Zagorath

Zagorath , 15 hours ago

The talk about AI is stupid. It's a tool.

The talk about the IMPLICATIONS of AI, and who uses it to automate what, at the cost of who, is the actual argument to be had.

Hear, hear.

Zagorath , 1 day ago

Off topic, but does this show get good? I love her standup, but after watching 2 or 3 episodes of this show I found it painfully unfunny, and not at all like the late-night show that it was billed as.

Zagorath , 1 hour ago

for all of us non Brits

It's funny you should say that. It's American, as you've learnt. I'm neither American nor British, but to me the show does actually seem more similar to a format of show that's very popular in Britain, but not so common in America. The panel show. Think QI, 8 Out of 10 Cats, or Would I Lie To You. Something that looks like a game show, but where the main purpose is really improv comedy and banter, more than actually winning the game.

The problem is for me, the episodes I've seen of After Midnight have just been much, much less funny than the typical WILTY or Cats does Countdown (and I don't even particularly like Catsdown).

Zagorath , 3 days ago

Valves aren't needed to "sound too good", they're needed to get more notes. Without valves, you've still got the harmonic series. Any piece played on bugle could also be played on trumpet. And the majority of classical compositions up until the late 19th century. (All classical compositions until the early 19th century.)

Zagorath , 2 days ago

Probably not. I'm not a brass player or a marine biologist but as I understand it the way a brass player's embouchure works would not be replicable by a dolphin's blowhole (it's not just "send air through the tube", it's more like blowing a raspberry). They wouldn't be able to play any note, let alone different notes.

Zagorath , 7 days ago

I saw your post and don't think it should have been removed, let alone banned, but I don't think you did yourself any favours in the comments. You kept asserting it as fact that there is a huge problem with silencing SA survivors, and when asked to give evidence, the only thing you had was three comments in the same thread, where the one sexist guy was being downvoted and the multiple people correcting him were upvoted. Not good evidence of a systemic problem.

(Ironically, you now do have that evidence, in the form of your ban.)

Zagorath , 6 days ago

You are being very deceitful here, dude

Wow, rude. An honest mistake is not deceit.

Are you sure the one that got taken down wasn't just because you were being an arse to people for no reason, like you are here?

Anyway, I'm glad the one I saw did not get you removed or banned. As I said, it wouldn't have deserved that.

Zagorath , 6 days ago

Peace, friend. ✌️

Zagorath , 7 days ago

Bro bought a Tesla just 2 years ago. Long after it was very widely known just how much of an arsehole Musk was, and after many other excellent EVs were on the market.

I'll let you draw the conclusions from those facts.

Zagorath , 7 days ago

eBay and PayPal broke off 9 years ago btw.

Zagorath , 7 days ago

Everything I've heard says that Teslas have had huge reliability problems.

Zagorath , 7 days ago

The point is that the teeny little barriers they're installing which are supposedly adequate for cyclists' safety are far less protection than the massive buffer they have as protection while installing them.

It's not about blaming the people doing the installation, it's about highlighting the government's hypocrisy when it comes to cyclist safety.

Zagorath , 7 days ago

This feels like a reference I'm not German enough to understand.

Zagorath , 7 days ago

Literally Game of Thrones logic.

Zagorath , 8 days ago

This woulda been way funnier if you'd Photoshopped out the text in the windows too.

Zagorath , 9 days ago

I had one of these with a new account recently. I forget what platform it was, but it wasn't anything from Meta. Didn't need to move your face in any specific way, but it was obviously doing some checks for signs of life so a simple photo wouldn't work. I found a video of some random dude on YouTube just staring at the camera, and I pointed my camera my computer screen while that played. Difficult, considering they only allowed the front-facing camera to work.

Zagorath , 9 days ago

child lore

ಠ_ಠ

Zagorath , 11 days ago

Yeah, the problem is those damn mums buying artificial formula instead of doing the right thing and breastfeeding!

/s, because sadly there are people who actually sincerely believe that.

Zagorath , 13 days ago

blahaj (I assume) uses Let’s Encrypt

Correct.

Screenshot of lemmy.blahaj.zone certificate details showing it was issued by Let's Encrypt.

Zagorath , 14 days ago

without breaking Kayfabe

You can't just throw out terminology like that to explain something to someone who has already told you they don't understand rap culture…

Zagorath , 14 days ago

That second screenshot adding in more people to this out of nowhere. Aubrey? I have no idea who she is or why he hates her too. Just cos she supports Drake in some way?

Zagorath , 14 days ago

Right, so kayfabe is like…"don't break the masquerade"?

Zagorath , 14 days ago

Ah right, cheers.

Zagorath , 15 days ago

Going from Moscow is gonna take a LOT longer than from Vladivostok

In the flat Earth proposed by the above picture? Moscow should be faster, shouldn't it? Even if they're avoiding flying over other countries, enter the Baltic Sea near St Petersburg and navigate the Danish Straits; or if that's too close, fly North of Norway & Sweden, either way, much shorter than from Vladivostok.

If we're talking the real world, it depends on which part of Alaska you're talking about. To Anchorage, it's definitely "a LOT" longer. Along the northern coast of Alaska though, it's actually...well, still longer, but by a surprisingly small amount, thanks to Moscow being so much further north than Vladivostok and able to take the northern passage.

Zagorath , 17 days ago

Jeanne de Florette and Manon des Sources are both astonishingly great films. But I'm not sure I get the connection here. It's been a while since I saw them, is there something I'm failing to remember?

Zagorath , 17 days ago

I assume South Korea. Calling it a dystopian shithole seems kinda unfair (especially when the only land border is with an actual dystopian nightmare of a country) but there is valid reason for the criticism. Korea has an incredibly patriarchal society where calling out authority is seen as a big no-no. Working hours are intense. Time after work is frequently spent with your colleagues and boss because of strong social expectations, with it being normal to expect employees to stay out drinking until the boss is ready to go home. Pressure for students at school is so intense the government has had to make efforts to ban the ubiquitous "hagwon" private approval schooling. For many, not achieving a spot at the one specific university is considered failure. The economy is something almost literally out of a dystopia, controlled by a handful of "chaebols", massive family-owned conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Lotte.

Zagorath , 17 days ago

Very different kinds of dystopias though. One's basically taken right out of a cyberpunk novel with corporations ruling over an ostensibly-free populous. The other is an extreme authoritarian dictatorship where the government rules with an iron fist.

Zagorath , 21 days ago

I love the idea of the app, but I think some greater coordination with the BDS movement would help. Instead of a simple "yes/no", tell the user of the app which category the product/company is listed in by BDS and let them make up their own mind.

For example, currently products in the "pressure targets" are displayed exactly the same as "consumer boycott target". As BDS says, boycotts are most effective when they're more highly targetted. So there's no problem with boycotting the pressure targets, but there is if someone uses the fact that they're boycotting a pressure target as an excuse to feel good and not boycott a boycott target. Being clearer could only help.

Relevant BDS page.

Zagorath , 22 days ago

I didn't know this problem existed, but now I'm incensed by it.

Zagorath , 22 days ago

I'm on Lemmy, using Jerboa. It displays for me that there's supposed to be an image there, but that the image has failed to load. May or may not be a related problem, or just a network issue at my end.

Zagorath , 21 days ago

Yeah I'm not sure, but I think feddit.de just region blocks any IP addresses not in Germany, which is honestly really frustrating and doesn't play nicely with the fediverse.

Catbox is blocked in many regions, including Australia, Britain, and Ireland; something they explain on their FAQ page (archive link to bypass any such restrictions, though their non-files domain probably should work anyway). Bizarrely, New Zealand is not on that list, despite a shooting in NZ being cited as the reason it's blocked in Australia. It's easy to bypass in some regions; harder in others.

Anyway, this image loaded for me just now, on lemmy-ui. Dunno if it was a client issue, a network issue, or something else.

edit: OH WAIT! I just realised that this image is a catbox one! That explains it. My phone doesn't have custom DNS set up which is what I have on my computer to bypass the catbox blocking. So it didn't load on my phone but does on my computer. Doh.

Zagorath , 20 days ago

Umm...yes? Of course?

Zagorath , 22 days ago

Gonna be honest, there's no price I'd be willing to pay for YouTube Premium.

I used to pay for YouTube Red. I didn't cancel it because it was too expensive, I cancelled it in retaliation for all the other shitty things YouTube has been doing. If YouTube wants me to return as a paying member, they need to reinstate the ability for small accounts to monetise their YouTube accounts; they need to stop demonetising/restricting educational content that might be related to war, weapons, sex, or sexuality; and they need to change their copyright policy to make it much, much harder to abuse false claims.

Zagorath , 22 days ago

I have to say I've really liked this community when I've seen it pop up. Some good lefty stuff without falling into supporting tankies like certain other instances claiming to be leftist do.

Zagorath , 24 days ago

And Messenger.

I honestly have no idea what it does, because I have no interest in that shit and have never clicked it.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

I don't believe I can mark it NSFW in any official way, but I've edited the title.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

u’re supposed to not have a comma before “and”

"Supposed to" is...debated. Some style guides like the Oxford comma, some don't.

Personally, I'm a strong proponent of it. It never creates confusion, it often removes confusion, and it always does a better job of visually representing natural speech patterns.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

Yeah I can't find it anywhere in lemmy-ui unfortunately.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

'fraid not. That comma isn't an Oxford comma. Also, the first example needs a comma both before and after Jack, because the commas are parenthetical commas.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

Rearranging can work for some contexts, but not for all. The most straightforward example would be if you were transcribing something spoken by someone else. You could try to blame them for speaking "wrong", but that's beside the point. They said what they said, and you have to write it down.

Do you put the Oxford comma in or not?

For me, the most important factor in answering that question is the fact that in speech, it's typical that there will be more of a pause between "stalin" and "and" in a list of 3 than there would be in a list of just 2. So there's no comma in lists of just 2, but there is a comma, including the Oxford comma, in lists of 3 or more.

At its core, written language is a way of representing spoken language. There are many cases in which this in not a one-to-one—a choice of em dash, brackets, or commas for parenthetical might have very little (if any) difference in how it is pronounced in the spoken word, for example—but hopefully we can all agree that there is at least a rough correlation there. And when "A B and C" has a similar pause between "B" and "and" as it has between "A" and "B", it makes more sense to write "A, B, and C" than "A, B and C".

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

This is not disinformation. At worst it's elevating one specific academic opinion over another academic opinion. But the Oxford comma is recommended by many fine institutions, including Oxford University Press, APA, and Chicago Manual of Style (on the other hand, Cambridge and The New York Times prefer to avoid it). To suggest this is disinformation is itself the only disinformation here.

There are, apparently, cases in which it can cause confusion. However, in my experience, this is far less common than cases where it can prevent confusion. Rearranging sentences is, at best, a patch that can work in some situations but not others.

Getting rid of it is inconsistent. Complex lists with comma-separated clauses separated by semicolons always use a semicolon after the penultimate entry, even by people who would not recommend the Oxford comma. It also makes for greater consistency within its own sentence: you see a comma, you know there's a new entry in the list—much simpler visual parsing.

Getting rid of it breaks the connection between the written and spoken word. "A, B, or C" has a pause after A and after B. "A, B or C" implies there is no pause after B. But there is, if the latter is intended to mean the same as the former.

A or B, C or D, and E or F is much easier than "A or B, C or D and E or F".

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

First sentence, I agree, maybe. More likely, I'd say each of the 2 strippers get $2,250 JFK gets $2,250, Stalin gets $2,250. But either of those two interpretations works.

Second sentence I just completely disagree. Either you don't use the Oxford comma, in which case this is the same as above, or the comma here is parenthetical, in which case JFK and Stalin each get $4,500. They are the strippers, so there's no separate category for them.

To get the outcome you wanted in your second case (with the bare minimum sentence restructuring) I would say "I would like to evenly split $9,000 between the strippers and JFK & Stalin." Ideally though, I'd use more words to be more clear.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

Personally I was taught not to use it, but I quickly realised just how dumb and inconsistent it is to not use the Oxford comma, so I rejected that and now insist on always using it.

I was also taught to put two spaces after a full stop when typing. That's even dumber and I will actively correct it when I'm editing something written by others.

Basically, people need to learn not to take to heart the rules they're taught in primary school as though they're set in stone. Realise that their primary school teachers may have been working on outdated information, may have been teaching a simplified view of the world that's age-appropriate when they taught it but shouldn't be applied rigidly at a higher level, may have taught something that has since become outdated**,** or may have been straight-up wrong.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

Damn, now both Stalin and the Chinese are getting involved‽‽‽ Damn commies.

Zagorath OP , 26 days ago

It's already happening!

Zagorath , 26 days ago

Yeah month-to-month is another name for the same thing. Generally, you fall back onto a periodic lease if your fixed-term lease expires and you aren't given another fixed-term lease to sign. With our current laws where I am, a period lease is actually incredibly secure, thanks to the relatively recent "no grounds evictions" ban. The two types of leases have the same "grounds" apply to each, except that "end of fixed-term lease" is one which obviously doesn't apply to a periodic lease. So the current situation is that you get that immediate day-one "notice to vacate" because landlords desperately want to avoid you ending up on a periodic lease where you're better protected.

My changes were basically "hey, fixed-term leases shouldn't be less secure than periodic leases are".

Zagorath , 26 days ago

A big reason this happens is because...they can do it.

Increase overall housing supply enormously through better zoning laws, and increase affordable housing supply by having ~30% of housing be government-owned at a reasonable cost, and it becomes much less viable to raise rent a bunch.

Zagorath , 22 days ago

One of the subreddits I truly miss is /r/cyclistswithcameras. That was a delightful place. The mods had absolutely zero tolerance for victim blaming.