Maximum rationalisation mode: Maybe Conservatives will now be so confident that they’ve already won the next election that those of them who are just feigning the hate for trans people, gays, immigrants, refugees, socialists, liberals, opponents of fascism, and whatever other scapegoats they can find in order to win popular support will feel that they can safely tone it down a little and just coast to victory without needing to stir up even more fear and anger.

Freedom of expression is very important, so I propose a compromise. Display as much advertising and other propaganda as you like, but no actual burning of fossil fuels is allowed anywhere within city limits. Temporary exceptions to be made for fire trucks, construction equipment, and essential freight deliveries so long as it can be show that there is no current alternative and there’s a credible plan to create one within five years.

I don’t think that kind of anti-labour attitude is likely to be prevalent among people who play daily NYT word games. A more mainstream response is probably more like “whatever, nerds.”

Having apps that do what users want but try to hide it from reviewers really highlights the absurdity of letting Apple decide what software you’re allowed to run.

The Featured Snippet quoted an article from the Mayo Clinic, highlighting the words “Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure.” But when she looked up “no link between coffee and hypertension”, the Featured Snippet cited a contradictory line from the very same Mayo Clinic article: “Caffeine doesn’t have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure”.

On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they’ve learned anything at all about medicine, it’s hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they’re given are biased or accurate.

… and people calling themselves communist still leaping to its defence, for some inexplicable reason.

Any talk of communism is a “red” herring when it comes to this topic. Russia isn’t in any way officially, notionally, or superficially communist.

Is there any truth to the allegations? Beats me, but seeing the possibility dismissed as as a preposterous notion that can only be part of a “New Red Scare” does not decrease my estimation of the chances of it.

This was just last month.

Just think of all the juicy benefits of replacing journalists with machines. They’ll never stumble or cough while presenting the news, they’ll never call in sick, never age, never get mad as hell and decide to not take it any more, never resign from the editorial board in protest no matter what garbage you tell them is the news. Machines are just better suited to the job, it’s inevitable.

They’re Canadian politicians. Their entire careers have been built in a world where everyone who matters believes that party loyalty is super important, or at least acts as if they believe it. They’re trying to do what they think is best for the Liberal party.

Well, he’s not wrong that it’s “super hard” to see any benefit of Denuvo for anyone other than the beneficial owners of Denuvo Software Solutions. Gamers might have a better than average ability to suspend disbelief, but that “new study” was pushing it a bit far.

I remember Bloor street before it had bike lanes. It was awful for bicyclists and almost as bad for the drivers competing with them for road space.

Too long to read? I get it. Here’s the summary. Download Firefox.

Yes. One option is to download it from here: https://librewolf.net/

Did this highly scientific study contemplate the possibility that this is in part the result of people feeling like they’re more justified in turning to piracy if a game is burdened with Denuvo?

Spoiler: It does not, so far as I can tell at first glance. It appears that the model is constructed entirely from DRM-crippled games that got cracked, and then then the estimate of how much revenue would be lost by going DRM-free from the start is extrapolated from that based on the assumption that it makes no difference. Maybe it’s true, but the acknowledgement that it “can and often does cause problems, and some developers have chosen to avoid Denuvo altogether because it had such a negative impact on how well their game would run” sort of suggests otherwise.

https://abs.freemyip.com:84/share/_5WuM4QF — be careful following strange links you found on lemmy, but this appears to be the pdf.

Isn’t this basically just the old trick of estimating (x * y) as (x + y - 1) when x and y are somewhat close to 1?

I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @pluralistic@mamot.fr casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.

Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Except it wasn’t just a notification that there’s been a complaint. It was “no more unwanted messages, please.”

Aside from that it could be somewhat reasonable if there really is sufficient evidence to suggest that a criminal complaint is warranted. That seems unlikely, but I suppose we should keep an open mind. In the absence of someone digging up some really damning stuff from social media it looks a whole lot more like a lawyerly — and presumably therefore less illegal — attempt at something like “swatting”, albeit a less violent version. The police should know better than to let themselves be used like that, but a lifetime of experience leads me to suspect that maybe they do not.

Thing is, they didn’t seem to have brought anything to inform her of. If they want to come out of it looking like anything but witless fascist goons trying to intimidate someone, they’re going to need to be a lot more specific than “unwanted messages” to unspecified persons.

She seems to think it was someone she replied to on twitter. I reply to random people on here all the time, just like I’m doing now. If it’s unwanted, by all means send the netiquette cops to my house I guess, we’ll see if I’m able to suppress my derisive laughter long enough to get a video half as good as this one out of it.

That seems like too fast for night driving. At that speed you’d want perfect conditions including maximum visibility.