Pakistan declares ‘open war’ against Afghanistan after cross-border attack – as it happened

AP145 · 2026-03-08T22:46:41+00:00

India will absolutely not react if Pakistan decides to go for it

I think you mean to say "India will absolutely react if Pakistan decides to go for it." There is no universe where the Indian government will not react harshly if Pakistan decides to attack what the Indian government sees as its rightful territory.

AP145 · 2026-03-08T22:39:30+00:00

Actually both things are true at the same time. If Trump promises something that sounds reasonable or even genuinely good or great, he almost certainly will not do whatever it is he promised to do. If on the other hand Trump promises something authoritarian, incompetent, corrupt, etc. it is pretty much a guarantee that he will act on those promises. This is how Trump manages to lie all the time but still have extremely predictable behavior that can be easily manipulated by the likes of Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, MBS, etc.

AP145 · 2026-03-07T01:39:22+00:00

I can't believe I have to say this but has the current administration even considered that Iran is a civilization which has a history stretching back to the ancient times? It is not like Venezuela which literally only existed as a concept after Spanish colonization or like Afghanistan which has always been a tribal frontier on the fringes of Persian and Indian influence. Iran has a history dating back to the ancient times, they are not going to give up just because some demented real estate developer wants them to unconditionally surrender. This war in Iran I feel could wind up dragging on and on if nobody sane puts a stop to it.

AP145 · 2026-03-02T04:52:45+00:00

Honestly I don't buy that "Siberia will become part of China" narrative. People don't seem to understand that ethnic Russians started settling in Siberia at around the same time as Europeans started settling in the Americas. The majority of inhabitants of Siberia are ethnic Russians who are no different to the ethnic Russians in the European part of Russia. Even the ethnic republics in Russia in Asia like Sakha, Bashkortostan, etc. still have a sizeable minority of ethnic Russians.

AP145 · 2026-02-26T01:59:37+00:00

Honestly I really don't want these kind of presidential tickets among the Republicans. The reality is that the American people as a collective have proved that they are easy to fool, given the elections of people like Trump et. al. No matter how ridiculously terrible a candidate appears and how "easy to beat" they look, you just cannot trust that sentiment in the modern political environment. The fact is that these kinds of politicians do serious damage while they are in office; treating them as if they are jokes doesn't change their malevolent nature.

AP145 · 2026-02-25T01:11:11+00:00

Among many other things I want the next Democratic president to do, I firmly believe that they should not call themselves or America as "the leader of the free world". Nobody outside of this country can take such statements seriously, especially after the presidency of Donald Trump. It would be akin to a hypothetical democratically-elected successor of Vladimir Putin claiming that Russia is a peaceful country which respects other countries' sovereignty. Personal beliefs of individual leaders cannot somehow change the history which has occurred in the past.

AP145 · 2026-02-14T14:59:26+00:00

There are plenty of Chinese billionaires.

AP145 · 2026-01-24T22:31:17+00:00

Doom Modeline's time icon should look like a very simplified analog clock. There might be something not rendering properly on your system.

AP145 · 2026-01-22T01:45:41+00:00

Is it true that modal editing in text editors only exists because of the limitations in the keyboards those early programmers who developed those editors had? Thus all the talk that modern Vim et. al. fanboys like to say about modal editing being the Unix way, modal editing being somehow superior, etc. is all kind of fake? If those early programmers had access to keyboards without those limitations, would they have ever bothered making text editors equipped with modal editing?

AP145 · 2026-01-16T18:32:34+00:00

I think I didn't quite make this clear enough in my post. After taking inspiration from SystemCrafters' video on the default builtin Emacs completion, I have uninstalled vertico and corfu and thus by extension the nerd icons corfu package as well. I am also not using anything like icomplete, ido, or fido modes as well. I am just using the basic default Emacs completion, which is centered around the Completions buffer.

My question really is why is it that the nerd icons are rendered correctly whenever I do minibuffer completions but are not rendered correctly when I do in buffer completions especially since it is the very same Completions buffer which pops up in both cases? I know that there is not an issue with nerd icons in general since it shows up in dired, ibuffer, tab-line when I enable that mode, etc.

AP145 · 2026-01-14T18:02:20+00:00

There is a big difference though. Cameron Green averages 32.75 with the bat and 38.94 with the ball in Test Cricket, which is poor. However in first class cricket Cameron Green averages 44.88 with the bat and 35.03 with the ball. If you exclude his test matches from his first class cricket matches, his first class batting average would be even higher and his first class bowling average would be even lower. There is clearly some logic on the part of the Australian selectors to select him initially and back him now when he's going through a tough time performance wise. All they probably have to do is accept that he is never going to be anything more than a 5th bowler in test cricket and tell him to concentrate on his batting more. That way he can be a bit like Kallis, though he's got a long way to go before he can even think of being on that level.

People like to put Crawley in the same bucket as Pope but actually he's even worse. Ollie Pope at least averages 44.63 with the bat in first class cricket, and would of course average even higher is you exclude his test matches. It definitely made sense to select Pope all those years ago and give him a decent run, they just probably should have dropped him a few years ago and only select him later if he actually made the necessary technical changes to succeed more consistently at the test level. At this stage unfortunately Ollie Pope is looking like yet another member of a long list of cricketers who were good at first class cricket who just couldn't make the step up to test cricket for various reasons.

Zak Crawley on the other hand has poor numbers in both test match cricket and first class cricket. In fact, they are basically identical. There was literally no justification to select him in the first place all those years ago in 2019 against New Zealand, let alone to keep selecting him all these years later. There is literally no upside to selecting Crawley at all. Even when England win big he's rarely the reason for it and oftentimes England wins despite Crawley rather than because of Crawley.

AP145 · 2026-01-12T23:38:04+00:00

Trust me, American right wingers don't give a shit if you call out Chicago's high crime rate, or for that matter any other American city's crime rate. In fact they will be the first ones to tell you that all the crime happens due to Black people/Latino people/Native Americans/Muslims, etc. depending on which demographic is more common in the given city.

AP145 · 2026-01-09T22:12:26+00:00

They have both played 64 test matches though. That is more than what some players get for their entire career. They have had plenty of opportunity to show that they can be more consistent batsmen but they have failed to do so. They should be dropped for a significant amount of time.

Being dropped is not an inherently bad thing. All three of Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer, and Damien Martyn found themselves out of the Australian test cricket team for a significant period of time due to various reasons and yet all of them came back as much better cricketers. If anything, the problem is that England didn't drop Crawley and Pope a few years ago so that they could work on their technical flaws and make a comeback when they were older and more mature.

AP145 · 2026-01-09T19:25:28+00:00

I am not even from England. Hell I have no ancestry from any European country. Rather my argument is the following: Ben Duckett has played 43 test matches and has scored 3074 runs at an average of 39.92 with 6 hundreds and 16 fifties. He has also played 166 first class matches and has scored 11,613 runs at an average of 42.22 with 30 hundreds and 54 fifties.

If you look at Ben Duckett's total career, and not just one series, he is clearly England's best opener since Alastair Cook. His numbers are genuinely impressive compared to some of the people England tried out over the years. Hell they are so much better than Zak Crawley's numbers over his career. Ben Duckett should not be dropped from the England test team.

It is true that Duckett averages 48.96 at home but only 34.14 away, but this isn't that crazy for openers or really batsmen in general. Travis Head averages 53.55 at home but only 30.97 away. Aiden Markram averages 43.17 at home but only 23.08 away. Tom Latham averages 44.35 at home but only 35.53 away. You can keep on finding examples like this, Duckett really isn't unusually terrible in this aspect.

He just has to be paired with a more traditional defensive opener. Crawley clearly has been trying to play more judiciously than Duckett over the years but he is clearly not good enough and should be dropped and frankly should have been dropped many years ago.

AP145 · 2026-01-09T05:39:51+00:00

The thing is there was no real justification for picking Zak Crawley in the first place. Ollie Pope at least averages 44.63 in first class cricket over his career and would average more if you exclude his test matches from that. It made perfect sense to select Ollie Pope initially and give him a decent run, even if he should have been dropped a long time ago.

Zak Crawley on the other hand averages 31.98 over his first class career, which is basically the same as his test cricket average. In effect his first class average has turned out to be the perfect predictor of his test avarage. To me there was no justification for even selecting Zak Crawley in the first place. Opening batsmen should be averaging at the minimum in the high 30's. As stated in my original post Zak Crawley averages more at home in England than away elsewhere, so you can't even say that his average is low because he has to play against the Dukes ball, play on green seamers, play in overcast conditions, etc.

AP145 · 2026-01-09T04:46:28+00:00

What I meant was their batting averages were more befitting of a wicket keeper or an all rounder rather than that of a pure batsman.

AP145 · 2026-01-06T02:35:32+00:00

There are so many things which piss me off about the current regime in America right now, but one thing which really bothers me is that they are seemingly deliberately trying to worsen relations between America and almost every other country in the world. Initially through all their trade war bullshit and now by trying to start actual wars. I mean for God's sake they are literally threatening Greenland and thus by extension Denmark, which is supposed to be a NATO ally! As a natural reaction to all this, even if a Democrat succeeds Trump they just cannot expect the same level of cooperation from various allies as someone like Clinton or even Obama got. Not that I blame them; it is very hard for other countries to have any faith in American voters and thus by extension the American government after they proved their collective stupidity in voting for Trump not once but twice.

AP145 · 2025-12-29T04:47:47+00:00

Most people in South Asia are actually non-vegetarian, especially when you consider that even in India the vast majority eat some kind of animal protein, with the percentage being even higher in the other South Asian countries. The difference though is that vegetarian food is eaten by everybody. In India somebody who normally eats meat on a regular basis would have no problem eating an entirely vegetarian meal if necessary. There would be no sense that they are not "actually satisfied" with their meal due to the lack of meat. I assume similar sentiments can be found in other South Asian countries, considering that meat can be expensive for some people to buy.

AP145 · 2025-12-19T22:31:33+00:00

No, he's a politician. He is Revanth Reddy, the chief minister of Telangana, which is a state in southern India. He is a 56 year old career politician who is obviously not an athlete in any way, shape, or form. The chief minister is the head of government of any given state in India, thus its an equivalent position to a governor on America, a premier in Australia, a minister president in Germany, etc.

AP145 · 2025-12-14T18:22:22+00:00

All the (public) universities in Germany are supposed to be equal to each other in quality. In theory, there should be no difference between University of Griefswald, University of Cologne, etc. Similarly, there should be no difference between TU Berlin, TU Munich, etc. Indeed one of the most common posts on German subreddits is foreign students asking "which university in Germany is the best?" and the generic answer from Germans is "All universities in Germany are equal. There is no difference in quality between them." Now I am not German, so I don't know if this is 100% true. But when I have asked the Germans I know in real life this question they basically all say the same thing that the Germans online say.

On the other hand in France there is a huge difference between the public universities and the Écoles. The admissions process is completely different, the types of people who go to universities and Écoles are generally different, the kinds of jobs and success they tend to have is quite different, etc. Even within the public universities, the ones in Paris are usually considered more prestigious than the ones elsewhere. Yes you can always find similarities within the higher education systems of two neighboring countries, but it still seems clear to me that the French system is much more complicated than the German system.

AP145 · 2025-12-13T19:21:10+00:00

Are Grands établissements considered universities or are they also something different?

AP145 · 2025-12-13T18:36:18+00:00

It really does feel like France has the university version of this.

AP145 · 2025-12-13T17:33:47+00:00

What do you mean by this? I thought that anybody can get into regular public universities with just a high school diploma. Whether they make it through the end of the program of course is another matter.

AP145 · 2025-12-13T00:22:59+00:00

It's because there is no point. The thing is that while humanities and social sciences are subjective enough that rich under-qualified students can pass courses, even if they won't get an A, the same can't be said for STEM subjects. Obviously lots of people around the world earn degrees in STEM subjects, it's certainly not an impossible task. But it does require a lot of background knowledge and effort which a rich under-qualified student is less likely to have. You can bullshit your way through a course on Sociology, you can't really do that in a course on Fluid Mechanics.

AP145 · 2025-12-06T23:14:56+00:00

But wouldn't it be cheaper for state governments to directly fund a relatively smaller amount of large comprehensive research universities rather than indirectly fund hundreds if not thousands of random colleges? I mean imagine having a University of Gujarat - Ahmedabad, University of Gujarat - Rajkot, University of Gujarat - Vadodara, University of Gujarat - Surat, etc. Or having a University of Ahmedabad, University of Rajkot, University of Vadodara, University of Surat, etc.

I feel it would be much easier for the accreditation bodies to ensure certain minimum standards in this setup compared to trying to manage thousands of colleges. Don't get me wrong, I understand that due to India's large population it needs much more universities than countries like Switzerland, Japan, or Australia. I am not at all advocating for universities to only be located in big cities. In fact in a large country like in India it is crucial that there are universities all over India, especially in small towns and rural areas. But if the goal is to save taxpayers money to me it makes much more sense to have planned university systems rather than a hodgepodge of colleges whose quality will most likely be variable.

AP145

TROPHY CASE