So… the secret service did their job this time? Rather than waiting while someone was camped out on a roof taking ages to miss a shot?

That is 95% false and is the nonsense that has mostly been pedaled by the musks of the world to justify privatized space flight.

Like everything with the US military industrial complex, we split everything up to nonsensical degrees. So much of the research and designs NASA uses are based on work and spec by the Army and Air Force. Which, in turn, leads to very specific proposals for companies like Boeing (eep) and the like.

But the actual design and research and even “small scale” testing? That is generally NASA and JPL. JPL in particular being a government research lab (similar model used by the Navy and the DOE) that coordinates with in house talent as well as university groups around the country.

But as spacex and the like basically poached so much of the top talent out of NASA and JPL and universities? It stopped being “Build this rocket to these specs” and more “Hmm. That rocket you are trying to sell us looks REAL familiar but we have been told by congress we can’t design it ourselves so here is your money. Say hi to Fred for us.”

I mean, nationalized spacex is just NASA again. Which I am all for since spacex (and blue origin and the other one) mostly just came out of poaching staff from NASA and JPL in the first place.

Yeah… I make it a point to not handle people with kid gloves when they are looking to make me convince them it is worth the mild inconvenience to not support a product with a long history of bigotry and harassment. Because, truth be told, it will never happen. Could give you a straight up handy and that would still not be neough.

So I’ll continue to make my disdain for people who knowingly use a product run by people who profit off of bigotry and harassment quite clear. Same end result but with the added benefit of making them feel slightly bad and me have a giggle.

Also, if you thought the above comment about ES-DE vs retroarch was “condescending” then… wow you are sheltered.

Which is a completely different topic.

starlink works… if it isn’t out in the sun for too long. spacex works… for the purposes of what the actual contracts are for.

the issue is musk being highly likely to be compromised and openly calling for the rape and murder of people he doesn’t like. Which gets back to “politics is allowed and you are the intolerant one” level responses.

Its not even that much more convenient, truth be told. Yes, just double clicking to install a core is nice but you do that basically once per computer. Contrast that with downloading the emulator you like (most of which are installers on windows/mac and flatpak/appimages on linuxes) once per computer.

At which point… just use ES-DE. It automagically detects the majority of standalone emulators and gives you a nice controller based GUI to pick what game you want to play and so forth.

The unified control layout is nice-ish but basically every modern gamepad is “close enough” to xinput that defaults work. And for the more obscure stuff… odds are you are looking more toward a mister anyway or it is that you actually have a god awful claw for the four n64 games worth playing.

Yes, there is a lot to be said about being able to just double click to install (and I think that most gui package managers provide flatpak integration these days? So that might actually be there?). But if you don’t know how to install an application then you are going to have a bad time setting up retroarch/es-de in the first place and likely also difficulty totally ripping all your cartridges and yeah…

Yeah… spend some time actually interacting with people with clearances. They are people just like any other so you have some humans and some deranged chuds. And everyone in positions of power are either political appointees (elected or otherwise) or ladder climbers who want to suckle on the teat of those appointees.

So when you point out that someone is actively cheering for russia in a conflict with our allies or is openly calling people slurs? You get told that people are allowed to have political opinions and you are the problem. Because YOU are the reasonable person who will drop it. Whereas they will then bitch and moan that someone in IT has “blue hair” and whine until a local politician runs on that and suddenly everyone has very strict dress codes.

Which, in turn, leads to people leaving in droves which just leaves the shitheads and the appeasers.

Mentioned in the other thread but:

There is very much an “expected” source for this. Retroarch.

For those not aware, retroarch is a frontend for emulators that takes things farther than tools like ES-DE by requiring packaging and code changes to hook in to all the retroarch libraries to handle things like controller mapping, achievement servers, and hacks/cheats. The lead “developer” on retroarch has a LONG history of transphobia and other forms of bigotry toward emulator developers. REAL hate campaigns with the goal of either forcing emulator developers to specially support retroarch or to stop being developers so that retroarch can continue to claim that they have all the best emulators (even if they are years out of date relative to standalone…).

Duckstation in particular was targeted pretty heavily by them but stenzek (the lead dev) is a straight up G who fought back and refused to support the hateful shitheads. Which led to the “swanstation” fork for retroarch purposes. I haven’t done enough research on the difference in the fork but it seems to be significantly behind Duckstation in terms of features while letting retroarch claim they have the best. And if the repo I found from a quick google is THE swanstation repo… yeah.

that can be rather easily fixed without throwing all of the maintainers overboard (?).

As can be seen in the article as well as the issue thread and general contributions: Stenzek did not throw any maintainers “overboard”. All contributors were contacted and either agreed or their code was rewritten. That is 100% the proper procedure.

I can see there being bad maintainers that will come shouting to upstream with every little thing that does not work on their platform, but man that’s just insincere towards maintainers that will dive, analyze and help where they can to make it work.

The issue is not the “maintainers” unless you count the transphobic shitstains at retroarch as “maintainers”. The problem is the same thing that faces so many other emulator developers where retroarch distributes outdated and broken versions and then punts user support to the developers. Which means periodic waves of “Ugh, your emulator sucks. Why don’t you have feature X?” when Feature X has been in the emulator for years at that point but the “maintainers” at retroarch couldn’t be bothered to update their “core”.

That said, I do expect a third license change before this is all said and done. Because, based on the linked issue, stenzek et al are still perfectly happy with developmental forks for MRs and the like and there is likely a better license that is exactly what they want, rather than “close enough”.

At the end of the day: Ideology is great. But please understand the human aspect of things and maybe do some research to make sure you aren’t just arguing that people should bend over backwards to placate people who run campaigns of hate to force other developers to contribute to their project with a patreon that doesn’t pay out for that work (outside of rare exceptions).

And, of course, the GOL article is written to make stenzek look like a jerk.

I like GOL as a blog a lot, but holy crap is Liam good at half-baked takes on nuanced subjects that mostly just rain shit down upon people.

More likely it is related to the years of harassment from the transphobe “running” retroarch and his horde of hateful shitheads who harass emulator developers until they work for him. Duckstation is far from the only emulator that has been targeted by this and “Swanstation” has always been incredibly sketchy for a “fork”.

If you spend years torturing open source developers, this is what happens. Which… has no real impact on the “legitimate” users but will hopefully bring more eyes to why we actively should not support retroarch and their campaigns of hate. Especially when tools like ES-DE do an amazing job of just scanning for what emulators you have installed and “making it work” without demanding developers make tweaks to support their framework.

Vance is immensely unlikable even amongst the republican base. And the past eight years have made it clear that trump can only really get trump elected. The only downside of him going to hell is that it will give republicans a few more years to figure out their post-trump pivot (which seems to be liz cheney).

I genuinely don’t care if someone’s holy book or ancient traditions say killing yourself is fine.

I very much do care about the family and friends that are left behind to process the deaths of loved ones. As well as the lives that are cut short because someone decided the world would be a better place with them dead.

I mean, taking the conquered as slaves also has a lot of history behind it. So does ritualistic sacrifice to get your way (hmmm).

But hey, that is a good enough reason. So please let me know who I should cheer for and call a hero for making the world a better place by killing themselves. Just like I need to know who should be property of others and who shouldn’t

Or maybe, just maybe, we can realize that it is massively fucked up to celebrate suicide just because it might be politically advantageous even though, time and time again, it isn’t even that?

Got it. he died for your righteous cause so it is all good. Nobody has EVER said that in human history.

So that means we need to rent a billboard to make sure everyone knows Little Johnny Smith killed himself because Amy Jo wouldn’t go to the prom with him?

There is a reason that news outlets have increasingly made it a point to not publish suicide letters. Whether they be individuals slitting their own throats or kids committing suicide by cop. It just leads to people who can find a political use for their death glorifying it… as we are seeing in this thread.

As for people who have commit suicide to advance a political or military agenda of an organization: We glorify Thích Quảng Đức even though, to quote wikipedia

Quảng Đức’s act increased international pressure on Diệm and led him to announce reforms with the intention of mollifying the Buddhists. However, the promised reforms were not implemented, leading to a deterioration in the dispute

Do we also glorify Japanese Kamikaze pilots in World War 2? What about child soldiers so manipulated that they are willing to die for a warlord?

Suicide is NEVER the answer*. And all glorifying it and calling people “heroes” for killing themselves does is give scared and lonely people an excuse. They aren’t ending their own lives, they are dying for something more important, yeah…

And anyone whose immediate reaction is “how can I use this death to my own advantage”… they are a fucking monster.

*: Well, outside of euthanasia for medical reasons but that is a much more complicated topic that requires a lot of discussion on the proper way to ensure someone is ending it because of quality of life and not because they are lonely or angry.

No. His death is something you can take advantage of.

Think about that

People make plenty of excuses for why they kill themselves. Plenty of scared and lonely people have complete manifestos on why they are actually winning by ending their own lives.

The end result is still someone killed themselves and left a hole in the lives of everyone who cared about them. And it should not be celebrated.

Exactly. All this person has accomplished is making those opposed to genocide seem like extremists while taking someone away from all the people who care about him.

And it should not need to be pointed out why calling him a “hero” and cheering for his death is maybe the wrong takeaway from this.

One can just as easily argue that that is the point of primaries in the US and other countries. You get a wide range of left and right leaning candidates and you downselect based on who the majority wants as well as general election theory to handle moderates.

And… the end result is that people get incredibly pissy when their candidate doesn’t win and disenfranchise themselves. Theoretically, a very strict ranked choice model that requires ALL candidates to be ranked could help with that but you still get into the realm of “protest votes”. See: People who refused to vote for Biden because he had shit stances on genocide and who would have given trump, who is openly genocidal, the win.

The reality is that we need to actually educate people on how governments work to undo decades of “haw haw, douche or a turd sandwich” levels of narrative. But we also need the politicians to actually unite against common threats. The fascists already understand that. But the Left continues to infight at every opportunity.

Why would he need the money?

It isn’t like he pays his lawyers. And you don’t need a great lawyer to appeal a sensitive case indefinitely.

And… it isn’t like he paid his terrorists. He left them hanging out to dry after they failed to murder pence and the entirety of congress a couple years back.

Also, I have a strong suspicion that he’ll end up pushing for some blatantly illegal “charity” where True Believers can donate to The Real President Of The United States.

And lastly: Money is not a cure for novichok.