You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.

I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.

[1] https://airwars.org/tens-of-thousands-of-civilians-likely-ki...

Jan. 2023: $1920

Jan. 2024: $1811

Jan. 2025: $1639

Jan. 2026: $2193

[1] https://bestvaluegpu.com/history/new-and-used-rtx-4090-price...

I imagine you don't intend it like that, but last month killed an extra five thousand people in Germany alone [1], more than one thousand of them in a single day [2].

"People may have died and the economy may be in trouble but my summer was amazing" is not the best take.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...

[2] https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/gvL9c/4/

I believe there are two ways to deal with a system that's not working as intended.

One alternative is to have shock buffers for unexpected circumstances. Berlin, known for its chaotic nature, used to have a second queue at the Foreigner's Office for people who needed an appointment today. You had to queue sometimes even from 3am on, which sucks, but it sucked less than having to cancel your holidays because you couldn't get an appointment. In my case all I needed was a signed piece of paper saying "this person is allowed to stay in Germany until we finally process their papers", but the office had no mechanism (or no will?) to do so.

The other alternative is to pretend that the system works fine, which is what the German administration is currently doing. Sure, I could hire an attorney to sue the government - it will cost me an upright investment of 1k€, it will take months, and all I'll get afterwards is most of my administrative costs (forget about my canceled flight) and an appointment.

Edit: on the topic of the GmbH, it is a complex topic because the German government made it complex. Estonia, Texas, and my own home country have much simpler rules for starting your own small company. Every government keeps promising "we'll simplify bureaucracy and we'll digitize" and yet all we get is new rules and more letters.

Best city: Leverkusen. Easy to get appointments, incredibly friendly personnel. Honorable mention for Potsdam.

Worst city: Saarbrücken. I was undocumented a couple months because they couldn't get hold of my documents and refused to give me anything saying it wasn't my fault. They called security to bring me outside, too. When I pointed out that without documents I could be deported they laughed and said "that almost never happens".

Worst delay: Köln. They sat on my documents for two years - not because they had to, mind you, but partially because they decided to proof from scratch documents that had already been vetted by Leverkusen. In the end I had to sue them.

Most improved: Berlin. By the time I left they went from overworked to quite okay. They also used to offer a queue for those who needed an appointment right now but couldn't get one the official way.

Generally speaking big cities are a nightmare and small cities are a delight.

> [Rules mean that] someone, or a group of people, sat down and thought about that specific thing and decided on a standard for everyone. When you have to do something, you don't feel lost, because you can just look it up. You don't have to find someone who knows.

I mildly disagree with this stance for two reasons.

First, "you can just look it up" it's like arguing that it's okay if the Linux kernel is badly documented because you can inspect the source code anytime. Try and figure out the rules for opening a GmbH by yourself (and the advantages over a Ug) and let me know if you feel comfortable in doing it without "finding someone who knows".

Second, the problem with inflexible rules is that you can't do anything when someone else breaks them. The case that everybody knows: if you need to renew your residence permit before a specific date you cannot book more than X weeks in advance (rule 1), you have a right to an appointment (rule 2), and the online system is the one and only way to get one (rule 3). So what happens when there are no appointments? Well, you panic, because suddenly your timeframe is very tight (thanks to rule 1) and you cannot reach anyone (rule 3) despite you having a right (rule 2). What happens if you respectfully but firmly demand that which is your legal right? Based on my experience, someone will call security to escort you out. And while I never thought my first time suing someone would be the German government, that was the only way to get them to give me my citizenship after literal years of delays.

Rules are fine, but only when everyone follows them. Once the government starts ignoring them while demanding that everyone else follows them, every rule becomes a potential headache.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_FIFA_World_Cup_bids

The Wikipedia page for "Ratlines" [1] discusses "systems of escape routes used by Nazis and their collaborators" and how they settled in Rome, Spain, Genoa, and various South American countries.

But there is no mention of Werner Von Braun there - for that you need to go to "List of Germans relocated to the US via Operation Paperclip" [2], which is described as a list of "German scientists, engineers, and technicians (...) taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment".

So my answer would have been "everywhere", but apparently Nazis fled exclusively to South America while good, honest German citizens working for the official German party were taken to the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II)#Ratlin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germans_relocated_to_t...

First, plenty of countries have been regularly playing under these conditions and will keep doing so after the World Cup. Too hot to play in the afternoon? Play at night.

Second, and more important, it changes the game in a major way because playing for 90 minutes with a single break is not the same as playing with three. I imagine data will say whether this has an effect or not, but I cannot imagine that an endurance player would feel the same if they have to always stop halfway.

As for it "being a thing": sadly yes. The number of papers has been steadily increasing over the years and the number of volunteer authors is simply not enough.

[1] https://aclrollingreview.org/incentives2025

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html

At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).

[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1.html

[2] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1.html

First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it, if only to give him closure.

Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get. Perhaps those parts of the game can be unlocked if you know how to use the console to set the proper variables.

I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad ending while there's a second one hidden somewhere (which has been hinted at [1]), but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.

> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.

I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.

[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/maniac_the_cave_thimbleweed...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013694

> we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration.

I had hopes for Digg, but whatever it is they ended up building it's clearly not that.

https://news.mit.edu/2026/three-sided-y-zipper-design-0504

Cars have plenty of advantages, and yet no one would say "the number of pedestrians killed by cars is rising, but that's an issue with the drivers". In fact, the opposite is true: from fines and school zones to speed bumps and bollards, we have accepted that cars bring structural problems with them that cannot be solved at the driver level alone.

> we need new tools to filter out junk

Agreed, but if my office suddenly was flooded with garbage my first thought wouldn't be "I need more, bigger trash cans" but rather "who brought all this junk here and why?". To simply assume that the garbage is a sudden natural phenomena that I have to live with seems, at the very least, unfair.

My problem therefore is: we are seeing more and more papers written with tools that are known to make up facts, citations, and even entire papers. And the number of papers has increased, too. I therefore see it less as "people are being more productive" and more "people are releasing bad science much faster than we can keep up with".

I read a good chunk of the criticism against Mother Theresa as either willfull misunderstanding and/or just repeating the same literal three quotes from Hitchen's book (seriously, they're always there). I cannot say whether she was a good person or not, but I can say: if you ask "which evidence is there which doesn't lead back to a man with a personal vendetta?", the list gets significantly shorter.