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Zagorath

@Zagorath@aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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

Zagorath,
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Most of the articles I’ve seen have been making the same mistake I was trying to correct.

Zagorath,
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I can’t see your posts from Hexbear, by the way

Yeah looks like Hexbear is having some serious federation issues. If you’re normally a Hexbear user, you might want to contact the admins about it and see if they can fix it. Happened to my instance a couple of weeks ago too. Something about other instances accidentally being marked as dead.

Zagorath,
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Fwiw the word you were looking for was “endonym”, as opposed to the exonym of Georgia.

Zagorath,
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Yes, but to know what is your left, one first needs to establish what is their forward. If you were previously on your front (which is itself not an uncommon sleeping position), “turn to face left” will put them lying on their right side.

This stuff really isn’t rocket science. I’m genuinely surprised to be getting push back here. If the goal is to tell people to lay on their left side, that’s what should be said. Not “facing left”, which doesn’t convey the same meaning.

Zagorath,
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Sorry I don’t get the reference here.

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

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

Nothing technical, sure. Just good coding practices.

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

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

Zagorath,
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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.

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

Zagorath,
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Intentional.

Zagorath,
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Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery. A documentary by Defunctland about the previously unknown composer of the Disney Channel’s signature theme.

Zagorath,
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Ooh, Defunctland was also the creator of my choice. But I went with Disney Channel’s Theme.

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