So you can find things by “that spicy chicken recipe” instead of having to remember what it was actually called, or slog through a gazillion chicken recipes in your history when you realise that “spicy” was nowhere in the name. Basically stemming/thesaurus search on steroids.

It’s quite likely to be opt-in as I imagine ingesting the sites you’re looking at is a significant computational load. The translators are also opt-in, there’s enough stuff inbuilt to detect languages but not to translate, you have to download those models first. And they’re quite good btw.

Another thing I could see them offering is stuff like tl;dr bot. It’s probably not for everyone, but I definitely can see that it can be a useful feature for many people.

There’s already AI in firefox: The integrated translator. From what I’ve heard they’re looking into ingesting browsing history locally so that you can find stuff again easier.

They’ll probably still have an instance in the sense that mozilla folks with have @mozilla.social addresses. That’s the kind of thing their hosting staff can easily administer on the side, and moderation is already covered by HR.

https://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/

Coming to study is possible but you’ll have to have cash to support yourself, vocational training is also possible and you’d generally earn money while training so that’s probably more approachable, if you already have an academic degree that’s a definitive plus, for IT people three years of work experience counts as a degree for these purposes. For all that there’s also the option to get a visa for the purpose of finding a job but you should definitely shop around beforehand otherwise that’s just an expensive tourist visa. If you, say, already worked as electrician or lorry driver you might lack qualifications to work here but that kind of experience will still count for companies hiring you.

Didn’t he step down as boss after the latest kerfuffle because he just doesn’t make for a good boss.

If “not that young” means born before 1993 Spätaussiedler status might be an option. Only knowing basics of the language isn’t an issue AFAIK especially if you’ve learned it as a native language, but tracing ancestry will be critical. I know very little about the process short of that it’s quite bureaucratic, here’s the government page on it.

Otherwise it’s going to be regular migration which generally means high-skilled or high-demand jobs, or otherwise having money so that you can finance living here without having a working permit. Or refugee/asylum status and reasons for that not expiring before you are entitled to naturalise.

Most Russian-speakers in Germany (which aren’t recent Ukrainian refugees) are in category 3 and there’s definitely few Putin-fans among them. In a sense it’s funny: Most came here directly after the fall of the USSR, passports are trivial to get for diaspora Germans from (ex-)communist countries, not all still spoke German – and if they did probably some random-ass dialect that noone else understands. Long story short their collective identity was always more a mix of German and USSR than that of any particular republic because they came from all over the place, of course there were Putin-fans among the ones from current-day Russia but the rest set many many straight pretty much day one.

Also flying Z flags gets you straight-up arrested in Germany: Approval of crimes, to wit, a war of aggression.

And you might get shouted at by a random Hungarian biker.

Link to segment. And, no, not only didn’t Liechtenstein not cross the threshold they’re not even in the EU they can’t vote.

Even more up to date numbers straight from the commission.

You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.

And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.

Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”

“Type A” and “Type B”, I assure you, are not things corporate or marketing came up with. This is programmer speak for “I don’t want to name it but can’t call it foo and bar either because normies will be seeing it”.

As said: This is a re-release. The game and its assets was originally never designed to support anything but a strict binary, but the pronoun vs. body type thing was trivial to do, so they did it. And then for some reason avoided “male” and “female” because face it that sounds like a good idea especially if you’re not overthinking it and the labels were left in because probably also easier to do. Or just didn’t consider the alternative.

That is: You’re assuming intent when there’s simply economy of action. You might call it laziness, but then the people who did that release had 10000 other things to do besides that.

Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work

Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.

That’s morph targets and you just increased the budget for the character model and every single set of clothing and armour by a whole magnitude. Might even influence animations, though I guess with Elden Ring being the game that it is those are the same for everyone.

Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.

The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.

In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.

I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.

As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.

As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.

Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?

Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.

Russia wasn’t sending any gas through NS1 at that point. Or at least thereabouts, remember those shenanigans around compressor turbines which were in repair and whatnot.

If you seriously, seriously think that Germany would risk an economic crash over pivoting away from Russia then I can’t help you either. There might’ve been some unease over “will Germany actually side with Russia over fears about the economy” but that a) makes no economic sense and b) nope we don’t just fuck over allies.

As to Handel durch Wandel: The whole thing cut both ways. The idea was to make war prohibitively costly by enmeshing economies – and, indeed, Russia’s economy is in the gutter. Ideally it would have made them not attack at all but a ruined Russian economy is a proper consolidation price. They e.g. can’t produce ball bearings necessary for their trains, just as a random example of many: They became reliant on German products, a thing that non-enmeshment could never have achieved. The Soviet Union was self-sufficient in those areas, and Russia would still be had Germany not gone in and wiped key strategic Russian companies off the market.

And the other direction? The gas? Figures that that wasn’t a dependency, at all. Maybe, maybe, after shit went down and we were able to see the actual impacts it would be prudent to re-evaluate past narratives, but, well, I can’t force you.

But when Germany reacted by selling a minority share of one single terminal

Not even the terminal, but of terminal operations: The Chinese said “if we’re going to be frequent customers we want to have a say in scheduling etc” and that’s perfectly fair. It’s also a common.

Any actual physical infrastructure is completely off limits to foreign investment, and “foreign”, here, from the point of view of Hamburg, means “anyone who is not the city itself”.

Also did you know that Hapag-Lloyd switched alliances and is going to chum up with Maersk, now. The Hanse and the Danes working together, who would’ve thought. At this rate next thing that’s going to happen is buying up the Netherlands, much of Bremen’s harbour is already vassalised.

The pipeline was a major source of income for the Russians and without 3 small nudges nothing tangible was going to change in the short run, while Ukranians where dying.

Nordstream 2 never went into operation. It was tested and held pressure, but Germany never certified an operator, stopped the procedure to do so two days before the 2022 invasion, and never picked it up again. The pipeline is wholly owned by the Russians.

When the pipeline blew up plenty of gas terminals were already under construction. Russia was playing games with what came through Nordstream 1. They were caught red-handed trying to drain gas reserves before the invasion. There was absolutely no fucking way Germany would in any sense have continued to rely on Russian gas with or without the pipeline blowing up.

I thought the investigation was closed inconclusive more than half a year ago?

Last I’ve heard is that Germany put out an arrest warrant for an Ukrainian (not saying it was Ukraine) and Poland failed to arrest him for months, then said “whoops he just crossed the border”. They also very much failed to hand over relevant evidence, or at least clues, e.g. surveillance tapes in an harbour.

But that doesn’t even mean that it was Poland – they have motive, but it’s also not really in character, they wouldn’t want to piss of Germany much less when Germany is in the process of getting rid of Russian gas. I still haven’t ruled out Germany, an investigation going on and on doesn’t point in the opposite direction of course they’d let the state attorney investigate to their heart’s content while simultaneously working with the intelligence services of other countries to turn every lead inconclusive and elusive.

Ukraine, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have the capability. US? I don’t think so, either, their submarines are way too loud (because nuclear), people would’ve noticed. They’re just not made for covert operations in the Baltic Sea. Manoeuvring two depth charges into place from a yacht seems to be grasping for straws.

Russians are also suspects. Yes it’s their pipeline, yes it’d have been easier for them to explode the pipes from within, but they might have orchestrated a false flag out of spite.

Chances are we won’t know until the war is over, or even a decade or two later. One thing is for sure: It was done by people who knew what they were doing.

Russian propaganda doctrine is about attacking the very concept of truth itself – they want people to think “I can’t know what’s true”, so that they disengage politically and leave the ruling to the ruling class.

F35s would overwhelm Ukrainian logistics capacity also Ukrainians don’t have many good things to say about the Abrams in practice, from what I gather mostly weight as well as lack of reactive armour package and general sturdiness of the turret. Leo2s have similar issues: A T74 weighs just over 40 tons, that’s the kind of weight Ukrainian infrastructure is made for (think random bridges in the countryside and lots of mud), Leo 2A5 55t, 2A6 62t, 2A7V 66.5t, M1A2 SEPv3 66.8t.

Send F16s and Bradleys instead. Send those Abrams to Greece they have about 500 Leopard 1s Ukraine can use and already has infrastructure for. Same weight class as the T74.

EDIT: Oh, before I forget: Send any Leo1 chassis you can find anywhere. Rheinmetall is working on Frankensteining new Skyranger turrets onto old Leo1 chassis which then will essentially be Gepard 2s – same chassis, even more capable turret. Those kinds of systems are about the only thing that can reliably take down drones in a cost-effective manner. Also send over three Patriot batteries or five or ten.

The “no parading prisoners” clause doesn’t really apply to these situations. Or, well, at least it’s debatable.

The provision was added to disallow what had been common in WWI and WWII, and that is parading prisoners through streets while crowds cheered on. Photography existed back then and the convention very much does not say “you can’t have pictures in newspapers”. Should there be some privacy considerations? I’d say yes, but we also shouldn’t overdo it. After all filming soldiers while they’re fighting is legal, why would everything suddenly change completely once they’re captured?