Communick News

Today’s game is Project Zomboid. We made a trip into Louisville today. It was a fucking adventure. I usually measure Zomboid sessions based on how many events could go into a Zombie TV Show. And this one was damn full of them.

After packing up the van we got everyone piled in and headed off down the road. The first stop was at a gas station where we stopped to grab some extra supplies. That’s where we had our first scare. One of our guys got grabbed and nearly got bitten. By a miracle he made it out alive. We finished fueling up and headed to our next stop.

That brought us to the military base. There was an entire horde in there and we fought our way through the entire thing. We had quite a few scares but somehow cleared the entire thing. If I had to guess we killed maybe 300 Zombies in there.

As we were looting it though the worst thing happened: The Helicopter Event. We tried to bunker down but it saw us and we had to hide out while it drew half of Louisville to our door step. We fought them off until the end of the event. We decided to stay there because it gave us a narrow choke point to hold down. Once we survived that though we finally made it to our destination.

We drove into town and found some Sheep. Just chilling in Louisville. We tried to take them home but they were too heavy and maimed some of our guys. So we just butchered them and took the meat home instead. We were starting to get tired but some of us wanted to press on. One of our players found some car keys and a working car, so they took some of the group home while the rest of us kept exploring.

Our trip ended at the Gentlemen’s club. It wasn’t originally our goal, but one of our guys unfortunately got bitten here and died. We took his stuff but with us being down a man we decided not to press our luck and turn around.

Thankfully the trip home was a lot less eventful, it was chill and we basically had no issues besides some mild traffic. I let one of our other players drive so I could mark up the road. I mark it up as we go so we can keep an eye on where the road blocks are and be aware. It’s handy.

When we finally got home we unloaded from our trip that lasted nearly 4 hours. It was a blast. I’m glad I got to take that trip because it’s some of the most fun I’ve had in Zomboid for a long while.

I figured this would be notable enough to show here.

DSP showed that no player input is needed to complete Wolverine's first motorcycle section. Considering he's the sort of guy this level of difficulty is made for, even he's baffled that he didn't need to do anything to clear the section.

The people who say the game is far too easy may have a point.

untitled

2019 / Somewhere outside Thessaloniki, Greece

© Nikoleta Glykou

Also published in "yes we are magazine" on Tumblr years ago. Here is the link to it: https://www.tumblr.com/yeswearemagazine/183938046991/untitled-2019-nikoleta-glykou?source=share&utm%5C_source=Pinterest&utm%5C_medium=organic

#nikoletaglykouphotography #nature #tree #photography #sky #clouds #landscape

@outdoor@fedigroups.social @nature@fedigroups.social @photography@fedigroups.social @hiking@fedigroups.social @photography@lemmy.world @Nature@lemmy.world @hiking@lemmy.world @joinin@fedigroups.social @tea@fedigroups.social

I am digitizing my dad's video and audio tapes, for which I - after painstakingly scouring the documentation of ffmpeg, as one should - finally have found the encoding options that I'm happy with. :D

But instead of retyping the PhD dissertation that are the ffmpeg commands that I use a bazillion times, I have simply started to do command substitution with for instance

$(cat command_ffmpeg_COPYCODEC)  

or

$(cat command_ffmpeg_H264)  

and the likes. This, however, still requires me to vim the correct filenames into these concatenated commands every time I work on a new project, so I thought, "Why not just set a variable, like I use to do with visudo as in

EDITOR=/bin/vim visudo  

So, wanting to do a little ffmpeg magic to delay the audio stream of a file, I tried

FILENAME='birthday_0' $(cat command_ffmpeg_SYNCAUD)  

but bash said, "no, who do you think you are?" After doing a wc on FILENAME, I noticed that there is an invisible trailing something after the filename - possibly some whitespace char - since it thinks that I mean to use an option "-synced.mkv".

How would you go about writing the now bash script (it simply wouldn't expand the variable through command substitution...) so that the trailing whatever is deleted, if that is indeed the case? I have tried slapping " ", ' ', ( ), { } in all conceivable configurations, but I'm simply to inexperienced. xD

Please advise! 🛠️

Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said Thursday that Estonia is preparing for various scenarios if Russia declares a general mobilization, after a file titled "Cabinet memo: Russian Federation mobilization" appeared in the government's document register.

Tsahkna said the security cabinet regularly discusses potential Russian actions and how Estonia should respond, adding that a general mobilization would significantly increase domestic tensions in Russia.

Prime Minister Kristen Michal stressed at the press conference that it is important to have regular updates on the security situation.

"There is nothing mysterious or extraordinary about this. It is no news to anyone that things are going very badly in Russia. There isn't a single healthy part of their economy and 30,000 to 40,000 men are killed or wounded every month. At some point, they will have to take steps to keep the war going and NATO and European Union countries need to be prepared for those steps and communicate accordingly. That is what we discussed. Dealing with the details and specific measures is the job of the relevant agencies and these will also be presented to the public at the appropriate time," Michal said.

...

Archived

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32023094

Yoinked from "Starfleet Officer's Manual" which is part of "Star Trek: The Role Playing Game"

I thought of sharing some issues that preoccupy me here, because of how active piefed development is. Btw thank you all for your hard work!

I have noticed that more and more articles are created with LLMs without disclosing it. So, it seems to me that if someone wants to avoid posting this sort of content, one needs to at least:

• check how many articles the author posts per day in the specific site,
• then if the author really exist and
• finally copy-paste part of the text in a couple of ai-detector sites.

Initially, I thought of making a post for a feature request like the one that detects AI generated images, but for text. But I can't because if I got this right, the ai-detectors may flag an article as ai generated when the author is not a native english speaker [1].

Of course the feature that allows us to label ai-generated content ourselves before posting it is very important. In a way my questions are related to something else: what to do before that. As briefly as I can, here they are:

• does the process mentioned above seem adequate?
• if yes, what else can someone do to check an article before posting, and are there any alternatives/variations to this process?
• if no, what would you suggest?

I was recently messing with CRTs and plasma TVs, both of which don't exactly have square pixels, are there any normalish wayland compositors that allow a different horizontal and vertical scaling factor?

One small step from that to this:

I call this work, "Adventure spotting" inspired by Trainspotting but with less heroin 😂

@outdoor@fedigroups.social @nature@fedigroups.social @photography@fedigroups.social @hiking@fedigroups.social @photography@lemmy.world @Nature@lemmy.world @hiking@lemmy.world @joinin@fedigroups.social @tea@fedigroups.social

#SaturdaySights #Sights #OC
#NaturePhotography #Nature #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Photo #September #Finland #Archipelago #AlandIslands #Åland
#Hiking #InMy #Autumn #Wonderland

P.S if your country doesn’t have the freedom to roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom/_to/_roam there’s something inherently wrong.

...

The problem is that each attack is treated as a separate incident against a separate country. The evidence is investigated nationally, the condemnation is issued nationally and any response is left to the country attacked. The campaign against Europe is broken into isolated cases, making a collective response politically much harder.

And it is a collective response that is the best way to respond to these attacks and force Russia into some kind of restraint. Europe should treat every confidently attributed Russian operation as part of an attack on European security, then select a collective and proportionate response from an agreed ladder of measures.

...

The term “hybrid” once described a useful fact. Russia mixes sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation, political interference and deniable kinetic attacks. Sure, the mix is hybrid but the political effect of the label has changed.

It makes acts of violence sound ambiguous, manageable and somehow less real. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys put it plainly: “Russia’s attacks against us are no longer hybrid. They are very kinetic.”

Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, spoke in a similar vein, saying on Thursday that “Russia’s hybrid war against Europe has already taken on a ‘kinetic’ dimension” and that these are “on the border between hybrid warfare and outright aggression."

...

Donald Tusk has warned that Russia could strike NATO territory and then present the incident as “accidental”. The official story, he said, would be that there was no reason to consider a NATO response.

That's the point. Russia wants Article 5 to appear, in Tusk’s words, “more theoretical than practical”. The immediate target may be a train, factory, airport or undersea cable but the strategic target is the credibility of collective defense. The Kremlin also wants to break European unity and wear down support for Ukraine.

NATO already accepts that a hybrid operation could, in some circumstances, trigger Article 5. The obstacle is political. Allies examine each incident separately, so almost every operation appears too small to justify a collective response.

...

Europe must reverse that calculation. An attack intended to divide European countries should bring them closer together. An operation designed to weaken Ukraine support should automatically produce more weapons, funding or air defense for Ukraine. Every Russian attempt to frighten one country should trigger a visible response from all.

...

Archived

[Original in Russian. This is an automated translation with minimal edits.]

Less than a third of Russians (30.8%) believe that the elections to the State Duma [Russia's parliament] of the IX convocation, which started on September 18, will be “honest,” an ExtremeScan poll showed.

According to a study conducted two weeks before the vote in all federal districts of the Russian Federation, more than half of Russian citizens believe that certain manipulations with the election results are likely. 32.7% said that the results “will be significantly changed”, 23.5% allowed “addition of votes” to some candidates, which, however, “will not significantly affect the outcome”.

The Duma of the VIII convocation, which worked since 2021 and was marked by a record number of repressive laws, in the opinion of most, “caused more harm”: this answer was given by 40.2% of respondents, and it became the most popular of all. 19.9% of respondents considered the work of deputies “useful”. At the same time, 7% said they “don’t know” what laws the Duma adopted, and 20% “difficult to answer”.

A three-day vote with a new electronic counting system from the CEC, which takes place in five regions, including in local territories - foams, benches and hoods of cars, will not bring a significant change in the balance in the Duma, where the majority has been held by United Russia for 23 years. The only opposition party, Yabloko, was removed from the federal-list election after the Kremlin noted that it was becoming an “assembly point” for anti-war forces in society.

United Russia may be allowed to sit down a bit to bring its declared results closer to the likely real results, but will make sure it “keeps absolute dominance in the Duma,” said Mark Galeotti, head of Mayak Intelligence consultancy. Elections are a kind of “legitimizing ritual” for the Kremlin, designed to create the impression of mass support, says Galeotti.

“In the current conditions, the elections have lost all meaning,” writes political analyst Abbas Gallyamov. The regime has completely emasculated them, depriving them of competition and therefore content.

And although “your vote will be stolen,” information about the real results of the vote in approximate form will be available to members of the electoral commissions from the parliamentary parties, some of which are real party representatives and will necessarily report to the party authorities “on a secret about the real preferences of the electorate,” Gallyamov said.

“The party leadership will not dare to publicly rebel, but it will be necessary to quietly indignate,” the expert is sure.

Archived