tal

I tend to think of "sports" as being things that require not just mental apititude, but strength, endurance, and the like, but competitive shooting is an Olympic sport and has been for as long as the modern games have been around, so...shrugs

I mean, is curling a sport? Bowling? I think that most would call those sports, but they don't really rely on exceptional strength or endurance.

I do think that there's an argument for having some kind of word that encompasses all sorts of competitive activities, but also an argument for having a term for the smaller set that requires excellent physical conditioning. You might want to refer to either set. Maybe just have two different terms, regardless of where "sports" winds up.

She said the authorisation was something that was not taken lightly, but "when required, it should be practical in its application".

If authorisation was granted under the new regime, it would be informed by operational and legal advice from NZDF, Collins said.

This would have been helpful about 80 years ago.

https://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_guadalcanal.html

Operation Watchtower: The Battle for Guadalcanal (August 1942-February 1943)

For Vandegrift, the news was far from welcome as he had not expected to go into action until sometime early in the new year and his division was spread out between Wellington and the United States, with part of it on garrison duty in Samoa. In just under a month he would have to make operational and logistical plans, unload his ships and reload them for combat, sail to the Fiji Islands to conduct a rehearsal and then sail to the Solomon Islands. Reconfiguring the division's supplies would have to be done in New Zealand's Aotoa Quay, a confined area that could only take five ships at a time. To make matters worse, the dock workers went on strike so that the Marines had to do the work themselves and the rains came which were driven by a cold persistent wind.

Was really not a good time for New Zealand to have its logistics shut down. That also wound up causing some of the Marines' supplies to be ruined, which didn't help the later supply-constrained situation on Guadalcanal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation

Because atmospheric patterns also play a large role in heat transfer, the idea the climate in northern Europe would be as cold as that in northern North America without heat transport via ocean currents (i.e. up to 15–20 °C (27–36 °F) colder) is generally considered incorrect.[35][36] While one modeling study suggested collapse of the AMOC could result in Ice Age-like cooling, including sea-ice expansion and mass glacier formation, within a century,[37][38] the accuracy of those results is questionable.[39] There is a consensus the AMOC keeps northern and western Europe warmer than it would be otherwise,[16] with the difference of 4 °C (7.2 °F) and 10 °C (18 °F) depending on the area.[14] For instance, studies of the Florida Current suggest the Gulf Stream was around 10% weaker from around 1200 to 1850 due to increased surface salinity, and this likely contributed to the conditions known as Little Ice Age.[40]

Well, if the UK cools by 4 °C, I guess that'll mitigate one global warming issue:

https://www.eenews.net/articles/boiling-britain-how-ac-could-become-a-uk-political-priority/

Boiling Britain: How AC could become a UK political priority

LONDON — The spate of heat waves that left Europe sweaty and irate has by now largely passed. But a debate in Britain that could become a political wedge issue over air conditioning is only just getting started.

Advocates for wider AC installation argue that increasing its adoption could raise living standards and productivity for a Labour government keen to make gains with frustrated voters and, perhaps counterintuitively, even advance the transition to net zero — while a failure to do so may mean it becomes politically damaging in the future.

Parties taking up the cause may too find their own dividends, as polling indicates growing public support for AC, which may increase as Britain gets hotter.

Might be location-based, what they show as available. I can see it (behind the "provide your location" overlay) in a browser that has no cookies or other state that they'll have when I first connect and haven't given them any information.

The photograph is of a cup of soup served with some saltines (a common combination in the US; I dunno if the saltines thing is a convention outside the US as well):

They do serve crackers.

https://www.crackerbarrel.com/menu/individual-sides/premium-sides/chicken-noodle-soup-cup?productid=94752612

Search engine queries are just like a one time short query

Search engine companies are in the business of tying together users from session to another.

I mean, Google harvests data from search engine queries. I doubt that LLM queries honestly leak all that much more information.

The issue is broader, just that people have gotten really comfortable for paying for service by selling access to their data, and I don't think that that's necessarily a great idea. Like, I'm not sure that everyone's fully considered all the ways in which their data might potentially be correlated with other data at scale.

Framework Desktop based on an AI Max 395+ processor with 128GB unified memory running a model locally, then hit /r/LocalLLama or !localllama@sh.itjust.works and ask which LLM models work well with corpse disposal techniques and are trained on long-form literature.

EDIT: Fixed link. Thanks, BB84.

Those fuckers who could afford headphones.

Pretty much everyone should be able to get ahold of earbuds.

https://www.amazon.com/Headphones-Earphones-Earbuds-Control-Cancelling/dp/B0FCB8TS6V

You can get USB-C earbuds for something like $3. They won't have all the blingy active noise cancellation stuff, but nobody had ANC on their portable music players up until pretty recently. And they're probably gonna be clearer than trying to hear a cell phone speaker on mass transit.

I can't even get a large soda around here for $3.

I guess that they're okay, but I didn't use them because I was unhappy with Google's index, but rather because Google didn't offer a no-log, no-profile service. I didn't want to be in a constant fight with service providers who are trying to make their money via whatever alternate route they can (selling one's data, profiling, showing ads, taking payment from people to get higher result ranking, whatever). Just wanted to pay them up front and not deal with trying to figure out and try to mitigate the latest way in which I was the product.

If Google would offer YouTube service that provided a no-log, no-profile option, I'd probably consider that too. That is, I don't have a problem with Google-the-company so much as I do the fact that they've decided that providing a privacy-oriented service isn't presently worth it to them. Kagi does have a video search that indexes a number of video streaming services (including YouTube, PeerTube here on the Fediverse, and a number of others), but you're still still needing to stream the video from the provider.

The only premium Kagi feature that I make much use of is their Threadiverse search ("Fediverse Forum" search lens), as there isn't really a great way to replicate that browser-side, and other search engines haven't bothered to implement it last I looked. They keep adding stuff, but I mostly haven't bothered to try the new stuff out.

looks

It looks like at some point, they added a Usenet archives search, which I actually commented here at some point saying they should implement. So maybe I'll make use of that. Right now the main alternatives there are Google Groups, which I don't think Google has been doing much work on in many years and has a kinda-broken index that mingles Usenet results with other scraped forum results, and a small search engine that some indie person set up that doesn't have much by way of filtering functionality.

As to result quality, Kagi has some trial option where someone can try out a limited number of searches without paying anything, so you can try it if you want to see whether their results are what you want.

paying for a browser

I don't use their browser, just their website. They have a plugin for Firefox that I use that makes it slightly more convenient to use them as a search option.

What the sycophant Rutte failed to mention at this gangsters’ get-together is that the reason for this spending spree is the fact that NATO is massively out-gunned by Russia’s powerful military-industrial complex

I believe that Russia has more artillery shell manufacturing capacity. But in general, outside that, I think that it'd be pretty hard to make that case.

kagis

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/07/16/is-russia-producing-a-years-worth-of-nato-ammunition-in-three-months

In a keynote speech in London last month, the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte repeated a warning he has made in public at least three times this year: the western alliance is severely lagging behind Moscow on ammunition production.

“In terms of ammunition, Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year,” Rutte said on 10 June, adding that Putin’s war machine is “speeding up, not slowing down".

Rutte, who became chief of the military alliance in October last year, went on to repeat the same warning.

“Let me repeat it again. NATO’s economy is 25 times bigger than Russia’s. It's 50 trillion (dollars), and the Russian economy is two trillion. That two-trillion-dollar economy is producing four times as much ammunition as the whole of NATO is producing at the moment,” he said.

The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service estimates that Russia produced or refurbished 400,000 artillery rounds in 2022, multiplying its production more than eleven-fold to produce 4.5 million rounds in 2024.

An analysis by consulting firm Bain & Company for Sky News in May 2024 came to the same conclusion, putting the total number of shells produced or refurbished in 2024 at an estimated 4.5 million rounds.

In 2024, Europe and the US produced an estimated 1.2 million shells per year, according to the Berlin-based German Institute for International and Security Affairs, compared to Russia’s estimated 4.5 million. 

It looks like RT and similar have been repeating the quote while not making it clear that Rutte was talking specifically about artillery shells:

https://www.rt.com/russia/623430-west-shocked-russian-arms-production/

Earlier this year, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that “it’s simply unthinkable” that Russia “should be able to outproduce and outgun” the US-led military bloc. Under US pressure, European NATO states pledged in June to increase their defense spending to 5% of their GDP.

So if you figure that RT's content probably reflects the messages that the Kremlin wants put out, the Kremlin is presumably aiming for an image that Russia is more-broadly powering past NATO in arms production.

A sorbet or an Italian ice doesn't have butterfat at all, because neither contain dairy.

I think that it'd be hard to convincingly claim that an ice cream intrinsically is higher quality than a sorbet or Italian ice.