Its not often trump officials admit to falling for a scam and attacking another country.

The Trump administration and its allies in Congress presented a shifting new justification Monday for the U.S. attack on Iran, with House Speaker Mike Johnson suggesting that the White House believed Israel was determined to act on its own, leaving the president with a “very difficult decision.”

Mom: If someone else is jumping off a bridge, would you too?

GOP: Yes

What was once old is new again!

I mean good-ish in the lesser-evil type of thing. I don’t expect any of those to be 100% ethical but there are some that are a lot worse than others

Ethics are subjective. “Good-ish” to you may mean you’re fine if its trained on copyrighted works as long as it wasn’t done with electricity from diesel generators belching exhaust into the local Memphis atmosphere (I’m looking at you Grok). Llama doesn’t do the diesel generator thing, but its a product of Facebook corporation. So is that “good-ish” to you or not? I don’t know. That’s up to you.

It may not be fast, but your i3 laptop with 12GB of system RAM can absolutely run a local LLM. This is where that “performance/accuracy” question I raised comes in. It won’t be very fast, and you won’t be able to run the most common large models like GPT-5 etc. However, if your needs are light, light models exist. Give this a read

Executive Branch’s tariff plan gets around the Congressional spending controls. I’m pretty sure those funds from tariffs are income that doesn’t come from taxpayer budgets that Congress controls/approves.

Depends on your definition of “good-ish”. Do you mean:

• performance/accuracy?
• ethical origin?
• ethical ongoing operation?
• privacy/future data harvesting concerns?

Running one locally on your own hardware would likely reach “good-ish” with some sacrifices against performance/accuracy (unless you’ve got a lot of expensive hardware to run very large models). As far as ethical origins, there are few small models trained on public domain/nonstolen content, but their functions are far more limited.

Someone see if “Micros|op” (with the pipe character) or “MicrosIop” (with a capital letter i) is also blocked.

They were not a thing like they are today

I disagree with your statement.

Do I need to point to obvious examples such as the US Declaration of Independence in 1776?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

And human rights have always been a thing only respected by democracies. But nowhere as much as in EU where it is a requirement.

Even ancient Rome had a number of things legally protected that we call “human rights” today. I think you’re conveniently cherry picking conditions and a time to make your statement true ignoring history. You’re welcome to do that, but I believe that’s intellectually dishonest. You’re free to your opinion and your position though, so I’ll leave you to it. Thank you for conversing up to now. I hope you have a great day.

I’m very very confused. You…don’t think the concept of human rights existed before 1939 (or 1945)?

There are some multi-user aspects to LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon). You can trade and communicate with other players through turn based messages (like mail). Additionally you can attack other players that are not staying at an inn, or be attacked yourself by other players (PvP). This is available in addition to the PvE content (leveling up to go after the Red Dragon).

Because its turn based, you can attack in your turns, and instantly see the outcome of the offline player. The computer plays their part in battle so you can choose to try to finish the battle or try to flee if you are getting your ass handed to you. As a defending player you’re not there for the battle so you log in you see the transcript of what happened along with your fate and that of the other named player. Its surprisingly exciting even reading it after the battle!

Lots of folks here are making good recommendations. Don’t forget some of the OG MUDs like Legend of the Red Dragon. There are quite a few internet accessible BBSes still running the classic game.

I like that it has an exhaustion component to the gameplay that only lets you do a few actions a day (that you can do in as short as 5 min if you want). This means you’ll never find yourself too deep in the game because you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for more turns. It also gives you something to look forward to the next day to see what happened in your absence between daily turns.

Geopolitically you’re cherry picking from a time when nations of the EU are not as powerful globally. When Germany was powerful, look how they treated the Poles. When Belgium was powerful look at it treated the people of Central Africa (Congo). Spain, at the height of its power, treated the Aztec and other nations in the Caribbean with zero respect.

also because to be in EU it is a requirement to observe human rights. Disrespecting the rights of people even if they aren’t of your own nationality, is contrary to democratic values.

That is part of the diplomatic veneer. Yes, its an ideal, but it will be discarded when geopolitically necessary. How many boats of migrants have drowned off the coast of Italy or Greece? Are diplomats and citizens of Israel still allowed free movement in the EU with its treatment of those in Gaza?

Keep in mind, I’m not criticizing the EU. I recognize the really ugly realities that come with geopolitics and the choices that national leaders make to serve the interests of their citizens, even with it conflicts with their own ideals.

You may be thinking China and Russia are just as bad or maybe even worse, but that isn’t the pattern you should be looking at, you should compare with other democracies, and especially countries that have better democracy than USA.

Comparing “degrees of disrespect” is ignoring geopolitical realities. If you want to have a conversation about ideals humanity should adopt we will likely agree on most of the points of the discussion, but understand national leaders will (when push comes to shove) ignore all of it and do what they think is best for their nation no matter the cost to other nations.

Also, none of this is a defense of the actions of China, Russia, or the USA. Its a recognition that powerful nations do these things when it serves their interests.

Nah that’s Biden’s fault too. But Trump is so much greater than Biden as well.

How are they trying spin that to make it make sense? Biden was a regular private citizen when the 2020 election took place. He didn’t even hold any political office at the time. One could even have called Biden and “unemployed old man” at the time the election had taken place.

Hoping JTS that green cap and not the 4050 chip…

That green cap I think is a mylar capacitor and will cost you maybe 5 cents at retail (and .00001 cents in bulk).

That 4050 is also dirt cheap. Maybe 50 cents to $1 USD at retail. You’ll pay more in shipping costs than for the part. Today’s CMOS ICs are a bit more robust against static discharge than those made in the 1980s, but don’t risk it when you do the replacement. Make sure you use a grounding wrist strap or the like when you desolder the old 4050 and put in the new 4050, partially to protect the 4050 but really to protect that CPU which will probably cost you closer to $11-$20 (just a guess) to replace if it dies.

Rape as a method of power is a tiny tiny tiny part/tool of geopolitics at the nation state level. Almost too small mention. The same original statement is the rationale for colonization of the Carrebean/Americas/Africa by European powers in the 15th century and beyond as just an example.

I’ve never worked on Atari consoles but you got me curious.

I did a Google search for schematics, not surprising, found many variants. So I don’t know if this one is your board, but here’s the schematic for one with some of my colored markup:

In working operation the Red arrow is apparently the “fire” button on the joystick and to activate the function, pressing the fire button ties Pin 6 to Pin 8 (blue arrow). Pin 6 is normally pulled down (to ground) by that circuit I have circled in dark red. Pin 8 has 5v+ generated by part I have circled in magenta. So pressing the button sends 5v+ first through that dark blue circled area which I think its doing some debouncing (cleaning up noise preventing accidental quick/up/down/up/down in the micro seconds of the fire button is pressed). If any of those capacitors or that diode is shorted, it would send 5v+ constantly “holding down” the fire button.

Assuming all of that is fine, the next area I’d look at would be that dark red circled area. This is where the pull down to ground comes from making sure pin 6 is low and the fire button is “off” or “not pressed” if any of this is floating, it could show up as “not ground” and the main IC would think the button is pressed.

Next would be the those 4050 ICs circled in green. These are CMOS buffers and CMOS ICs ARE EXTREMELY VULNERABLE TO STATIC DISCHARGE. Their job is just to take an input of some voltage and output a single clean digital signal of either 1 or 0. There is one buffer for each fire button (left and right joysticks).

Finally the fire button output of that 4050 buffer is delivered in to the main CPU that A201 TIA PAL (my schematic may be from a European model).

If you had this disassembled on a bench and had a voltmeter, you could get a good idea of where the problem is in about 10 minutes.

Trump wants his fuckin name all over everything

There’s a fantastic new IRS approved tax advantaged retirement savings account for newborn (and otherwise young) children. The asshole named it after himself and even called the tax form 4547. I’m considering skipping using it simply because of his name attached to it, but trump will be long gone when children owing these accounts finally put them to use, so I’ll likely bite the bullet and use them anyway.

Trump wants his fuckin name all over everything

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election

So the narrative they’re going with is that China interfered with the election while trump in charge, and trump was powerless to detect or stop it, but that 4 years later President Biden was able to execute free, fair, and accurate elections?

They’re admitting he’s a loser and couldn’t do the job?

USA has absolutely zero respect for the rights of people in or from other countries.

Your statement isn’t wrong, but you could substitute any powerful nation in the place of “USA” today or throughout history and the statement would be correct too. Geopolitics is really really ugly if you peal back the thin veneers of soft power and diplomacy on top.

I’m really happy to hear this news! You had no obligation to share it, but I thank you for doing so.

The sun is shining just a little bit brighter today.

That walking stick

You mean his antifa woke vegan truncheon? /s