Blake [he/him] @ Blake @feddit.uk

Posts

3

Comments

704

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yep, I hate this. I’ve avoided “loyalty” cards all my life because I’m not interested in giving valuable data to corporations that I already hate away for a tuppence. But now that they’re doubling prices on stuff unless you use the loyalty cards there’s not a huge amount you can do. What I’m doing at the moment is avoiding those shops that do this as much as I can, and when I do go there, a bunch of friends and all use one of our elderly mum’s loyalty cards, with the hopes of making their data just complete nonsense. That little old lady is sometimes vegan, sometimes not, she buys condoms, men and women’s hygiene products, various different brands of pretty much everything, she’s truly living life to its fullest!

Where I live, there are like 5 Tesco stores and just one other major supermarket. Definitely some corruption in the local council going on.

To give her the benefit of the doubt, (which you shouldn’t - I am a trained pedantry professional, please do not try this at home!) you could imagine that she saw a particularly young looking 14 year old learning to put a condom onto a dildo and being very bad at estimating the ages of kids, thought they were 8, and also misinterpreted the lesson as being about how to use sex toys rather than about safe sex.

Of course, I know fine well that this isn’t what happened. This woman is just spreading anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and it’s also very possible that she’s projecting. Even if she isn’t a pedophile, she is still a danger to kids, especially LGBTQ+ kids.

I’m probably exaggerating about the number, I have no idea how many times I got banned - it was for reporting some power-tripping mod post that had comments disabled and telling them what I thought of them. I guess they reported me to the admins for report abuse, then I was getting a notification every second that I was banned from Reddit for about 5-10 minutes. More than anything I just found it amusing and created a new account.

I don’t comment or post on Reddit anymore. Occasionally, I’ll check some niche subreddits, and if there’s someone I can help, I’ll reply to them personally - I’m subscribed to a few small-ish disability-related subreddits, so I feel a bit bad about abandoning those people or trying to get them to move to another community since they’ve already got enough to deal with, so I think what I do is a good compromise.

So what you’re talking about isn’t really globalism, but technological supremacy? Globalism is just about supply chains being spread across the globe. When I pointed out that nations connected with large supply chains still got invaded you moved the goalposts to be about technology.

The fact is that I don’t think there really is any domestic technology that everyone relies on which only has one source - high tech industries such as semiconductor electronics, aerospace engineering, biomedical engineering, etc. are researched, designed and manufactured all over the world. Yes, there are certain countries which have a lot more research in one area than others, or which manufacture a lot more than others, but it’s not as if China, Russia, the USA, Israel, Europe, etc. would be incapable of research, design and manufacturing if those other powers just suddenly ceased to exist.

The Roman Empire had technology that was decades ahead of their contemporaries and that didn’t seem to help them keep the peace - but something else did - an emperor who valued peace and saw it as the goal of the Roman Empire. After the death of Marcus Aurelius, Pax Romana went into decline. It wasn’t technology, or trade, or even military strength which kept the peace - it was a desire for peace, and the people who worked to achieve it.

Not OP and not a woman, but yeah, there are way fewer communities for women here, but Reddit was much worse and a lot more sexist when it was just finding its feet. There is still a bit of a boys club mentality around Lemmy though.

Once a Reddit admin got annoyed with me and banned me a good 500 times in the span of a few minutes.

I believe that we have a duty to break unjust laws. Obedience is a harmful thing to teach your kids.

People love to make this claim but it’s kind of impossible to prove. I could just as easily say that the Second World War itself resulted in a distaste for war, or that innovations in computers and electronics contributed to world peace. There’s just correlations, but it’s just kind of “vibes” - “oh they wouldn’t go to war because they rely on eachothers trade!” as if historically nations didn’t also have trade. Like, Venice was notoriously the trade hub of Europe in the Middle Ages and it still got invaded a whole bunch.

single-handedly destroying globalism

Oh no! Anyways…

I remember when I was around 13-14 years old we had sex education class and we had to put a condom on a dildo. We all thought it was great fun.

This isn’t really related to whatever this woman is talking about, she’s probably just making shit up, but it just reminded me of that and I thought I’d share.

A lot of American leftists are so obsessed to American imperialism that they consider anyone/anything that opposes the US to be “the good guys” and any criticism of the good guys must only be because we bought into western propaganda. This sadly makes it pretty much impossible to really engage in any sort of meaningful discussions around criticism of China, because no matter what you say, you’ll either be assumed to be acting in bad faith, or you’re a useful idiot for some western government.

With all of that said, it doesn’t really have anything to do with Israel or anti-semitism, really, does it? Pretty much every leftist is justifiably critical of Israel, but also strongly opposes anti-semitism. People can be wrong about some things, but right about others.

“high level of theft cost retailers money that would be better used to reduce prices and invest in a better customer experience”

Hahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahhahaaaaa

i dont think its better than New Vegas

To be fair, that’s quite a high bar, games that are as good as New Vegas are very rare indeed

Text input by a user is almost always a string, because the user presses 0 or more keys on their keyboard before hitting enter.

Without validation, we have no way to know that the user typed - did they type “1” or “True”, or did they embrace chaos and type in “Batman”? Unless we check, we can’t be sure.

We can assume, but then we have to accept that our program will have what we call “undefined behaviour” if our assumption is incorrect - which is definitely not good. In the best case scenario, your code harmlessly crashes. In the worst case scenario, your code is being used by the Pentagon for some reason and just started global thermonuclear war, which ideally should be avoided.

There are ways around this. For example, we could listen for individual keystrokes and only accept the inputs if they meet our criteria - if the user presses the 1 key, that’s true, if they press 0, that’s false, any other key is ignored, for example.

But the best thing to do, in my humble opinion, is to accept a string input and then check what the user entered. In most cases, “True” or “False” aren’t usually what we want, unless you’re writing some sort of true or false guessing game or something. Most cases where we want a Boolean input from a user, it’s a yes/no kind of thing. “Would you like to continue?” or “Shall we start global thermonuclear war? y/N”

So you’re better off just embracing the string, and using that to determine behaviour, rather than a Boolean directly. For example, something along the lines of :

    
if user input is “y” then launch nukes
else if user input is “n” send fruit basket
else print “input invalid”`

  

As others mentioned in the thread, it may be wise to convert the input to lowercase - just in case the user enters Y or y. Personally I wouldn’t go so far as to take the first letter as the answer, in case the user enters “you must be joking!” for example :-)

Most of the big issues aren’t specific to the Tories, to be fair, they’re mostly a result of the way our world has been organised by the ruling elite to steal as much wealth as possible.

The Tories are definitely one of the worst parties that you can vote for, but a better world sadly isn’t on the ballot, all we get to vote for is whether or not we would like some extra bigotry and cruelty.

For a truly better world we need to take action outside of the ballot box, and I’m not talking about gluing ourselves to things or blocking a road. We need to work together to build a better world completely separate from all of the systems controlled by the state and the wealthy.

This should be totally obvious to everyone. Even from a heartless economic perspective, properly funding the NHS more than pays for itself - people who have health issues have reduced productivity, and that means less taxes for the government, and that they end up paying more in benefits, and the impact on people’s health tends to mean that one issue becomes a much bigger issue or other issues… leading to things to get worse to a point where they can’t be ignored and it’s much more expensive to put right.

There is no good reason to continue to underfund the NHS. It is entirely ideologically motivated - despite the fact that publicly funded healthcare makes complete sense, it just doesn’t let the elite extract enough wealth from the rest of us!

I’ve played Starfield (PC) a good bit by now and I’d say that mid 80s is probably fair.

The gameplay is great fun - the combat, gear, etc. is really quite similar to Fallout 4 (though without the VATS), with a Skyrim style talent tree.

The base building and ship building is quite like Fallout 4, though much improved (thankfully!) but still a bit janky.

The worldbuilding is immersive but the world itself is just okay - it’s really predictable, they play it a bit too safe, every faction is nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before, and society hasn’t advanced at all ~400 years in the future apparently.

Characters are exactly what you expect from a Bethesda game - a bit two dimensional, but nice enough.

Graphics are good, sound design is good, music is nice but a bit too similar to Skyrim IMO.

The story is also really quite safe and derivative, reminds me simultaneously of Mass Effect and Skyrim.

The exploration is cool, but does get a bit repetitive after a while. I think more interesting “random” locations would be really good - after a few abandoned, flavourless civilian bases, you’ve seen them all.

I’m a sucker for customisable bases/houses/etc. especially for space ships, giving me all those building blocks and letting me loose in the sandbox (starbox?) is honestly hours of entertainment.

Space combat is fun, but IMO the space part of the game would be way more immersive if I did all of the ship piloting stuff in-character rather than in the UI menues, seems like a big oversight - why not have something like the galaxy map from mass effect, or have everything on displays in the cockpit? It would be much more immersive, but I guess it would have delayed the game quite a bit.

A lot of the game is juggling menues and interfaces which aren’t the best designed. very similar to Skyrim - I imagine UI redesign mods will really shine once they start coming out. It’s pretty tricky trying to figure out what stuff in your inventory is junk you accidentally picked up (looking at you, Fire Extinguisher!) and which items have a surprisingly good value-to-weight ratio (like some - but not all - of the books, or the deck of cards, surprisingly)

There are occasionally little bugs and glitches, but it’s not too bad for 2023 - nothing that makes the game unplayable or breaks major things, it’s just been stuff like glitchy animations, containers placed in the wrong place/orientation, weird physics behaviour, and I’ve noticed a couple missing textures here and there.

If you’re looking for more of a story/RPG game, I’d suggest something more like Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.

For exploration and space combat, I think No Man’s Sky is better, but with much less customisation.

For more customisation and sandbox style gameplay - but less action-oriented - Space Engineers is probably a better choice.

All in all, Starfield is a fun game - Skyrim in space is a good starting point for describing it, but it’s a lot closer to “Fallout 4, but the bombs didn’t drop”, though the game has a lot of cool extra systems beyond that. I’d be happy to recommend it to someone who would enjoy a single player sci-fi themed looter-shooter sandbox game with some mild RPG elements and player-constructed ships and bases, and I’m sure there are hundreds of hours of enjoyment there, and, as with the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, it’s likely a game that I will return to for many, many years to come

Ah yes, the notorious proposed M15 motorway, good journalism there metro.

The Jedi Code: A Manual for Students of the Force. I am lucky enough to have a copy which been passed from master to student, and many annotations have been added to enrich, update or contest the material in the book, which really widens the perspective. Sadly, a section near the front of the book has been ripped out, I’m guessing that one of my predecessors wanted to scan the section regarding the Prophecy of the Chosen One - probably to email a PDF of it to Master Windu!