Zagorath

Zagorath, 3 days ago

!nottheonion

Zagorath, 3 days ago

chock it up

Chalk it up?

Zagorath, 3 days ago

Neither of the above. The question mark indicates a rising tone (common in informal speech), as a way to reduce intensity and specifically not be a dick about it. It’s a polite and friendly way of letting you know you made a fairly easy-to-understand mistake (it’s basically a mondegreen), and what the correct phrase is.

Zagorath, 3 days ago

I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.

I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I’m fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced “oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player” premise.

But the main problem I had was mechanical. It’s just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It’s so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game’s engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don’t even get me started about ladders.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.

Zagorath, 3 days ago

I’m not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title…) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).

I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.

Zagorath, 3 days ago

Yes, of course there do.

Some smaller companies are run by people still in touch with humanity.

Some bigger companies might see the writing on the wall and pre-empt the vote as a tactic to gain public goodwill.

Zagorath, 3 days ago

I genuinely think the alignment problem is a really interesting philosophical question worthy of study.

It’s just not a very practically useful one when real-world AI is so very, very far from any meaningful AGI.

Zagorath, 4 days ago

Honestly it seems to just be the artist’s style.

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/44f45a9f-73b3-4be8-a166-c6ffb74c2638.png

Sounds like she’s just having a hissy fit.

Zagorath, 4 days ago

Telling a mod of the community you’re in to “blow me”? Brave move.

Zagorath, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Debugging spells isn’t like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.

But most wizards just go with the ol’ “add print statements everywhere” method of debugging.

Zagorath, 4 days ago

The Last Agni Kai > Aang v Ozai, CMV.

Zagorath, 4 days ago

or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

English borrowed a shit tonne from Latin & Romance languages, but it is at its core a Germanic language.

To make a joke that still sticks with the facts, maybe something like “wannabe Latin”, or “that shitty Romeaboo language”.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

I’m not sure if it would be actionable at all, or how to go about it, but those comments really feel to me like they ought to be referred to the Office of the Independant Assessor.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

Except they won an overwhelming victory at the Brisbane Council election, and they’re predicted to win the upcoming State election pretty handily.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

I don’t know what he’s cooking, but I can smell my flatmate’s dinner from my room. Dunno what it actually is, but the smell is like really good popcorn, and now I’m craving popcorn with extra butter and salt.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

it’s better in my opinion to keep a fucked up secret then have 10 men die

wtaf

Zagorath, 5 days ago

the journo doesn’t have clearance

The journo literally doesn’t need to have clearance. That’s why we have whistleblower protection laws.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

I dunno about other universities, but I’d say the UQ protests actually are focused on something they have more ability to change than McBride’s conviction. Boeing has a very cosy relationship with UQ, and their core demand is to end that partnership and stop their own university being complicit in genocide by association.

A UQ student has more ability to change what corporations UQ partners with than they do to change court decisions made in Canberra.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

I honestly don’t even know how to respond to someone saying they would rather have 10 people die because of keeping a fucked up secret than have an open and honest society. Like seriously that’s just beyond the pale.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

getting UQ to dissociate with Boeing is hardly likely to actually achieve anything in the context of war

Absolutely fair. But it’s the one thing UQ students have the most ability to affect, and if Boeing and other weapons manufacturers lost their associations with every research institution because of similar protests, that would have a much more sizeable impact.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

Ok, but that’s not what your earlier comment said. It’s quite the opposite of your earlier comment.

Anyway, even if we do take it that way, as others have said, it just doesn’t work that way. Keeping these secrets is enabling more deaths to occur. The “fucked up secret” was “people are getting away with murdering noncombatants and prisoners and covering it up”. By revealing this “fucked up secret”, McBride was helping to save lives.

Ironically, this is kinda what you seemed to be acknowledging in your earlier comment. You said that keeping the secret leads to deaths (“keep a fucked up secret then have 10 men die”).

Zagorath, 4 days ago

Pls just remaster Battle for Middle-Earth II and put it on sale on modern platforms with modern multiplayer. That’s literally all I want.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

Oh damn yeah. I was comparing YouTube Premium in countries like Australia (US$11.07/month), US ($13.99), and UK ($16.41). If you’re somewhere that it costs a tenth of that, it definitely changes the calculus.

Zagorath, 5 days ago

It does? It seems completely obvious to me. Buses are like cars, but bigger. Cars have huge numbers of complex parts that need to be maintained, but the most obvious one is tyres. Rubber tyres wear out, and on heavier vehicles they wear out faster. Fossil fuel–powered buses additionally have very complex engines and transmissions which require significant amounts of maintenance for which there is simply no equivalent on trains. Electric buses perform better in this capacity, at the cost of being heavier and thus putting more wear on their tyres. Because of their maintenance needs, you’ll need to over-purchase buses in order to have the required number running while others are off the road for maintenance.

There’s also the secondary effect that buses do a lot of damage to roads, being both heavier and more frequently accelerating & decelerating at the same locations than single-occupancy cars, and thus you end up needing to spend more money on road resurfacing. And again, EVs end up worse in this regard than petrol, diesel, or natural gas vehicles.

Trains are steel on steel. They wear out shockingly little. Their electric motors require less maintenance than ICE engines. And the vehicles themselves last a lot longer due to this simplicity, so you can buy trains now and keep using them for far longer than you can keep using a bus you buy now. I’m not clear on the lifespan of electric buses, except that at a minimum the battery will need to be replaced much more regularly than a train would need replacing.