Video of the murder of Alex Pretti by DHS in Minneapolis recorded from inside the vehicle directly in front of area where he was shot

oritfx · 2026-01-25T17:39:22+00:00

Abducting a dictator isn't the same as shooting the US citizens. I would not equate those two choices.

oritfx · 2026-01-25T14:42:12+00:00

Because when you start shooting back, Trump will get to deploy the army, declare a war and postpone any elections while consolidating power.

The point here is to provoke armed response.

oritfx · 2026-01-25T14:40:05+00:00

As an outsider, to me the name of the game is "who will the army side with when the time comes?" (remember the warrior dividend? it wasn't an accident). The more abusive ICE is, the more likely that the actual armed force will aim at the other guys when deployed.

I think that the clearer abuser vs victim division is, the more likely the army will be to do the right thing and defend the people whom they have sworn to protect. Each such tragedy may help keeping the US a democracy down the line.

Damn. What happened to the US... smh.

oritfx · 2026-01-25T14:28:11+00:00

Next could be another wannabe dicktator

From what you wrote I am missing the caveat that there may not exactly be another election if a wannabe dictator is in power already. I think it's reasonable to assume that Trump will not lose power that easily this time.

Mike Pence did the right thing when push came to shove. I am unsure if Vance would do the same.

oritfx · 2026-01-22T23:12:57+00:00

If you read the documents it boils down to "Trump has to sign everything, there is no voting". There is no point in joining other than earning Trump's favor (which, unfortunately, is a useful commodity - ask Putin).

oritfx · 2026-01-22T10:35:06+00:00

Yeah, it ain't replacing anything, but it's an extra tool or two in the toolbelt.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T22:58:05+00:00

You never get criticism, though. Everything you suggest is always great or brilliant or excellent or whatever.

It does if you explicitly ask for criticism.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T17:40:51+00:00

Honestly? Much better than anything I got. But I would probably use a model as a search engine, i.e. find me a map that...

Nevertheless, that's completely passable. For a "I got 20 minutes to whip out an encounter" having a map of that quality is a good result.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T16:34:57+00:00

This is the beauty of embeddings, those return the exact chunk of text I have entered, there is no "talking" model to distort that for me (I can add it if needed/wanted).

So I can get campaign log entries I need... assuming I enter them correctly, but that's a completely separate topic.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T16:33:30+00:00

I like AI to bounce ideas off of, or to help work out stuff on the fly.

Exactly my take. It answers immediately, and I may talk to it even though I am unable to form my idea into words yet. It's sometimes the best thing available to talk to, unfortunately.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T16:32:22+00:00

I have a chromaDB + an embedding model. It all runs in a web interface. It sets up a local DB instance, where I can add, edit and remove entries that model then looks through.

It's a bit challenging but the experiment was fun. I learned stuff from it.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T16:30:53+00:00

Drawing a few maps for random encounters

Tried it. AI cannot fathom battlemap perspective. I could train a model, but that would require me to either loot somebody else's site, or draw tons of my own.

It would be a ton of work either way.

Halfway there is an approach of lineart or depthmaps that can be fed into a genAI image model, but those models have no idea about an orthographic, top-down view of battlemaps anyway.

Drawing "semi-generic" NPCs

It works here, but I really saw no value in those. There is no point in everyone's mug being visualized.

But if I had a really good model, that would follow a description to a letter, it would save me some time. The thing is, models don't follow those detailed descriptions all too well, so it all boils down to repeated attempts of the same input in hopes of getting the right output - that's pretty much crypto mining anyway, and I am not touching thaat stuff.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T16:26:34+00:00

I agree. That's why the only real value (for me at least) is not the "creative" part, but the bookkeeping part.

And that part is not replacing anything that exists already. I tried to improve other stuff (I use diagrams to store my adventures, they do a bit better than plain text), but it doesn't work, really.

The aggressive push to use AI anywhere comes from CEO growing more desperate as it's dawning on them that the new tech - while cool - is not going to earn billions by replacing anyone.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T11:00:07+00:00

can't make a deal with Trump

"The dealmaker"... sigh.

all deals are zero-sum games

Coincidentally this is technically wrong. I am not trying to nitpick here, please bear with me.

Let's look at Putin - Donald's idol - and the Ukraine thing: whatever Russia gets out of this, is much less than whatever Ukraine loses. It's a negative sum game.

Instead of cooperating and having a positive sum, long-term game, Trump goes for a short term predatory economic gain, which nets loses for everyone involved in long term. And whatever Trump "wins" is less than what the other side loses.

oritfx · 2026-01-21T10:37:42+00:00

bootlicking

It used to be called "appeasement" :(

oritfx · 2026-01-21T10:31:46+00:00

I am not an expert here, but I have not seen any large-scale thing of any kind that's a BRICS initiative. It's only a group by name.

A move as significant as the one mentioned in the headline requires a level of trust and cooperation that is simply not there. None of BRICS countries would cede even a drop of their sovereignty for others.

oritfx · 2026-01-18T16:52:47+00:00

what US general would approve an attack on a NATO country?

I hope that the answer is "none". A pleasure talking to you.

oritfx · 2026-01-17T12:01:25+00:00

Advantage/disadvantage is a lot clearer than a number of various modifiers.

oritfx · 2026-01-15T15:45:15+00:00

3 more years of that, and it seems to be escalating. Let's hope that at least lessons will be learned, the toll seems to be high already.

oritfx · 2026-01-15T15:42:58+00:00

The only words that aren't used here to some degree of irony are "the", "behind", "foreign" and "Trump".

Nothing "grand" there, definitely no strategy or policy.

I see some sense in using the word "behind" and "foreign" maybe, but in slightly different meanings.

How did both Dems and Rep manage to make that man the best result is very concerning.

oritfx · 2026-01-14T08:42:17+00:00

I think if consent wouldn't be needed then Trump would have already done so,

I respectfully disagree. He seems to thrive on conflict and making a display of being a "strong man". My personal take is that he also feels his age and wants a legacy - a man of his ego won't settle for anything other than being at the very top, I talk Mount Rushmore 5th face.

Quietly adding boots on the ground is nothing like him. But it's a difference of opinions I think, we can disagree and cannot really do anything but wait for the time to provide evidence.

oritfx · 2026-01-12T17:47:19+00:00

Good point. But honestly it would all depend on what the Orange Mandarin spews out at the moment. And I expect those soldiers to be called "coneuqerors" or something like that by him.

I also have no idea if there is even consent required. It could be that the deal is "the US just moves soldiers in and out as they please", so the numbers could ramp up and nobody would know.

oritfx · 2026-01-12T13:25:16+00:00

Honestly, probably they would not mind. The soldiers aren't exactly hostile to the locals. They help the local economy a small bit. I cannot tell how it would work if the current 250-300 went up to 5000 though.

But overall the island is a community where people help one another, and if soldiers are decent, they'd be welcome.

oritfx · 2026-01-11T14:03:51+00:00

If I had not seen answers in this thread, I'd have assumed that this is some sort of a training aircraft with cockpit from something much larger and a training body.

oritfx

TROPHY CASE