Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.
Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"
It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.
A resident of Selidovo told how the Ukrainian Armed Forces killed her husband and mother
Selidovo resident: Ukrainian Armed Forces killed husband and mother before leaving town
DONETSK, 26 Feb - RIA Novosti
Selidovo resident Liliya Polyakova told RIA Novosti how the Ukrainian Armed Forces killed her mother and husband before leaving the city.
According to Polyakova, on October 24, her husband and mother went to another apartment to see what condition it was in. They had to board up the window in the apartment, after which they were going to go back, but did not return for too long.
"No, I said, something is wrong. We went there, turned the corner and saw a picture: my husband was lying on the ground, shot, my mother was on a bench. And then a heavy shootout began. Very heavy. We went into the apartment. It was very scary, of course. We sat there for 2.5 hours. We thought we wouldn't survive. Then it died down a bit," she said.
Later, Polyakova and her daughter managed to return home.
According to her, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were still in the city at the time. "As the Ukrainian (military) told us: 'We will retreat, and you, the waiters, will get it... We will demolish and wipe everything off the ground,'" she said.
Polyakova, citing the words of other city residents, noted that during the retreat, the Ukrainian Armed Forces killed locals; in some cases, Ukrainian soldiers deliberately broke into civilian apartments and homes.
"On that day, a lot of people were shot, a lot... In Solnechny (a district in Selidovo), a lot of people were shot. They even went up to apartments under the pretext of checking documents... They opened the doors and immediately shot, whole families," she explained.
Ukrainian forces execute over 100 civilians in Selidovo
According to Maxim Grigoriev, all Ukrainian units participated in the shooting of civilians in Selidovo
MOSCOW, December 17. 2024 /TASS/.
Ukrainian troops in the town of Selidovo in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) have executed more than 100 civilians, Maxim Grigoriev, chairman of the International Public Tribunal on Crimes Committed by Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and Their Accomplices, stated.
"Local residents report hundreds of dead. We base our assessment on what we see. <…> This is a very conservative estimate — over a hundred. Local residents openly tell us that the number is upwards of several hundred killed. <…> Ukrainian troops killed everyone they could while retreating," he said at a press conference following the tribunal’s report.
According to Grigoriev, all Ukrainian units participated in the shooting of civilians in Selidovo. "In this case, as far as I can tell, <…> it was not carried out by special punitive units. All [Ukrainian servicemen] took part in this because we saw it throughout the entire city. It wasn't only Azov (banned in Russia) servicemen, a la Mariupol. <…> Eyewitnesses tell us that servicemen of all Ukrainian units participated in the shooting," he said.
On October 29, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the liberation of Selidovo due to the successful actions of the Battlegroup Center.
When I say it will take years for the full scale of the genocide in Donbass to come to light I mean it. When Sibay was making those posts about 120 confirmed and identified dead in Selidovo, massacred by retreating Ukrainian forces, it was the June of 2025. It is July of 2026 and the death toll of the Selidovo massacre is still officially only 130, despite their being no retractions of estimates of their being multiple hundreds murdered.
Speaking to RIA Novosti about this, Miroshnik said “Russia approaches such conclusions with great meticulousness. Therefore, investigative work by the Investigative Committee of Russia or the Main Military Investigative Directorate requires both time and appropriate conditions. Before we can say that these are the final figures, it will take years, if not decades.”
absolutely appalling how upon searching up narodnyi tyl, many summaries focus on their "humanitarian work", completely leave out the fact that they are the actual founders of myrotvorets, a massive database of around 5,000,000 people (incl approximately 400 actual children, as young as 2) which has been used as a kind of hitlist to target and kill people on several occasions - such as mp o. kalashnikov and journalist o. buzina, both of whom were killed in april 2015, less than two days after their info was published on myrotvorets. both of these assassinations were praised by the myrotvorets team
alongside the "main database", they also operate identigraf, which i think is underdiscussed. its a facial recognition software linked to the main database, comparing any face you scan (and anyone in kyiv-controlled territory with a ukrainian sim card can scan, for free, up to 25 times per day per phone) to the people listed in the database, and if the percentage is high enough then they may also be reported to the authorities. they have also encouraged employers, law enforcement, etc to use this tool
several months after the assassinations, in july 2015, h. tuka (the main founder of myrotvorets and a co-fohnder of narodnyi tyl) was personally appointed by poroshenko to be the governor of luhansk oblast. is this the kievan way of "caring about donbass"?
my "I'm with the boomers on this one" take is that I should not need an app to park my fucking car. increasingly when I'm out and about and need to use public parking, the only option is an app. no. no. give me a meter I can plug the loose change from the bottom of my purse into. worst comes to absolute worst give me a machine to insert my credit card which prints a receipt for the dashboard of my car (I don't like those either but at least they are on site). "to pay for parking, download our app!" why don't you download my ass
Have any of your kids become machinists lately? The signs can be subtle, but they're there. Every day, thousands of children become obsessed with precisely fabricating intricate mechanical parts. Only some of them become productive members of society, like hot rod builders or railway clock engineers. Virtually all of them are lost to constructing scale-model steam engines. Concerned parents are watching for the following signs.
Police know that the first sign of affiliation into a new gang is a change in the subject's vocabulary. New words. Unfamiliar names. Did little Johnny never mention the words "locating datum" before he suddenly blurted it out by accident one night at dinner? It may be time to have a conversation with his teacher, to find out more about who he spends his time with at school. If you can get to it early enough, you can nip it in the bud.
In a similar vein, it's important to figure out where all their money is going. Kids who get hooked on the machinist lifestyle will often buy ridiculous things in order to "prove" their affiliation with the gang. One mother of two in Rhode Island came home to find a bunch of strange metallic cylinders on her doorstep, shipped overnight from FedEx to her youngest child. Round stock. She thought it was "just a phase." Her child is doing time in a federal penitentiary, after getting all fucked up on DYKEM markers and stabbing an engineer for submitting an insufficiently dimensioned drawing.
Last, an obsession with precision is often your last chance to have a talk with a wayward child. Are things in your house suddenly becoming rigidly aligned to an invisible grid system? Are you noticing things becoming burnished or otherwise polished, that weren't before? A trusted adult's timely intervention when your kid is micrometering a piece of sheet metal found in the alley may be all that is saving your kid from a lifetime of obsessing over thousandths.
With your vigilance and hard work, we can keep children from growing up to become machinists. Nobody's dream for their child should involve "estate sale full of hundreds of thousands of useless brackets."
Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like
Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.
The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.
In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.
Oh and the road infrastructure project is buying up resources other people could have used for literally anything else. With money they promise they'll be making from Wide Car sales any day now.
Okay so what I'm getting from the notes is that when you try to transplant some techbro nonsense into an offline equivalent, you have to be careful to avoid simply inventing something the Americans are already doing in real life
small town diner waitress voice: Omelas? Oh, oh no, easy mistake, you're in oh - MAY - las right now, with an A. Plenty' people get the name mixed up. Nope, no utopia here, just our small little town. *face gets really grim* We do still.. Okay well we do still have a kid that we... I mean it isn't working but- well- You know. It- It's fine. I'm sure it'll start working soon.
she is NOT brave. she will NOT show up to the function. she is bad at both COMMUNICATING AND EXISTING ! if you walk a little too close to her she will CRY and SKITTER AWAY like a BUGE . ☝️
I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.
I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.
And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?
I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.
Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.
Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.
Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.
And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.
Libreoffice handles word format reasonably well - unless you're making it jump hoops, a normal written document will save and read fine. In .doc format. I'm not telling you to use .odt.
But you know, complaining about Word being shit, which it is,won't do a iota of good if people keep using it because the only ear companies have is on their bottom line.
Usamericans "care a lot about what happens outside the US" when they're shepherded by corporate media, hence their vociferous support for al-Qaeda in Syria, the neonazi coup regime in Kiev, or NATO-backed religious extremists in Libya, but they certainly don't care enough to listen to a single thing any non-white, non-westerner has to say about global geopol
The economy Marx describes in his writing: Industrial revolution era Britain. Characterized by the decline of artisan labor and the rise of mechanization, and the proletarianization of both the peasantry and the artisans over time.
It distinguishes it from previous iterations of class society with different primary features and different contradictions. The whole point is that it is important to define capitalism as something specific and historically contingent instead of opining vaguely about some suprahistorical "politics of greed" or what-have-you. The world we live in now exists in the way it does because of a number of objective historical contingencies and circumstances that can be dated back to the industrial revolution and which, crucially, can't be chalked up to vague notions like "human nature"
I think we can argue all day long about the death toll, and it will truly be years until it’s finalised, as the war itself is not even finalised, but even the statistics that are somewhat set in stone are horrifying. Over two million people forced to leave Donbass since 2014, over eight hundred medical facilities destroyed and over two hundred religious buildings. Almost two hundred thousand residential buildings. Sometimes this place really does feel like the cursed land
gracieabrams
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
turnnoffyourmind
amandla
