Esn024

"America is the opposite: it acts before it has consensus. One administration invades Afghanistan; the next one pulls out."

From my perspective, the US has a remarkably consistent foreign policy despite some occasional initial wobbles when a new president comes in (which usually ends up being all or mostly talk). Obama talked about closing Guantanamo Bay and pulling out of Iraq, but he didn't do that, did he? And it was obvious for a long time that Afghanistan was a quagmire. Ultimately, the US only pulled out of Afghanistan two presidents later... conveniently freeing up resources for the big war in Ukraine that had been threatening to start for years, but only somehow really got going once Afghanistan was no longer a major drain on resources.

No, it seems to me that even a president as volatile as Trump is unable to just do what he wishes. I remember how often in his first term he announced and even ordered that the US would leave Iraq, but ultimately that didn't happen, and everyone who buys Iraqi oil still has to pay the US Treasury for it, which then sends some percentage of the money to Iraq, higher or lower depending on how happy they are with the Iraqi government.

The people who run US foreign policy long term seem pretty good at persuading the temporary occupants of the US White House not to do anything "too rash". As for what the methods of persuasion are, who knows? Perhaps they're just very good at making the political case, or maybe there's more to it.

At least in the case of the recent Iran War, there might be "more to it".

Thanks, I will.

This seems a decent introduction. The only thing mentioned that I wasn't really aware of is the effect of the tongue in addition to the lips on the embouchure of higher notes. Can anyone recommend some more info on that?

Yes, it is surprisingly polished. I tried playing the first three Phantasy Star games, but each time was put off by one annoying design flaw or another (such as the camera not being centred in II, so that you can't see very far ahead when exploring). In the fourth game, everything just works.

Just about the only annoying flaw still left is that it's not obvious what items do, and you kinda will need to memorize lots of random names... (Well, or have a reference near you while you play) This is actually mentioned in the interview as them not wanting to be too explicit about what things do (not saying "attack +20" etc.) - unfortunately, it's one of those design decisions that does create friction for the player.

I agree, I found it hard and frustrating to read on my (small) phone because the text is just too big. I usually skim long articles to some extent to focus on reading the parts I'm most interested in, but this format makes that impossible. I can't skim anything because barely a sentence is on my screen at one time.

I think Brian Daley's books have a somewhat similar feel as Asimov's, particularly "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" and its sequels.

I also find C.J.Cherryh's books to be often quite interesting.

Asimov really did have a knack for clear, deceptively simple writing that isn't all that common.

Winhance for removing things like OneDrive and the option to KEEP them removed even if a future Windows Update tries to reinstall them. You can also save your configuration to easily get all your preferences back on a fresh Windows install. I use this instead of WinUtil (which I haven't tried yet... is there any way in which it is better?).

Windhawk for quality of life improvements if you don't like some of Windows's defaults. For example, I use it to have two rows on my taskbar and smaller icons (which was disabled in Windows 11), always open Classic Notepad instead of the new one (it loads much faster), and add multi-step "undo" to the Classic Notepad (the only thing I didn't like about it), among other things.

I often find that using Google Search (the Video tab, with "site:youtube.com") allows me to find videos that don't show up in the YouTube search... or sometimes vice versa!

>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.

The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).

The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).

Very neat! My native language is Russian. I could understand it pretty well up to 1300, then only about 40% of the 1200 section (not at all the beginning, but the last paragraph was easier), then quite little after that - though I understood enough to glean that there was some woman who had showed up that caused the Master to flee.

I really got into reading Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" (about 1497) about a year ago, and I suspect that really helped me with this exercise, since he uses some language that was archaic even back then.

I really wish there was an audio recording of this story. I found the spellings in the earlier years more and more confusing.

I think, unlike what the author writes, communities CAN be moved if they are sufficiently small and loyal to the leaders who do the move, and the leaders don't screw it up. Moreover, the move is sometimes an improvement.

I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I can't think of anybody that got lost, and it was actually an improvement because the new discussion infrastructure was better than it had been before. The community didn't scatter to the winds, far from it; it consolidated and grew.

Of course, such a situation is probably rarer with the enshittification these days, but it would be worth it to figure out when it works, too.

And history is replete with stories of groups who became most successful AFTER a migration, or at least were not so negatively affected by one.

What other sites like this exist, besides milliondollarhomepage?