Zagorath

Zagorath, 1 year ago

I just don’t think that usual linguistic rules should apply to a thing that a guy literally invented and named.

The person who invented it gets to name it.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Out of interest, how do you pronounce “sudo” (the command) and “lib” (the directory)?

Zagorath, 1 year ago

That’s less than 2 years.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Everything And Fast Castle?

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Just some extra detail that I think you might have been missing about the German electoral system. #1 spot doesn’t refer to the leader of the party as this comment sort of seems to imply.

Germany uses a voting system called Mixed-Member Proportional. In it, you vote for your local candidate exactly the same as you would in America or the UK—using first past the post. But then you also vote for your favourite party. And there are additional seats in the Bundestag (congress) that are not tied to a particular region, but are instead used to “top up” the total of the Bundestag so that its party representation is proportional to the wishes of the voters. So if 10% of voters want the Greens and 20% want SPD, then 20% of the seats will be SPD and 10% will be Greens. If a party wins more seats in local elections than it is owed proportionally, it gets no additional people. If it wins fewer local elections than its national party vote percentage, it gets topped up using its party list. The #1 spot on that list will be the first person elected under this system, unless they also won their local race, in which case it goes to #2 instead, etc.

MMP is a really good electoral system, and honestly it’s probably the one I would advocate for and would encourage Americans and Brits to advocate for in their respective countries. Though I would replace the party lists entirely with a “nearest loser” to eliminate the problem @LwL describes. I’d also prefer IRV be used for the local part of the election, though that might be overly complicating it for some. Having those proportional top-ups means third parties not just can earn a place (which is what IRV by itself does), it actually guarantees that they will earn a place, if any sizeable number of people want them to. No more Nader ruining it for Gore; instead, Nader’s party will actually have representatives elected.

So looking back at the example they described about Germany, if we ignore local seats for the sake of simplicity, if the Greens are owed 1 seat, that seat will always be a woman. If they’re owed 2 seats, they’ll have a woman and a man. Owed 3 seats and they’ll have two women and a man. Etc.

Hope that helps.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

How did the AI decide to ignore the skirt that literally every real hovercraft (and therefore, one would presume, source image of a hovercraft) has to trap the air below it?

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Sorry I don’t get the reference here.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

based on those three notes.

We don’t even know what those three notes are. Is it a treble clef? Bass clef? Tenor clef‽

Zagorath, 1 year ago

old people like me

The person who sends me far more TikTok videos than anyone else is my boomer dad.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

The Khmer were the best thing to ever happen to Tristan.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Yeah that’s my theory. I think the workers were busy catching up on the whole backlog of all the comments and posts that had built up over the ~3 week period it wasn’t working.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Why is a mortar round on a stick though? Wouldn’t a mortar round normally just be the “head” of this hammer?

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Man I hate this new dynamic and insertion bs. For 15 years all the podcasts I listened to had host-read ads. And in most cases, I had enormous trust in the podcaster to choose companies that he was willing to stand behind. I’ve used products I first heard about on a host-read podcast as before, and never regretted it.

But in the last 12 months I’ve been getting dynamically inserted ads a lot more. Partly because those older podcasts are using them to supplement income as advertisers are less willing to buy host-read ads than they once were (a lack of data and targeting when buying a podcast ad spot is the biggest factor, but also laziness on the part of marketing managers because host-read ads need to be negotiated and bought individually, rather than making single big buys in automated insertion systems), but mostly because I’ve started listening to a few newer podcasts that weren’t around in the heyday of podcasting.

And it really sucks. More and more it’s feeling like the podcasting industry is being enshittified, not even because of the desires of podcasters themselves, but thanks to advertisers hating the idea that podcast ads were more like TV ads than internet banner ads/YouTube preroll video ads, and thanks to big businesses like Spotify coming into the audio content market. (N.B., it’s very important to remember that what Spotify does is not podcasting. By definition if it’s delivered via a proprietary service rather than the open RSS standard, it is not podcasting.)

Zagorath, 1 year ago

There is a 0% chance that AI can accurately determine if someone is 18 or not, even with hypothetical futuristic AI technology. Some 20-year-olds look very young. Some 16-year-olds look shockingly old. And nobody changes very significantly between the day of their 18th birthday and the day they were 17 years, 364 days.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

it was honestly a highlight of the voyage

Bruh if getting politely corrected on social media is the highlight of your holiday, you gotta find a better type of holiday.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

No it’s not. Speed is a very significant element of road safety. At lower speeds, you can stop in a much shorter distance, and if you hit someone their chance of death or serious injury goes way down. Braking distance is proportional to the square of velocity, and reaction distance is directly proportional. If hit at 50 km/h, a pedestrian has a 90% chance of death. At 30 km/h, they have a 90% chance of survival.

At lower speeds, you’re also far more likely to notice something that might require you to stop or slow. Your cone of vision at 60 km/h is 40°. At 80 it’s 30°, and at 100 km/h it’s 20°. A different source I found says under 50 km/h it’s 104° and at 65 it’s 70°. Whatever the specifics, lower speeds are much safer.

This isn’t to say that speed cameras are the best or should be the only method used to ensure road safety. Narrowing roads, adding furniture by the roadside, and increasing the complexity of the route, are all good ways to reinforce a lower speed limit by reducing how safe drivers feel driving at high speed. But speed cameras are a useful supplement to that, for those drivers determined to be irresponsible.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Making winding roads slows down traffic but increases the amount of time it takes to cover a given distance

You don’t do this everywhere. You do it where you want traffic speeds to be low. Residential streets, school zones, shopping precincts, and the like.

Plus, you further aid pedestrians and cyclists by having these residential streets not be through-traffic, except to pedestrians and cyclists. Use “modal filters”.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

I’m a big fan of NJB (shout out to !notjustbikes), but I’m not going to argue against speed cameras. That’s ridiculous. Yes, if I have to choose one or the other I’ll take the better road design. But even with good road design, some people will choose to be dicks because they can, or they see it as a challenge or some shit. And speed cameras can be implemented right now, whereas better road design waits (even in the Netherlands!) until that street is next due for repaving.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

I mean it sincerely. It sounds like the cruise itself wasn’t super enjoyable to you. Which is totally fine. Maybe you’d enjoy going on a guided tour, or self-guiding yourself around another country or region. Or maybe you’d get maximal enjoyment out of just spending a week at the beach. Different people have different sorts of ideal holidays, but if a mediocre social media interaction was the highlight of your cruise, I’d be inclined to think cruises might not be yours.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Did you also recently watch the recent Bright Sun Films video about Nickelodeon Studios?

Zagorath, 1 year ago

I didn’t even know Nickelodeon was around in '92. I always thought of them as being very much a '00s channel, maybe founded in the mid-to-late '90s.

Amazing that they were not only around, but old enough to feel it made sense to do a time capsule then.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

So does uBlock Origin, even while logged in.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

Yeah, as far as I can tell it’s normal in America to say 615 as “six hundred fifteen”, whereas the rest of the anglosphere would say “six hundred and fifteen”.

The fact that the line break happened to be right where the word “and” was missing probably made it even harder to parse correctly.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

The lack of the word “and” in the number there made this parse really weirdly in my brain.

Instead of “I play with 615 giraffes”, I read it as “I play with 600 15-giraffes”. I don’t know what a 15-giraffe is, but it sounds like it might be an unstable isotope or something.

Zagorath, 1 year ago

I’ve heard it said that the average Englishman and the average Indian are more genetically similar than two random Englishmen, too.

In other words, if that’s true, there are some general trends in genetic differences between “races”, those trends are, overall, far smaller and less significant than the random differences that pop up by chance within a single race.