For me the required characteristics would be that it dispenses a burning liquid at a distance in a controlled, directed manner.

• If it dispenses burning gas it’s not very useful as a weapon and is really just a big gas burner. Roofing torches, blowtorches, and weed burners fall into this category.
• If it doesn’t cover a meaningful distance it’s also not very useful as a weapon and is essentially just a leaky container. Driptorches fall into this category.
• If it dispenses the burning material in an uncontrolled or undirected manner it’s either an incendiary bomb/grenade of some sort or an accident. It might be a weapon but not one I’d call a flamethrower.

Right. Should’ve worn proper protective gear. Hard hat, headlamp, laboratory goggles, chemical-resistant waders, heat-resistant gloves, ESD strap, respirator, bomb suit, hi-viz vest. You know, the bare minimum to move a box.

True. Just this weekend I spent far too much time trying to get a printer to work again on Windows after its IP address got changed. In the end Windows refused to talk to the printer unless I removed and then readded the device from the Settings app, which prompted a reinstallation of the device driver. No, just changing the IP address in the device settings wasn’t enough; Windows insisted on the driver being reinstalled.

Linux didn’t need reconfiguration; it just autodetected that the printer had moved.

I’m not saying that Linux is without issues, not by far. But Windows has never been terribly “it just works” for me either. The closest to “it just works” was (aptly) OS X somewhere around Snow Leopard.

You forgot the degaussing sound for those screens that had that feature. Like turning them on but louder.

*KLONK*

Hurd?

And I wouldn’t know where to start using it. My problems are often of the “integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs” variety. LLMs can’t do shit about that; they weren’t trained for it.

They’re nice for basic rote work but that’s often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.

Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.

Most of our plants were already fairly old and major overhauls would’ve been necessary.

In 2000 we had plans for a nuclear exit already, intending to phase them out until 2015. In 2010 the government decided to keep some running. IIRC they did that in part so they could shut down coal plants instead.

Then Fukushima happened and we went full panic mode, deciding to shut all of them down ASAP. Then the Ukraine war got reignited and the timeline got slightly stretched out a little again for practical reasons.

The last three reactors got shut down last April, about eight years later than the 2000 plan intended.

It’s a bit more complicated. We were already planning to get out of nuclear because our plants were aging and new ones weren’t economical. Then the government decided to freeze those plans for the time being. (IIRC one reason was that they wanted to close some of our terrible coal power plants first.) Then Fukushima happened and the Greens got everyone to panic.

We could’ve gone with a measured response but a combination of the Greens believing that nuclear power is infinitely bad and plenty of old people still having vivid memories of fallout-related health warnings from Chernobyl was enough to drive most of the country into an antinuclear frenzy. It’s almost a miracle they didn’t force all of the plants to scram immediately.

Why not 2.022k?

“Well, excuuuuuse me, princess!”

gets shot twice, just to make sure

Probably more than a little behind Germany. I remember coming across an article about communication pitfalls in the business world that stem from Americans being indirect and using a lot of stock phrases for courtesy.

I remember well-known examples like “how are you” not expressing an interest in how the other person is doing. Or more obscure stuff like “we should meet for coffee soon” expressing not an intention to meet in the near future but a generally positive disposition towards the other person. Or them giving a positive response when someone suggests something they don’t want and relying on nonverbal cues to convey their disapproval.

Perhaps it’s proximity but as a German I find British indirectness (which often revolves around obvious understatement or sarcasm) to be easier to parse than American indirectness (which revolves around stock phrases). Americans can be a bit Darmok if you’re not familiar with a phrase. Thankfully online communication doesn’t feature them as much.

Perhaps there are two Democrats inside of you.

Wait, do those two internal Democrats have internal Democrats themselves? Does that make every Democrat a fractal?

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

I’m not sure about the SSD. Has QLC substantially improved since hitting the market? If not I’d recommend going with something TLC-based.

Manga is typically read right to left.

And even if the warheads aren’t functional anymore, nobody wants to get a dirty bomb dropped on their heads. The best nuclear weapon is one that’s not launched.

Still doesn’t mean Russia gets to do what it wants.

That’s why they’re on the plane; they’re working overseas.

Of course this is mostly a 3D Fallout issue. Fallout and Fallout 2 had more intricate dialogues, Fallout Tactics isn’t an RPG, and Brotherhood of Steel is obviously perfect and doesn’t have any issues.