nyan

One question I haven't seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn't have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.

I would have been more amused if they had "mined" the gold from old tailings piles (the ones around Kirkland Lake used to have enough gold still in them to make that feasible, although I don't know whether that's the case anymore), or at least some mine with an associated settlement, rather than one located way out in the wilderness.

The ones that were better than I expected:

• QA in Another World: I love the fact that they lean into this being a game (as opposed to a gamelike isekai), and that the characters exploit that fact. Other iterations of the "trapped in a game" trope in anime haven't done that. (Shangri-La Frontier does, but the stakes are a lot lower there.)

• No Longer Allowed in Another World: Just a nice change from stereotypical isekais and stereotypical isekai heroes.

• Atri: I had really low expectations of this one going in, but it turned out . . . okay. Not brilliant, but okay.

• Slime: The last cours was sufficiently bad that this one was an improvement, even if it's certainly not the best in the series.

The ones that were worse than I expected:

• Dahliya: It's just . . . where's the conflict? What little does show up gets resolved within an episode or two. There's pretty much nothing to drive the story here.

• Tasuuketsu: Started off very strong, but the rest of the season didn't live up to the first episode. Then again, I don't know what could have. Not awful, but merely okay.

• Bye Bye, Earth: Interesting world, but they did a horrible job of showing it to us. A lot of things needed a couple of sentences of explanation that they just didn't get, and the little labels that kept popping up were worse than useless.

Best of the season: NieR Automata (although I had sufficiently high expectations of it going in that it didn't exceed them).

Hardest to watch: Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction. I think I'm seven episodes behind right now, and having a hard time mustering the desire to continue on. Anything that has bigotry as a major theme is a difficult watch for me right now, given what's been unfolding in the real world lately.

Most incomprehensible art direction choice: Delico's Nursery. The backgrounds look like tracings of photographs, or maybe carefully coloured-in photocopies of photographs, and the effect in combination with the characters is just . . . strange. Maybe it's a carryover from the manga, which I've never read?

Best dragon award: I Parry Everything, but mostly by default, because I don't remember any other dragons of significance (even bad CGI ones, which would be ineligible).

Y'know, if something seems too good to be true, it pretty much always is. Batteries are no exception.

In other words, the article specifically says that they don't know (or at least, the RCMP won't say) what led to most of these firearms being reported as lost (we have external invormation in a few cases, like the trailer theft mentioned by another commenter, but not for most). There isn't even enough information there for us to be able to tell whether all detachments use the same criteria in deciding whether a firearm qualifies as lost.

The article isn't clear on what is categorized as "lost" in this context. Are these all "we know for sure they were stolen" or are some of them "we couldn't find them when we did inventory, but they might just have ended up in an incorrectly-labeled box"? While neither of those is good, one is clearly worse than the other.

Oh, for the love of . . . If you need, or even just want, accessibility options, including larger pointer targets, they should be available to you, but as options, since not everyone needs the same ones, and things that help one person's issues can actually make another's worse.

The killer combination is to have both ramps for those who need them and stairs for those who can use them, coequal and well-maintained. Sometimes space may dictate that you can only fit one in, in which case you should choose the ramp, but a dozen different Windows skins would take up less space on the install media than one flop "feature" like Paint 3D, and I assume it's the same for a Mac. Part of the reason for the currest state of affairs is that corporations are horrified at the thought of giving people actual choice and letting them find what works best for their level of ability as well as their preferences. They might make $0.01 less per unit that way, you see.

If people liked it, that’s what we’d have. Surely this is a simple concept?

It's bullshit. Most people choose from among the handful of things the corporations offer them. You have to be exceptionally blockheaded to stay with an OS that no longer receives security patches, even if you prefer its interface paradigm, and if you're not the one controlling the machine you may not even have the option. The type of retrofitting I've done on my work machine is just that—work—and I understand why people may not want to do it, or may not be able to do it if they'd have to fight a draconian IT department for permission.

Furthermore, most people aren't designers or even terribly compute-literate. They don't necessarily understand which design elements are causing them to be so inefficient when they move to a different OS version, or how to revert them in cases where that's possible. They're stuck with Microsoft-Apple-Google's poor design decisions, until the same corp hands them another set of poor design decisions. The corporations don't want to decouple the UI from the OS the way Linux and other Unixoids do and let people choose, because the shiny new UIs are an advertising opportunity and impress certain types of reviewers.

TDE. Mate would work too, I suppose, but I imprinted on KDE3 early.

Given the amount of electricity training and running all these LLMs requires, they might, like cryptocurrency, become drivers of climate change as they cause polluting generators to be built or unmothballed.

Yet do they use ancient copies of the software that broadly still performs the tasks people need of them? No.

Yes, actually—I have a VM reserved mostly for 16-bit software.

Do they theme their system to look like the oh-so-superior Win98? No.

Yes, actually—the Windows machine I'm forced to use for work restores as much of that aesthetic as practical, sometimes with the help of third-party software. My main home machine features a Linux DE whose appearance is largely the same as it was circa 2005 and whose development team is dedicated to keeping that look and feel.

Some of us do put our money where our mouths are, although I admit that isn't universal.

It's true that some level of padding is necessary in a UI, but the amount present in contemporary design is way too large for a system using a traditional mouse or laptop touchpad, which are capable of small, precise movements. Touchscreen-friendly design is best saved for touchscreens, but people don't want to do the work involved to create multiple styles of UI for different hardware. I've never encountered anything touted as "one size fits all", whether it be a UI or a piece of clothing, that actually does fit everyone. At best, it's "one size fits most", and I'm usually outside the range of "most" the designers had in mind. At worst, it's "lowest common denominator", and that seems to be the best description for contemporary UI design.

As for worst… I have one in mind but the name escapes me at this very moment. Oh right. Gibiate.

Oh, $DEITY, that thing was such a train wreck! I watched it to the end thinking that it couldn't possibly get any worse.

It did.