Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

---

Read more

Posts

161

Comments

3,576

Joined

2 yr. ago

Life expectancy is a useless metric for this purpose. Maybe it would be more useful if you used "life expectancy at age 10" (so after any childhood illnesses), but even then it doesn't really say anything about what the process senescence looks like.

Damn has it really been three years?

Only 2.

unless this path is made absolutely impossible

That's the problem though. Taiwan clearly does not want reunification. Peaceful or otherwise. Younger generations are increasingly in favour of either status quo (de facto independence without any official declaration) or even explicit official independence. And the increasingly aggressive rhetoric and actions from China are only pushing the Taiwanese more in that direction. Consider: in 2018 support for moving towards unification was at its highest in over 15 years, but then China's human rights abuses in Hong Kong, and more recently its aggressive military drills in and near Taiwanese airspace and waters have driven that down to an all-time low.

So realistically, there are only two paths to unification. Through China doing a complete 180 on its foreign policy posture and showing it can sustain that reversal in the long term, as well as showing it can respect human rights. Or, through force.

Nor on Jerboa. But lemmy-ui (the default web UI) does it.

All QWERTY-based layouts.

– sincerely, Dvorak user.

Also, don't tell me you need to roll more than sixes to win yahtzee

Ok but this is an interesting question.

If you rolled only sixes, you'd score 30 in the upper section, missing the bonus.

Then in the lower section you'd get 30 in each of 3 & 4 of a kind and chance (90 points) and 50 for the Yahtzee. One could make a case that it's a weird full house, but that's a stretch.

That's a total of 170 points. That's not going to do very well when 250 is often considered a minimum "good" score.

However…some rules give you an extra bonus for a second or subsequent Yahtzee. With that, you could actually win with all sixes. Just get 100 after 100 after 100 and end up with over a thousand points.

On a mobile phone it's super easy. Long press the hyphen button and swipe over to the dash.

On Mac it's pretty easy still, but requires a little more knowledge. Option-shift-dash. (Without the shift gives you an en dash.)

On Windows it's the completely arcane alt-0151, and only possible if you have a numpad. I memorised it like 15 years ago and have regularly used it since, but it's hard to blame people for not doing so.

No idea about Linux.

If you were actually a fiend for dashes, you'd have used an em dash—not used a hyphen as a stand-in for one.

Happy cake day!

unless it is made to pose a direct threat to them

This is some unfortunately weasely phrasing when it comes to international diplomacy. Don't forget Israel claimed that Iran was "posing a direct threat to them" before they proactively decided to fire missiles at Iran.

I certainly hope China doesn't invade Taiwan. But if they do, I have almost zero doubt that it will be after fabricating some sort of nonsense casus belli that gives them a veneer of legitimacy.

I don't think the jury necessarily made a mistake here to be clear. They had access to far more detail than us. I trust that the jury did a good job here.

Have you watched the SBS reality TV series ‘The Jury: Death on the Staircase’?

I have not. Is it good?

It was a frustrating insight into how difficult it is for some people to understand the difference between these two things

For me I think the problem might be the opposite. I've not been on a jury, but I think I might have trouble distinguishing between beyond reasonable doubt and beyond any doubt, and I might have trouble returning a guilty verdict in the face of anything other than 100% certainty. But I haven't actually been there to know for sure how I'd react.

Yeah I thought the same. Obviously the jury has access to much more detail than we do, but based on media reporting of the evidence I thought she probably did it, but I don't think I could have returned a verdict of guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

she can still appeal this decision

She can appeal, it's important to remember that appeals can only be on the basis of a mistake of law. So for example, if the judge of the case permitted the prosecution to present evidence that he shouldn't have allowed, or if it's determined that his jury instructions were heavily biased, that might get up on appeal.

An appeal can usually not decide that the jury was just wrong in terms of which evidence they decided was more persuasive than others. Based on the information that's public so far, there's almost zero chance of a successful appeal. Just because you or I, or even a High Court judge would have (based on media reporting of the evidence) decided it didn't meet the burden of "beyond reasonable doubt", isn't sufficient for an overturning of the jury's decision.

The media hasn't been allowed to report on decisions made by the judge while the jury wasn't in the room (which may have included discussions about whether particular evidence is admissible) while the trial was still ongoing to prevent potentially tainting the jury. Now that it's over we might begin to learn that sort of thing. That's where appealable factors might be hiding.

Pell seems to put doubt into this, and frankly created an enormous amount of distrust in the legal system's ability to hold power to account. There's some very shaky legal argumentation behind it (basically: the defence presented evidence that, if accepted, would necessarily result in a finding of not guilty, and the prosecution did not specifically do anything to try to refute that evidence)

I 100% tell people "I play D&D" or answer "are you busy this weekend" with "I've got D&D" even though I haven't played D&D since COVID and even before then I had done multiple campaigns and one-shots in other systems.

Supposedly Mage M5 is in progress!

“recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people

I agree with your conclusion (recognition should be based entirely on who has Actual Control, in cases where that can be clearly determined), but not with this particular explanation. Nobody "recognises" Taiwan, but it has nothing to do with believing it's illegitimate or unrepresentative. It has to do with the fact that China has a hissy fit if you do.

But that’s not changing the design, really

Depends on what one means by "change the design". It doesn't make a fundamental change to the deeper architecture of the game, no. But it does require some relatively superficial changes, which are themselves a design problem of sorts.

There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.

"Live-service" games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (...and "anti-piracy" bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.

Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.

MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).

Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:

• Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
• Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server's only/main job is matchmaking)
• Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity

In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it's online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it's an unexpected requirement, that's going to be a huge development cost. If it's expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.

Well, I went to an Aldi for a grocery shop for the first time today. Self-checkout was great! Not as nice as scan & go, which I'll miss, but worth it. Cheers for the tip.

Not a fan of the bagging area though fwiw. It's just an "area", without hooks. I didn't notice the camera thing. I think I've only ever really seen that at Coles.

Rare Reddit w

If guys like this are good at getting whole generations of people interested in science, more power to them

That's the problem here though. He might be good at getting a certain kind of STEM bro into science, but his smart attitude turns away heaps more. He contributes to the perception of science as being hostile to women, at the same time as reinforcing the perception of science as elitist and exclusionary. He might've fit in well in the '90s and '00s, but unfortunately he's around in the '10s and '20s.