Zagorath

Zagorath, 8 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

A slightly more recognisable way of writing it would be “d’ya eat yet?” But “d’ya eat” becomes elided even further down to “dyeat”, which can be reanalysed as “jeet”. I’m not really sure what the phonotactics are behind “yet” becoming “chet”, but in this sentence…yeah, it just kinda does.

edit: wait no I worked out why “chet”. It’s the /t/ at the end of “jeet”. /tj/ becoming /tʃ/ is .

edit 2: to be more precise, dy (/dj/) becoming j (/dʒ/) is also yod coalescence. So it’s all about yod coalescence + allision.

Zagorath, 8 days ago

and are recognised as such by a fair chunk of overseas countries

Which? Wikipedia says they’re “reaching out to countries like Russia and Venezuela to establish diplomatic relations”, but there’s nothing in there or on the cited article suggesting they received any response. Searching Google restricted to their official website for the words “recognise”, “acknowledge”, “embassy”, “relation”, and a few conjugations of those words all turned up zero results. They do seem to have had friendly discussions with federal ministers, but no formal recognition, and they don’t seem to be using their own vehicle registrations any more. (Side note: that last article is a particularly good one for getting a full broad picture of what it is they really want and the situations that lead to them being as they are today.)

Note: I am not attempting to make any kind of “ought” argument here. Merely an “is” one. And it does not seem true to claim that the Yidingi Nation “is” recognised in any official way, as far as I could find.

Zagorath, 8 days ago

The hexbear admin has essentially admitted to this.

Source? I wanna see their exact words

Zagorath, 8 days ago

Man the way America teaches maths in school is so wack.

Zagorath, 9 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

1. Better cycling infrastructure. Yeah, no shit. We need more paths, more direct paths, and more connected paths. You should be able to go anywhere you want using a route that it at least as direct as the most direct driving route, by bike, without ever sharing a road with cars above 30 km/h, and with a minimal number of road crossings where the cars get priority.
2. Use AI to identify where cycling infrastructure needs to go. 🙄 Or you could just ask cyclists. We’ve got no shortage of ideas of places that are severely lacking already. Maybe the AI could be useful once most of the basic network is done, but not today.
3. Improve transport modelling to include cycling. Yes! Add in induced demand effects on infrastructure for cycling, public transport, and cars. Use models that understand traffic evaporation when reducing road widths or adding modal filters. Our transport engineers are currently woefully behind the times.
4. Politicians need to actually care about cycling. Yeah, no shit.
5. Make active transport funding a priority. Yup. Our councillors love to harp on about how they spent X amount on cycling infrastructure, but they never put that in context of how much is spent on roads. But also, let’s make sure that money goes where it’s most useful. Spending billions building one green bridge is great, but is still much less useful than building many kilometres of good separated bikeway for the same price. (The real answer is to do both!)
6. Recognise the health benefits of cycling. Yes, but this isn’t really an actionable item. It’s just more reason to do the above items, particularly pointing to 4.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

I agree that the helmet laws are unnecessary, but I think they’re far from the most important thing compared to having good infrastructure to ride on.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

No, I just think it’s silly to talk about applying AI to something that just manifestly does not need AI. It’s a dumb buzzword at best, an excuse to spend less money actually building infrastructure because more money is going to AI consultants at worst.

Like I said, if it were about filling in the little cracks once we have a really good overall network, I could maybe get behind it. But right now there’s just zero need for it, because the stuff that’s missing is so obvious and there’s so much of it. At least in Brisbane, the Council could decide to triple its spend on bike infrastructure and still take a decade before the big problems we’ve been calling for action on for years are all exhausted.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

People whinge about all kinds of things as excuses for why cycling doesn’t happen. In Canada it’s “it’s too cold”. In the UK it’s “too wet”. In Brisbane I alternately see “too hot” and “too hilly” brought up as excuses.

It’s all bullshit.

The evidence tells us pretty clearly. Infrastructure is the whole thing. With good infrastructure, people will cycle in any weather. It’s what happens everywhere in the world, every time they build actual good infrastructure.

And for what it’s worth, I find it much easier to cycle in Brisbane’s summer than its winter. Our winters are an awkward in-between temperature where you can’t rug up properly because if you do you get too hot while riding. But it’s too cold to go out in shorts. Speaking objectively, those Canadians are closer to having a good point. Warm weather doesn’t make your tyres slip; doesn’t require snow to be ploughed off of the path.

Zagorath, 9 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

How is the government (who has to end up building the stuff) getting this AI data? They’re paying some AI company for it. Money that would be better spent directly on infrastructure we already know we need.

The better question is: without the technobro hype, what do we actually have to gain from this AI technology?

Zagorath, 9 days ago

But that’s just…straight-up not true? Just ride a little bit less intensely. It’s really not that bad. I’ve done it for years—including in a city far hotter and more humid than Brisbane.

Or yeah, have a shower. It’s pretty easy. Most office buildings, schools, universities, and hospitals have EoT facilities. And you can skip the morning shower at home.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

It won’t be the norm for workplaces for a long time

I have no idea what they’re talking about, because it’s already the norm. Last time I was applying for work, asking about end of trip facilities was one of my routine questions, and they always had a good answer to it. Most CBD offices have them. As do other major employers like unis, schools (via the change rooms used for PE, if nothing else), and hospitals.

And if your particular CBD building doesn’t, there’s the Cycle2City EoT facilities, which are cheaper than public transport and much cheaper than paying for CBD parking.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Statistically, it’s been fairly well understood for a while now that the benefits of a larger number of people cycling outweigh the safety risk of some of those people not wearing a helmet.

Infrastructure and keeping people separate from cars is more important, but mandatory helmet laws are a net detriment to public health.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

This is the agreement in question. Just to repost the link to it for anyone who may not have already seen it.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

It’s unclear to me whether or not Airbus sells to Israel (I couldn’t find that information), but they are also a weapons manufacturer.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

They instead should take a State-like approach

They did take a State-like approach.

The Australian Government supports Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. The ABC supports Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. State-like.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Fwiw I think there’s probably nothing especially good or bad about Montessori at a daycare level. I’d just say avoid it once he’s actually in school!

But damn, that sucks with the cost and not getting subsidies.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Even saying “Australians are racist” doesn’t mean you are claiming every single Australian is racist. A bit like “toxic masculinity” isn’t implying that every single man is toxic

I agree with your conclusion, but don’t like this analogy. The phrase “toxic masculinity” in itself identifies the fact that not all masculinity is toxic. “Toxic” identifies which strict subset of masculine behaviours are being referred to, because if all masculinity were toxic, there’d be no need to say “toxic” masculinity.

Whereas from a purely syntactical perspective, the phrase “Australians are racist” does seem to imply all Australians are racist, even if what’s actually meant is that “the collective behaviour of the society made up of Australians is a racist one”.

A better analogy might be ACAB, which certainly seems as though it’s saying each and every individual cop is a bastard, even though that’s not what it means.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Probably made by a non-native English speaker. Prepositions are so unique to each language and oftentimes seemingly randomly chosen (is that à, de, sur, or no preposition at all, French?). If you roughly know a one-to-one translation of the prepositions from your language into English, you can often get it wrong just like this.

Zagorath, 8 days ago

It’s definitely not an “excuse”, but I don’t think I’d say English is any worse than French in this regard. Just the examples you gave, they’re all “go to a country”*, but we’ve got “en”, “à”, and “à la” (with conjugations). They’re as bad as each other.

• New York obviously not a country, but its preposition is a duplicate of Cuba anyway, so doesn’t change the point being made.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

I still to this day don’t know how it worked, but I remember back when I would pirate games and often there would be like 20 different compressed archives, but somehow you only need to decompress one of them and the game would install. Was like magic.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Opening somthing.rar also reads the data in somthing.r01 through somthing.r15 etc

Oh so it’s just kinda a part of the rar specification then? How did that work on CDs or floppies, if presumably you’d have had to swap out to insert the next part?

Zagorath, 9 days ago

So the first file acts as a sort of index? From the earlier comment I thought it was autodetecting the presence of the numbered files and expanding what it found.

Zagorath, 9 days ago

Almost every argument for fantasy-type settings where “that character wouldn’t be black/is described as X” but honestly if it doesn’t affect the story

What shits me is that this so often happens with adaptations, and when the adaptation that did this ends up terrible they end up claiming it’s proof they were right all along. As though the inclusion of a minority character is somehow the cause of terrible writing, set/prop/costume design, effects, acting (including from the cishet white actors), and direction. No, it couldn’t possibly be because most adaptations are terrible regardless, it must be tHe gAYs.