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DdCno1

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DdCno1 ,

Key quote:

Palestinian militants armed with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades opened fire on the rescuers, as Israel called in heavy strikes from land and air to cover their evacuation to the coast. “A lot of fire was around us,” Hagari said.

It was this bombardment that appears to have killed and wounded so many Palestinians.

DdCno1 ,

Funny you mention that. Israeli brain surgeons saved Yahya Sinwar’s life by removing a tumor when he was imprisoned in Israel for torture and murder of several Palestinians and Israelis. He “thanked” the lead surgeon by having his grandson abducted on October 7.

DdCno1 ,

This was a ruse of war, which is entirely permitted:

ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/…/rule57

What isn’t permitted is fighting in civilian clothes, but if you read the article, there is nothing indicating that they did. It is entirely legal to move about and set up an attack in civilian clothes, provided they are discarded immediately before striking.

DdCno1 ,

What’s far more disgusting is stalking me after I called you out.

DdCno1 ,

Everything you’re writing is 1:1 Russian state misinformation, completely identical to lies spread by the Russian government in order to justify their imperialistic expansion.

DdCno1 ,

They’ve been told to do this for decades and they are proudly ignoring these requests.

DdCno1 ,

Chinese military tech has always been and will always be decades behind. Autocratic regimes are terrible at fostering innovation - and unlike with civilian tech, China cannot make use of cooperation with Western companies in order to catch up. Their only remaining option is subterfuge, which has limited effectiveness.

Additionally, the Chinese military lacks institutional knowledge and experience - and courting Western experts won’t make up for this. They haven’t fought in any serious war since the 1970s. Against pirates and sandal fighters in and around Africa, they are performing shockingly poorly. On top of that, there’s corruption that is at least as bad as in Russia, poor quality equipment, low training standards, awful electronic warfare capabilities, etc. pp.

DdCno1 ,

“But what about” * 5. It’s always whataboutism with sycophants of autocratic regimes.

DdCno1 ,

The thing is, floating windows were absolutely useless in the age of 13 - 17" CRTs. On modern ultrawide or even just conventional widescreen displays, they make far more sense.

DdCno1 ,

They might just as well sell PC power supply to USB adapters then.

DdCno1 ,

Not all of them. In recent years, virtually all arcades have been powered by standard gaming PCs (see for example the infamous Half-Life 2 arcade). In the past, it wasn’t unheard of for some arcades to have nearly identical hardware compared to home consoles. The Neo Geo arcade for example is running the exact same code as the home console (although in this case, the arcade came first). There have also been edge-cases, like the Namco System 11, which is using only slightly modified PS1 hardware (primarily in the sound department) in order to drive down costs.

DdCno1 ,

What a dishonest and empty comment. I feel second hand embarrassment and shame for you. You know that that the US isn’t exactly the same, yet you chose to lie, just to defend a genocidal autocratic regime using the last line of defense any sycophants for dictatorships are using: Hypernormalization. After all, if everyone and everything is equally awful, your favorite oppressive machine maybe isn’t so bad. I’ve seen this exact line of reasoning, if one can call it that, used by defenders of Russia, Iran, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Hamas, Saudi Arabia, etc.

I have one question for you: Why are you doing this? Are you a paid troll for the Internet Research Agency, fighting on the virtual front lines of the new Cold War so that you aren’t sent to the real front lines of the hot part of it, so that you aren’t end up as the main attraction of some Ukrainian drone bombing video, dying slowly to the sound of some questionable music? Are you perhaps a delusional Western Tankie who is still reflexively applauding to everything Moscow is doing, despite the fact that the “evil West” you’ve been indoctrinated (or indoctrinated yourself) to hate is now far more left than the currently extremely far-right Russia? Or perhaps you are much further to the right and simp for Russia precisely because it aligns itself so well with your belief system, e.g. in regards to its oppression of ethnic and sexual minorities, its violent imperialistic politics, the macho strongman aesthetics the insecure leader is cultivating.

Which of these is it?

DdCno1 ,

your rights barely exist

I’m not American.

I point out that the US is just as vile as all the oppressors

That’s not pointing out anything, because it’s flat out wrong. For all its faults, the US not as bad, not even close and nobody sane would make this claim. You are doing nothing but normalizing actual oppressors with this.

The fact that you included Hamas and not Israel

I don’t think you are quite aware of just how stark the difference between Israel and Hamas is - or you’re deliberately ignoring it. Tel Aviv is considered one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world - whereas in Palestinian territories, gay people are being publicly tortured and executed. That’s just one aspect. The difference between Israel and Palestinian territories in regards to civil liberties is about as stark as the one between the two Koreas. This doesn’t mean Israel is perfect, far from it, but the fact that you feel the need to lie about yet another topic and in the same sentence excrete a vile insult doesn’t exactly make you look like a reasonable person.

DdCno1 ,

You don’t get to cherry pick which human rights to respect in order to seem progressive.

The way you casually threw away a human rights aspect you don’t care about can only be called cherry-picking. That’s really all that needs to be said in response to this gish gallop.

DdCno1 ,

I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

DdCno1 ,

I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.

DdCno1 ,

Each Sims game is quite different. The biggest difference is between Sims 1 and 2 simply due to the change from isometric 2D to 3D graphics. Not the first game in the genre to have 3D graphics and they weren’t even particularly impressive for the time nor good compared to its competitor, but the charming animations and attention to detail make it a far more enjoyable experience than the comparatively sterile predecessor. Sims 2 ended up becoming an evergreen with very long legs, to the point that people are still playing it, although it helped that EA distributed the complete version with all add-ons (the game is older than the term DLC) for free for a while (you can still find it if you know where to look).

Sims 3 was fundamentally different from Sims 2. Gone were the isolated homes of the predecessor (initially in Sims 2, you couldn’t even see your neighbors’ homes unless you were on the map screen; later they added in low-res stand-ins) and instead, it’s an open world game where you can see your Sim commute to work in real-time. Neighbors can be visited without going through a loading screen - it all feels more organic as a result. Customization saw a huge upgrade as well, the AI was improved, etc. Sounds nice in theory, but the problem was that it was too ambitious for PCs of the time. This series has traditionally attracted non-gamers who don’t deeply upgrade their machines all that often and instead play on laptops bought for homework or old rigs inherited from big brothers. Sims 1 ran on a toaster, Sims 2 on a pizza oven with some kind of GPU grafted to it - whereas Sims 3 was one of the most demanding games of its time in order to facilitate gameplay changes that few people actually asked for and rounded, bloated looking Sims that are somewhat offputting. It was still a massive success and a huge hit with modders as well, but Sims 2 remained popular due to its more focused nature, the fact that it ran on anything and the fact that it was complete with a massive library of add-ons that took years to be replicated in Sims 3.

Sims 4 reset the series back to Sims 2, but went too far initially, limiting player freedom in regards to neighborhood creation. Instanced homes returned, customization features and open world of Sims 3 were cut, the AI saw a massive improvements, Sims didn’t all look obese anymore, hardware requirements were modest again - but at the price of having incredibly intrusive DRM, an attempt to monetize the proud modding community and being very bare-bones in the beginning, requiring years of DLCs to reach feature-parity with Sims 2 and 3. IIRC, even pools - an absolutely essential part of Sims lore - were missing initially. All of the improvements to the building mechanics in particular were overshadowed by EA’s corporate nonsense. It’s come a long way since though. Just like with the predecessors, buying all DLC at once will make you poor - but the base game is free now and the actual intention is that you only buy the DLC that have features or items you care about. The modding scene is as vibrant as ever, making any non-feature DLC unnecessary anyway.

This series is an interesting and unique phenomenon. It’s a prime example of something that only ever truly works on PC. All of the many console, mobile and browser spinoffs and ports were nothing but mere blips on the radar, because fundamentally, it can only work on a platform as open as the PC. It primarily attracts female players who rarely play anything else, yet dive deep into modding and modifying every little aspect of these games like the most hardened PC nerds. It started out and still is in many ways a faksimile of ideal American suburbia, although enhanced by both some quite subversive humor and subverted by an astonishing level of player freedom that goes against the conformity of the real world - while at the same time replicating the fads, consumerism, cliques, feuds and other less wholesome aspects of the real world through its behemoth of a community. It’s ultimately a platform for individual creative expression and the worlds (both in-game and outside of it) that emerge as a result of it, a sandbox that was only ever bested by Minecraft, which literally broke everything down to its individual building blocks. Each game and its DLCs become more like car payments to seasoned players, something you pay for so that you can travel where you want to go, which in turn keeps the experience fresh, finances further development and prevents the community from getting stagnant as it has to learn to adapt to changes from the developers.

I’ll end this here. This wasn’t meant to turn into an essay and now my fingers hurt, because I typed all of this nonsense on a touchscreen.

DdCno1 ,

Reminds me of my younger sibling inheriting my first PC - 486 with a 500 MB hard drive that I had assembled from several scrap computers - and trying to install this game to it. It did just about fit and there was even enough RAM (48 MB instead of the minimum 32), but the CPU wasn’t compatible, since the game required the MMX instruction set.

DdCno1 ,

Repacks make installing the game with its bazillion DLCs a breeze these days.

DdCno1 ,

I meant, the “no ads” thing was only feasible in the very beginning, when they were solely funded by venture capital.

DdCno1 ,

No, they are not. There are certain high technologies, especially litographic equipment, that China can not produce and can not catch up to, because it’s a moving target and they will be perpetually lagging behind. The end result will be the exact same issue that Eastern Bloc computing suffered from during the Cold War.

Car makers BMW, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Volkswagen (VW) used parts made by supplier with links to Chinese forced labour, U.S. probe says (www.bbc.com)

BMW, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Volkswagen (VW) used parts made by a supplier on a list of firms banned over alleged links to Chinese forced labour, a US congressional report has said....

DdCno1 ,

Why do people who degrade themselves by defending China always resort to whataboutism? It’s almost as if what this murderous dictatorship is doing is entirely indefensible, so they can only come up with clumsy ways of pointing fingers at others.

DdCno1 ,

No surprise about Telepolis being on this list. They like to portray themselves as some bastion of journalistic integrity, but they have been neck-deep in conspiratorial thinking and propaganda going at least as far back as the earliest 9/11 truthers.

I also had to laugh about “anti-spiegel**.ru**”. That’s about as subtle as a T-34 shell to the face.

DdCno1 ,

BRB, gonna learn Estonian.

DdCno1 ,

I wonder if this would make swapping in assets from the Xbox remaster of Conker possible/convenient. I suspect it depends more on how accessible the files of the remaster are.

DdCno1 ,

The entire thing is horrible, but this is the worst part:

Fawzia says that a few months later, “they asked our family to kill us”. The authorities argued it would stop the shame they were bringing on the family. “They said, ‘We will help your son do it,’ but my family refused,” she says. “

DdCno1 ,

I’m the kind of person who reads the source code of software I’m using at least some of the time (and modifies it on occasion), but I’m no genius and not qualified to notice a well-hidden backdoor or potentially fatal software bug - let alone issues with the design, construction or implantation of the hardware. I would never ever trust a brain implant or any device that interfaces directly with my brain.

DdCno1 ,

Does this look like ending three years ago?

imgur.com/K84UYxX

Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together?

It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...

DdCno1 ,

So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they’ll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.

DdCno1 ,

The Israeli military said it killed 20 Hamas fighters and found three tunnel shafts.

Good. Let’s hope that the crossing can soon be reopened “under new management” and that aid can flow through it.

DdCno1 ,

Why make up nonsense? There’s plenty of actual things to criticize the IDF for.

DdCno1 ,

I’m suggesting that you don’t make up fictional dialogue.

I am not denying that kids are dying in this war. This has more to do with how Hamas are deliberately embedding themselves within civilians, preventing them from fleeing and using them as human shields than the IDF deciding to deliberately murder children. I am not aware of any other armed forces going even remotely to the same lengths to warn civilians as the IDF. They even invented the practice of roof-knocking, which Palestinians trust so much that they are standing within meters of a marked building in order to film its destruction.

Your second link does not support your claim that Israel said they are only killing Hamas.

DdCno1 ,

Should they, for example, abandon their residences as individuals

That’s not the issue. Hamas terrorists are doing far more than just going home in the evening to their families. Read this academic paper on Hamas’ use of human shields. It’s highly accessible, yet in-depth:

stratcomcoe.org/publications/…/87

I seriously implore you to actually read it and not just dismiss it, because you dislike the title or because I’m the one recommending it to you.

Would this also have applied to, for example, Jewish resistance fighters during the holocaust?

Originally, I was prepared to write a lengthy reply to each of your points, but I’ll not waste my time any further with someone who has the sheer audacity of equating Hamas terrorists with Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters. How dare you smear the legacy of these people in such a shameful way!

DdCno1 ,

Why should I continue debating anyone who glorifies terrorists? What’s the point? But sure, applaud them for this nonsense.

DdCno1 ,

Allied bombings killed more German civilians in WW2 than German bombings killed Allied civilians. Does this mean that the Allies were morally inferior to the Nazis on the Western front?

Have you considered that there is more to this than just numbers, namely intent?

DdCno1 ,

This old thing. Here’s a rebuttal from many years ago that has lost none of its relevance:

progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quote…

DdCno1 ,

Arkane Austin was hemorrhaging talent before and during Redfalls development. In the end, there wasn’t much left of the studio that had developed the Prey reboot. Hi Fi Rush and Evil Within are critical darlings, but the former only got its player base thanks to Game Pass and both didn’t sell enough to keep a studio of more than 130 people alive (for perspective, that’s about as many people as worked on Skyrim).

I get how sad it is to see these studios disappear and it’s of course devastating for individual employees (at least in the short term), but it isn’t all that surprising. Also keep in mind that the talent doesn’t evaporate into thin air. We as players should pay far more attention to game credits and individual developers than the studios these people are working for. Talented developers are very likely to reappear elsewhere and continue making great games.

I think the blame for the demise of these studios is at least equally shared between Zenimax, Microsoft and the studios themselves. Blaming it all on Microsoft is a bit simplistic.

DdCno1 ,

“Think of the children” has rarely ever been used rationally and your comment is no exception. No, that’s obviously not what I’m saying and you know that. The sooner the war is over, the fewer children will die.

DdCno1 ,

Hamas’ idea of statehood is a global Islamic caliphate, according to their own words. For obvious reasons, this won’t ever be on the table.

DdCno1 ,

Hamas and their cause are considerably is less popular in Gaza than in the West Bank according to independent Palestinian polls. This more recruits talking point that I see repeated all the time has no basis in reality. The uncomfortable truth is that people in places that have been bombed by Israel are less likely to consider armed resistance a valid option and are instead dramatically preferring a two-state solution now:

i.imgur.com/gRNX0Qb.png

i.imgur.com/MgDk1PU.png

Source: www.pcpsr.org/en/node/973

I think that most Palestinians who have been unfortunate enough to be at the receiving end of Israeli weapons and lucky enough to survive are starting to realize just how enormous the disparity in capabilities has become.

The land in Gaza is near worthless to Israel. There are almost no natural resources, the soil is of abysmal quality and fresh water is highly contaminated by seawater. The only resources that exist in abundance are sunlight and salt water. It’s an awful place to settle, which is one of the reasons why Israel was willing to forcefully evict their remaining settlers in the Gaza Strip in 2005 and why today, only a far-right fringe wishes for Israelis to settle in the strip again. It is completely pointless to ethnically cleanse Gaza and has no majority within Israeli society.

There are other reasons for there being a famine in Gaza right now; it’s not some dastardly Israeli master plan:

  • Israel had no plans for this war and it’s taking far longer than expected. Hamas attack caught them totally by surprise and the response is nowhere near as well thought out as it would have been if this war had been planned ahead.
  • War obviously caused nearly all local food production to cease. Israel tanks driving straight through fields and orchards (avoiding main roads and creating their own in order to circumvent IEDs) doesn’t help. Israel unsurprisingly puts the safety of their soldiers above the concerns of local farmers.
  • Since the war is continuing for so long, the food supply was inevitably going to collapse. Gaza is notoriously reliant on food imports, unlike Israel, having never built up the ability to be self-sustainable. Damage to infrastructure alone makes maintaining pre-war levels impossible right now - and it doesn’t help that every truck has to be screened for weapons beforehand, which takes a ton of time.
  • Hamas is misappropriating a significant portion of the aid and hoarding it so that they can continue their fight. They know that this will result in more civilian suffering - but they are counting on it, because they know this will result in pressure against Israel, not them.
  • The far-right government in Israel is unsurprisingly unwilling to allow in significant aid that gets stolen anyway in order to continue the fight.
  • Aid that doesn’t disappear into the tunnels gets sold on the black market instead of being distributed to the people in need. Extreme local corruption, including within international aid organizations (which are overwhelmingly staffed by locals), hampers any and all aid efforts.

Before you think I’m some mindless defender of Israel (or, worse, a Hasbara), read this: I detest the current Israeli government with a passion, just like any other far-right government. I’m frequently horrified by public statements by leading Israeli politicians, I think that the war has exposed serious operational deficiencies within the IDF, I think that individual soldiers and officers who recklessly endanger civilians or, worse, commit war crimes need to be far more seriously punished than they already are and every nation that has friendly relations with Israel should never stop pressuring them to conduct themselves as best as they can in this war.

However, I do not subscribe to the belief that Israel is guilty of committing a genocide in this war. Note that I am not denying individual war crimes - those are being committed by Israeli soldiers, there is no doubt about it - but I have seen no evidence of there being a master plan to eradicate Palestinians as a people or even attempt it. The enormous lengths the IDF goes to warning Palestinian civilians alone - to the detriment of military operations - should put this hypothesis to rest. In my opinion, and you are free to disagree, this is merely a war and wars are universally terrible. Most of us, especially in the West, have been shielded from the realities of warfare, especially the fact that it’s civilians who are always and in every single war suffering the most, for so long that we are mentally unprepared for a war that is as heavily “televised” (outdated term, I know, but still appropriate) as this one.

Combine this with a shocking lack of knowledge of international law and international affairs among the wider population, even in reasonably educated circles like young academics, a massive multi-national disinformation campaign (Russia, Iran, China, Qatar as the four big players) finding fertile soil and it’s not difficult to see why a small number of easily debunked talking points are dominating public discourse. It’s incredibly frustrating to see idealistic, well-meaning people fall for this. It makes me fear for the future of the developed world, if I’m honest. How will they react to the likely coming war against Taiwan, for example? How easily could they also be manipulated into taking China’s side there or Russia’s side in a possible attack against the Baltics?

Sorry for the long diatribe. I don’t blame anyone for tuning out after the fifth paragraph or sooner.

DdCno1 ,

Tons of examples here, including several that are newer than from 2017:

memri.org/…/hamas-leaders-our-goal-establishment-…

Yes, I’m aware that Memri has a pro-Israel bias (to say the least), but all of these examples are literally from the horse’s mouth, just collected in one place here.

By the way, I hope you are not naive enough to believe in the milder language of that 2017 charter. Among other things, it claims that Hamas believes in pluralism and democracy. That’s obviously a lie and so are most of the rest of the revised points.

DdCno1 ,

No, it’s not a war crime to bomb civilian infrastructure that is being used for military purposes. This distinction appears to be entirely lost on people. I’ll let you think about why the Geneva Convention explicitly creates this exemption.

DdCno1 ,

The only acceptable response here is a total, unilateral surrender from Israel.

That is how you would respond to the terrorist attacks of October 7? Seriously? Have you even thought about this for more than one second?

DdCno1 ,

They would all be still alive if Hamas hadn’t massacred their way through Israel on October 7. Every single nation on Earth would have reacted to this with a full-on war - there is no other way any nation can react to this.

People are just under the delusion that somehow, clean wars with few or no civilian casualties are even possible. They are not, especially not against an enemy that does everything they can to increase the suffering of their own civilians.

DdCno1 ,

The underdog isn’t automatically in the right. This seems to be lost on so many people.

DdCno1 ,

You don’t lash out against oppression by massacring, raping and abducting civilians. Hamas are not resistance fighters. They deliberately attacked small, peaceful communities that were far-left and extremely pro-Palestine, the very opposite of the current Israeli government and its policies. One of the most well-known Israeli pro-Palestinian advocates was among the victims:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Silver

Read the article. She was the kind of exemplary human being that is instrumental in bringing Palestinians and Israelis together. Her death alone was a terrible blow to the peace process.

This is not a coincidence - Hamas targeted these communities in order to make peaceful coexistence unpopular in Israel, push voters to the right, because they know this would result in more heavy-handed reactions by the Israeli state. One of their many miscalculations was just how destructive to their organization this response would be.

Hamas relationship with the Israeli government in general is far more complicated than how you are trying to describe it. For starters, this off-shoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood began as a less militant religious alternative to the far more dangerous secular PLO, which is why there was initial clandestine Israeli support for them. The far more recent influx of Qatari cash that Israel signed off on happened after significant international pressure against Israel - and Netanyahu sold it to his power base as some kind of “divide and conquer” strategy after the fact. In reality, the Israeli government was under the delusion that Hamas were growing fat and lazy in power, that the billions in misappropriated aid money enabling a luxury lifestyle for the leadership would make this leadership less militant and thereby pacify Gaza. This was a foolish miscalculation.

DdCno1 ,

The reason a ton of civilian infrastructure gets destroyed in Gaza has less to do with Israel being callous and far more with how Hamas are operating, how deeply they decided to embed themselves within civilians.

Read this:

stratcomcoe.org/publications/…/87

I mean actually click on the PDF link and at the very least read the first few pages. It’s a thoroughly researched, yet accessible academic paper that shows just how systematic Hamas is in their use of human shields.

I’m pressing you on reading the above report, because I highly doubt you actually ever read the Geneva Conventions (so many people I’ve debated are using them in a vague manner, never able to name any specific sections), because there are explicit exemptions contained within that you would be familiar with if you had actually read them. If for example a hospital is being used for military purposes, it loses its protection under international law:

ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/…/article-19?activeTab=…

Guess what Hamas have been doing? Example:

youtu.be/pka7H1aMlkQ

An older report:

As well as carrying out unlawful killings, others abducted by Hamas were subjected to torture, including severe beatings with truncheons, gun butts, hoses and wire or held in stress positions. Some were interrogated and tortured or otherwise ill-treated in a disused outpatient’s clinic within the grounds of Gaza City’s main al-Shifa hospital. At least three people arrested during the conflict accused of “collaboration” died in custody.

amnesty.org/…/gaza-palestinians-tortured-summaril…

DdCno1 ,

Idealism on its own is admirable, but it doesn’t solve any problems. Yes, I want there to be no war, no injustice, no suffering in the world as well, but that’s not how this wretched planet works. I’ve learned to strive for and support the least terrible realistic options instead of unobtainable fantasies. It’s painful and uncomfortable, I’m constantly questioning myself about it, but I really don’t see alternative to it.

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