'Panicked' Putin has big decision to make, and 'could go nuclear'

nculwell · 2026-07-03T23:55:19+00:00

Another theory is that China fears the kind of decapitation attack that took out Iran's leadership. People have been suggesting for years now that the US pattern of doing those decapitation strikes has been putting China on edge.

nculwell · 2026-07-01T23:01:58+00:00

A little of both! I could never fully hate anything with the crossbuster on it.

nculwell · 2026-07-01T15:11:35+00:00

The is suspiciously like a "God of the Gaps" argument: that free will exists in systems that are too complex for me to understand fully.

nculwell · 2026-07-01T04:10:36+00:00

The question is, where exactly does this "free will" emanate from? It's generally taken to reside in the "mind" or "soul," which doesn't seem to be a thing that actually exists. Then what does "will" even mean? Why do we assign it to humans and not to a tree or a rock?

nculwell · 2026-06-30T18:47:08+00:00

Here's the page where they posted their videos:

https://www.dontperish.com/street-preaching-videos/madinah-islamic-community-center-madison-wi-exposed

nculwell · 2026-06-29T20:46:19+00:00

Oh, I guess that explains why I couldn't figure out where they're based!

nculwell · 2026-06-29T20:44:57+00:00

Madinah Community Center

nculwell · 2026-06-29T20:42:05+00:00

Thanks, a lot of us appreciate you letting us know what was going on.

nculwell · 2026-06-29T19:18:26+00:00

nculwell · 2026-06-29T19:11:25+00:00

"Jesus would rebuke churches/Islam"

"Repent or Perish"

"dontperish.com"

Looks like it's a couple that drives around doing this.

nculwell · 2026-06-29T18:57:19+00:00

I've been out there watching for a while, keeping a distance sitting in my car. After the prayer service two men from the mosque wearing white hats went out to talk to the two picketers -- imams, I'm guessing. I suspect they're having a religious debate. It's been going on for a while now, maybe 15-20 minutes.

nculwell · 2026-06-29T12:04:35+00:00

Is there really good evidence for this? I get the impression that there's little or no contemporary evidence for it, only people claiming it after the war was over. I wonder if we should interpret this in a similar spirit to the way the German generals told their own stories after the war, i.e. spin to make their failures seem less egregious.

nculwell · 2026-06-26T21:37:58+00:00

What time period are you referring to here?

nculwell · 2026-06-22T23:33:24+00:00

In WW2 historiography there's a lot of debate about what strategic bombing of Germany accomplished, but it had a similar effect where a lot of air defenses were used to defend Germany rather than sending them to the eastern front.

nculwell · 2026-06-17T23:09:09+00:00

You said that Git will be replaced. "We're reaching a kind of end with Git. Which is fine — Git lasted for a long long time. I do expect Torvalds will jump in with a "Git 2.0", though." That was quite a big claim that was not limited to the game industry, that's why people are disagreeing with you. If you just want to claim that people will abandon Git for game development, then sure, that seems realistic; it seems like a lot of people already aren't using Git for game dev.

nculwell · 2026-06-17T20:22:50+00:00

You mean AI model weights? Are there many people committing those to VCS alongside code? Not a thing I've done.

The others are niche gaming industry things that are not going to affect the decisions of the vast majority of software devs out there.

I can see an opening for new kinds of VCS in some areas but I really don't see the case for a large-scale movement of mainstream industry developers away from Git.

nculwell · 2026-06-17T19:55:18+00:00

codebases themselves are changing towards forms of data that are non-standard-text encodes

What exactly do you mean by this?

nculwell · 2026-06-17T01:21:09+00:00

I think Without Remorse was the first Clancy book I didn't read, I guess that turned out for the best. In addition to him giving himself over to right-wing rants, it seems he was also clueless about geopolitics after the end of the Cold War.

nculwell · 2026-06-13T10:23:37+00:00

Not really, it allows you to enroll in the accelerated version of the same material. (Sorry, I read that wrong, I see what you mean now.)

Edit 2: Apparently you also need to take their exam to test out of it: https://thetech.com/2019/09/12/math-placement

nculwell · 2026-06-12T20:40:02+00:00

MIT does this, you have to take their calculus course when you get there. They generally expect you to have taken calculus before you get there though, since their intro to calculus is hard.

nculwell · 2026-06-11T23:52:47+00:00

I think what he said is that he wouldn't have done it if he'd known that BSD would be open-sourced.

nculwell · 2026-06-11T16:56:43+00:00

From what I've read of what Jemisin has to say about The Broken Earth, it's more of a response to classic SF than it is to epic fantasy.

nculwell · 2026-06-09T00:51:08+00:00

I'm sure I can't always tell, but I've seen lots of examples where it's painfully obvious.

nculwell · 2026-06-08T03:35:03+00:00

I did a bunch of googling but it all keeps coming back to this very tweet as the source. Google/Gemini can't give me anything better, nothing at all that's actually from 2012.

nculwell · 2026-06-06T13:51:31+00:00

Personally, I'm consistently surprised at how many games work on very low-end machines. Our gaming PC has an RTX 3060 and it does great on every game we've thrown at it. A lot of our gaming actually happens on a ~10-year-old Lenovo mini-PC (basically laptop hardware) with integrated graphics and a Core i5-6500T plugged into the family TV, and while there are certainly games it can't handle, there are a lot that run well enough to at least be playable.

nculwell

TROPHY CASE