tal

Klofkorn stated that he committed the arson because he wanted to be arrested

Well, sounds like he was successful there. This guy have a history?

kagis

https://recentlybooked.com/AZ/Maricopa/Dieter-Klofkorn~960_G090676

April 2024:

Charge Code: 13-3407A1
Charge Description: DANGEROUS DRUG-POSS/USE

Charge Code: 13-1504A1
Charge Description: CRIM TRESP 1ST DEG-RSID/YARD

Charge Code: 13-3415A
Charge Description: DRUG PARAPHERNALIA-POSSESS/USE

So I'm gonna guess here that dude's got drug issues and I'm gonna guess that that first degree trespassing is probably because he's homeless, maybe arrested for squatting somewhere.

kagis more

Back in 2018:

https://www.abc15.com/news/crime/pd-duct-taped-suspect-held-for-glendale-police-after-attacking-surprise-officer

PD: Duct taped suspect held for Glendale police after attacking Surprise officer

Authorities say a construction worker helped an off-duty Surprise reserve officer who was being attacked by a man. 

Glendale police report that on August 7 officers responded to the area of 75th Avenue and Bell Road. 

There they found 29-year-old Dieter Bradford Klofkorn bound in duct tape. 

Witnesses reportedly told police that Klofkorn appeared homeless and dehydrated, so workers offered him a chair to rest in and water to drink. 

An off-duty Surprise reserve officer was also there and went behind a wall where the suspect was sitting to take a phone call. 

Klofkorn then allegedly pushed the officer with one hand, while reaching for the officer's gun with the other. 

The officer later told police that Klofkorn nearly removed his weapon before he was able to retain control of the firearm. 

The officer turned and struck him, and a construction worker assisted him by grabbing Klofkorn. 

He was detained with duct tape until Glendale police arrived. 

Klofkorn has been charged with aggravated assault.

Yeah, I'm gonna assume that this Klofkorn guy probably isn't part of some kind of cabal aiming to swing the election.

where the only acceptable style is jacket with pants?

Well, there's the Scottish, who can do a gussied-up kilt.

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

Formal evening wear (white tie)

The traditional white-tie version of Highland dress consists of:

Men:

• Formal kilt doublet in barathea or velvet. The regulation, Montrose, Sheriffmuir and Kenmore doublets are suitable in a variety of colours. Velvet is considered to be a more formal material. The Prince Charlie jacket (coatee) is considered to be less formal,[by whom?] although when introduced it was to be worn with a white lace jabot. Tartan jackets are also seen.

• Waistcoat in white marcella, tartan (usually to match the kilt), red or the same material as the doublet. No waistcoat is worn with the Kenmore or Montrose doublets.

• Kilt with formal kilt pin

• White stiff-front shirt with wing collar and white, gold, or silver studs and cufflinks for the Regulation doublet, or a white formal shirt and optional lace cuffs for the Montrose, Sheriffmuir, and Kenmore doublets

• White lace jabot. A black silk or a white marcella bow tie may be worn in place of the jabot with the regulation doublet (Highland wear often includes a black bow tie even at white-tie events).

• Black formal shoes or black buckle brogues

• Tartan or diced kilt hose

• Silk garter flashes or garter ties

• Silver-mounted sporran in fur, sealskin or hair with a silver chain belt

• Black, silver-mounted and jeweled sgian-dubh

• Highland bonnet (Balmoral or Glengarry) with crest badge (only worn outdoors)

• Short belted plaid with silver plaid brooch (optional)

• Scottish dirk (optional)

your own guilt

Hmm.

I have a pretty hard time blaming Character.AI, at least from what's in the article text.

On the other hand, it's also not clear to me from the article that his mom did something unreasonable to cause him to commit suicide either, whether or not her lawsuit is justified -- those are two different issues. Whether-or-not she's taking out her grief on Character.AI or even looking for a payday, that doesn't mean that she caused the suicide either.

Not every bad outcome has a bad actor; some are tragedies.

I don't know what his life was like.

I mean, people do commit suicide.

https://sprc.org/about-suicide/scope-of-the-problem/suicide-by-age/

In 2020, suicide was the second leading cause of death for those ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34

Always have, probably always will.

Those aren't all because someone went out and acted in some reprehensible way to get them to do so. People do wind up in unhappy situations and do themselves in, good idea or no.

If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.

US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn't rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile submarine fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.

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

In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country's assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent's own nuclear forces.

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.

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

Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.

In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.

This non-reliance on launch-on-warning is also true of the French and British nuclear deterrents -- the British don't even maintain a nuclear arsenal other than on subs, so they haven't even bothered with maintaining the option to do so, and the French only use tactical ALCMs in addition to the strategic sub-launched weapons; those weapons probably would be poorly-suited for such a role.

The Brits rather famously have the "letter of last resort".

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

The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines and stored on board of each. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike has both destroyed the British government and has also killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and their designated "second person" of responsibility, typically a high-ranking member of the Cabinet such as the deputy prime minister or the first secretary of state. If the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of His Majesty's Government.

If the letters are not used during the term of the prime minister who wrote them, they are destroyed unopened after that person leaves office, so that their content remains unknown to anyone except the issuer.

Process

A new prime minister writes a set of letters immediately after taking office and being told by the Chief of the Defence Staff "precisely what damage a Trident missile could cause". The documents are then delivered to the submarines in sealed envelopes, and the previous prime minister's letters are destroyed without being opened.

In the event of the deaths of both the prime minister and the designated alternative decision-maker as a result of a nuclear strike, the commander(s) of any nuclear submarine(s) on patrol at the time would use a series of checks to ascertain whether the letters of last resort must be opened.

According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, the process by which a Vanguard-class submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.

In 1983, the procedure for Polaris submarines was to open the envelopes if there was an evident nuclear attack, or if all UK naval broadcasts had ceased for four hours.

Options

While the contents of these letters are secret, according to the December 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary The Human Button, there were four known options given to the prime minister to include in the letters. The prime minister might instruct the submarine commander to:

• retaliate with nuclear weapons;

• not retaliate;

• use their own judgement; or,

• place the submarine under an allied country's command, if possible. The documentary mentions Australia and the United States.

The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: "Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there", "Go to Australia", "Retaliate", or "Use your own judgement". The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.

Yeah, I was gonna say...GPUs have to be more significant today for general compute than they've ever been.

Okay, yeah, maybe you don't need one for CAD acceleration in 2024, but that has to be a vanishingly small thing compared to parallel compute on stuff like AI work.

Did NVIDIA stop selling videocards in Russia?

kagis

https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-to-stop-all-product-sales-to-russia

Nvidia Stops All Product Sales to Russia

March 5, 2022

So, yes, though I don't think that it matters a huge amount, since companies are just gonna re-export them out of China or Kazakhstan or wherever. I mean, it's not like the hardware has some kind of region-locking. It's a piece of consumer hardware, sold and resold anonymously all over the place. It's not some kind of specialized military hardware with four end customers and tight control over the movement of the product.

kagis

https://hardwaretimes.com/nvidia-loses-just-2-of-its-revenue-as-offices-are-shut-down-in-russia/

In October [2022], NVIDIA officially shut down all its operations in Russia as sales of both data center and consumer graphics cards were wrapped up. At the time, around 240 employees worked for the Santa Clara-based company. These folks were given the option to either relocate abroad or look for other jobs.

Furthermore, NVIDIA hardware has been banned from sale via official channels.

Fortunately for Team Green, the Russian Federation represented a minor market for its wide portfolio. Disclosures from the Q3 2022 earnings report indicate that the Federation accounted for just 2% of its revenue and 4% for the gaming business.

Although channel partners are forbidden to sell the latest GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards, Russian gamers can still procure them from the grey market.

It'll probably add cost and some risk of getting ripped off and no manufacturer's warranty, but I would be surprised if someone who wanted a new GPU couldn't continue to get ahold of one in Russia, given enough funds.

EDIT: Does make me wonder about Windows-side driver updates. Like, people here are talking about Linux. Windows requires driver signing, and I don't know if those signatures are region-specific.

You can operate a VPN service in Russia legally, but it is obligated to block state-specified stuff internally to the VPN.

https://www.cloudwards.net/russian-vpn-ban/

VPN vendors have to get approval from the authorities to operate within the Russian borders. Usually, this means the provider has to comply with Russia’s censorship demands, like connecting to the FSIS.

Most sanctions, aside from ones aimed at individuals, are going to have indirect effect. That is, they will produce pressure on Russia in aggregate, and that means that they'll impact the typical citizen.

But that being said, there have been a lot of sanctions applied, and...the impact on Nvidia drivers isn't, I think, really a huge one relative to those. Like, things like cutting off access to all kinds of electronics parts and payment system access and stuff are going to be, I'd say, a lot more impactful to a typical person in Russia, even if the impact is secondary.

I don't know about wands, but I assume that they have to be the same type of wand.

For armor, I know that you can't just take any old piece of armor and any other old piece of armor. Like, you need two pieces of chain mail or whatever.

There are still X-planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X-planes

https://commission.europa.eu/about-european-commission/towards-new-commission-2024-2029/commissioners-designate-2024-2029_en

• Estonia: High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission

• Lithuania: Commissioner for Defence and Space

• Finland: Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy

So Finland and the Baltics hold the security and military seats. Fun times for Russia, I imagine.

for some reason

It's called price discrimination.

If there are multiple groups of potential purchasers who have different levels of willingness to pay, if you can identify some characteristic of people willing to pay more, then you can create a version of the product that targets that characteristic and thus the group.

Price discrimination ("differential pricing",[1][2] "equity pricing", "preferential pricing",[3] "dual pricing",[4] "tiered pricing",[5] and "surveillance pricing"[6]) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of.[7][8][2] Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy.[2] Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers' willingness to pay[8][2][4] and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.[9]

• "Product versioning"[8][16] or simply "versioning" (or "second-degree" price differentiation) — offering a product line[13] by creating slightly differentiated products for the purpose of price differentiation,[8][16] i.e. a vertical product line.[17] Another name given to versioning is "menu pricing".[14][18]

In this case, you're going to have something like a group of "value customers" who care a lot about how much they need to spend on the game. And then you're going to have "premium customers" who aren't too fussed about what they pay, but want the very fanciest experience.

If you had just one version, sold the game at the "value customer" price, then you'd lose out on what the "premium customer" would pay. If you sold it at the "premium customer" price, then you'd have a bunch of "value customers" for whom the game would no longer be a worthwhile purchase, who wouldn't buy the game, and you'd lose the sales to them. But by selling it at multiple prices, you can optimize for both groups.

EDIT: l'd also add, on the technical rather than economic side, that I've messed around with having a custom HRTF model myself, as Linux (and maybe elsewhere, dunno) games that use OpenAL let you specify a custom HRTF model in the config file. My own impression was that any impact on audio experience was pretty minimal. Might be different if someone had really weirdly-shaped ears or something, dunno.