Saul Goodman probably would…

Had.

It’s nothing to do with stopping pedos. The people pushing this year-in and year-out don’t care THAT much about pedos. It’s not a cause that’s motivating enough for them to be putting in so much effort, trying to sneak in legislation after being repeatedly rebuffed.

Did the car get successfully recharged though?

In terms of pacing and stakes, it would have made much more sense for the PCs to have gone to Baldur’s Gate earlier in the game to do all the “adventurers faffing around” stuff, then revisited the city during the endgame. Though it would have clashed with their “each act is one set of maps” setup.

Instead, in the last act we have Gortash, supposed 5D chess player, centering all his plans on the PCs flipping to his side. Then he sits back and lets them wander all over the city, undermining him. Ultimately, when they don’t take up his offer, his backup plan is “whelp, guess I’ll die”.

Maybe the excuse is that the Elder Brain was making him stupid…

Loyalty pledges are kabuki theatre. There’s no point talking about them, since the state has plenty of degrees of freedom to force citizens to do what they want, with or without them. And not just the Chinese state; the US just outright decided one day that no US citizen will be allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry, as though citizens are property of the government – they didn’t need no signed loyalty pledges to enforce that.

It was too long and had too much content.

Seriously, though. In the last act, Baldur’s Gate was so huge and took so long to explore that it destroyed the momentum of the overall story. (The evil army is invading! Oh wait, they are now hiding underground doing nothing, so that you can take your time exploring the city).

Yes, you caught me out as a pro-CCP shill. All hail Xi Jinping, thought leader of the world (please ignore my previous comments calling him a dumbass).

Clearly the university did have stuff China wanted, otherwise China wouldn’t have targeted it. You don’t have to be educated at IC to figure that out.

Chinese orgs love signing MOUs. Looking at the underlying story, this looks like bog standard research into computer vision and related topics. If it were the Chinese government wanting to steal stuff, they’d be going after companies. There won’t be anything in Imperial College that they won’t find already in top Chinese universities, let alone their tech giants.

Huh? China has much better domestic sources of AI tech than anything out of Imperial College.

The British always like to think they’re on par with the US in all things, so I guess now they’re imagining they’re the world leaders in AI and the Chinese want to steal their tech…?

I was curious about this too, but digging around on the internet doesn’t seem to give a definitive answer to this question. The “breaking Android application compatibility” story is real, see this Technode article.

What I think seems to be happening is that Huawei is developing HarmonyOS the way GNU/Linux came out of Unix, replacing bits and pieces at a time. They started out using many prominent Android components which led to some commentators dismissing it as just an AOSP fork, but over time they’re diverging into a genuine third mobile operating system, including their own ABI and development toolchain.

This is a fairly predictable consequence of economic stagnation. France is still below its pre-Covid level of GDP per capita, while Germany only caught up. Both countries, and most other countries in Europe, seem to be permanently stuck at a GDP per capita level 20-30 percent below the US.

There are lots of excuses for Europe’s lower economic dynamism relative to the US, about how it’s a trade-off for improved quality of life (more vacations, etc). But young people benefit disproportionately from dynamism, because they’re the ones working their way up. If young people want economic opportunities and the economy doesn’t give it to them, you’ll see the frustration appearing at the ballot box.

Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that’s because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We’re now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.

If fossil fuels hadn’t come along, it’s possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we’ve gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don’t want to see an “age of the dinosaurs” climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.

At this point, Western gaming companies’ monetization schemes are becoming worse than gacha, so you may as well go play Genshin Impact ;-)

The recent success of the European far right is precisely because they’ve revised their image to get rid of the freakshow aspects. The days when you could dismiss these people just by calling them “absolute freaks” are over.

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It’s pretty sad to see Vox’s decline into gutter clickbait media. I guess it was inevitable once Klein and Yglesias left, and their mediocre minions took over.

Reads like NIMBY propaganda. “Oh no muh construction dust.” Bitch you live in a desert…

They’re good products, and Australia has no vested economic interests in keeping them out. Hardly surprising.

Don’t sweat it, Bibi, it’s just 6 weeks, then the killing resumes!

The US can make them, they’ll just cost $10,000 and be several design generations behind the world market.