So where do we go from here? Venezuela doesn't have the capacity to strike back. I assume this triggers a civil war for power. Maduro is a dead man flying to his future grave.
(If I were in charge from this minute on, I’d offer Maduro a pardon, asylum and a mountain of cash to (a) assist with a regime change and (b) tell us all of Cuba, Iran, Russia and China’s nasty business.)
They might as well declare they are president of USA as well while they're at it. Maduro's regime was just publicly emasculated. They already had no legitimacy due to a fraudulent election and now they have no physical power either.
Without might makes right (US puppet) or some recognition of legitimacy, any leader is little more than a loudspeaker in a pretty house.
Trump claimed in the press conference that we will be controlling their government via her as a puppet and if they don't do what we say we'll put boots on the ground. And I am not even slightly embellishing. So sure she is the 'president' but only by proxy.
Presumably Venezuela has a continuity of government process, so the VP becomes head of the government? I don't see any indications that the regime has or would relinquish power, unless (more amenable) factions within it take advantage of this opportunity (perhaps this has been already coordinated).
Maybe the Venezuelan government remains intact, and now we have the embarrassing situation of a sovereign country asking for its head of state back.
And even more to the point: this is a website. What is he afraid of this website doing that all the other websites don't already do? Why single this one out?
> I just really don't see a way that Russia takes any NATO territory without the entire thing being a psyop against NATO not responding via far-right isolationists, and we're not there yet, or as an assist to help China take Taiwan, which likely means world war, and we're all fucked.
I mean that's really the setup.
1. Get America to move towards a more isolationist setup / unwilling to help Europe or Taiwan. This is already in motion politically and via social media operations.
2. Get America stuck in a conflict with Iran. This is ramping up.
3. China takes Taiwan. Probably in the next 2-5 years.
4. Russia takes the Baltics and starts to carve further into Europe.
My further total crackpot theory on all of this is that most of this has been agreed upon by all the major powers involved.
1. Russia gets to claim over Europe in the future.
2. China gets Taiwan and control of Africa + APAC.
3. US gets control of North America and South America. This culminates in the annexation of Greenland once Russia takes Europe. This is the agreed upon transaction for America to back out of Russo-European affairs and China-Taiwan affairs. Canada and Mexico eventually are also merged into the US unwillingly but without any major allies left there isn't much to prevent it.
Russia started the full scale invasion with 190 000 troops (out of 1 M total active military personnel). Today they have 700 000 deployed in Ukraine. Casualties are probably 200 000 killed and up to a 1 M injured. At the same time they now have 1.3 M total active military personnel. Estimate that 1/3 of the injured are bad enough that they aren’t effective as soldiers. That is 500k unrecoverable losses, and a military that is 300k larger, so they have recruited another 800k to be where they are today.
If they stop fighting actively, then it becomes easier to recruit again without mobilising. Give it a few years and they could have another go at some other location. They clearly don’t care about casualties. Maybe not against NATO, but Georgia, Azerbaijan etc. And so it could continue for a very long time.
”Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Citations for numbers from Claude, that are all best estimates.
In your mind what does a “Russian claim over Europe” mean. Do you really imagine a country with one third the population of the EU is going to dominate the EU + UK?
There are biggest protests in Iran in years & they lost a war with Israel recently - I don't see them being a problem in a long term & with a bit of luck their horrendous regime that regularly slaughters their own citizens might be gone.
Thats what I meant. All I see from americans is apathy or feverish reverence for their leader. No american will intervene when the US government gives marching order towards Canada or Mexico.
US annexing Greenland is just an excuse for US to leave NATO, Trump or Vance might do it if Putin attacks Europe, and he will when China attacks Taiwan.
Hispanics and Mexicans would slauther every gringo and if your annexation attempt for Latin America and Canada happened to occur, Cuba and Venezuela would got Chinese and Russian nuclear missiles in the spot. Canada would just call the French for a good nuclear missile set. Either the USA steps back, or California gets turned into dust.
Texas would already had seceded and turned into a neutral state in order to avoid further issues. And OFC several states bordering Canada and Mexico would secede too joining Canada and Mexico themselves in order to fight Washington and Nevada. Because that's the way to avoid being a nuclear target. Similar stuff would happen in Russia too with states becoming independent so they aren't a target from both Europe and the USA.
China would just stare there thinking on the good chunk of money would get post war. It would just declare neutral too a la Switzerland asking for diplomatic agreements between the two sides.
The most probable war today with Russia would be an small one in the Arctic because of oil/gas, totally irrelevant and with few casualities.
These are all pretty niche products at this point. For the true professionals that need these tools they're stuck but most people can find reasonable alternatives for their hobby or side hustle.
I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.
Yeah. MS must have been so hurt about losing to the iPhone, they really jumped the gun on AI as if to avoid a similar mistake. It's Satya's major play and I think they are already paying for that decision. xbox is hollowed out so that AI can be funded, while the pc/console hybrid project is doomed to fail because "windows everywhere" doesn't work if windows is crap. indeed, they might be left with just the cloud business in the end.
And the funniest thing is: not having a mobile platform anymore will be the death knell for all of their AI efforts.
I’m not really into this AI shenanigans, but it seems to me that if you want people to use /your/ bot, you gotta give it to people in the most seamless and efficient way possible, and that does not translate well to a desktop OS.
I don’t think they would have dethroned iOS or even Android had they stayed their ground, but they probably would’ve had a stronger base to build upon for their Copilot nonsense. Those that used Windows Phone used it because they loved it, Copilot could’ve garnered some good rep from those already sold on Microsoft’s platform; instead, they’re trying to shove it down people’s throats even though very few people actually use Windows because they actively like it, most use it because it’s the “default” OS and they do not (and care not to) know any better.
"Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth."
Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.
MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.
If people were buying new PCs every year like they used to I'd be worth it. Turns out there isn't as much value having a "captive market" on a PC unless it's locked down.
When the rumour was Windows 10 will be the last windows! I don't think people thought it would because of win11 would be so unbearable it would finally drive users to Linux.. but here we are. RIP.
Our Go CLI tools are like 100MB+ and often we bundle them in containers that are in the GB+ territory. Nobody cares or at least has cared enough to tell us to minimize stuff.
My SSD would like a word with you :)
I don’t say every app needs to be in the kb range. But it is strange that applications for the terminal eat up multiple megabytes. I see the reason when this is statically linked though and one needs stuff like open ssl etc.
Bundling the JRE in the bundle typically results in something that is not redistributable with the default OpenJDK license: The Java ecosystem is heavily tilted towards the Apache license, but Hotspot is licensed under the GPL v2 only (no classpath exception). The Apache license and older GPL versions (before 3) are generally assumed to be incompatible.
Every modern openjdk build is licensed as GPLv2 + classpath exception. That exception includes hotspot, since it's part of the jvm. That exemption allows shipping the JVM with your app or linking to it. Otherwise a bunch of enterprise software couldn't exist.
You're asking about a fundamentally different thing.
An app bundle (.app, .rpm, .deb, .msi/.exe etc.) are things jpackage can build for you and are a single shippable artifact for a user with a JRE included so they don't need to do that. It's designed to make it easy to ship Java applications around.
I'm not asking about a fundamentally different thing. The success of other languages isn't because they produce installers. Have you tried native image for a non-trivial application? I've been using it since it came out; I was the first adopter of native-image for Quarkus on Windows. I even wrote the documentation for it at the time. It is not trivial to use, the compile times are extremely long, and the resources it requires are sometimes more than a developers machine can provide.
Or use a graal to build a native-image and ship that around.
But that's not what people want. They want an .exe or a .app, or .rpm, or whatever. That's a container for holding that .jar and it is platform specific and there is no workaround to that problem.
The thing that jumped out to me was the mention of the engineer jumping ship to DFI. Despite DFI still existing, they stopped making consumer stuff back in 2012, and it seems like they somehow disappeared from the consumer mindset even more than Abit did.
I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI.
I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.
The DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D (Socket A) is my favorite motherboard of all time. It was basically purpose built for overclocking. I got to a stable 250Mhz (500Mhz DDR) on that board and ran it stable like that for years, though I did put an active heatsink/cooler on the northbridge.
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