Zagorath

Zagorath, 21 hours ago

omg thank you! That whole story was so adorable.

Zagorath, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

To elaborate after I Googled to find more information about this:

Stallman had cast doubt upon the reports that AI pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Epstein’s victims. In an email chain sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list that was published by Motherboard, Stallman said that “the most plausible scenario” was that Epstein’s victim “presented herself to [Marvin Minsky] as entirely willing.”

Stallman also described the distinction between a 17 or 18 year old victim as a “minor” detail, and suggested that it was an “injustice” to refer to it as a “sexual assault.”

and a different article:

Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a victim of Epstein at age 17, testified in a May 2016 deposition that “she was directed to have sex with Minsky when he visited Epstein’s compound in the US Virgin Islands,”

Stallman objected to the text of the event announcement, saying that it “does an injustice to Marvin Minsky” by saying that Minsky was “accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims.”

“The word ‘assaulting’ presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself did say no such thing. Only that they had sex,” Stallman wrote.

Stallman added that “the most plausible scenario is she presented herself to [Minsky] as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to conceal that from most of his associates.”

After one person wrote that “Giuffre was 17 at the time; this makes it rape in the Virgin Islands,” Stallman responded, “I think it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”

“We know that Giuffre was being coerced into sex—by Epstein,” Stallman also wrote. “She was being harmed. But the details do affect whether, and to what extent, Minsky was responsible for that.”

“Headlines say that I defended Epstein,” Stallman wrote. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said. I’m sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.”

Stallman, who in 2006 wrote, “I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children,” also wrote in September 2019 that he had changed his mind about sex between adults and children.

“Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it,” Stallman wrote. “Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.”

Zagorath, 2 days ago

Lemmy is absolute garbage on privacy

I mean, yeah, it is. But that’s because privacy is not what it’s trying to do. If anything, privacy is fundamentally antithetical to what it does. Saying “Lemmy is garbage on privacy” is a bit like saying “Microsoft Word is a terrible IDE”.

Zagorath, 2 days ago

Mate, even Lemmy Trekkies can’t agree on whether to use the startrek.website communities or the ones hosted on other instances like lemmy.world.

^Yes,^ ^I^ ^know^ ^you^ ^were^ ^just^ ^baiting,^ ^but^ ^I^ ^wanted^ ^to^ ^take^ ^the^ ^bait^ ^in^ ^this^ ^one^ ^specific^ ^way.^

Zagorath, 2 days ago

Did you just say criticism is justified…because of Clone Wars‽ That’s like…the one thing outside of episodes IV and V that is universally beloved.

Zagorath, 1 day ago

I only first watched Clone Wars as an adult, because when I was younger I refused to watch it because I liked the 2d animated Clone Wars cartoon and was upset that the 3d animated show was out of canon with it.

The movie is widely regarded as pretty poor, and there are a fair few bad episodes, especially early on. And it’s a deliberate character choice to make Ahsoka annoying at first as part of her character arc.

But the show is really, really good. It highlights a number of things the movies were never able to properly emphasise, like the corruption of the Republic and especially the failing dogmatic strictness of the Jedi order.

Someone produced this guide as to which episodes to watch:

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/8a4f65b4-4dd9-4e79-88ee-bda19fb842ff.jpeg

The place I saw it linked from also said the first 4 and last 4 episodes of season 6 (which wasn’t out when this guide was produced).

From a quick look at the guide, I’d say most of the “honourable mentions” are also worth a watch.

Zagorath, 4 days ago

The subheading reads:

Clinton referenced Trump’s 34 felony counts during a conversation at the Environmental Media Association Summit on Wednesday.

Zagorath, 4 days ago

To be fair, she never said the word “rule”. 34 only takes on a problematic context when you talk about rules.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

So, does it have a long body or a long neck?

Zagorath, 4 days ago

I believe it’s a reference to Korea’s plummeting fertility rate, which currently sits at the lowest birth rate in the world, at less than 1 child per woman.

Zagorath, 6 days ago

Vulome!

Zagorath, 6 days ago

$40 AU for the base game, $65 for Premium edition, but $55 pre-order price. Premium gets you the first two expansions (one of which is confirmed to be “all-new Chinese”—wonder how similar they’ll be to the Tales of the Dragon Chinese civ) free (which they say will be valued $15 US each), as well as a day-one DLC major god (which they say might cost $6 later), and a 1-week early access and a cosmetic.

Source.

Aside from the fact that I don’t love them positioning a new major god as premium content day-one—when earlier Definitive Editions gave you all the existing civs plus a couple of new ones in the base price—this Premium edition actually seems like a pretty good deal. I love that they’re committing to at least 2 expansions worth of support post-release, too.

Zagorath, 6 days ago

Oh, the other interesting thing here is that the developers are listed on Steam as World’s Edge, Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, CaptureAge, Virtuos Games. World’s Edge is Microsoft’s subsidiary managing the Age franchise, Forgotten Empires is the main developer on all the definitive editions, with Tantalus Media supporting. Virtuos is unclear, but I wonder if they’re involved in the Xbox port.

But the really interesting bit there is CaptureAge. They build a third-party tool for AoE2, and I think they also have something for AoE4, used for viewing replays and spectating others’ games with a UI that provides more useful data for casting or for reviewing/analysing games. If they’re working to integrate it directly into the game, that’s awesome.

Zagorath, 6 days ago

Garmin is like the Apple of the fitness world. Very much not open source, but broadly privacy-respecting.

And like Apple, the reason they do this is because they don’t make their money from data harvesting, they make it by selling high quality hardware at a premium. And depending on your perspective, either unlike Apple or to a much greater extent than Apple, Garmin pushes their hardware by artificially restricting their software. You can expect to get maybe one year of feature updates on your thousand dollar bike computer or running watch, and a few security updates after that. Some of those limitation might be because of genuine hardware limitations (e.g. my Forerunner 935 not getting Garmin Pay because it lacks an NFC chip), but many are purely because they want you to have as much incentive to upgrade as possible.

Zagorath, 6 days ago

Everyone here debating the mechanics of the button or engaging with the question explicitly posed.

But I’m just trying to figure out wtf the bottom comment in the pic is about. A day? What day? No time frame is ever mentioned in any other part of the post.

Zagorath, 6 days ago

The Extended Edition was like the HD Edition of Age of Empires 2 (now called “Age of Empires II (2013)” on Steam). This is more like the Definitive Edition. Significant graphics improvements (as opposed to just taking the existing graphics and upscaling them), as well as new content and probably QoL improvements.

Zagorath, 6 days ago

AoM: Retold is using the AoE3: DE engine, according to comments made back around the time it was first announced.

Which is amusing, since AoE3: DE’s engine is based on the original AoE3 engine, which in turn was based on the original engine of AoM.

Zagorath, 7 days ago

Someone should get it added to this git project comparing different photo libraries.

Zagorath, 7 days ago

The game was already announced, but a new trailer for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which I’m excited for.

But I don’t play a very wide range of games.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

We had a problem in my country a few years ago where large numbers of people would buy up a heap of baby formula so that they can resell it overseas at a massive profit. Enough that stores had to put caps on how many you’re allowed to buy, and local parents still frequently couldn’t get their hands on it.

They weren’t generally stealing, but if they were, you bet I’d report that. And if they were noticeably going back in to buy more than the limit.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Wait, is this just projects stored in your online Adobe cloud account, or are they even stealing your content if you’re just using their desktop software? Because one of these is way, way worse than the other…

Zagorath, 9 days ago

They could require the app to connect once every 30 days or similar in order to keep functioning.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Why begrudgingly, may I ask?

Zagorath, 9 days ago

If you’re using it professionally, you need your Photoshop to be properly licensed.

If you’re not using it professionally, there’s no need for proper licenses. And thus you can…acquire Photoshop in a way that doesn’t involve it calling back to Adobe’s systems.

Zagorath, 8 days ago

Are you thinking of “content-aware fill”? Generative fill is, as far as I’m aware, much, much newer and uses newer generative AI. Content-aware fill is basically clever automatic clone stamping.

Zagorath, 11 days ago

1

Zagorath, 13 days ago

you could link to a YT video by the id (not URL)

Asking individual users to make that kind of change is bad UX. Better if you got the client-side change based on use preference, even though users just post the normal YouTube link.

Zagorath, 13 days ago

This page lists and compares a bunch of different options. Just quickly eyeballing it, Nextcloud Photos/Memories (not sure if they’re separate apps from the main Nextcloud you mention), LibrePhotos, Immich, and PiwiGo seem the best options.

Zagorath, 16 days ago

One take I’ve seen some Australian lawyers suggest is that the extent of politicisation of America’s Supreme Court is an inevitable result of how highly political their constitution is.

In Australia, our constitution deals with the basic functioning of government; how elections take place, who can vote, and mostly fairly boring procedural stuff like that.

America’s constitution quite famously lays out a number of very specific rights. Rights that are, by their very nature, quite politiciseable and open to interpretation. If SCOTUS is able to invent rights that they claim are implied by the written text, with the legislature unable to legislate around it, that’s a problem. It becomes even more of a problem when SCOTUS decides they can infer rights that are implied by those rights which SCOTUS themselves inferred. Deciding what rights people have—or removing those rights—should be the job of democratically elected representatives, not political appointees. So the court granting a right to abortion because they say it’s implied that you have this right based on the right to privacy (quite a large stretch, IMO), and that right to privacy being implied by your explicit right to due process (a more reasonable inference), is quite a silly arrangement. Better for the legislature to simply do their job.

Not that this is in any way “simple”. It would require a complete ground-up rewrite of the American constitution. And that’s obviously never going to happen.

Zagorath, 15 days ago

I do think that the idea of judicial review itself makes sense. After all, what’s the point of a constitution if the legislature can just makes laws that go directly against it? The problem, in my view, is that the constitution covers too many things, and does so in far too unspecific terms, which makes for an incredibly broad range of possible political interpretations.

Zagorath, 17 days ago

Oh you know what, you’re right. My mind actually went first to the Star Trek Discovery episode where the enby character in that came out, to exactly the same reaction. But Umbrella Academy is a much more obvious comparison.

Zagorath, 17 days ago

Oh yeah it definitely is. I just didn’t recall how the coming out scene happened in UA, whereas the Discovery coming out scene really stuck in my brain.

Zagorath, 17 days ago

Fuck me that’s stupid.

Australian politicians from our main two parties very obviously think like this as well. But they’re both—even the right-wing “hates the poor” party—smart enough to not fucking say it out loud. They even pay lip service to the idea housing should be “affordable” from time to time.

Zagorath, 17 days ago

I was thinking very powerful magnets.

Or a disc wheel. Which, while it also blocks a stick, is not technically “spokes”.

Zagorath, 17 days ago

I dunno if TFL is a good example to use. It’s just straight up a government-owned corporation and it uses a .gov.uk eTLD.

Zagorath, 19 days ago

My problem with “blocking” on many platforms is that all it does is mean you don’t see their comments. But if they can still see yours and reply to them, you leave yourself at a disadvantage where to outsiders it may seem as though you had no response, and thus they appear to have “won”.

Zagorath, 23 days ago

Nobody is Al, this is just bad dictation software misunderstanding that you’re supposed to get Azure already.

Zagorath, 24 days ago

consent matters a lots

Well I don’t consent to having a Head of State who’s only achievement is being born to some spoilt bitch who herself was only notable for having been born to some earlier rich dickhead. I don’t consent to my Head of State not even being a citizen or a resident of my country and in fact hasn’t been to my country in over half a decade and for a total of less than one season. I don’t consent to a foreign rich dickhead having the power to unilaterally overthrow my country’s democratically elected government—a power his institution has used in his name in living memory.

Zagorath, 25 days ago

I think Mylio does this, even in its free version. I don’t think it’s FOSS though.

Zagorath, 26 days ago

I’m even willing to add “large amounts of water & a big ladder, or sick/injured people” to that list.

Zagorath, 26 days ago

I do 65 minutes in the morning to work, and 80-85 coming home

I think you’ll find most !fuckcars members will also be big advocates for zoning reform that enables more people to live closer to their work. Nobody should be living a 65 minute drive from their work unless it’s purely by choice. They shouldn’t even be a 65 minute bike ride away from their workplace.

Zagorath, 26 days ago

To be clear, I am in no way blaming you here. The fact that most people have to live a long way from their workplaces is a result of restrictive zoning laws that mean there aren’t very many homes near the centre of cities (where most jobs are located for practical reasons), and what homes there are tend to be very expensive. Better laws would make it so more people are able to live closer to work if they want to.

Zagorath, 25 days ago

A totally reasonable question, but in summary, the answer is no, it’s not better.

There will always be some people who do prefer to live rurally, that’s true. And they should have that option. But most people prefer the amenities of a city. The problem with how the US, Canada, and Australia do things currently is that the majority of the living area is “suburbia”, which tries to provide the peace of rural living with the amenities of a city. But it ends up doing poorly at both.

It’s particularly bad for people who cannot drive, like children, teenagers, and people with certain disabilities. Car-dependent suburbia is extremely restrictive on them compared to being able to, for example, hop on their bike a ride to their friend’s place, or to soccer practice.

You might say you want “only residential housing”, but isn’t it more convenient if there’s a cafe within walking distance? Or a community pub/tavern you can grab some food at? Isn’t it better to be able to stop off at a grocery store on your bike home from work, or the walk from the train station, than to have to take a dedicated weekly car drive to a large shopping centre 10–15 minutes by car away to do a single large shop (and hope you don’t forget anything on that weekly shop, or you’ll have to make a dedicated trip especially for that one thing!)? Wouldn’t most people be better off if they can walk or cycle conveniently to nearby sports clubs, community centres, etc. in order to partake in their hobbies and leisure activities?

There are also economic reasons behind it. More dense places like I’m describing have enormous economic benefits. People spend more in the local economy when they walk or cycle to shops, rather than driving. Because when driving they’re more likely to go to a big box store on the periphery where the profits go to a large national or multinational chain rather than a local business. Denser living costs a lot less for the government, because the cost of infrastructure like electricity lines, sewerage, and road maintenance are much, much lower than in lower density suburban or rural areas. And it makes the building and operation of public transport networks more feasible and affordable.

It’s also cheaper for the people who live there. Having a shared wall means you lose less heat in winter, reducing your heating cost. Being able to walk or ride most places means you don’t need a car, or maybe your family which would have had 2 cars now only needs 1, which dramatically reduces your transportation cost. (Seriously, an average car costs tens of thousands of dollars per year in petrol, maintenance, and the upfront cost. It’s a huge financial burden.) And, obviously, because of the above paragraph, your personal council tax/rates bill will be lower.

I’m not talking about everyone living in soviet-style concrete blocks, either. The ideal form of development is medium density. 2–3 storey townhouses and duplexes, 3–5 storey comfortable walk-up apartments. With modern building standards these are incredibly comfortable and quiet.

Zagorath, 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago)

Never buy early access on the hope that the game will get better. Buy it if it’s at least good enough to justify its current price tag right now.

Zagorath, 27 days ago

The talk about AI is stupid. It’s a tool.

The talk about the IMPLICATIONS of AI, and who uses it to automate what, at the cost of who, is the actual argument to be had.

Hear, hear.

Zagorath, 30 days ago

Valves aren’t needed to “sound too good”, they’re needed to get more notes. Without valves, you’ve still got the harmonic series. Any piece played on bugle could also be played on trumpet. And the majority of classical compositions up until the late 19th century. (All classical compositions until the early 19th century.)

Zagorath, 29 days ago

Probably not. I’m not a brass player or a marine biologist but as I understand it the way a brass player’s embouchure works would not be replicable by a dolphin’s blowhole (it’s not just “send air through the tube”, it’s more like blowing a raspberry). They wouldn’t be able to play any note, let alone different notes.