Zagorath

Zagorath , 1 day ago

the u is still elongated

Eh? Resume is /ɹəˈʒuːm/ or /ɹəˈzjuːm/. Résumé is /ˈɹɛz.(j)ʉˌmeɪ/. That's in my accent and other accents will vary in the precise vowels used. But because the accent is on the first syllable in résumé, the vowel becomes de-emphasised and, in many accents, more centralised. And that is, as far as I'm aware, nearly universal among English speakers.

Zagorath , 2 days ago

Fantasy series with a very D&D-esque world and a combat system that feels a bit like an MMO or a turnbased tactics game. It's real time with optional pausing, and you operate your whole party at once, with the ability to pause to give each of them precise orders, or to pre-program them with specific responses to situation.

I think it mainly became popular on the back of its characters. The story was good but nothing special, and personally I found the combat in Origins to be absolutely terrible. But building up your party, getting to know the characters and making decisions that affect them was amazing. At least on par in this respect with the original Mass Effect trilogy.

Zagorath , 2 days ago

Can I play it in front of my kids?

It's been a while since I played, but I think the answer is mostly yes. There are sex scenes, but they're pretty well-telegraphed ahead of time and I don't think you can get into them by accident.

how long from startup to the next save point?

What's a save point, to you? The game allows saving at any point (except maybe during combat?), but this may or may not be a satisfying experience to you. For the most satisfying experience you'd probably want to consider your camp the save point, and that can go a couple of hours between occurences, depending on the quest and how good you are (/the difficulty level).

Is it a lot like Mass Effect?

A very similar narrative style with the focus on your relation to the NPCs. Gameplay is very different. Much more about tactics and less about action. Personally I found that balance really awkward and not enjoyable: I'd rather lean more into the action like a Skyrim (or, indeed, ME) style game, or do tactics properly in a turn-based manner like BG3 or Lord of the Rings: Tactics. But I stuck it out for the story & characters which were great, though I couldn't bring myself to keep going with the big DLC once I lost momentum thanks to finishing the main story, or to pick up either of the sequels.

Zagorath , 15 hours ago

tetrapods are fish

I like this particularly because it allows you to tell people that whales are fish, which is generally going to get a much stronger response than if you said "people are fish". Because in the latter, they know you're up to something weird, but in the former they're not sure if you might just be wrong.

Zagorath , 4 days ago

Actually long desks are no longer considered best practice. At my work, some devs have a lazy suzan, while others prefer a circle that they can pivot around to face the right computer.

Zagorath , 6 days ago

I don’t know anyone that owns a dinosaur

I do. It's somewhat more common with people living in more rural areas than in the city, but I'd guess they're the third most popular pet after cats & dogs.

Zagorath , 6 days ago

Yeah I mean, I know dogs come in a wide range of sizes, but I feel like default dog is a lot bigger thanks default chicken.

Zagorath , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

Fyi Lemmy doesn't do spoilers the way Reddit does. The syntax for spoilers is:

::: spoiler visible spoiler text
Text that's hidden behind a spoiler
:::

visible spoiler text

Text that's hidden behind a spoiler

Zagorath , 4 days ago

Very strange. What client are you using, out of interest? If it's an app that pivoted from being an old Reddit app into a Lemmy app, it might be an issue worth pointing out to the developer.

Zagorath , 8 days ago

Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down

Umm, what? Apple was always going to move to USB-C. The EU regulations at most hastened that by a couple of years. Their tablets and even laptop computers were using USB-C before the EU even enacted that legislation. It was only a matter of time.

But back on the subject at hand, this is nothing like that sort of bullying. This is a company being asked to build more infrastructure at their own expense, and then use that infrastructure to place its own users at risk. They've made a simple calculation that it's better for their bottom line and their reputation to choose not to comply, and instead pull out of a few small markets.

Zagorath , 8 days ago

Part of being a monopoly is being anticompetitive

No it's not. Being hit with antitrust laws requires first being a monopoly, but the monopoly state exists merely by virtue of size within the industry.

Edit: to be clear the only point I am making here is in relation to that definition you provided. Nothing more.

Zagorath , 15 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Not all homes have a safe place where you can do that. And I even recall one story of a family that built a small shed in their front yard so they could store their bikes—not even for safety, but just the convenience of not needing to awkwardly drag the bikes up and down narrow stairs every dat—and the council forced them to remove it.

Apartments need to be required to have secure bike storage, and houses need to be allowed by right to build small bike sheds.

Edit: it was Ireland, not the UK. I guess because most of the stories about cycling I hear that aren't Australian are from the UK, my memory just lumped all of the British Isles together.

Zagorath , 15 days ago

I don't know about the UK, but at least in Australia Amazon would be responsible at least for the cost of a replacement. Which is small comfort in a case where it's done significant damage and even killed people, but in cases where it was a faulty product that failed in a mostly harmless way it's pretty good.

(I don't know one way or the other whether they could be held liable for more than that.)

Zagorath , 15 days ago

There are three reasons you probably don't need to worry about those checked devices.

First, ebikes have way larger batteries than mobile electronics. The first laptop that came up when searching for laptops with large batteries had 80 Wh. The smallest ebike battery that appears in the first article searching for "ebike battery capacity" is 400 Wh.

Second, these problems tend to occur in uncertified third-party knock-offs. Your Lenovo or HP or Apple laptop, or even your Shimano or Bosch ebike, are much, much less likely to fail than a cheap eBay or Amazon battery.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, you are at highest risk while charging, slightly less risk while in use, and lowest risk when off. A device switched off in an aeroplane cabin is about as safe as it can be.

Zagorath , 16 days ago

It's still safer. They can steal your wallet and pay for anything trivially. If they steal your phone, they have to be able to unlock it to pay with it.

Zagorath , 16 days ago

If you go over the limit they ask you to confirm in a way that requires the phone anyway

Oh interesting. Where I am if you go over the limit (usually $100), you just have to input your PIN. But $100 is enough to get up to some serious trouble, considering it's a per-purchase limit.

And I've both never heard of banks using the NFC directly (as opposed to using Google, Apple, Garmin etc. Pay), and wouldn't trust them in the slightest with it even if they did offer it, because they're not exactly known for great security. (And I'll take security over privacy any day.)

Zagorath , 15 days ago

Oh yeah I know it's theoretically possible. I've just never heard of it actually being done, for payments specifically, by banks. Using Google Pay doesn't restrict you from also using any of those other use cases: you're not giving anything up in terms of flexibility of functionality.

Yeah Garmin Pay is the equivalent on Garmin smartwatches. Unfortunately it's not as widely supported by banks (at least where I live) as Google and Apple Pay are.

Zagorath , 18 days ago

The Extended Edition was like the HD Edition of Age of Empires 2 (now called "Age of Empires II (2013)" on Steam). This is more like the Definitive Edition. Significant graphics improvements (as opposed to just taking the existing graphics and upscaling them), as well as new content and probably QoL improvements.

Zagorath , 18 days ago

AoM: Retold is using the AoE3: DE engine, according to comments made back around the time it was first announced.

Which is amusing, since AoE3: DE's engine is based on the original AoE3 engine, which in turn was based on the original engine of AoM.

Zagorath , 25 days ago

This page lists and compares a bunch of different options. Just quickly eyeballing it, Nextcloud Photos/Memories (not sure if they're separate apps from the main Nextcloud you mention), LibrePhotos, Immich, and PiwiGo seem the best options.

Zagorath , 26 days ago

I actually really like this as an idea. Has someone made a chess variant with PF2e-style action economy before?

Personally I feel like any capturing move would be 2 actions, as would castling. Any other move is 1 action. Maybe capturing with king would be 1 action.

I'm not sure how it would actually play out, but it could be interesting.

Zagorath , 26 days ago

Oh yeah, I like that.

I'd say it should do away with checkmate and use a Drawback Chess–style system where you win by capturing the king. This would cost 3 actions. I think merely moving into check could cost 2.

My original idea was that capturing with king would cost less than a normal capture because I wanted to buff the king's ability to protect himself, and in particular I was worried about strategies that could force the opponent to spend 2 actions capturing your piece with their king. But making moving into check cost 2 actions and capturing the king cost 3 would completely negate the need for that.

Moving into check with a capture would, obviously, cost 3 actions (1 for move, 1 extra for capturing, 1 extra for the check). And discovered checks would also cost 2 actions, with discovered check via a capture costing 3.

Zagorath , 28 days ago

He's unlikely to go to gaol for this particular set of crimes even without getting special treatment. He'd be looking at a maximum of 4 years (per count, but I suspect those would probably be served concurrently), but as another article about the subject said:

But Trump is unlikely to be sentenced to prison, experts say. He is a first-time offender, and the crime he has been found guilty of is a non-violent paper crime.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

One take I've seen some Australian lawyers suggest is that the extent of politicisation of America's Supreme Court is an inevitable result of how highly political their constitution is.

In Australia, our constitution deals with the basic functioning of government; how elections take place, who can vote, and mostly fairly boring procedural stuff like that.

America's constitution quite famously lays out a number of very specific rights. Rights that are, by their very nature, quite politiciseable and open to interpretation. If SCOTUS is able to invent rights that they claim are implied by the written text, with the legislature unable to legislate around it, that's a problem. It becomes even more of a problem when SCOTUS decides they can infer rights that are implied by those rights which SCOTUS themselves inferred. Deciding what rights people have—or removing those rights—should be the job of democratically elected representatives, not political appointees. So the court granting a right to abortion because they say it's implied that you have this right based on the right to privacy (quite a large stretch, IMO), and that right to privacy being implied by your explicit right to due process (a more reasonable inference), is quite a silly arrangement. Better for the legislature to simply do their job.

Not that this is in any way "simple". It would require a complete ground-up rewrite of the American constitution. And that's obviously never going to happen.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

I do think that the idea of judicial review itself makes sense. After all, what's the point of a constitution if the legislature can just makes laws that go directly against it? The problem, in my view, is that the constitution covers too many things, and does so in far too unspecific terms, which makes for an incredibly broad range of possible political interpretations.

Zagorath , 28 days ago

Fuck me that's stupid.

Australian politicians from our main two parties very obviously think like this as well. But they're both—even the right-wing "hates the poor" party—smart enough to not fucking say it out loud. They even pay lip service to the idea housing should be "affordable" from time to time.

Zagorath , 29 days ago

I dunno if TFL is a good example to use. It's just straight up a government-owned corporation and it uses a .gov.uk eTLD.

Zagorath , 30 days ago

line 2
    return False
    ^^^^^^
IndentationError: expected an indented block after function definition on line 1

Zagorath , 30 days ago

Wtf kind of Randian hellscape nonsense is this? They should be allowed to charge double to exploit people who are already disadvantaged by the way other companies are treating them? Fuck this nonsense.

Go create your own bear-infested village somewhere nobody with any morals has to live near you. But this time do it from scratch rather than ruining things for the people already living there.

Zagorath , 29 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

Interesting. This is certainly not the first time there have been markdown parsing inconsistencies between clients on Lemmy, the most obvious example being subscript and ^superscript^, especially when multiple words ^get used^ or you use ^reddit ^style ^(superscript text).

But yeah, checking just now on Jerboa you're right, it does display correctly the way you did it. I first saw it on the web in lemmy-ui, which doesn't display it properly, unless you use the triple backticks.

Zagorath , 1 month ago (edited 23 days ago)

At the very beginning I had to switch from ABP to uBO. I actually used ABP specifically because I wanted to allow through some non-obtrusive ads, because I think it's morally right to let companies make a profit if they're not being overly obnoxious about it, and ABP's Acceptable Ads policy is great for that. Unfortunately ABP was slower to implement something to avoid YouTube's fuckery, so I switched to uBO. Google has shot themselves in the foot because now instead of a small number of ads getting through, none do.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

(A⇒B)⇏(B⇒A)

Zagorath , 1 month ago

But then for some reason, another company went back and restarted publishing the old lines

I think it was the same company. White Wolf published World of Darkness games using its Storyteller system from 1991 until 2004. They then made the move to Chronicles of Darkness (a retroactive title the only came about in 2015, until then they were also called World of Darkness officially, known to fans as "new World of Darkness") in 2004. CoD changed some of the lore around and drastically cut back on how detailed and complex the metanarrative was.

CoD used their new "Storytelling" system, and did not perform very well commercially. Probably some fans didn't like it much, but mainly they decided to stop selling in stores so there was no discoverability. During the CoD era, White Wolf still published some WoD material, such as the 20th anniversary editions.

The most important detail here though comes in 2015–2018. Up until this point White Wolf has been bought and sold a couple of times, most recently by CCP. In 2015 they are bought by Paradox Interactive. In 2018 they release VtM 5th edition. In response to allegations of some very problematic material in V5, Paradox dissolves White Wolf and brings WoD production into Paradox Interactive.

I think that only Vampire, Hunter, and Werewolf are currently supported in the latest edition of Storyteller, but I may have missed something.

It's true that Onyx Path as a separate licensee has published books for White Wolf/CCP/Paradox. But they've done 20th Anniversary, CoD, and V5 stuff. The actual decision to go back to WoD was White Wolf/Paradox's.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

So, my context here is that I've never played any WoD or CoD games. But a couple of years back I was almost part of a group that was going to play a V5 campaign before it fell through. (I forget the timeline...might even have been December 2019 or thereabouts...) So I bought and have read through the V5 Core Rulebook. I obviously don't have earlier editions to compare it to, but I thought the system itself seemed really elegant. The kind of beautifully simple game design that first attracted me to D&D 5th edition. (Unfortunately having not played V5, I couldn't say whether I would eventually get tired of that simplicity in the same way I got tired of D&D 5e.)

From what I understand, they seem to have changed the metanarrative quite a lot from previous editions. Seemingly for the worse, according to a lot of people who really liked the old lore. Which might mean it's for the better (relative to old WoD) if you preferred CoD?

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Debugging spells isn't like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.

But most wizards just go with the ol' "add print statements everywhere" method of debugging.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

YouTube Premium costs as much for just two months as Nebula does for an entire year (if you sign up through a creator's code—US prices. Australian prices it's about 2.6 months) Highly recommend, probably the best bang for your buck option.

Dropout is quite a bit more expensive than Nebula, and narrower in range of content (basically comedy panel shows, sketch comedy, and D&D), but it's still only 5.4 months' worth of YouTube Premium in cost (for your second & subsequent year—4.3 months for the first year discount), and you're directly supporting the creators. Still a very good deal.

If you've got both of those, that's 8 months of YouTube Premium's cost, leaving 4 months worth that can be spent directly on individual creators' Patreons, Kofis, one-off donations, or on their merch.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Nebula is US$50 per year if you go straight to the website, but $30 per year if you click through any one of the creators' own referal URLs. No region-specific pricing as far as I know (but YouTube does have region-specific pricing, which is slightly cheaper in Australia than America using current currency exchange rates, which is why Nebula is more expensive here than in America, in YT-months).

The vast majority of Nebula content is available on YouTube, albeit with sponsors/ad reads removed, and sometimes a week or so early.

There's a fair amount of Nebula "Plus" content. Extra or supplementary material to videos that are otherwise available on YouTube, or an extra video in a series where most of the series is on YouTube but this episode is not.

There are also Nebula Originals, where Nebula themselves helped fund the project and the video is exclusive to Nebula. There are quite a few of these, but they're less common than the other categories.

The entire library is available to browse for free without an account if you go to their website and hit Explore so you can see for yourself. Look for the Nebula logo star for Originals, the + sign for Plus content, and the lightning bolt for Nebula First. You can also use the filters near the top to see only those, if you want. To give a rough sense of the relative abundance, my tablet displays up to 9 thumbnails per screen, and when sorting by most recent, the oldest I see without scrolling is 20 March for Originals, 30 April for Plus, just 9 May for First, and when unfiltered it only goes as far back as 19 hours ago, including 2 Nebula First videos.

some companies just convert dollar values to local currencies

This is what Dropout does I think. It displayed some weird numbers like $91.74, but didn't actually say anywhere that this was AUD until I read the fine print, so I almost started out comparing it to the US YT price. I assume the US price is a more round number.

Nebula just displays US prices and charges US prices regardless, I think. It's been a while since I actually looked at how they do it.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Oh damn yeah. I was comparing YouTube Premium in countries like Australia (US$11.07/month), US ($13.99), and UK ($16.41). If you're somewhere that it costs a tenth of that, it definitely changes the calculus.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

I'll believe it when I see it.

This post comes just hours after the US joined just 8 other countries—including Israel—in voting "no" in the United Nations General Assembly on a non-binding motion in support of Palestinian full membership of the UN. They can't even vote "yes", or join the likes of the UK and Canada in abstaining, on a non-binding recommendation.

Zagorath , 1 month 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 , 1 month ago

child lore

ಠ_ಠ

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

Would a centaur have two navels?

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

Photo showing a white horse stepping on a large keyboard where the keys are large enough to be easily usable by a horse hoof.

Zagorath OP , 1 month ago

Riderless horseracing maybe, but surely never horseless horseracing.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

I don't think that's the right reason, though it does touch upon one of the biggest reasons.

Communist projects have failed in no small part because of external interference from non-communist countries. Look at the US and their infamous "bringing democracy" around the world, for example.

But they've also failed not because of innate human nature, but because some people's nature is indeed what you describe. And unfortunately, violent revolutions have a tendency to make it very easy for those people take step in and fill power vacuums left in the wake of the former regime's demise. Even if the ideals of many of the boots on the ground in the revolution was entirely well-meaning, the leadership might not be, either from the start, or as the revolution goes on. That's why so many of the more famous communist regimes are incredibly authoritarian.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

It's easy to imagine a hypothetical way that could lead to problems. But in all the code I've worked with, either that scenario is avoided entirely, or other context makes it absolutely clear which IProductService is being used.