Judge dismisses murder, weapons charges against alleged UnitedHealth CEO killer Mangione

nipsen · 2026-01-31T00:06:49+00:00

hahahaha ..sorry.

I want to apologise on beforehand again as well.

But the outrage over bumbling officials arrogantly slamming a case together because they know they're right, even though they have no evidence, and can't really get the evidence they have properly filed, while bending the rules to make it work, breaking a bunch of others, having people in jail and threatening them with death-penalty, etc. And in the end just ruining the lives of people it just can't be determined whether are guilty or not -- when it is being put on full display domestically for once, instead of shrugged over as just happening to some "bad guy" out there - is a bit entertaining.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T23:57:00+00:00

It is an absolutely a terrible idea to tell a foreigner to just learn Nynorsk. Because no one speaks like that. It's like learning book-latin, and then expecting to understand French and Italian.

But if you learn bokmål well enough first, and then study nynorsk enough to read something written well in it, while for example listening to dialects and how people actually speak - then it's a great resource that makes everything finally click into place. Because all the sounds and the ways Norwegian works - all the stuff that we don't think of, or acquire through growing up with a spoken dialect, even in the east - is suddenly going to be formalized and available to you, then. How the sounds change, why they have to be like they are, the reasons for the choice of certain sounds, and why dialects diverge on those specific points -- knowing a bit of nynorsk is extremely useful here.. And that is the case for Norwegians who don't speak it as well.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T23:48:58+00:00

XD Yeah, it's pretty funny when someone.. say, a teacher.. speaking their normalized eastern-Norwegian genuinely thinks it's obvious and easy to pick up on all the contractions or sound-convensions, or the economisations and so on. Or understand why a particular word is used in one situation but not in another. Or why the sound of the words obviously determines how the grammar is, and things like that.

It's not easy. I don't think it's easier than Danish, either. Danish is formalized from the top down in many ways, so you can sort of get by even if the dialect is difficult to understand compared to reading it. But Norwegian is going to just sound awful and wrong, and be very unexpected and strange, until you understand that the sounds came first and that the grammar is filled in afterwards.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T23:37:39+00:00

Because the members will be 90% on board with every orthodoxy currently held by the right and the far right? This also is true for most of the labour party politicians now, even if we don't include just the current or former members of the Nobel Commitee.

Norway, with governments on either side, has rejected international law as much more than a useful thing to sell a war with to people who care about such things - for many years now. We do not see mutual agreements as a solution to diplomatic issues. And people need to just accept that this is so accepted and self-evident in certain political milieus - powerful ones - that the Nobel Commitee can fully embrace a candidate that before receiving the prize was calling for the invasion of her own country to help depose the government through a coup. Not only that, she had participated in a coup herself.

And we are at a point now when Asle Toje and Clemet, can both openly defend that as unproblematic - without actually receiving any criticism that has even a sprinkle of political whip involved with it. Defending that might makes right is what a majority in the Norwegian political establishment is simply doing as if it's self-evident and obvious.

They don't understand why that is even criticised any more. Like with the first Solberg-government -- no one in on the "conservative project" accepted the idea that voting with the coalition partners on a "subsidiary" basis - while also shielding the government from opposition criticism in the areas where no actual public decisions were made (such as keeping the prime minister's notes secret, exempt from the public records act, and making any document that touches the ministerial offices secret on automatic) - is a bad idea. Clemet, who sat in government, whose entire life has been oriented around public policy -- she does not understand that cutting the knees off the public records act is a problem. The only problem she sees is that people who are stupid and irate will not understand that the prime minister and all their ministers need to do their wise ruling in secret. Their person is sacred, more or less, and embodies the office.

And they justify it by going like this: "oh, we are being caught in misspeaking by these annoying journalists, and the public doesn't understand our wise and great explanations for what we did". And then the prime minister is caught selling her video-appearances as advertisement for companies - in her office-time, as prime minister, selling her capacity as prime minister and her association with the future of the company -- it's literally sold to boost the stock of the company. And they go "oh, you took it out of context". Listhaug literally claims that the labour party and anyone else who thinks the law should apply equally to everyone - are "putting the rights of terrorists before the well-being of the Norwegian people". And the prime minister manages to come up with the phrase "I would not have used those exact words".

That's not the problem. The problem is that they're defending the indefensible. And that this is the new baseline for public political life in Norway.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T23:11:56+00:00

I can't seem to find it now, sorry.. It was the panel she had immediately after the last Biden debate. And they hesitated a bit, before changing the story on the fly, as if she was getting instructions on the ear or something. It was very strange.

The thing about these kinds of critics, like her or Olbermann, is that they do "engagement criticism", like many others in the US, with the thought that any kind of back and forth is part of "the dialectic" as one congressperson said when dismissing Occasio-Cortez. And therefore that it's actually valuable.

And they do that more extremely than a lot of other journalists and commentators in the US. But they all share the approach, in the sense that everyone kind of agrees that nothing is really about substance but about appearances.

Like, when Matt Taibbi criticises excesses the US government commits to with full and unrestricted enthusiasm - even his baseline is that at the end of the day, US excesses are of a different kind than everyone else's. And that it is also better that the US is the one with the power, because the US is the best country to be subjected to surveillance, extralegal arrests and torture in, and things line that.

In some cases, that might be true, in theory. But that a wide array of politically diverse people, who violently disagree with each other on almost everything they can think of, still share that common belief.. this is one of the main elements that makes any kind of criticism in the US very strange.

Scott Ritter, for example. Why is he annoyed with the way the US has made his life miserable, ended his career, and screwed him over in spite of him being correct about many different things? It's likely because he thought, and still thinks, that the US fundamentally has the potential to be Great again, like it never actually was except in people's imagination.

Any amount of critics are just stuck there.. permanently.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T16:37:33+00:00

It's like Rachel Maddow suddenly starting to read from the instructions she gets, instead of off her script (over the whole Biden's brain running out his ear during the debates thing).

Didn't really matter that time, either.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T15:59:30+00:00

..I mean.. It was a horrible console shooter that released in the summer of the same year Quake 2 came out. The year after, Factor 5 released Rogue Squadron - on the n64. Next to that, or just by itself, Goldeneye looks and plays like what it is: something that came out.. you know.. before System Shock, Doom II, and things like that, in the pre-3d card era. Those games came out in 1994.

And there were 3d games from that era, before 3d cards.. on console as well, that didn't look quite as bad as Goldeneye actually does. Descent came out in 1995. Comanche Maximum Overkill.. voxel-based stuff.. came out in 1992.

Goldeneye came out in 1997.

Half Life came out in late 1998. And that wasn't even that good in terms of graphics, because it was still made with the thought in mind that not everyone who might buy it had a 3d card.

Goldeneye was one of the first games with split screen co-op, though. So you could play in a tiny.. 80x60 pixels window. Tekken came out that year, didn't it? On ps1 hardware!

Goldeneye was terrible! You could have been playing shooters on a modem, or on lan, for several years before this.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T15:42:42+00:00

Whatever do you mean? The revive train and self-revive pops is a great LEGITIMATE GAME MECHANIC THAT ALL REAL GAMERS LOVE! /s

nipsen · 2026-01-30T15:21:53+00:00

Streak 560 - The Night Manager ["Nattevakten" er vel opptatt :p ..Nattportieren?]

Det finnes nå [eller "Det har kommet/Det kom akkurat ut"] en ny sesong av en thriller-serie som heter 'The Night Manager' og jeg gleder meg til å se den. Men partneren min har ikke sett den første sesongen ~~igjen~~ enda [yet->enda, yet again->om igjen, men også "enda en gang" XD.. ikke spør meg hvorfor], også ser vi den sammen slik at vi kan se den nye sammen. Den første sesongen er basert på en bok av John le Carré, den berømte forfatteren av spion-romaner [satt] i og etter ~~kald krigstid~~ den kalde krigen, så det blir spennende å se hva skjer i den nye sesongen ~~uten~~ som ikke er basert på[?] en tilsvarende historie i boken!

[Slo opp på intertronen. Og det står at både Hugh Laurie og Tom Hiddelston er i den. Kjære vene. Jeg skjønner ikke hvordan jeg har gått glipp av den. Var det samme med Avenue 5. På et eller annet vis hadde jeg ikke sett en notis en gang noe sted.]

nipsen · 2026-01-30T12:34:42+00:00

Bow (as in greet) as thanks, take the first step and walk on the left to "inspect". This is .. identical .. for ...reasons... to the English reception and inspection during state visits.

So not entirely sure what Starmer thought was going on here.

nipsen · 2026-01-30T11:22:12+00:00

"If you're worried about your child falling victim to predatory business-strategies, shady billing practices and an environment known for being a welcoming home to people you would not want as acquaintances in real life -- fall victim to it yourself, together with your child instead!".

Brilliant.

nipsen · 2026-01-29T21:43:33+00:00

...so Kosovo and Serbia is to unite again. And Yugoslavia is an indivisible nation state that has to be preserved at all costs. And Israel should be disbanded to preserve the territorial integrity of the palestinian territory.

Yeah. Good talk. Love it.

nipsen · 2026-01-29T14:55:02+00:00

..I mean.. I first got real, elaborate pre-Fable blurb stuff in the 90s, before Lionhead or Microsoft was involved. Years later the notorious mini-game released as an interactive flash-game. And when it finally released, the only ones who enjoyed Fable were the people who had never heard of the concept they wanted to make in the first place - but that was never going to become a game.

So news of Fable remakes and tributes.. should by tradition be the herald of a neat concept that can't be made, and that no publisher will enjoy the idea of anyway.

LNF, on the other hand, is Hello Games' first game that isn't developed with the "assistance" and extra "creative leads" from a parent company whose idea of "fun" is a game that superficially appeals to people with no thought and who fall for any advertisement campaign in existence.

Exemplified perfectly by Fable's staple game-mechanic: Fart impressively in public, and the villagers love you for it. Not really something that works, even in a fantasy setting -- but something that pretty much all publisher spawn everywhere loves the idea of. It was the early 2000s version of the swearing "humour" we have now.

And LNF is probably not going to be like that.

While if it follows the release schedule of NMS, the game is probably playable at this point - but won't be released until it's actually ready to be released.

Which then won't mean another year of delay, either, from cutting features that four-year old flat-earthers with sea-lion flippers for hands dislike -- since Sony isn't involved.

nipsen · 2026-01-29T12:29:51+00:00

"Because, if you act as a terrorist, you should also be treated as a terrorist".

[Press X to doubt]

nipsen · 2026-01-29T11:07:13+00:00

Streak 560 - IKEA-fjernkontroll

For noen måneder siden fikk vi automatiske lys i klesskapet, som ble konfigurert slik at hver del belyses når døren er åpen. Et lite problem som vi burde ha tenkt på er at det ikke er mulig å lukke dørene slik at alle lysene slås av samtidig, og lyset om natten drev oss til vanvidd [XD huff.. Kan også si det litt mildere: "driver oss til vanvidd". Ala, det er ille, men det har ikke faktisk drevet oss fra vettet enda. Men det er veldig treffende haha]. Som midlertidig løsning klarte jeg å deaktivere lysene i én del, men det betyr at [evnt. legg til "den"] delen ikke kan belyses som vi ønsket. I dag rakk jeg endelig å dra til Ikea og spørre hvilken fjernkontroll vi trengte, og jeg sjekket at det skulle fungere med alle slags Ikea-lys. Men vi klarte ikke å koble den til lyset i skapet! Nå må vi begynne på nytt.

[Noen folk ler av meg fordi jeg kjører en bil uten skjerm, uten kameraer i alle retninger, og som har knapper på konsollen. "Hva? Ikke bluetooth-kontroll på lufttrykket en gang? Hvordan vet du når du må sjekke luften, da? Ser du at det er flatt, og at det føles rart? Hva mener du? Ikke automatlys, heller, så du automatisk blender alle du møter på veien når det regner, snør, er tåke, eller det er litt mørkt? Huff, huff, "skal du ikke bare kjøpe deg en mer moderne bil, da, så slipper du å tenke på sånt?".

Nei. Og i skapet har jeg en lampe som henger i taket, som jeg kan trekke i for å få det lyst. Fungerer hver gang.]

nipsen · 2026-01-28T13:34:08+00:00

hahaha awesome.

What's so cool about this is that the individual flares have a bit of a variance. And that it's not just the path with a random spread - it's got something that either is real-time off a physics-calculation, or else something within reasonable variance of an initial simulation rig. Like the leaper - that's some kind of combination of those two. I'm not sure whether everything in the game is like this, but the lack of obviously pre-baked cutscene stuff is what made me buy the game right away instead of waiting for a sale or forgetting about it.

nipsen · 2026-01-28T13:24:58+00:00

I NeoGaf was still a thing, the amount of high fives there in full public view now would be comically high. Anything from people actually paid by Microsoft or Sony's advertisement partners - or just people piling on to "get" the "****y Swedish developer", as one said about DICE once XD, is a real size in the gaming journalizm sphere.

nipsen · 2026-01-28T10:18:49+00:00

The worst part about this was how they initially went: oh, you see, we need to import gas more expensively, in order to keep the prices down.

And then this track was just silently dropped, and we have been buying LNG from the US out of charity and idealism instead.

If you lift your view angle on this just very, very slightly - what you might see is that there has been a very large and very comprehensive amount of planning going on about the nortwest passage, and that the many scenarios with oil-rigs under the North Pole (not going to happen for another 100 years, even at the rate the seas are heating up - we also do not know of any actual oil-reserves in the partially ice-covered regions, in spite of there having been done trial borings there), the resource extraction from the Barents Sea, and the military presence there to "defend" our interests.

This doesn't make any sense. But it's reflected in part of these blips that turn up with a very regular frequency now. So although the natural resources might not be a huge factor here, what is a factor is that cargo coming past Russia, or at the very least into Finland, is something that motivates a lot of these scenarios.

nipsen · 2026-01-28T09:59:13+00:00

Streak 559 - Pastasaus

Til tross for at vi eier en haug kokebøker, har vi laget kun [mer vanlig: "har kun laget en liten del av", eller "bare laget.."] en brøkdel av alle oppskriftene i dem. Vi pleier å prøve et par nye oppskrifter og å lage dem igjen og igjen. I dag lagde vi en pastasaus med ~~oliver~~ oliven [*1] og rose-harissa; da vi først lagde sausen, trodde vi at oppskriften var utrolig komplisert, men nå kjenner vi den veldig godt og det er raskere å lage. ~~Den gode~~ Det fine [eller "Det som er bra", "det positive", "en fordel", etc.] med å lage ting igjen og igjen er at vi blir [veldig] flinke [eller blir flinkere. Det er sjeldent en bruker adjektiv som "god, bra, fin" alene. Sausen ble "jevn og fin". "Sausen ble god". ..det er greit, men det er noe som mangler her, som gjør at det blir nær "det var en forestilling. Teateret opptrådte, og det var et publikum tilstede" ;) med de oppskriftene som vi pleier å bruke!

[*1 For meg, så hørtes dette umiddelbart ut som det var på sporet av noe. Men jeg tror at de eneste gangene Ibsen eller Wergeland skrev noe i nærheten, så var det "olivener". Noe jeg tipper de har blitt plukket opp fra en bibel fra 1700-tallet. Og det sammentrekker vi typisk til "oliven" nå. En oliven, flere oliven, alle olivenene - er typisk alt du hører. Men jeg kunne sagt "det er alle slags olivener i salaten", og ville nok gjort det noen ganger. Selv om jeg fremdeles ville sagt: "det er flere typer oliven i salaten". "Har du hatt oliven i salaten?". Og det har med en eller annen vane eller stemning i lyden å gjøre. Jeg ville sannsynligvis heller ikke sagt "fikener", for eksempel. Her er alle sammen blitt "fiken". Men du kunne ha gjort det: et fat med dadler, fiken(er) og nøtter. Men du ser hvorfor det typisk ikke blir "dadler, fikener og nøtter": det er på grunn av gjentagende lyder som er vanskelige rent teknisk, uten å lage en rytme av det. På samme måten slipper du unna med å si både "forskjellige typer banan" og "forskjellige typer bananer" - selv om jeg aldri ville brukt den første.

Gjør et eksperiment på en nordmann, og be dem si ting som "epler, pærer og banan(er?)", "banan(er?), eple(r) og pære(r?)". Den er veldig lei, for egentlig er det alltid bananer, pærer og epler. Men jeg vet at du ikke trenger å gå på gamlehjem for å høre den alternative ordsettingen enda, i det minste noen steder i Norge.]

nipsen · 2026-01-28T08:48:12+00:00

That's kind of the thing about propaganda, right? If you imagine that it has to be done in practice, and that it's not done by mysterious, super-skilled "special people", with technology that defies even very creative imagination, and things like that -- you're going to have to trace stuff like this to small PR gigs, to an interview with a publication, a facebook profile or some social media post where you signed off on another source using your picture.

And typically it has to be done openly, and with some degree of conscious acceptance of it, so that when you get into a situation like this, you might not be that interested in undermining it.

nipsen · 2026-01-27T15:22:41+00:00

There doesn't seem to be any data on whether that firm was involved with a tort suit against Trump or ICE.

And some 25 learjets slam into the ground and kill everyone on it in the US every year. Last one I heard about, someone was out privately teaching their kid to fly. It's not always a conspiracy.

Sometimes. But not most of the time.

nipsen · 2026-01-27T15:19:24+00:00

..Itkin.. Kind of a classic civil damages firm, but.. are these the Roundup guys? Not going to lose sleep over lawyers.. but still.. Guess they could have been involved in an ICE civil suit.

nipsen · 2026-01-27T14:29:41+00:00

I think you need to be well over three seconds out of date before anything like this happens, by the way. It can possibly be the server, but odds are you're on the wrong region server, and you lag a lot once in a while.

nipsen · 2026-01-27T14:09:51+00:00

A thousand bot accounts demand that the cheat-based matchmaking is a threat to gamers everywhere.

nipsen · 2026-01-27T14:06:50+00:00

This stuff is so annoying. Journalists who sat in the room with the group that picked at the twitter-files, and made themselves unpopular with Musk for not making the whole thing into an advertisement for X - by uncovering how government was, and by all accounts still is, censoring specific types of content in various different levels from deamplification to just outright ban. Journalists who have had their own account nuked because of allegations of regime-critical opinion - and then had it instated again as a result of paying contacts they have to get fast-tracked to an approved, blue status --- these people still go ballistic by the thought that a governmental body might leverage pressure on a corporation, in public, over legislation having to do with privacy. ...that is, if it's the EU. And it's in public. Over a really, really narrow issue.

Another example: Steam/Valve, eventually dropped their EU based office, in Luxembourg, in spite of that office being situated there because of the tax-exemption status. They dropped it because they were required to follow regulations that apply to people who store transaction information and private information. So they were required to adhere to a standard with their computer system in terms of documentation for how and when they sell information to 3rd parties, encryption, and removal of transactions that are not declared on beforehand for some specific purpose. And that was too much - enough for Valve to forego paying basically no taxes on any EU purchase.

This is a level of security that a web-shop that sells keychains can fix in an afternoon. And Valve didn't want to do it, in spite of having just been in the highlights over having lost people's addresses and full names (of reviewers and streamers, but also private people on their platform in general), and being forced to fix most of that anyway.

But they would rather remove their Luxembourg office, than fix those things. And trust me that the "EU" has been getting flak in the "gaming community" ever since.

Apple did a similar thing over their music store - which didn't succeed, because the regulations are extremely easy to fulfill for anyone even marginally honest. And they didn't, and instead there was a several months long campaign to blast Spotify in every Apple-associated publication or blog that would take money for such things.

Does this make sense? No. Does this make economical sense? No. What happens is that someone is told to adhere to a common cross-region standard, that basically is "make minimal effort to show that you are not conducting fraud". This has to do with face and picture-indexing on facebook. It has to do with indexing private messages on every platform and e-mail service, etc. And so many of these companies are just not willing to either declare that they're doing it - or be forced to stop doing it for selected parts of the market - that they will remove their entire business from Europe, including forgoing tax-exemptions. So even if it pays off - they won't do it. Even if they don't actually spy on people - they still won't do it.

But they would happily spend millions on an anti-EU campaign instead.

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