I mean, if you want to play a game made by volunteers, that’s where Team Fortress came from.

There originally was the Quake-based Team Fortress mod.

There was Weapons Factory for Quake II, which was similar.

The TF team was hired by Valve to do the confusingly-named Team Fortress Classic for Valve’s Half-Life, itself based on Quake II.

And Valve did Team Fortress 2.

Only HR, IT, and management are believed to be unaffected by the cuts, which reportedly would see the developer’s title, 2016’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, transferred to Gameloft’s studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Kharkiv? Damn. I mean, Kharkiv is an active war zone. As in “I read regular news reports about fighting there”.

This was today:

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-attacks-kharkiv-with-fab-500-bomb-for-first-time-injuring-4/

Russia attacks Kharkiv with FAB-500 gliding bomb for first time, injuring 4

searches further

And it’s not just casually using the term to refer to Kharkiv Oblast, either. The studio is in the city, slightly on the Russia side.

10 Nezalezhnosti Ave, BC Kvartal, 61022 Kharkiv, Ukraine

EDIT: They aren’t in the district that was bombed above, but they’re one block away from said district.

I mean, the whole thing doesn’t need to be destroyed for a bunch of pieces to be broken off.

I haven’t used it recently, but last time I did, I used MO2 with vanilla WINE, just setting my WINE prefix to the Skyrim Proton prefix. WINE and Proton would convert the registry in the WINE prefix back and forth each time one launched. I haven’t used SteamTinkerLaunch.

Prior to that, I used Wrye Bash, which was a mess to get working in Linux – but could run natively, at least at one point, with some prodding. I’ve also run it under WINE. It took a lot of massaging. I don’t recommend that route unless you can program, know Python and are willing to get your hands dirty.

And I also had a stint where I wrote my own scripts to reconstruct the modded environment from scratch.

My most-recent attempt for Bethesda modding was in Starfield, with a much-simpler CLI mod manager, this. I have gotten some mods working but not others; don’t know if it’s a case-folding issue. Will need more experimentation. It doesn’t have the conflict-diagnosis tools that Wrye Bash does, or I assume MO2 probably does (though I haven’t run into). I don’t think it supports Skyrim, Fallout 4, or Fallout 76; that probably matters at least insofar as mod managers for those need to merge leveled lists. My (brief) impression is that the Starfield modding community is heading down the direction of avoiding needing the mod manager to do that, having a mod that merges that stuff dynamically at game runtime.

the performance is not great.

Uh. The performance of MO2 or Skyrim?

MO2…I don’t recall, it might not have been snappy, but I don’t recall it being especially unusable. Certainly not at the level that I wouldn’t use the software. I was using a reasonably high-end system, but I don’t think that it’s particularly resource-intensive. I was running off SSD, and maybe some of the stuff might have been I/O intensive.

Skyrim was fine from a performance standpoint. I mean, you can obviously kill performance with the right mods, but I assume that you mean “modding at all”.

EDIT: If you put a lot of mods into Skyrim, like, hundreds, it can take a while to launch. IIRC, one problem – not Linux-specific – there is that loose files aggravate launch performance issues. My understanding is that, where possible, use mods that merge files into a .BSA rather than loose files. A number of mods have multiple versions; pick the .BSA one.

EDIT2: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and the Fallout 76 versions of Bethesda’s engine don’t really take much advantage of multiple cores the way the way the Starfield version does. I get buttery-smooth performance in Starfield; Fallout 76 invariably is a bit jerky when loading resources in a new cell. I don’t get a pretty consistent framerate at 165 Hz in Fallout 76 the way I can in Starfield. But I don’t know if that’s what you’re running into, without specifics of the performance issues. And that’s not gonna be a Linux-specific issue or anything that can realistically be resolved short of forward-porting the Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 games to the Starfield engine.

Unison might be worth a look, provides bidirectional merging and command-line operation. It’s what I’d use if I were mostly working with binary files and didn’t want a history.

Rsync, which someone else recommended, is really aimed at efficient unidirectional replication, not keeping two directories on computers that are both being changed and are intermittently connected in sync.

config files

If there’s mostly text and you’re going to want to review changes, want to keep a history, and do a lot of merging, I’d use git, symlink files to aim at the git repo. I have a custom helper script, but stuff like GNU stow is aimed at this, and I’d probably recommend that someone look at it before rolling their own. Here’s an example of someone using it with git in this role:

https://ratfactor.com/setup2

I agree with that guy about using bare git repos as the “master” copy, even if one of the machines in question also hosts the bare repos and technically you have some redundant information on it. Makes life easier, no machine is “special”.

If I had both binary files (say, a music collection) that I wanted kept in sync without a history and text files that I do (say, my dotfiles), I’d use both.

I’d like to highlight this bit, as we recently had a post talking about North Korean soldiers being sent to Ukraine.

There is currently no evidence supporting recent reports that North Korea may be sending engineering forces to rear areas of occupied Ukraine, and ISW has been unable to locate the North Korean confirmation that some Western amplifications allege has been made. Western news outlets circulated reports that North Korea is planning to send engineering forces to occupied Ukraine, largely citing a June 25 statement from Pentagon Spokesperson Major General Pat Ryder.[36] Ryder stated that he questions a hypothetical North Korean decision to send “forces to be cannon fodder” in Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the reports implied that Ryder’s statement confirms that North Korea is sending engineering forces to Ukraine.[37] Ryder did not confirm these reports, however; Ryder was responding to a question claiming that the North Korean Central Military Commission “confirmed” the report, and Ryder himself hedged his answer by stating that “that’s something to keep an eye on.”[38] ISW has been unable to find any such statement by the North Korean Central Military Commission. The most recent press release from the North Korean Central Military Commission is from its Vice Chairperson Pak Jong Chon on June 24, in which Pak expresses support for Russia in its war in Ukraine but does not confirm any force deployments to Ukraine.[39] Similar statements from North Korean officials mentioning Russia or Ukraine since June 21 also do not mention any force deployments.[40] As ISW has recently reported, the original report regarding North Korean engineering troops deploying to Ukraine came from South Korean television network TV Chouson, which reported on June 21 that an unspecified South Korean government official stated that South Korea expects North Korea to dispatch engineering forces for reconstruction efforts in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[41]

At this time, all actors involved have either explicitly denied or refused to confirm reports that North Korea may be sending engineering forces to support Russia in occupied Ukraine. Claims that such reports are “confirmed” by US officials are inaccurate. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated on June 27 that the Kremlin is unfamiliar with recent reports that North Korea may send engineering units to occupied Ukraine.[42] US Department of State Spokesperson Matthew Miller was also asked on June 26 about the alleged North Korean troop deployments, which the question described as having been officially “announced,” but Miller responded that he does not “have any specific comment” and that he “had not seen that report.”[43] ISW will continue to monitor North Korea’s evolving relations with and military assistance to Russia, including continued provision of weapons for use in Ukraine and speculation of force deployments to Ukraine.

Einstein was wrong

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

He didn’t say that World War III wouldn’t be sticks, mind.

It’s like a baby CAESAR.

Most of California has a Mediterranean climate where the summers are dry and the winter is when the rain comes.

Would be better if some holiday around February or so, at the end of the winter, was when the “big fireworks holiday” was.

Does he ever offer any reasoning behind these veteos?

I haven’t followed this issue, but if I were governor of a state that had a major beach tourism industry, I probably wouldn’t be out trying to increase the profile of any pollution issues.

There is, but that isn’t why I split it – comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.

Well, I’ve called for it on here. Now this’ll put it to the test – we’ll see how Californian students perform before-and-after the introduction of the classes and relative to states that don’t make it part of their core curriculum.

I hope this works.

Skimming their material, looks like it also deals with countering some sales tactics and the like, like companies aiming to exploit fear-of-missing-out to sell product.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this

There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates

https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport

If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.

They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)

Ukraine has a navy. The navy just – for the moment – doesn’t have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.

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

Toss-bombing always looks cool, but has had very little application before this war. With dumb bombs it’s inaccurate, and with precision bombs countries like America gain air supremacy and fly high and drop from level flight.

We used it for nukes for a while – I remember reading an article from an early Cold War USAF pilot who did it. When you’re throwing the equivalent of tens of thousands of tons of explosives, pinpoint accuracy doesn’t matter too much in a lot of applications.

kagis

I don’t think that this was the article I remember – this guy is Navy – but same idea:

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2000/october/bomb-and-i

By 1953, two years after I graduated from the Naval Academy, I was a first-tour aviator (a “nugget”) in an AD Skyraider squadron, where a small, special cadre of pilots were training for something secret. Everything was hush- hush. On cruise, however, our contemporaries in VC-35 (flying AD-4Ns) and VC-3 (F2H-3N Banshees) were more open—they were practicing new ways of delivering bombs using a loft maneuver, a variation on toss bombing.

The AD had an analog toss-bombing computer, and we had all had a fling at toss bombing, theoretically a way to provide some distance between the target and your release point, but we had always done it out of a dive. Now, we did it from low-level with an acrobatic maneuver for recovery—too good to be true for hot (we thought) pilots.

With our new knowledge, we began to practice loft maneuvers (surreptitiously, of course). Racing in toward the target on the deck at 260 knots (attainable only out of a shallow dive), we’d pull up at a pre-determined point, smoothly applying 4.5Gs within two seconds, maintain that G-loading during the wings-level pull-up until the simulated weapon released automatically as we passed through 45° nose-up, continue the pull wings level over the top of a loop inverted, then at 45°nose down—still inverted coming through about 2,250 feet above the surface—roll right side up, and continue diving back down to a low-level run out leaving the target at our six o’clock: a half Cuban Eight. Nobody ever shared with us the real reason for lofting, and we were too naive to figure it out.

It all came together at the Special Weapons School at Moffett Field, California, where we learned all there was to know about the Mark 7 nuclear bomb. The AD could carry one Mark 7, and a special cockpit control box (with a complex set of switches and lights we had to learn cold) readied the weapon for use; an in-flight insertion (1F1) device was the key. The heart of the Mark 7 was a spherical charge of nuclear material, surrounded by conventional explosive and wrapped in an electrical harness. A cone cut from the nuclear material normally sat on the end of a screw jack outside the sphere. With the cone backed out, the bomb lacked critical mass, and thus there was no chance of a nuclear detonation in the event of a mishap; it might go low-order conventional, although even that was not likely. Not until nearing the target would a pilot activate the IFI, which slid the cone into the sphere and armed the weapon. We practiced this in flight with dummy weapons (called “shapes”), and it always worked. We wondered if it would work as well with real weapons.

During training, we used 25-pound Mark 76 practice bombs and, occasionally, a 2,250-pound shape with electrical innards similar to those of the Mark 7. We then practiced (legally) the loft and high-altitude dive delivery maneuvers that were designed to enhance our chances of surviving an actual nuclear burst. The goal was to be as far away as possible when the bomb detonated, and the loft maneuvers generated various degrees of “safe separation” distances. We assumed our chances were not good, but lofting was fun, so we practiced enough to get our circular error probable (CEP) down to a very respectable 250 feet or less.

Note regarding the above with the guy training for nuclear toss-bombing at Moffett Field, which, reading through, makes me chuckle – normally, US airfields have ICAO codes that sound something like the airfield’s name. Moffett does not.

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

Moffett Federal Airfield (IATA: NUQ, ICAO: KNUQ, FAA LID: NUQ), also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale.

I’d guess that that explains where it got its ICAO code.

Getting back to the Ukrainian plane here, that’s gotta be kind of anus-clenching for them, since I assume that by flying up like that, they’re also potentially flying, at least momentarily, into the engagement envelope of a SAM.

Also, regarding Russia knowing what’s up there and being able to talk to it, apparently earlier in the week Ukraine attacked a Russian satellite communication facility, so I dunno what secondary implications that might have, whether it could relate to this satellite situation.

https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-attack-atacms-space-radar-fire-1916340

Crimea Videos Show Fires Blazing As Space Radar Targeted with ATACMS—Report

Ukraine has struck a Russian deep space network hub in annexed Crimea—allegedly used by Russian Aerospace Forces—using U.S.-supplied missiles, according to local reports.

Kyiv’s forces launched the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) attack across Crimea on Sunday night, and “successfully struck” Russia’s Center for Long-Range Space Communications in the village of Vitino in the Saky region, open-source intelligence X (formerly Twitter) account OSINTtechnical said.

“Multiple areas of the facility are burning,” the account said.

The center is one of three complexes that make up Russia’s Yevpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications, which supports manned and robotic space missions. The facility was reportedly previously struck in December 2023 with British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.

If it’s a “radar” site, then it presumably deals with stuff nearby.

I don’t think that Russia needs deep space communications facilities to talk to stuff in LEO – hobbyists can do that with simple setups – but it was apparently a military facility, and I think that most military applications today are for LEO. Maybe GLONASS, which has military applications and is in a larger orbit.

And Ukraine presumably isn’t gonna be expending limited weapons on it unless it’s got military significance to Ukraine. So maybe it was also being used to talk to satellites in LEO, dunno.

Also, stuff like constructing transport infrastructure for military logistics or more fortifications or revetments in airfields or any number of things may have significant military effect, even if they aren’t fighting.

considers

If North Korea is going to directly be involved in Ukraine, that maybe changes the calculus for what kind of stuff we send in. North Korea isn’t China, but it is East Asia. A lot of the argument from people who don’t want us committing more heavily in Europe is that it’s a waste of resources relative to what we’d like to do, which is pivot to Asia. But if East Asia is going to be fighting in Europe, that might make this an “Asia conflict”.

Satellites don’t just spontanously burst into 100 pieces.

Well…

There are at least three possibilities that occur to me, and two of them probably aren’t done by Russia intentionally.

One is that they tested it as a target for some kind of anti-satellite weapon. It was decomissioned and probably expendable, so that’d be consistent with targets of past anti-satellite weapon tests. Russia has been talking about anti-satellite weapons and is not happy about us providing satellite reconaissance data to Ukraine. US intelligence also believes that Russia has been considering deployment of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pentagon-official-warns-russian-anti-satellite-nuclear-weapon-devastat-rcna150314

A senior Defense Department official told lawmakers Wednesday that Russia is developing an “indiscriminate” anti-satellite nuclear device that would pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the world.

"The concept that we are concerned about is Russia developing and — if we are unable to convince them otherwise — to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space which will be an indiscriminate weapon” that would not distinguish among military, civilian or commercial satellites, John Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing.

He said the threat was “not imminent” but that the Pentagon and the “entire” Biden administration were concerned about the program.

This isn’t that – that’s in earlier stages and we’d know immediately if something like that were used – but I suppose it’s probably a fair bet that anti-satellite stuff is being discussed in Moscow. That’d be on Moscow, if they did that.

The second is that it got hit by some kind of debris too small for us to detect. If we don’t know about it, the Russians probably don’t either, and probably couldn’t avoid it.

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/measurements/radar.html

NASA’s main source of data for debris in the size range of approximately 5 mm to 30 cm is the Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR). The HUSIR radar, operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, has been collecting orbital debris data for the ODPO since 1990 under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. HUSIR statistically samples the debris population by “staring” at selected pointing angles and detecting debris that fly through its field-of-view.

The data are used to characterize the debris population by size, altitude, and inclination. From these measurements, scientists have concluded that there are approximately 500,000 debris fragments in orbit with sizes down to one centimeter. The NASA ODPO also collects data from the Haystack Auxiliary Radar (HAX) located next to the main HUSIR antenna. Although HAX is less sensitive than HUSIR, it operates at a different wavelength (1.8 cm for HAX versus 3 cm for HUSIR) and has a wider field-of-view.

Since 1990, the Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar has collected orbital debris data for debris as small as about 2 mm in LEO for the NASA ODPO. It is located in the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California and is operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar is an extremely sensitive sensor capable of detecting a 3-mm metallic sphere at 1000 km, which makes it an incredibly useful tool in the characterization of the sub-centimeter-sized debris population.

Even with all that, my guess is that there’s probably debris up there that can cause a lot of damage. The example above is small, but also a metallic sphere. I’d bet that there are some materials that are a lot more transparent to the radar that they’re using.

Low Earth Orbit objects are moving at a pretty good clip:

https://www.space.com/low-earth-orbit

In very simple terms, low Earth orbit (LEO) is exactly what it sounds like: An orbit around the Earth with an altitude that lies towards the lower end of the range of possible orbits. This is around 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) or less. The majority of satellites are to be found in LEO, as is the International Space Station (ISS).

In order to remain in this orbit, a satellite has to travel at around 17,500 miles per hour (7.8 kilometers per second), at which speed it takes around 90 minutes to complete an orbit of the planet.

The most common handgun round is 9mm Parabellum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9×19mm_Parabellum

7.45 g at 360 m/s for one type of ammo, about 4.6% as fast.

So something that weighs 0.34 grams will have the same energy as a 9mm round.

A paperclip weighs maybe 1 gram. So something in LEO a third the weight of a paperclip will hit as hard as a bullet from a Glock.

It could also be a micrometeor not in Earth orbit coming in from outer space. I don’t know if we can detect those. Those could be moving a lot faster (and hence could be even smaller to cause a given amount of damage).

A third possibility is that something on the satellite exploded. It’s got maneuvering fuel with oxidizer…I’d guess that there are probably ways for that to blow up. If there’s something that has a lot of kinetic energy, that could fail. Flywheel failures can be pretty exciting in terms of shrapnel going everywhere, and if they use gyros to do orientation, it might be possible for one of those to shatter:

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

A reaction wheel (RW) is used primarily by spacecraft for three-axis attitude control, and does not require rockets or external applicators of torque. They provide a high pointing accuracy,[1]: 362  and are particularly useful when the spacecraft must be rotated by very small amounts, such as keeping a telescope pointed at a star.

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

High performance flywheels can explode, killing bystanders with high-speed fragments.

IIRC Russia was talking about detaching their modules and using them to help bootstrap some new station. So I dunno if those will get brought down.

That being said, that was also when that rather pugnacious guy was running Roscosmos, and I dunno if doing a new space station is the top of Russia’s priority list for their limited budget.

kagis

Dmitry Rogozin.

kagis further

It looks like they canceled the idea of reusing the Russian ISS modules back in 2021. So I guess those are destined for SpaceX’s deorbit too.

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

The Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (Russian: Орбитальный Пилотируемый Сборочно-Экспериментальный Комплекс, Orbital’nyj Pilotirujemyj Sborochno-Eksperimental’nyj Kompleks;[1][2] ОПСЭК, OPSEK) was a 2009–2017 proposed third-generation Russian modular space station for low Earth orbit. The concept was to use OPSEK to assemble components of crewed interplanetary spacecraft destined for the Moon, Mars, and possibly Saturn. The returning crew could also recover on the station before landing on Earth. Thus, OPSEK could form part of a future network of stations supporting crewed exploration of the Solar System.

In early plans, the station was to consist initially of several modules from the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) of the International Space Station (ISS). However, after studying the feasibility of this, the head of Roscosmos stated in September 2017 the intention to continue working together on the ISS.[3] In April 2021, Roscosmos officials announced plans to exit from the ISS programme after 2024, stating concerns about the condition of its aging modules. The OPSEK concept had by then evolved into plans for the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS), which would be built without modules from the ISS, and was anticipated to be launched starting in the mid-2020s.[4][5]

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

The Russian Orbital Service Station (Russian: Российская орбитальная служебная станция, Rossiyskaya orbital’naya sluzhebnaya stantsiya) (ROSS, Russian: РОСС)[3] is a proposed Russian orbital space station scheduled to begin construction in 2027. Initially an evolution of the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) concept, ROSS developed into plans for a new standalone Russian space station built from scratch without modules from the Russian Orbital Segment of the ISS.[4]

I still dunno if they’re gonna get the money for a new space station. Like, deciding to have a war in Ukraine may have kind of killed off the viability of doing a new space station.