BananaTrifleViolin @ BananaTrifleViolin @kbin.social

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The articles take is still out of kilter with a lot of opinions. He's focused on the empty procedurally generated content but then talks about how "phenomenal" the main quest is?

The main quest is ok. I wouldn't say it's "phenomenal". I'm not seeing the depth of gameplay and writing that I saw in Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. Starfield is not a bad game, but it's also not phenomenal. It's ok. I'm more excited by the next CD Projekt Red or Larian game than I am about the next Bethesda game at this point.

Yeah this is dodgy. Basically he's saying "we cannot say something but we'll say it anyway,". You only need 1 confounding factor or 1 incorrect adjustment to completely break the validity of any link.

To say the link got stronger as they adjusted for different confounding factors doesn't mean anything. It's a specious argument.

I find the logic behind this uncomfortable. This may help people try rationalise issues in the US or other colonialised regions but it's actually a fairly absolutionist view of the issue - the chain dismisses any argument or discussion about what it means to be indigenous vs a settler as invalid.

At first glance that may not seem to be a big issue but lets invert this for a moment: I'm a white person living in Europe; does this stuff apply to me too? This absolutionist view is problematic - it'd also excuse the anti-immigration rhetoric of white nationalists in my continent. I'm an "indigenous" person in my country but I would not argue in favour of this chain or logic.

I can understand the motive - a deep sense of injustice and dismissal of one group by another "majority" group. But this is not the solution - this just stifles discussion and frames any discussion as if there is no valid opinion that does not conform to one narrative.

Indigenous vs colonial/settler/immigrant issues are not simple, they cannot be reduced or distilled in such an absolutionist way. You do not solve injustice or right the wrongs of the past by replacing it with a new type of injustice.

Normally the vice president wouldn't get this kind of attention. She's getting this attention because Biden is so old, and he is standing again for election. Vice President is a bizarre non-job in the US system but also very important because of its potential.

Kamala Harris is being attacked because there is a serious chance she will be President.

On the one hand she is being attacked and undermined because she's a woman and she's black. But on the other hand it is an election and it's right to think about the vice president, and particularly one who may actually be President.

More likely a teleprompter. The main screen is upside down but it's reflected on glass you're supposed to read from.

Still a bit amateurish for a long established politician he's never used a teleprompter before?

Read the text they wrote in the newsletter (I've posted is in this thread) and make up your own mind. Bear in mind this was not sent as private email expressing her views; they wrote it for (and published it in) the weekly Student Bar Association newsletter and signed it as SBA President.

I doubt the NYU Law Student Bar Association is a political organisation.

It is what was actually written and the context that matters in this story, both of which are largely missing from the theintercept.com coverage. The reaction was for them to lose their position as SBA President and have a job offer rescinded.

EDIT: To be clear I don't see how freedom or democracy has been curtailed here. People are free to say and do what they want, but actions have consequences. The SBA membership is entitled to remove their student president and the law firm is entitled to rescind a job offer.

Yeah this is exactly right; an inability to separate their own political stance from their professional role. For the law firm, there is also a lack of insight and common sense around wading into such a controversial and difficult issue in such a way.

This is the text from their newsletter:

Hi y'all.

This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance. Instead…

I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison. I condemn the violence of collective punishment. I condemn the violence of phosphorous bombs. I condemn the violence of the United States military-industrial complex. I condemn the violence of obfuscating genocide as a "complex issue.” I condemn the violence in labeling oppressed people as "animals." I condemn the violence in removing historical context. I condemn the violence of silence.

Palestine will be free.

Your SBA President,
Ryna

This was in the NYU LAW Student Bar Association's SBA Weekly newsletter.

They made a mistake in removing SMS support - that was a good way to become useful to people with the current paradigm and encourage them over to the new. Sometimes Signals decisions are self destructive.

I still have signal but I use it much less since it stopped SMS support; I just open it less and so when starting conversations default to WhatsApp. For a while signal was growing amongst my friends and colleagues but it appears to have stalled.

Google are now doing the same pushing their RCS in the default SMS app in Android.

I think they want to be vendor neutral to reap the benefits regardless of where people bought the game (i.e. not be limited to steam workshop)

I'm more bothered by the Mods being for Console and PC. I worry that PC modding is going to be held back by the inherent limitations of modding on and for consoles.

Or was this the first example of gurilla paid advertisement in the comments section? "How do I advertise my dental practice? I know I'll pretend I was disturbed by a telegram and they shall print my complaint! And it shall goeth viraleth"

Not sure exactly what you meant about the fonts but I do routinely install the Microsoft Fonts from my Linux repo whatever system I'm on. It used to be very important when browsing the net as Arial and Times New Roman were ubiquitous. That is less true now, and many sites use their own fonts.

But in office Times New Roman and Arial are still there. Microsoft has moved to newer fonts now like Calibri and Cambrea but this is proprietary. You could try and get your hands on copies of these (relatively easy if you already have windows).

When creating documents you can embed the fonts you used in Libre Office in it to ensure if you send it to someone else it renders as you intended. When you open someone else's documents you can see what fonts were used and try and install those or ask libre office to substitute fonts you do have for the missing ones. A metric font is a font with the exact same size of characters in terms of character width and height (even if it looks different) - this preserves the layout so if you're missing a font and have a metric equivalent you can subsitute that font and the document layout should then be preserved.

For Calibri there is a freely licensed Google metric alternative called Carlito. I believe that usually comes with Libre Office but double check. Also Cambria is another common Microsoft font with a free metric equivalent called Caladea that should come with Libre office.

The Liberation fonts commonly found on Linux and Libre office are metric equivalents of the Times New Roman, Arial and Courier fonts if you want to avoid Microsoft proprietary fonts all together.

Finally if you are sending documents to be read and not edited or just to print at another location, then save/export them as PDFs. PDFs will look the same on any device and OS and will print the same from anywhere.

Lastly I would suggest you use a sync service to keep your documents and keep your school docs in folders that sync. Something like DropBox. Microsoft Office uses OneDrive and it is fully integrated which was a game changer when it comes to accessing documents from anywhere but you can do the same with DropBox and Libre Office on other devices to ensure you can get your documents wherever you are and edit them in whatever is available (e.g. a school PC if you don't have your laptop to hand or your mobile device). Lots you can do with synced documents but you don't need Microsoft to do it.

In Australian slang a mob can just mean any grouping of people, not necessarily a criminal group or a group of rioters. It's not uncommon for people to refer to their own ethnic or political grouping as a mob; at least from what I've seen when reading Australian websites.

And by local government I think they are referring to the states and territories governments.

Yeah as someone outside Australia I've been surprised at how biased and simplified the reporting has been. A complex constitutional issue is being painted as a simple "good people, bad people".

When I read about the changes myself (after having to go hunting for some actual detail - the reporting is pretty poor on this) it honestly seems more like virtue signalling rather than useful or meaningful reform.

I think this is the real problem with the gaming industry. Development studios are treated as if they're sources of IP when in fact it's more about the people working for them.

A good dev team is the people who made the games. A team gets bought out by a big publishing giant and it seems they inevitably lose the people who made them great.

That's not to say big publsiher owned studios can't make great games but I'd argue the best games are coming from the indy studies whether that by one man bands like ConcernedApe or big independent studios like CD Projekt Red.

Also CD Projekt Red was highly motivated to fix Cyberpunk as it's a smaller studio, and pretty much their entire future business needed it to be fixed and work. They need and want to make more Cyberpunk games. Microsoft has zero motivation to fix Redfall - it was a commercial failure in a big coroportation; they will just dump it and move on but also be more averse to trying to make new IP.

This is a link aggregator website and he's posting links, I don't understand the issue? The links are to legitimate news sites.

Everyone has a selection bias in what they post, but maybe you need to think about your own biases of you find it so offensive?

As for this specific link, it's a legitimate news source and this is an actual news story which has not happened in isolation. There are multiple news stories about the social media claim and that Biden seems to have confirmed them just now seems to be walking back from that claim.

Part of it comes down to trust. I just don't trust Brave Inc long term - it may well be a private browser now but I don't trust that in to the future. I don't trust a company that Peter Thiel invests in. I don't trust a company that has already been shady and caught redirecting traffic secretly for referrer codes. But I also don't trust Google or Microsoft either.

I trust Firefox and Mozilla. I don't like that they are dependent on Google revenue but I trust that they're open and transparent about what they do, and not motivated or compromised by a desire to maximise profits for their venture capitalist investors.

So the way evolution works, the design we have works well enough that it doesn't cause problems. It might be the best possible design or it might not, all that mattered is that whenever it arose in evolutionary history it was either an advantage over what camebefore in terms of survival so propagated or it was not detrimental and paired with something else genetically that propagated.

We can't definitively answer your question but we can speculate on why it's a good idea to separate urine and faecal matter. Urine is a reasonable medium for growing bacteria. That wouldn't matter in the colon but would matter if bacteria from the colon could ascend into the kidneys and diarupt it's function. Valves could help or a bladder that drains into the colon, but complete separation may just be better.

It may also be that the acidic nature of urine would disrupt the helpful bacteria we rely on to colonise our guts to help digest foods.

Another possibility is the constant flow of urine would mean our faecal matter would never dry out. It'd be like having diarrhoea all the time and we'd need to poop constantly. The colon retrieves enough water - but not all water - that's why poop isn't hard as rock. If it was flooded with fluid it may not need to retrieve fluid.

The fluid might even be stuck in a cycle between the colon and the kidneys and make it harder for the body to keep homeostasis - as the kidneys excrete more fluid to try and regulate fluid volume the the colon could just resorb it. Basically the colon could end up working against the kidneys and cause even more work for thenl body. It may just be less efficient than discarding water as needed.

Drier faecal matter in the colon and a reservoir of fluid in the bladder does also give us freedom to release when it is safe to do so, which may protect us from predators (having to stop to poop even a few times a day is dangerous compared to only going when you know it's safe to as there are more opportunities to be attacked by a predator). It would also be very easy to track an animal that leaves a constant trail of poop and urine uncontrollably behind it.

All or none of these may be reasons why we have separate urinary and alimentary tracts; it's impossible to know and would always be speculation. But regardless these do seem like reasonable reasons why we may have separate tracts.

The film and book share themes but are quite different.

In the film, people live in one city and believe the outside is poisonous. The plot is very different including how people die, why, what happens to runners, what sanctuary is and the ending. Despite the significant differences from the book, it's a good film and worth watching in it's own right.

What was your dream about windows?

I agree but I think ultimately this shows how broken the US electoral system is.

The two parties have such control over the electoral apperatus that no other party can conceivably get a look in. Instead the two parties have broken down to form parties within parties but the overall bi-partisan set up makes it so unstable

Effectively the MAGA republicans get disproportionate power - 8 representatives can cause chaos because the republican party cannot do anything but work with them.

The debate is always about Republicans or Democrats when it really should be about electoral reform to break the duopoly. A dose of proportional representation even at local and state levels would be a huge step in the right direction in breaking the hold the two big parties have over the US.