The Kremlin is planning to mobilize 1,2 million soldiers immediately after the September sham elections.
The border with Finland and the Baltic states is already closed to prevent young men from fleeing the country.
This is a desperate move by a fading dictator.
When Apogee created the episodic method of releasing games in 1987 (with our Kroz games) the whole idea was to take advantage of the already existing worldwide digital networks of sharing games, including pirated games.
As for pirating of the full versions of our games, we treated it as an unstoppable problem and for the most part ignored it. Every studio faced the same issue and back then piracy wasn't something we could defeat without putting our real customers through hell with flaky copy-protection schemes.
What bothered me/Apogee the most was Blockbuster and Gamestop. Blockbuster started renting games, like Max Payne, which could be completed in 6-8 hours. And Gamestop implemented a buy-back program to buy back and resell games. Both rentals and buy-backs were legally legit, but they really hurt sales of games that were shorter, or lacked a multiplayer component.
Back then the solution most game makers looked at was how to add multiplayer to their games, so that players were more likely to buy the game and keep it for months.
Now we live in a world of Steam, GoG & Epic, so rentals and buy-backs are a non-issue now. But in the late 90's and 2000's these were headline issues for the gaming industry as they were hurting sales tremendously across the board (along with pirating).
In a now deleted post, pro-Kremlin slop farm claimed that the Finnish President Sipilä allowed the import and storage of nuclear weapons in Finland.
Former Prime Minister Sipilä left politics in 2019, and has never been the president.
And Elon pays these people.
@UrbanCourtyard Floyd, VA (400 people) was one of my personal highligts of a small town that had in 2016 a superb town center full of people around monthly and weekly events, with great selection of stores and life as a result for a town of that size
@UrbanCourtyard Perspectives matter, would've said anything under 30 k myself 🤣
Although in US, your administrative definitions and zoning make urban life in cities like Asheville (100k, metro 400 k) feel much closer to metro pop cities in Europe of some 100 k
But there's much potential in 🇺🇸
Germany, 1948. The Reichsmark is worthless. Cigarettes function as currency. Factory output sits at half its 1936 level, and the Allied occupation runs a price-control regime so absurd that farmers feed grain to livestock rather than sell it at the dictated price. Then Ludwig Erhard walks into a radio studio on June 20 and tells the German people the controls are gone. He did not ask the occupation authorities first. He told General Lucius Clay afterward that he hadn't altered the regulations, he had abolished them.
What followed embarrassed every Keynesian planner watching from Washington and London.
The Deutsche Mark replaced the Reichsmark at brutal terms: roughly 100 old marks for 6.5 new ones. Hard money, scarce by design. The black markets emptied overnight because goods reappeared in shop windows the moment prices could speak. Industrial production jumped over 50 percent in the second half of 1948 alone. And here is the part the textbooks bury: through the 1950s, as the economy grew at better than 8 percent a year, the cost of living stayed remarkably flat. Germans got richer while prices held or fell. Productivity outran the money supply, which is exactly what's supposed to happen when a central bank keeps its greedy paws to itself.
Falling prices alongside roaring growth, rising real wages, and a currency people actually wanted to hold rewarded Erhard's Germany. Deflation is not the disease. It is the natural reward for producing more than you did last year.
The Bundesbank inherited this discipline and guarded the Mark with a stinginess that drove politicians to fury for forty years. That stinginess built the strongest economy in Europe. Then the same political class buried the Mark under the euro in 2002 and handed monetary policy to people who consider 2 percent annual theft a "target."
Erhard proved sound money and free prices rebuild a bombed nation in a decade. Every finance minister since has worked very hard to forget it.
⚡️ @Netflix has acquired rights to the Russian series Masha and the Bear, which incorporates pro-Kremlin, militaristic propaganda aimed at children.
🧵 1/15 ⬇️
Rahassa mitattuna Suomeen kohdistuva sota maksaa meille noin 100 miljardia vuodessa. Ihmishengissä menetykset mittaamattomia.
Pelotteella pyritää tätä estämään.
Satsaukset puolustukseen tuntuvat sangen järkeviltä.
This is exactly what we predicted earlier - Laura Loomer's engagement has dropped by 28% after she started challenging pro-Kremlin propaganda.
Social media is not real, and most Russia-supporting influencers are being amplified by Russian, Iranian and Chinese networks.
i'm obsessed with AI DIY projects
my favorite one right now is this guy who built an AI system that listens for birds outside his apartment, figures out what species they are, and paints them on his wall.
here's how the whole thing works:
1. a cheap usb mic on his balcony listens for birdsong 24/7
2. BirdNET, Cornell's AI model trained on 6,000+ species, names each bird species from the sound alone (no camera needed)
3. every time it hears one, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image paints that exact bird in the style of an Edo-period japanese woodblock print
4. the new painting drops into a live collage of everything that's been singing outside in the last 24 hours
5. and it all shows up on a framed e-ink display on his wall that reads "heard today" like a little museum placard for his neighborhood
knowing which birds visit you used to take a field guide, a trained ear, plus years of patient practice.
teddy just glances at the frame on his wall and sees the cardinal came back this morning
honestly i'm highly tempted to build one myself haha
Lainattu MP-netistä. Tämän mukaan YLE:n rajat auki ja ymmärrä Venäjää-jutut kirjoittaa 90-luvulla Suomeen tullut venäläistaustainen toimittaja. Tämä selittäisi aika paljon.
🇺🇦❗️Fedorov: Ukraine launches TrophyLab platform — open access to Russian weapons technologies for partners from around the world.
The platform provides access to the results of research on captured equipment for:
🔹Ukrainian defense technology manufacturers;
🔹military units;
🔹scientific institutions;
🔹international partners who help Ukraine.
The platform allows you to submit a request for physical examination of captured samples.