Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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2 yr. ago

No u in Qantas. It's an acronym. The Q stands for Queensland.

Maybe, but I'd like to see a concrete example of how they are "designed to talk to each other" that couldn't be achieved by the extension just reading the DOM.

I agree with you about dropdown menus being something that could/should be natively available to HTML, but I'm less convinced about form submission. Sure, if we assume everything is happy path it's a great idea, but a system needs to be robust enough to handle a variety of cases. Maybe you want to redirect a user to a log-on page if they get back a 401, or present an explanation if they get a 403. A 5XX should usually display some sort of error message to the user. A 201 probably needs to add an element into the page, while a 200 might do nothing, or might alter something on the page.

With the huge range of possible paths and desired effects, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that designing an HTML & CSS–only spec that can meet the needs is infeasible. There's definitely a case to be made that JavaScript has become too powerful and can do too many potentially dangerous or privacy-invading things. And maybe a new range of permissions could be considered to limit a lot of that at a more fundamental level. But what we're talking about here with the form submission stuff is the real bare-bones basic stuff JavaScript was designed to make easier—alter the contents of web pages on the fly in response to user actions. And it's really, really good at that.

• Your operating system
• Your CPU architecture

Agree. No reason they should have this.

• Your JS interpreter's version and build ID

I can see a reasonable argument for this being allowed. Feature detection should make this unnecessary, but it doesn't seem to be fully supported yet.

• Plugins & Extensions

This is clearly a break of the browser sandbox and should require explicit permission at the very least (if not be blocked outright...I'm curious what the legitimate uses for these would be).

• Accelerometer and gyroscope & magnetic field sensor

Should probably be tied to location permission, for the sake of a simple UX.

• Proximity sensor

Definitely potential legitimate reasons for this, but it shouldn't be by default.

• Keyboard layout

As someone who uses a non-QWERTY (and non-QWERTY-based) layout, this is one I have quite a stake in. The bottom line is that even without directly being able to obtain this, a site can very easily indirectly obtain it anyway, thanks to the difference between event.code and event.key. And that difference is important, because there are some cases where it's better to use one or the other. A browser-based game, for example, probably wants to use event.code so the user can move around based on where WASD would be on a QWERTY keyboard, even though as a Dvorak user, for me that would be <AOE. But keyboard shortcuts like J and K for "next"/"previous" item should usually use event.key.

There could/should be a browser setting somewhere, or an extension, that can hide this from sites. But it is far too useful, relative to its fingerprinting value, to restrict for ordinary users.

how sensors are used to fingerprint you, I think it has to do with manufacturing imperfections that skew their readings in unique ways

It's also simple presence detection. "You have a proximity sensor" is a result not every browser will have, so it helps narrow down a specific browser.

Though for area damage spells, it’s much, much more complicated.

That's an optional variant rule described in Xanathar's Guide. The default rule for grids is simpler: just do Chebyshev.

Ah right, so "diamond" (depicted as a square rotated 45 degrees) is Manhattan, circle is Euclidean, and square is Chebyshev, then?

As it happens I've just looked up the 5e rules for this for the sake of another comment, and their rules are that, like PF1e, if you go vertical, you follow the same rules (i.e., Chebyshev by default, optional alternating) as on a flat plain.

I've not looked up the PF2e rules, but I feel safe in assuming it's the same in this regard as 1e.

D&D's targeting rules are quite strange, but yes, it's very explicit that Chebyshev is used in 5e by default, if playing on a grid. On page 192 of the 5.0e PHB:

To enter a square, you must have at least 1 square of movement left, even if the square is diagonally adjacent to the square you're in.

The DMG presents, on page 252, an optional variant of the optional grid rules, which is to treat it the same as Pathfinder 2e does (alternating 5 ft and 10 ft):

The Player's Handbook presents a simple method for counting movement and measuring range on a grid: count every square as 5 feet, even if you're moving diagonally. ... This optional rule provides more realism.

When measuring range or moving diagonally on a grid, the first diagonal square counts as 5 feet, but the second one counts as 10 feet. This pattern...continues when you're counting diagonally even if you move horizontally or vertically between different bits of diagonal movement.

As for the value of cube vs sphere in the context of Chebyshev ranges, there are two key differences.

First, cubes measure side length, spheres measure radius. A 10 ft cube covers 4 squares. A 10 ft sphere covers 16.

Second, and more importantly (since the above could easily be translated by using only cubes or only spheres throughout the system, with either half or double the numbers), cubes are cast from one side, whereas spheres are cast from the centre. If you're standing in the front line with enemies in front of you and allies behind, a cube cast with you as its origin point will hit either allies only or enemies only, but not both. A sphere cast with you at its origin point will affect both allies and enemies. Note that the rules for cube, on page 204 of the 5.0 PHB say "A cube's point of origin is not included in the cube's area of effect, unless you decide otherwise." So you could include yourself and your allies, or you could include enemies but not yourself, if you so desired. Or, less likely, you could include allies but not yourself, or enemies and yourself.

From memory, cube spells are mostly cast from a range of "self", which is where this becomes an important distinction. If a spell has a range of X feet and cube, then the main difference is just that its area is smaller but its reach is longer than a sphere with the same numbers.

Fair point. I actually don't know what, if anything, the D&D (or Pathfinder) rules say on this matter. I've always just treated it as a natural 3D extension of the 2D grid rules. If they're three squares in one direction, same square in the other, and 10 feet up, I'd treat that as 15 feet away because of Chebyshev rules.

Personally I find Euclidean easy to remember because it matches the much more general Euclidean geometry. So you just remember "this is like, real maths". Manhattan distance is easy to remember because it does basically "refer to the metrics in terms of what they are", so long as you remember that Manhattan famously is a grid. Chebyshev is the hardest, but for me it's a simple matter of "the one that's left over".

I have no idea, based on the name, what diamond and square metrics are supposed to be.

So are feats, and point buy.

But D&D uses Chebyshev distance, not Euclidean. No need for Pythagoras. And Pathfinder alternates between Chebyshev and Manhattan to approximate Euclidean.

Idgi

I'm always surprised when I'm reminded that that show was Disney. It feels so similar tonally to BTAS, I'd have sworn it had to be from the same studio. Especially with how off brand it is for typical Disney cartoons.

Apparently a live action reboot is in the works. Can't say I'm holding my breath on that one.

They're pretty much your bog standard right-wing media. They don't endorse ridiculous conspiracy theories or the overthrow of democracy like Fox News does in America or Sky News does in Australia, and they basically try to stick to relatively factual reporting. But they also, as you say, bias towards the right in story selection. And they're relatively low-brow, going for sensationalism rather than good journalism, more often than not.

Another brief period of not bad?

The 50s and 60s were the peak of Robert Moses and similar figures in American urban planning. Explicitly racist, destroying the liveability of cities in ways that are still ongoing to this day, with only some of the very most progressive cities even starting to try to turn things around.

It was also the peak of the red scare, during which the "freedom of speech" Americans are so proud of took a back seat to witch hunts over political ideology. Along with that you get the height of US intervention in foreign governments, with the US involvements in Pinochet's regime in Chile probably being the most striking example, but far, far from the only.

So nah, it might have been a period of time when the US was perhaps less bad than today, but it's still not great.

drawing a square in thr corner doesn’t make it 90°

No, it doesn't, but it does mean that, for the purposes of your 6th grade geometry question, you can assume the angle is a right angle. Even if it visible looks like 45°, if they put a square there, that's 90.

More to the point though, a radius of a circle always meets the circumference at 90 degrees. All the squares in this problem are doing is telling you "this line, if it were continued, would be the radius of the incomplete circle".

Collapses? Wish Amazon would collapse after it was revealed their magic grocery store where you just walk out with what you want was just Indians viewing CCTV.

Yeah Google's direction with android is rather concerning (though one should read the full comments in "view all comments" in that post before reading too far into it based on the source there).

The problem comes when it's not an app you're using for the app's sake, but because it's the app of some company you have a real-world relationship with. Your bank's app being the most important one that comes to my mind, considering I've already heard about some banks trying to restrict users to only Google's flavour of Android before this.