It’s fine, they’ve sorted out sleep mode on most hardware a while ago

Ont the food shortage front, North Korea kind of got hit by a perfect storm of problems that might not have been so severe, had they not all occurred in short order. In brief, over the span of several years in the 1990s, the DPRK managed to lose their greatest backer and trading partner with the collapse of the USSR, which in turn meant that flaws present in some already failing internal policies could no longer be ignored, and were, in fact, exacerbated. Then they had widespread flooding that devastated domestic agriculture, making a bad situation worse. International sanctions would have also impeded efforts to turn to international markets temporarily to purchase additional food and necessary supplies to turn the situation around. While the US did supply food aid starting in 1996, much like how the US weaponized the embargos on Cuba and sanctions on Iran in a way that worsened their situation during the Covid pandemic, George W. Bush severely cut US food aid, and in some years, it was eliminated entirely.

There’s a whole article on the subject on Wikipedia that is a good start for understanding it. While there are certainly plenty of things to criticize North Korea for, I think the general “Hurr durr, communism is bad, look at all this nice food I have,” take that has become widespread in the US is a pretty reductive bit of anti-DPRK propaganda. Also, I don’t know how much of their relative success before that point was due to the USSR propping up an allied state and how much could be attributed to Kim Il Sung’s capabilities as a statesman, but his successors don’t seem to be his equal either in finding strong parties to ally with or in their statecraft. It’s also entirely possible that they are simply the Juche version of failsons, slowly dissipating their father’s legacy for their own gratification after having grown up fairly privileged and viewing the enterprise left to them (or state, in this case) purely as part of their inheritance to plunder for personal gain.

From what I’ve seen in other articles about the same case, it’s basically nothing special. The North Korean applies under a false identity that isn’t associated with North Korea, and they have (or at least claim to have) relevant education and experience that would make them good fits for roles like programming, then they apply for remote jobs where they can continually work at one job without having to go in and interact with people face to face.

I kind of doubt the problem is being suspected of being an operative, though, so much as ex filtration of corporate secrets and potentially falling afoul of sanctions against North Korea if they continue to employ someone in their company once they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is a North Korean national working under a false identity. They would be helping the North Korean government to maintain a steady inflow of foreign currency that they need, which I’m sure could land them in trouble. Aside from that liability, I would imagine they would beore concerned about company IP and tratedsecrets this employee would have access to being available to the DPRK to do what they will with, as well as others in the government being able to use their credentials to potentially access and compromise systems on the company’s network that this employee could access.

Man, Microsoft doubling down on the whole “Let’s force most of our customers to purchase entirely new computers to use the next release!” strategy after it went so well for Windows 11 is just hilarious. Especially with hardware costs skyrocketing due to AI BS.

Firefox is just the browser, Mozilla is the organization constantly wasting money on features Firefox’s users are actively hostile to in a bid to tempt away people already using Chrome. Not the OP, but I’d be down to donate to Firefox’s development directly, but I wouldn’t want to make a donation to Mozilla hoping it would go toward Firefox, only to find out they took my money to build some new LLM integration that nobody asked for, only to sit unused for years before being quietly shuttered in favor of the new tech buzzword of the day.

I’m sure there’s a cli program to just do batch audio conversion, but in favor of simple and least amount of hassle, it wouldn’t be that much work with fre:ac. You should be able to just open up the game’s directory in your file browser by going to the game properties in Steam, clicking “Installed Files”, and then clicking the browse button in the top right. Drag the wma files into an open window of fre:ac, make sure mp3 is selected for the output in your preferences and click convert. Or if you installed it in Wine, just browse to where you installed it, then continue the same once you have the wma files. Then just replace the wma files with your new mp3s, and you’re done. Honestly, you’ll probably spend more time waiting for your package manager to install fre:ac than you’ll spend on everything else in this process. Not as easy as just running out of the box, but really not as bad as it might sound at first.

It’s a standard letter in Icelandic, so there are probably plenty of fonts incorporating thorn, even if not everyone uses them. Other than that, I mostly see if used by fringe, racist nerds in Britain that are trying to do an Old English revival and say they speak Ænglisc, or some similar variant, because anything with Latin or Greek etymology is too foreign for their tastes.

Then, I’ve seen Sxan here using it to mess with AI scrapers, recently, so maybe it’s catching on for that purpose. Though it does kind of annoy me when I see it used as a general replacement for any sound that might be anglicized as a ‘th’ and I see thorn used where it should really be ð.

That thing better be running on TempleOS and be coded with HolyC, or I’m calling BS and telling people they’ve just found a new way to make LLMs even more annoying than they already were.

Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??

They shouldn’t be, since the model for updates is quite distinct from Windows or iOS in a way that I would argue should effectively meet the requirements anyways. If a distro releases a new version twice a year, outside of enterprise situations where a company is paying for support, there’s nothing to really stop anyone who wants from upgrading. They don’t charge for it, and while new versions might add out-of-the-box support for new hardware, it’s pretty rare for Linux to suddenly change minimum hardware requirements in a way that requires you to buy a whole new machine in order to run the latest release. The only case that immediately comes to mind is that of distros increasingly removing support for i386 machines, but in fairness, Intel discontinued manufacturing of i386 chips 18 years ago.

Of course, this all assumes that the people in charge of making these decisions actually understand the technology in at least a general sense, and it’s not being left up to a bunch of idiots who have refused to keep up with any innovations more recent than the fax machine, so odds are kind of crap.

It really isn’t, in this case. The issue is not the currency being used for the transactions, but rather two companies having a duopoly on processing those transactions that allow them to dictate terms to other people on how they can legally use their money. If there were two similar points of failure in processing cryptocurrency transactions, they would be just as vulnerable to having whoever occupied those two spots throwing their weight around. Sure, I suppose in that situation, companies could take payments to a new wallet easier than they could open new business accounts, and bypass the restrictions temporarily, but it still wouldn’t be a viable solution in the long term.

Kindly refrain from putting such stupid words in my mouth, and keep them in your own, where it seems they rightly belong, thank you.

You asked about Israel and Hamas, then instantly conflated this particular conflict with a broader conflict to come between Israel and Iran, which are not the same thing. That’s beyond moving the goal posts, we’re no longer even discussing the same events. You’re also conflating Israel with Jews as a whole here. Calling for the state of Israel to no longer exist and calling for all Jewish residents within its borders to be either killed or displaced are two rather distinct things.

I know of no definition in which a single attack in isolation, or merely killing civilians during a war, is considered to constitute genocide. Even if this were the case, the civilian casualties in the many conflicts between Israel, Hamas, and more or less all of Israel’s neighbors in the region have been decidedly lopsided. Israel suffers far fewer civilian deaths than those they inflict on others, so even if we were to entertain the notion that Hamas’ resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories constitutes a genocide and we accept that the Iranian regime is in some major capacity responsible for such actions because they provide funding and support to Hamas (which, lol, even Israeli media admits Israel did, too), just going by the casualties, we’d have to conclude that Israel is either a decidedly more genocidal regime, better at genocide, or both.

Israel continues to interfere in the affairs of other sovereign nations, support settlers stealing other peoples’ land and is actively engaging in a brutal genocide. If the Israeli state were to be dismantled and Israel ceased to exist as a nation, I could only say that it’s past time for it to happen. And before you put more hysterical words in my mouth, note well: Israel no longer existing as a sovereign theocratic ethnostate and the Jews who currently live in the region being in any way harmed are two entirely separate things. Calling for a particular state to no longer exist is not a call for genocide, in and of itself.

Tl;dr: Get lost with your hasbara attempts, they’re woefully transparent.

What makes the Israel-Hamas war a genocide and for example, the Vietnam war not be considered a genocide?

Because Vietnam was a war of ideologies, not a land grab intended to wipe out the current occupants so they could be entirely replaced by a “superior, chosen” people not of the ethnicity of the current residents.

This is such a mindblowingly stupid attempt at a gotcha question. Ffs, you literally had over a million Vietnamese fighting on the same side as the US in the ARVN during the course of the war. The belligerent parties in a conflict both being composed of largely the same peoples fighting each other tends to preclude it being described as a genocide.

Lots of people in Brazil and many Spanish a speaking companies would disagree with you unfortunately. It’s incredibly embedded in those countries, to the point where WhatsApp will often be the primary, and sometimes only, point of contact for a business. At least it’s not that bad here.

I had a similar situation at my previous two jobs, but I just told people I wasn’t installing WhatsApp, if they asked, and nothing ever came of it. If it’s that important, they could text me or use my work email.

Hey, if they want to put themselves through looking at me in the nude, they can inflict that pain on themselves. I’d be more worried about them tracking everything else someone does day to day, and who could get their hands on that data.