AnarchistArtificer @ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

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1,199

Joined

2 yr. ago

Oh God, that's horrifying. Thanks for highlighting this.

if this leads to incarcerated people coming to harm, I know that there will be people who will say that was a good thing and that makes me feel sick. As someone who has been a victim of violent crime, I thought that the perpetrator receiving a prison sentence would help me to heal from the trauma. I was wrong, and increasingly I understand that there is no justice to be found through retributive punishment, just more injustices heaped onto people.

There's a reason one of the difficulties is story only.

That is something I appreciated about the game, it makes it clear that lower difficulties are valid ways to pay the game

Oh yeah, I really wish I had played on a higher difficulty for this reason. Especially because one of the most immersive and thematically cool parts of the game for me was the main story section near the end of act 1 where you have to make a blade oil to fight a >!werewolf!< . (Vague wording to minimise spoilers in my main comment.) I really liked this because it made me reflect on what it means to be a Witcher — how the knowledge might be more important than the mutations and the magic.

An additional point to the prepping is that being open-world means that you can potentially go to areas or take on challenges far beyond the "intended" level. On lower difficulties, I didn't feel sufficiently punished for being audacious in that way, and I think the potential for punishment is part of the fun of the audacity. Especially when getting destroyed like this isn't the game "fuck you for even trying", but rather a "try exploring some more, find some new recipes and come back later (or just read the bestiary and find out that you already have the item you need)"

I think it's for ads. I first discovered this watching "Interview with the Vampire". In the UK, it's available on BBC iPlayer, but that version runs faster than the pirated version. I didn't notice until we took a break from watching and notice we were out of sync. I decided to test it by playing the pirated version at the exact same time as the BBC version. It was uncanny to hear them start out synced but gradually diverge.

The BBC iPlayer version doesn't have ads, but when playing on live TV it does have ads, so I assume that's why.

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I'm a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like "is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?". My answer is "Yes."

Eh, there's a reason that Mildly infuriating exists as a community — sometimes the best way to exorcise one's aggravation is to give space to the annoyance by sharing it with other persnickety people.

That's actually helpful, thanks

I don't think I've personally played any games with that, but I think it can be a problem? I get the sense that it may vary game by game, but as I say, I have no direct experience or knowledge

I read a thing recently that insurance companies are getting increasingly skittish all over the country, even places that wouldn't traditionally be considered risky, because yay, climate change.

The interesting thing about it was that insurance companies' insurance is increasingly the thing that's causing issues, because it's getting harder for the risk to be spread out. That is to say that insurance companies financially rely on areas with low rates of natural disasters because they end up being a net positive due to insurance premiums and no need for payout. Fewer of these "safe" areas mean the insurance companies struggle to stay solvent and have to rely on their own insurance policies to have their back, but those meta-insurance companies have apparently been historically loud about climate change — probably because besides the government, they're the ones who have to pony up

Oh shit, those numbers are feet, not inches. That took me a moment. Fuuuuuck.

That is so incredibly fuuuuuuucked

Good luck to you and your family. I don't know anyone in Florida, so I will be thinking of you as a proxy for all the people I am concerned for in the potential path of this hurricane.

I like the furry community because they respect artists. I'm neither furry nor artist, but I have multiple friends who have a home because commissions from furries gave them a more stable income than their day job

I don't know how gaming on Mac works, but since I switched my home rig to Linux a couple of years ago, I have not once had a problem with installing a new game that doesn't have native Linux support^[1]. I wonder whether developers have learned that they can rely on Proton for their Linux support (for better or worse).

[1]: there was a point when Baldur's Gate 3 stopped working after a big update, but I fixed it by switching to Proton-GE, a forked version of Proton. https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

I have seen it in a few instances where the baby changing facilities were only in the women's bathroom, and a father needed to access them. I wish that bathroom discourse could involve structural inequities like this, but the bigots are overly concerned about what is in people's pants

Tangentially related: I really enjoyed the EULA of Baldur's Gate 3:

Step 1: someone says trans people are bad and wrong (subtext: and therefore we should do something about it)

"Oh, but I'm just expressing my opinion. What's wrong with that? Am I not allowed to have opinions anymore? Surely you are the actually intolerant one, because I only implied that I don't think trans people should exist by saying they are bad and wrong"

It's frustrating because subtext does exist and matter. They only acknowledge the subtext in their bigoted assertions when it's convenient for them.

Edit: accidentally a word

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer's researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It's grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a "non-scientist" forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can't remember it).

Yay learning

Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I've never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it's because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.