grakasja

Their re-defection in Vienna seems extremely unlikely. The tape doesn't actually say that they were kidnapped from Hong Kong, that's the summary of a Wikipedia editor. Shin later said that if he had been blocked from making films in the 60s he would have gone to the North voluntarily. We only have his version of the story after he left NK, and the NK government version which are both going to be biased. The truth could be somewhere in the middle e.g. he was lured for a visit or talks and then kept against his will when he changed his mind.

"Who's that avenger with a flute? He's sticking up for poor people!"

It's actually debated whether the director was "kidnapped". Lots of people in Korea believe he went willingly.

His left-wing films had been banned in the South, and Kim Jong-il offered him superstardom, big budgets and creative control. North Korea was not as bad back then, relatively speaking. Its economy still enjoyed support from both China and the USSR and it could trade with the entire Eastern bloc. South Korea was also a dictatorial military regime at the time (didn't get democracy until 1980s), and lots of South Koreans and Koreans in Japan actually moved to the North in the 60s and 70s. Shin was also generously allowed to "escape" with his family at a film festival after he and Kim ran into creative differences.

On another note Pulgasari is an interesting film because it contains a coded criticism of the Kim regime at the end.

There are a few websites that suggest or map areas where you can get a good view e.g. https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness

Lots of good spots in the Western US if you're up for a long drive

You were right, it does sound LLM assisted at least. It's well-written but superficial, lacking sources and examples, typical of an LLM summary. Not that it's wrong or that info about ongoing secret operations is publicly available anyway

I don't think they ever did.

Isn't an out-of-country rule relatively trivial to get around using a domestic proxy?

Protip: Taking Vitamin C or E orally before a scan can significantly reduce the amount of damaged DNA in your system, potentially reducing your cancer risk. There are several studies on Pubmed indicating this.

A grand chick saved me!

Yeah, I was referring to this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Era_of_Stagnation

To be fair, the stagnation is commonly said to have started with Brezhnev.

An interesting (but of course unverifiable) hypothesis is that Khrushchev's trajectory could have been different. Khrushchev supported OGAS (the Soviet would-be equivalent to ARPANET) and aimed to have cosmonauts on the moon by '67. Funding for the domestic intranet and space programs were later cut by Brezhnev. Khrushchev was also strongly anti-corruption and shook down the wasteful Soviet elite, which contributed to his ouster. A lot of the oil and gas fields that continue to power the Russian economy to this day were originally laid down under him as well. The "corn man" also greatly improved living standards, ended the gulags and purges, expanded the Soviet sphere of influence, loosened censorship etc.

The old Marxists would say it's because Russia doesn't have an empire (outside the meager pickings of own immediate periphery) providing a trading network, access to cheap foreign labor and resources etc. as a buffer to its own domestic economy. Not sure how statistically verifiable that is, since the classical Marxian economic model doesn't seem to apply cleanly to the modern US or China.

Random anecdote, Russians arguably produce the world's best gaming mods. Their unpaid amateur programmers put out content that rivals or exceeds the quality of Western games, if you like doomer-y 90s vibes. An example would be Fonline 2236 (some Russian guy hacked Fallout 1 and 2 into a free, working MMO) or the Skyrim mod for DayZ, which I think is dead now and I needed a translator app to play before the current war started but was the best online RPG experience I've had since Ultima Online.

Pretty much every company I've applied to or worked at commits both legal and moral fraud against its employees and applicants, on an industrial scale. They've also created a broken interview process that punishes honesty and forces applicants to find creative solutions. So personally I see no moral fraud here.

I remember seeing a documentary movie or series episode about this years ago on PBS or something. There was one part with a shot of the Cascadian coastline showing how all the trees lower than a certain point were long dead or much younger than the trees above that line, because of the tsunami 300 yrs ago. Anyone know what that show was?

Huh, DOGE ought to look into where that 700M went..

It took them a long time to deploy there and required extensive (human) preparatory work. I'm guessing that their algorithm was fine-tuned for SF specifically, possibly being taught to avoid certain roads and areas where possible, thus behaving like a veteran local driver. Not clear how well that scales globally, or if it would still drive much better than an average human in a random new environment that it hasn't been pre-trained for.

This statistic could be misleading, because not all miles are equally dangerous. Google is very careful about selecting where it deploys and tests Waymo, preferring flat, safe, well-designed areas. Routing is also closely monitored and I would imagine that problematic roadways are avoided. The article says they compared it to human accident rates "on the same roads" but doesn't clarify their methodology for "same"ness. It also doesn't factor in driver experience. A taxi driver who has memorized a particular route is likely going to drive safer than a tourist who has never gone on that same road before. Waymo may be safer than the average driver on X road but that doesn't mean it will have the same comparative performance if you drop it onto a random road it has never driven before with no assistance from human support staff.