merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

merc,

The full scene if anyone’s interested.

Carl Weathers is an interesting contrast to Arnold. Arnold got his muscles by focusing on how he looked, on bodybuilding. Weathers developed his physique training for professional gridiron football. He played college football, then in the NFL (coached by John Madden) and CFL. Arnold used his unique physique as a way to get into movies without ever training as an actor. Weathers was studying theatre arts while playing college football, and finally finished the degree in 1974 just after retiring from pro football. He went on to get a master of theatre arts later.

Both of them pivoted extremely successfully to comedy later in their careers, with Weathers doing Happy Gilmore and Arrested Development, and Arnold doing his whole variety of comedy movies.

Also, good to know that Weathers loved this scene:

“Predator, the handshake. That’s iconic,” says Weathers, grinning from ear to ear. “The director shot that scene beautifully. And it’s a great movie. You put that movie in the theater today and it works just as well as it did back in 1987.”

thedailybeast.com/baby-carl-weathers-has-a-stew-g…

merc,

Yes, “Bias Automation” is always an issue with the training data, and it’s always harder to resolve than anyone thinks.

merc,

Another similar “shortcut” I’ve heard about was that a system that analyzed job performance determined that the two key factors were being named “Jared” and playing lacrosse in high school.

And, these are the easy-to-figure-out ones we know about.

If the bias is more complicated, it might never be spotted.

merc,

When the choice is between status quo and a fascist, status quo isn’t so bad.

If there’s ever a way to undo first-past-the-post, that should be the focus. FPTP requires you to vote strategically to keep the greater evil out, but that frequently means voting for the lesser evil. Get rid of this need to vote strategically and maybe you can have a meaningful choice.

merc,

Nintendo used to be a company that specialized in cards, although these days it’s more associated with carts. They made a very successful transition into gaming, but still make cards in Japan.

I can’t see Hasbro being as effective though. I’m sure Hasbro is just going to try to churn out shovelware that bears their IP so that they can monetize things they own.

merc,

It’s a bit late to make plans. Roads are going to be massively congested in the hours before and after. The best way to avoid that is to stay somewhere overnight, but those places are all booked now.

merc,

I don’t believe Israel was intentionally targeting World Central Kitchen. This whole incident is a massive PR disaster for them, especially given that the victims were citizens of powerful and influential countries doing one of the most selfless humanitarian jobs possible.

Having said that, this is the kind of mistake that only happens when a military’s targeting rules are basically “commit war crimes”. Like, maybe their target was white civilian vans being used as ambulances by the Palestinians, and they just blew up the wrong white civilian vans. The difference is that killing Palestinian doctors and paramedics doesn’t generate the same international headlines.

Just this week I read a story about how Israel is using AI to identify targets to assassinate. At first they were just targeting senior Hamas leaders, but at this stage they have tens of thousands of targets including police and civil defense workers. Technically these are affiliated with Hamas, but only because Hamas is the official government of the Gaza strip.

How do they kill them? It’s hard to target and kill them when they’re out in the field, so the Israelis wait until they return home and then they bomb their houses, killing them and their families: “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians”

What do they call the system that alerts them when the targets return home, and can now be targeted for a bombing? I shit you not, it’s called “Where’s Daddy?”

merc,

Yeah, exactly my point. I don’t think they set out to bomb World Central Kitchen people specifically. But, their targeting is so broad, and they’re so willing to kill civilians that it doesn’t take a very big mistake to accidentally kill WCK people instead of some other group of civilians in white vans.

merc,

You missed the part where they literally coordinated with the IDF on their trip, didn’t you?

No, I didn’t. I just don’t think that means much.

Yes, I’m sure they told the IDF, and that the IDF said “ok, sure”. Then the IDF essentially ignored it. Maybe they entered the information into a database or something, but I doubt it was widely communicated. Maybe you have this image of the IDF as being this ultra-competent, supremely vigilant organization that never kills anybody by accident, so any killing has to be deliberate. I don’t share that view. I think they’re tossing so many bombs and care so little about collateral damage that WCK checking in with the IDF means essentially nothing.

The only reasons this could happen are intentional or criminal negligence.

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to stupidity.

Given how well this fits with the trends, it’s hard to imagine it was negligence.

Given how well it fits with the trends, it’s hard to imagine it’s anything but negligence. When the IDF is leveling Gaza, killing indiscriminately, targeting civilians with only a very slight tie to Hamas, it’s no surprise if they kill some aid workers too.

The story I linked shows that they are targeting so many people that they spend only 20s verifying that the target Lavender came up with is a valid target before ordering a bomb strike. In that situation, it’s completely unsurprising if they accidentally kill a convoy of international aid workers instead of a convoy of Palestinians.

Your theory is what, Israel is targeting every one of the 29,000 bombs they’ve dropped very precisely, with a whole lot of planning and thought, and that each one of them is a deliberate and careful target, and there are never screw-ups in any of those 29,000 bomb strikes? Given that this is a PR disaster for them, isn’t it easier to assume it was a mistake caused by their unwillingness to thoroughly and carefully check every possible target to make sure that they never make a mistake?

merc,

I don’t think it’s effectively the same thing. One view is that they’re supremely evil and extremely competent. The other view is that they’re slightly less evil and much less competent.

merc,

Sure, if you want to phrase it that way. IMO it’s much worse than that.

merc,

Yup, and hopefully it will be enough that the world starts putting sanctions on Israel. First, obviously, stop giving them military aid. Then even ban them from buying weapons.

merc,

In addition, they’re forcing binding arbitration on anybody who doesn’t opt out.

To opt out, you need to send an email within 30 days of the day they go into effect. They go into effect on April 15th so you have until May 15th to opt out.

That means if you have a reason to sue Discord, you’re forbidden from doing it. Instead you’re required to use an arbitrator. Whatever they decide is official. But, don’t worry, even though Discord pays for the arbitrator and relies on them for repeat business, the arbitrator is definitely neutral.

lemmy.world/post/13764695?scrollToComments=true

merc,

“You can’t sue us for making opiods ‘too pleasurable’, say major drug manufacturers in response to addiction lawsuits.”

The reality is that it comes down to motive. In the case of the Sackler family, lawsuits showed that they were effectively trying to get people addicted to their opiods. They lied about them, claiming they weren’t addictive. They tried to push doctors to prescribe them for everything from sports injuries to arthritis, not just for ultra-serious pains like from cancer. They were rewarding doctors for prescribing them, even when it was obvious those doctors were just selling drugs to addicted patients. They especially liked to try to talk to doctors who were not pain specialists. Sales reps were trained in how to overcome objections from doctors, like saying “The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug”, even though they knew that wasn’t true. They gave doctors all-expenses paid junkets to Boca Raton, Florida to attend seminars on OxyContin.

If a developer ends up making a really good game that keeps you wanting more, that’s one thing. But, if you have internal messages from that developer talking about how they can hack dopamine releases and keep people coming back, that’s another thing. If internal messages are about the “whales” and how to get them to cough up the most money, that’s yet another one. If someone leaks internal memos where employees are laughing at idiots who are ruined after spending all their money on loot boxes, that’s even worse.

IMO, the developers who really need to be sued are the ones developing gambling machines. They seem ultra-optimized for addiction, and to extract as much possible cash from the victim. It’s amazing that that kind of thing is legal, but as long as it’s legal, it needs to be heavily regulated so that gamblers are actually having a good time, not that they’re simply being slowly drained of their blood.

merc,

IMO metric also allows you to reason about things in your head more easily because doing base-10 calculations in your head is doable.

For example, “Each 1m section of a pipeline contains 20L of oil. The goal is to empty a 200 km section of pipe into trucks. If each truck can handle 20 tonnes of oil, how many trucks would be needed?” In metric that calculation is 20 * 1000 * 200 = 4 million L. 20 tonnes is approx 20,000 L since 1L of water is 1kg, so it’s going to be at least within an order of magnitude of that for oil. 4M / 20k = 200.

With US customary units it would be "Each 1 foot section of a pipeline contains 1.5 gallons of oil. The goal is to empty a 100 mile section of pipe into trucks. If each can handle 20 tons of oil, how many trucks will be needed? To handle that calculation you’ll have to convert feet to miles. Gallons to pounds, pounds to tons, etc. You can do it on paper, but all those weird conversions add massively to the difficulty.

merc,

During the French Revolution they tried to create metric time units, but it didn’t stick.

The one thing I think is possible within our lifetimes is getting rid of time zones. Instead of a business being open from 9:00 EDT to 17:00 EDT it could just be 13:00 UTC to 21:00 UTC. Then it’s much easier to schedule things with people in other parts of the world. China is already kind-of doing that, the entire country is on China Standard Time, even though it’s a huge country. That means that the sun is directly overhead at approx 3PM CST in the far west, and at the equinox the sun will rise at about 9am and set at about 9pm.

merc,

Nobody even uses exact degrees when using Fahrenheit and talking about the weather. You can’t feel the difference between 71 and 72. Most people just round off to the nearest 5 degrees or so when talking about the weather. With Celsius you might be slightly more likely to use a non-rounded value, say 22 degrees instead of 20 or 25. But, you’re almost never going to use fractional degrees.

merc,

And water boiling at 100C is useful too because boiling water is used so often in cooking.

merc,

But, with Fahrenheit you also need brain cells to remember that 90F is super hot outside.

merc,

People can spend hours outside at below 0C temperatures as long as they’re wearing the right gear. Some people even like doing sports outside when it’s -20C.

But, you’re right that most of the time people only care to the 5 degree range. It’s a bit different when it’s close to the ideal room temperature. If you personally like it at 22C and the room is set to 20C you will probably feel cold after a while. If it’s 24C you’ll probably feel overly warm. But, except for something like measuring a fever, people almost never care about fractional degrees.

merc,

Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales

In what sense?

similar to how pint is a good cup size

Actually a pint is 2 cups.

merc,

In Canada the scale goes higher and lower.

  • -5 to -10: a warm day in the winter, a break from the misery
  • -10 to -20: Ugh, again?
  • -20 to -40: Wow, it’s actually really cold out!
  • -40 and below: Wow, even with all my winter gear, this is going to suck.

Then sometimes in summer:

  • 35-40: WTF, we’re hotter than the Sahara again!
merc,

Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time

Not really. Time zones exist for 1 reason: it was too difficult for each town to have its own time, especially when it came to train schedules. So, they were organized into zones so that 6pm in Baltimore and 6pm in Philadelphia were the same. But, people were still used to having 12 pm being the time when the sun was at its peak, so NYC was put in a different zone from Los Angeles.

To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is

You normally don’t need to know where the sun is, you need to know if it is normal business hours. Or, if it’s a friend, what their schedule is like and if this is a convenient time for them. You can search for the time in that other place and guess that maybe their business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM, but that isn’t always true across companies and especially across cultures. What you really need to know is something like “what are Dimitri’s business hours” which is easier if everyone uses UTC. If you ask “What are Dimitri’s business hours” and you get the answer 8h - 16h EET, now you need to figure out what “EET” means. But, if you get 6h - 14h UTC and you’re also using UTC, there’s no conversion needed.

is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?

If that’s what you need to know, what you really need are the current UTC offsets used to describe time zones. Just store those as “sun offsets” relative to cities and nuke the time zone aspect.

merc,

I gotta ask, do you use a thermometer to boil water?

No, but I use a thermometer (built into the electric kettle) to prepare tea. Greens want to be brewed at 75-80C. Whites are often about 70C. Oolongs are about 95C.

The numeric value associated with boiling water has no impact on cooking, because the boiling water doesn’t care.

But the human who is doing the cooking might care.

merc,

Below zero is when air temperature starts to get hazardous

Hazardous in what sense? If you’re not wearing proper clothing, lower than 10C can be hazardous. Many hikers who get lost get hypothermia even if it’s above zero because they were dressed for an energetic hike, not sitting around waiting for a rescue.

If you are properly dressed, -10C is no big deal. Many people do outdoor sports for hours when the temperature is well in the negatives.

IMO, if you’re within 10C of ideal room temperature, you may be uncomfortable but you’re probably not in danger. But, if the temperature is above 30C or below 10C you need to take precautions: shade and water in the case of hot weather, warm clothing in the case of cold weather. I don’t think there’s anything special about 0C for humans, except for the fact it’s when water turns to ice, rain turns to snow, etc. If you have the right gear, 5C, 0C, -10C and -20C are all survivable, possibly even comfortable. You just need more and more specialized gear as the temperature gets lower.

merc,

I’m imagining a tank wearing a fez.

merc,

Crude is approximately the same as water, about 0.8 to 0.9 g/mL. But, even if it were significantly less dense, like gasoline (0.74 g/mL) it’s still good for an order-of-magnitude calculation. Knowing that 1L has a mass of 1kg is especially useful since many of the liquids we commonly encounter are water-based.

merc,

Like I said, people who use Celsius know when to wear a coat.

So do people who use Fahrenheit.

But if we’re maintaining that 0 and 100 are special numbers, then Fahrenheit maps hazardous conditions more neatly to those numbers.

I completely disagree. 0 Fahrenheit is very cold, but there’s nothing special about that temperature. You need to start dressing for cold conditions long before it gets that cold, and if you dress for cold conditions you can easily handle temperatures well below 0F. 100F is also nothing useful. Yes, it’s very hot, but you start needing to take precautions for heat long before it hits 100F.

Basically the Fahrenheit scale has nothing particularly useful at 0 or 100F. The Celsius scale has useful things at 0C and 100C. 100C is not useful for weather, but 0C is very useful for weather because it tells you whether it’s likely to be icy out.

merc,

See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.

No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.

If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.

Business hours are correlated to where the sun is

There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.

People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.

No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.

Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.

And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.

merc,

I don’t see how that would solve anything. That would just result in people streaming in the “normie” classification, but pushing the limits as far as they could go.

merc,

We don’t know because Twitch is owned by Amazon and they don’t give out the financial info of that subsidiary. It could well be that Amazon is subsidizing Twitch as a strategic move.

merc,

That’s what we have now

Which, I think most people agree, sucks.

this would give them an option to target a different demographic

They already have that option. They could stream on cam sites dedicated to adult content if they wanted to do adult content. They don’t do that because they want to reach Twitch viewers not porn viewers. But, they know they get more attention from the Twitch viewers if they’re doing nearly-porn.

merc,

Whoever wrote that note isn’t great at communication.

“The refrigerator is currently heating items.” Ok… does this mean it is broken? Or is the heating intentional and this is just a warning not to put things in it that you don’t want heated up? Is this heating up phase meant to stop anytime soon?

“Thank you for your time and consideration,” for what? Reading the note? Is this a request that the refrigerator be fixed? Or is it merely a warning to other people? If we’re meant to assume that the fridge is broken, has someone in charge been informed?

merc,

I think you should grab the free games.

Epic still has to pay the publisher whenever they give away a game. So, every time you grab a free game, the publisher gets money and Epic loses money. Right now they’re losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

As long as you can limit yourself to only the free games, every free game you get causes Epic to lose money and gives money to some random publisher. I grab the free weekly game every week. I’ve never played any of them. But, if there’s a really good one I haven’t played, I might do that. The key thing is that each week I cost Epic some money.

merc,

The two new Deus Ex games were some of my favourites. I love stealth games and (aside from shitty boss battles that apparently they farmed out to an external contractor) the entire game is stealth-friendly.

merc,

I don’t know much about it, but I read something about epic paying for “minimums”, so it sounds like they pay a flat fee up to a certain number of “sales”, then pay per-unit (or at least pay more) beyond that. But, like you said, more “free” games claimed is more units shifted, so publishers will expect higher fees, even if it’s a flat fee.

merc,

Exactly. A blockchain is just a slow, inefficient, append-only distributed database. The only excuse for using one is if you lack a central authority, but in this case CCP has to be the central authority because everything in the DB only works with their game. So, just use a normal DB, it gives you everything the blockchain does in this case, but is much more efficient.

merc,

It’s great that two organizations that more or less act in the public interest won an academy award.

20 days in Mariupol is the work of the Associated Press and PBS’s Frontline. This has to be one of the first times that a major documentary winner wasn’t attached to a for-profit studio.

merc,

Pretty good, but a bit busy for my tastes. I do support the cause though.

merc, (edited )

I mean, it’s definitely true.

Engineering has its share of math, it can get fairly complex (in the case of electrical engineering, it’s literally complex), but being engineering it’s often based in practical things. But, pure physics has weird-ass math invented just to deal with the messed up calculations required by quantum mechanics.

If you hate weird-ass math, you’ll hate pure physics as lot more than any engineering discipline.

Engineering has the kind of math that can be plugged into spreadsheets and CFD simulations. It’s the kind of math that might be really complicated, but you can get answers out of it, and those answers can be compared to reality. Physics has the “symbol manipulation” kind of math where you don’t even deal with numbers, other than the occasional 2 or 3 when when something is squared or cubed.

merc,

That’s the whole point of why it’s bad to use the word “illegal” as a noun

We’re talking about using the word illegal as an adjective: “illegal immigrant”. Immigrant is a noun, illegal is an adjective.

merc,

They’re not common, but they most definitely are used, and nobody objects because it accurately describes the situation.

merc,

So which is it?

It’s the same consistent thing: Jaywalking is not punished as severely as illegal immigration, because it’s not on the same “level”.

The majority of the country disagrees.

Which country, because definitely not the USA.

merc,

Nope, that’s not what we’re talking about.

merc,

It’s not an asset. A bubble doesn’t prove anything. Tulips were once as valuable as houses… until they weren’t.

The theory of money is a theory. The fact is that money has always been associated with a state.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines