kremlinology is the term for any political intelligence gathering that's all second-order. In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data and even then there were so many moving parts that you needed an expert in just that area who had alot of data like who was having drinks with whom to predict who might be on the out and who might be ascendant.
There was one analyst reading Pravda who noticed a lot of people were suddenly being promoted into positions held by members of a certain large clique, with no notice about what was happening to the former appointees.
After one of the nuclear treaties was signed, there was a guy whose photo was published in Pravda, shaking hands with Gorbachev; a different fresh photo of him shaking hands with Gorbachev every day for an entire month. He turned out to be the head of the ministry of strategic deception.
kremlinology is an old pre-1989 term for people trying to observe and interpret the workings of a tightly sealed institution. Could be used for Vatican rumors and news, too, for example, or North Korea, etc.
Similar to that idea of trying to derive stuff from an indirect channel, but much more distant. (There is an obvious link between food consumption and building occupancy.)
Stuff like watching the order of names on public lists of attendees for dinner events, etc. If someone disappeared or moved off the top few names, perhaps they're in trouble or have been purged from the party ... or maybe they're just sick this week.
A similar hack created The Panama Papers. Not much came from those either. Like the Epstein Files, it may make for interesting reading, but I don't expect much legal action.
I don't know why, but on windows, the first time I start VLC after a windows boot, it takes about 5s to 8s to open a video file, any sort of video file
I suspect it's a graphics driver issue, or something else
It's caused by a stale plugin cache, which somehow triggers a blocking windows defender scan on application launch.
I only managed to figure that out thanks to this[1] reddit comment, which also includes a solution:
Noticed this a while back with 3.0.23. Managed to troubleshoot via debug logs.
Basically the plugin cache goes stale and has to rebuild itself every first launch. No clue why.
To fix: go to C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC (or wherever you installed) with a terminal in administrator mode.
run the command: ./vlc-cache-gen.exe "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins"
That will rebuild the plugins.dat file which should fix it.
I fear that in the future, opengl will be made obsolete and GPU vendors will stop supplying drivers for it, because it won't be worth it for them. Of course there are layers to be put on top of vulkan, but I don't know if they're reliable enough and can support 100% of opengl.
I would say that's one thing that the "stop killing games" movement would not see coming. I am not expert enough in graphics programming.
I am wary because lately, I realized I could not run blender 4.5 on a thinkpad from 2014, on windows, I had to use a 3.x version because that thinkpad has a chipset.
Generally in software, making things work for a long time doesn't generate profits, and it feels like opengl is getting a bit old already. I hope it won't happen and people can contradict me here.
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