Zagorath

Zagorath, 7 months ago

Sorry I don’t get the reference here.

Zagorath, 7 months 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, 7 months 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, 7 months 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, 7 months 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, 7 months 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, 8 months 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, 8 months ago

I can’t speak for others, but I still seem to be experiencing issues with federation. I’ve got a comment in here that isn’t showing up on other instances.

Zagorath, 8 months 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, 8 months 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, 9 months ago

humans are better at vision at the moment

Eh, humans are better at certain kinds of vision—particularly on tasks that deal with non-white people where the AI was trained mostly on white people.

But things where the vision is looking at very fine detail, AI is very good at. Like determining if a patient has a disease based on a retinal scan or other medical imagery.

And I think it’s fair to say that, at least superficially, the problem in this thread seems like it might be more similar to those medical cases where an AI could do a really good job. The problem is that actually, no. There’s no known marker that could determine age with the level of accuracy that would be required for this task.

Zagorath, 9 months ago

Because my app shows it to me and I wanted to understand.

Zagorath, 9 months ago

Responding to your deleted comment, I’m genuinely not sure how Jar Jar’s role in the downfall of the Republic in Episode 3 is the joke being made by this comment. Sorry.

Zagorath, 9 months ago

There’s nothing limiting what a comment should be as far as I know.

Nothing technical, sure. Just good coding practices.

Zagorath, 9 months ago

Is the Greek question mark a legal identifier for variable names?

Zagorath, 9 months ago

It’s always weird to talk about indexes. Is the “first” element the one with index 0, or with index 1? You can make a good case for both.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

Huh, that’s very interesting. I’m genuinely curious to know what it was that you didn’t like about it.

Because the truth is that you’re seemingly in the extreme minority. While 2013’s HD edition seemed to split the community and received a bit of a mixed reaction, since 2019’s DE has been an unmitigated success in terms of both finances for the devs, and in terms of unifying and growing the size of the community.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

Yeah fair enough. That sort of thing is definitely subjective and it would be impossible for anyone to say you’re wrong.

Personally, I find the new QOL features impossible to live without now. Shift-queueing absolutely any task, being able to queue multiple techs or techs and units, villagers keeping one resource until they actually start gathering—rather than losing all the gold they’re carrying just because you accidentally clicked a tree—farm autoreseeding. To me, none of these really change the fundamental way the game feels, they just make it feel like a smoother, more polished version of the original game.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

Yeah that’s not great. To be honest for the most part I really like it. Most of the stuff you unlock is pure cosmetics (profile pictures or alternate looks for units—which only display as different for you, not your opponent). They’re just some good fun, and I find my completionist nature enjoys jumping into the game to get them.

But there have been a few of the things unlocked as part of the challenges—that 256x mod is one of them, and there have also been a couple of cheat codes more recently—that did feel like more substantial things to miss out on if you happened not to be able to play while they were on offer. I wasn’t playing when the 256x mod was around, but when the cheat codes first appeared I recall thinking it was pretty disappointing for anyone who might have wanted them that would miss out for whatever reason.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

so you’re saying that every political faction “denies genocide and defends aggressive warmongering”?

No. Leftists who aren’t tankies don’t.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

I’m a leftist who isn’t a tankie

To be clear. If you call yourself a leftist, and you pretend China isn’t committing genocide, that makes you a tanky. That’s what tankies are: people who claim to be leftists who support violent authoritarian regimes.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

claims are basically an astroturfed campaign by an evangelical christo-fascist named Adrian Zenz.

Yes, because Zenz is definitely the only reason anyone knows about the genocide. There totally aren’t actual Uyghurs who have told their own stories or anything like that.

that’s the hardest part for a lot of Americans since you’re

Nice try, but nope. I haven’t exactly been subtle either. Actually wait, not even nice try, because the correct answer is literally my instance.

Yeah, US imperialism, and western imperialism more broadly, is bad. That isn’t relevant here though, because we’re talking about a genocide China is committing against a minority population within their own borders.

(You could maybe have made something at least appearing to be a valid argument about imperialism if we were instead talking about Russia’s unprovoked aggression against another country, which I know tankies also like to defend. But that’s not where we’re at right now.)

If you call yourself a leftist, try reflecting a bit on what that actually means to you. Because to me, it means desiring equality and opposing social hierarchy. And restricting people’s ability to express their culture; stealing children away from their parents, preventing people from leaving your country to reconnect with their relatives. These are all very much not in line with leftist ideals. Defending a country that calls itself communist just because that’s in its name, without reflecting on how well they actually live up to those values, is pretty poor leftism in my view.

Zagorath, 10 months ago

You’ve already proven not to be interested in accepting evidence. So what more value is there in trying to provide any?

Zagorath, 10 months ago

What evidence would you accept? Because you act as though you’ve already convinced yourself it’s not real and wouldn’t accept any evidence to the contrary. What, precisely, would convince you that you’re wrong, if firsthand accounts aren’t good enough?

Zagorath, 10 months ago

Thus I do not accept claims about “genocide” committed by the US’ main rival without good evidence

It’s very easy to say this, because it means you can just reject any evidence to the contrary as “not good” or “biased”.

Separating children from their parents. Raising them to be assimilated with the majority culture. Clamping down on their expression of their culture. These are all acts of genocide.

The most untrustworthy source here is the Chinese government themselves. Any report from a country should be treated with scepticism, but none more so than when that country clamps down on the free press.

We have so many reports out of Xinjiang. Leaks from people in the province itself. Reports from the family of people there. Evidence inferred from satellite imagery and what information is publicly available from the Chinese government. There’s just no denying it. You can choose to pretend China’s doing nothing wrong if you like. I hope you sleep well, knowing you’re defending genocide.