Sorry, kids.

I mean, yeah, but in practice, the UN is structured the way it is, with the UNSC veto, to avoid creating World War III. That is, it’s aimed at avoiding great power conflict.

Taiwan was functionally removed and replaced by China, but that was really a recognition that Taiwan didn’t really de facto control China, which was who the seat belonged to.

Could Russia one day roll up to the UNSC and discover someone else sitting in their seat? Yeah, theoretically, but in practice, I don’t think that there’s a realistic chance that Russia would be removed from the UNSC seat as long as it’s running around with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, absent some kind of hard counter showing up that renders that arsenal useless.

The Budapest Memorandum committed the signatories not to themselves use force against Ukraine, but it was not a multi-way defensive alliance with all parties which obligated parties to fight against another party who attacked.

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

According to the three memoranda,[9] Russia, the U.S., and the U.K. confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively removing all Soviet nuclear weapons from their soil, and that they agreed to the following:

• Respect the signatory’s independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[10]

• Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

• Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus, and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.

• Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they “should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used”.

• Not to use nuclear weapons against any non–nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.[5]: 169–171 [11][12]

• Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[13][14]

France and China were not signatories but apparently had similar agreements, which I have not read.

The UK and the US (and I assume China and France, if their agreements had approximately the same content) have fulfilled the Budapest Memorandum commitments — Russia broke her commitment.

EDIT: Well, okay, I’m not sure what China’s position has been on Ukraine at the Security Council, though de facto the issue is kind of academic for the moment. Russia holds a permanent UNSC seat, and thus has veto power on the UNSC, and regardless of what countries do there, if it’s on defending Ukraine against Russia, I’d bet that Russia will veto it. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN and so wasn’t present to veto US initiatives on behalf of South Korea, so the US was able to get through stuff to initiate UN authorization to use force on behalf of South Korea after North Korea invaded. But I think that it’s probably safe to say that Russia isn’t going to let that happen a second time. Also, that dealt with the use of nuclear weapons by an attacker, and that has not happened (and if you recall from earlier in the war, there was a discussion between the US and Russia on what would happen if Russia used nuclear weapons against Ukraine. I don’t believe that the material was ever generally-released, but I did see a Polish official announcing that the response would be “conventional” (i.e. non-nuclear), and some discussion that centered around the US possibly authorizing airstrikes on Russian positions in Ukraine).

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

During the Soviet boycott, the Security Council adopted a resolution which allowed for the deployment of UN troops to the Korean war in defense of South Korea against the attacking communist North Korean forces (Resolution 83)

That being said, the US has taken a position that providing arms to a country in a conflict doesn’t violate neutrality obligations (which dates back at least to early WW2, where the US was providing arms to the Allies while simultaneously claiming neutrality). Historically, providing preferential access to arms this had not generally been in line with the obligations of neutrality.

The US has also taken the position that providing intelligence to such a party, as it is with Ukraine on Russia, doesn’t violate neutrality obligations. Going back to WW2 again, this was how some of the first shooting between Germany and the US started in World War II:

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

At 0840 that morning, Greer, carrying mail and passengers to Iceland, “was informed by a British plane of the presence of a submerged submarine about 10 miles [(16 km)] directly ahead. … Acting on the information from the British plane the Greer proceeded to search for the submarine and at 0920 she located the submarine directly ahead by her underwater sound equipment. The Greer proceeded then to trail the submarine and broadcast the submarine’s position. This action, taken by the Greer, was in accordance with her orders, that is, to give out information but not to attack.” The British plane continued in the vicinity of the submarine until 1032, but prior to her departure the plane dropped four depth charges in the vicinity of the submarine. The Greer maintained [its] contact until about 1248. During this period (three hours 28 minutes), the Greer manoeuvred so as to keep the submarine ahead. At 1240 the submarine changed course and closed the Greer. At 1245 an impulse bubble (indicating the discharge of a torpedo by the submarine) was sighted close aboard the Greer. At 1249 a torpedo track was sighted crossing the wake of the ship from starboard to port, distant about 100 yards [(100 m)] astern. At this time the Greer lost sound contact with the submarine. At 1300 the Greer started searching for the submarine and at 1512 … the Greer made underwater contact with a submarine. The Greer attacked immediately with depth charges.[6]

That is, the US position was that it could provide arms to the UK and could tell the British where German U-boats were without violating neutrality obligations, as long as it wasn’t actually fighting Germany (with the Greer firing back on a self-defense justification after having a torpedo fired at it). Germany wasn’t that enthusiastic about that interpretation at the time.

Under the UN Charter, countries are not supposed to engage in war unless (a) they’re defending themselves, (b) they’re defending a country with which they have a collective security agreement (a military alliance, think NATO or something like that), or (c) the UNSC has given authorization. That being said, there has been somewhat creative interpretation of (c), as with the US arguing that U.N. Resolution 1441 qualified and constituted such an authorization to intervene in Iraq in 2003, which is certainly not a universally-accepted take.

I imagine that there are ways to game any AI shopping agents that we imagine might be used in the future, same way there are to game human shoppers.

It’s archaic. I can’t really imagine a situation in which we’d use “thou” today for formality reasons. If you say “thou” , you’re pretending to be someone from hundreds of years ago or you’re quoting the King James Bible or something that is hundreds of years old.

I think a more-reasonable division between formality and informality would be whether or not one uses a title like “sir” today.

In this context, “generic mini-PC” doesn’t need to even be “non-gaming-PC”, just not a platform for buying Valve’s games; a razor-and-blades model requires that you be the one selling the blades. If someone just goes and runs games purchased from GOG, that’s already an issue for them.

It’s why inkjet printer manufacturers, who do use this model, try to make it so stupendously difficult to use ink from competitors (outside of the bottled-ink printers, which don’t use that model, where the manufacturers are fine with you doing that).

FDR is Franklin D. Roosevelt, a US President in the early 20th century.

CATO is an organization that pushes for small-government, market-oriented policy. They’d be, economically, on the right side of the US political spectrum, whereas typically, an American using the term “liberal” would be talking about a social liberal, somone who would be, economically, on the left side of the US political spectrum, would favor a larger government.

EDIT: Also, to add to the fun, the US uses “political colors” that are something like the opposite of what is the common convention in Europe.

In the US, historically, there was no association between color and political position. However, in the, I believe 2000 election, a convention became adopted, started off some arbitrary choice by a TV station, where the Democrats (the more-left of the Big Two parties) were the “blue” party, and the Republicans (the more-right of the Big Two parties) were the “red” party.

However, in Europe, the convention is for blue to be associated with center-right parties, and red to be associated with left parties.

EDIT2: Yes, 2000 election.

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

By 1996, color schemes were relatively mixed, as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and The New York Times referred to Democratic states with the color blue and Republican ones as red, while Time and The Washington Post used the opposite scheme.[15][16][17]

In the days after the 2000 election, the outcome of which was unknown for some time after election day, major media outlets began conforming to the same color scheme because the electoral map was continually in view, and conformity made for easy and instant viewer comprehension. On election night that year, there was no coordinated effort to code Democratic states blue and Republican states red; the association gradually emerged. Partly as a result of this eventual and near-universal color-coding, the terms “red states” and “blue states” entered popular use in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election. After the results were final with the Republican George W. Bush winning, journalists stuck with the color scheme, as The Atlantic’s December 2001 cover story by David Brooks entitled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”, illustrated.[18][original research?]

You’ll tend to notice that in recent years, Democratic presididential candidates will wear a blue tie, Republicans red. Might also be true below that level; I haven’t looked. And, of course, Trump’s MAGA hat branding is red.

Valve willing to sell at a loss

I don’t think that Valve will sell the Steam Machine at a loss.

Closed-system console vendors often do, then jack up the prices of their games and make their money back as people buy games. So why not Valve?

Two reasons.

1. They sell an open system. If Valve sells a mini-PC below cost, then a number of people will just buy the thing and use it as a generic mini-PC, which doesn’t make them anything. A Nintendo Switch, in contrast, isn’t very appealing for anything than running games purchased from Nintendo.

2. They don’t have a practical way to charge more for games for just Steam Machine users — their model is agnostic to what device you run a purchased game on. So even if they were going to do that, it’d force them to price games non-optimally for non-Steam-Machine users, charge more than would be ideal from Valve’s standpoint.

If you’re not from the US, unqualified “liberal” in the US started to refer to “social liberal” back around FDR.

This has been a source of irritation to some; CATO, which I’d call moderate right-libertarian, complains that they should get the title and self-describes as “classic liberal”. Meanwhile, in, say, Germany, an unqualified “liberal” tends to refer to the latter, so you get confusion when people accustomed to the two uses meet.

An unqualified “libertarian” in the US usually refers to right-libertarianism, whereas in some places, it would historically have referred to left-libertarianism; that can also be a source of confusion.

Some parties in Europe on the left side of the spectrum self-describe as “socialist” when they don’t really advocate for socialist policies any more, but rather for things like a larger welfare state. I’d call them “social democratic”; this branding is a legacy of older forms of those parties, when they did advocate for socialist policy.

The fact that small USB battery banks are typically rated in milliamp-hours and large ones are typically rated in watt-hours is just absurd.

i just had to battle a blister pack for like five minutes for ONE tiny pill

I keep a very tiny folding knife (a Spyderco Bug, though I’m sure that there are more-economical and equally functional keychain knives) on my keychain. I take it off if I’m going to fly somewhere. If one has something like that handy, one always has something with them to cut into a blister pack.

There’s some company that has done some CGI videos making fun of the Boston Dynamics use of a hockey stick for separation, do videos that have humans pretending to be Boston Dynamics people abusing a CGI robot.

kagis

Corridor Digital, as “Bosstown Dynamics”:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query="bosstown+dynamics"

e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE

If you mean a post, you can only chose one image to be the target of your post, but you can embed more in the text of your post.

If you mean a comment, I’m not sure the source of confusion. You can embed multiple images. The Lemmy Web UI should work, as well as all the clients I’ve used.

You just need to have the text:

![](url-to-image)

…in your comment text.

Most Lemmy home instances will be runnimg a pict-rs instance, and let you upload an image to it with a button near the comment text field and also add the above text to display that image in your comment in one go.

If you’re trying and it’s failing, there can be a maximum byte size placed on the pict-rs upload by your home instance, and it’s possible that maybe your first image is below it and your second is not. There are also some image formats that wouldn’t be recognized, if you’re using something exotic for your second image — that could also cause the upload to fail.

It’d be kind of nice to have something, animal or human, that could speak Minoan, as it’d maybe let us finally decode Linear A.

Flashlights produce orders of magnitude more light than any smartphone.

Flashlights can definitely put out a lot more light (and store more power) than a cell phone light, but for a lot of close-up stuff, the cell phone is fine.

I’m skeptical that flashlights will go away, as @[email protected] is proposing. But I do think that smartphones are a partial replacement.

In urban areas, I don’t need a bright flashlight much, because there’s fixed lighting all over, but in more rural areas, if you’re outside at night and walking around, you do tend to need a flashlight.

I also don’t know how much more change there will be. Like, people already have smartphones pretty much everywhere. I think that most of the replacement that will happen has probably already happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQz4VBablAM

Waymo’s starting to roll out self-driving robotaxis onto the freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area; news coverage from today.

My expectation is that there will be a lot more autonomous cars out there in the future.

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H5uWRjFsGc

tries running yt-dlp on the page URL to grab the URL of the actual video file involved

Try:

https://video.euronews.com/mp4/SHD/29/22/96/00/SHD_PYR_2922960_20251113112832.mp4

I mean, yeah, but that’s wartime policy. Like, most countries are willing to take more risks and accept more costs if they consider is necessary to fight a war.

But as far as I know, doing this demo successfully isn’t something that Russia needs for any kind of war purposes.

Frankly, if the thing is that untested, I’m not sure that I’d want to have the developers or the audience that close to it without shielding. And it should have a remote E-stop switch (though maybe it did here, and that’s why it froze up).

You know those Boston Dynamics videos? Unless the stuff is pretty mature, they’ve got those protective walls or are interacting with the robots with hockey sticks.

Ex:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYwekersccY

EDIT: Actually, looking at the Russian video again, I think that the AIdol people don’t have a remote E-stop button and were instead fumbling around with one built onto its back there, since that’s when it stopped moving.