think that we could still live in a world where those weren’t protected and interesting stuff still gets created. If that were to happen, then I agree, it’d be necessary to make it very clear who created what, since the setting and characters alone wouldn’t uniquely identify the source.

Like, there are things like Greek mythology or the Robin Hood collection of stories, very important works of art from our past, that were created by many different unaffiliated people. They just couldn’t be created today with our modern stories, because the settings and characters would be copyrighted and most rightsholders don’t just offer a blanket grant of rights to use them.

That’s actually one unusual and notable thing H.P. Lovecraft did — if you’ve ever seen stuff in the Cthulhu Mythos, that’s him. He encouraged anyone who wanted to do so to create stuff using his universe. One reason why we have that kind of collection of Lovecraftian stuff.

But you can’t do that with, say, Star Wars or a lot of other beloved settings.