“fish” is perhaps a bad example to make your point with, given that that’s a non-technical term that doesn’t refer to any particular genetic branch of the animal kingdom - hence the podcast “no such thing as a fish”. So I’d say that calling a mountain goat a goat is supported by the idea that many unrelated animals are called fish.
On the weekend, I was having lunch with a family member, and they were talking about how they were so sick of all the apps that everyone wanted them to install. Apps for going to the museum, apps for paying for car packing, apps for ordering at a restaurant etc.
I pointed out to them that although they are complaining, they are still using and installing the apps; and I asked why they were doing that. Its easier to do it than not, they say.
Meanwhile, I myself don’t use a smartphone at all. Zero apps. And so although it is mildly annoying to keep see “just use the app”, and “scan this QR code”, I still manage to simply not do those things.
My suggestion to people who don’t like installing apps for random crap is this: don’t. Just don’t do it. And if that means you have to walk 10 more steps, or say a couple of extra sentences to a human; then accept that cost. Accept that experience in a world that is not controlled by the auxiliary brain you keep in your pocket.
I even don’t remember Catwoman being in Dark Knight Rises.
So is the plan is to use a heat-pump to cool the computers while getting some waste-product as hot as possible, and then eject the waste product? Or perhaps rather than ejecting it, the heat could be put into a large surface-area heat-sink thing to just radiate the energy black-body-style…
I think ideas like this are fair and reasonable if we have to have a data centre in space (for example, if we wanted people to live indefinitely on a space-colony or something like that). But its pretty clear that no plan will ever be anywhere near as good as what we can do on the planet’s surface.
Building and operating these things on the Earth’s surface is already expensive and resource intensive. And doing it in space is going to be a lot worse.
As an Australian, my understanding is that tortoises walk around on land, and turtles swim. Sometimes people say one when they mean the other, but that’s a bit like confusing bees and wasps (i.e. people understand they are different, but in some circumstances that difference isn’t important enough to try to get it right!)
I’m very much anti-car. I don’t own a car. My apartment doesn’t have a car park (at my request before it was built). … But I think you’re really over-egging the utility of horses. I don’t think they are anywhere near as viable in dense urban environments. I’d say a bicycle is far more realistic alternative to a car (I say that from experience). Perhaps an electric bike depending on your needs.
Keeping a horse takes a huge amount of space and resources. Perhaps you can do that if you live in a rural area and own a bit of farmland; but otherwise, I don’t think its is affordable or practical to own horse.
I’ve talked to heaps of parents and heaps of kids about this. What I think is interesting is that people face-to-face seems to be generally supportive of the law. They say that social media is problematic, and that the law helps by discouraging its use. A few different kids have said that they it helps them break an addition. Other kids say they don’t care, because it hasn’t blocked them. So mostly positive or neutral responses when face-to-face.
But every time I see this mentioned on the internet, it’s very negative. There are always heaps of comments saying that it is a failure, and could never work, and that the government is stupid; and there are often other comments saying it is a part of a secret plan for the government to track us or whatever. In any case, mostly negative views - with just a sprinkling of fairly neutral views such as “it hasn’t been active for very long. Lets wait and see.”
I just think that’s interesting. I guess my real-world social circles don’t totally match my internet social circles.
I figure I’d post a follow up after having the game for a couple of weeks:
I still stand by all the criticisms I made. (Poor early-game experience; lots of UI oddities and annoyances; weaker world-building and thematic buildup compared to DD1.)
However, I will say that the strategy and tactics side of the game do improve after unlocking a bunch of stuff. When first playing the game, there often weren’t any good responses to many challenges - so it was basically down to luck. But after unlocking stuff the balance is a lot better. I reckon the game would have a better early experience is more items were unlocked from the start. Unlocking stuff does give a nice sense of progress - but the player needs to have meaningful viable options to actually play.
So anyway, I do think the core gameplay is pretty good, and has quite a bit of variety in viable tactical styles - once you have the stuff unlocked to actually make it work! I think its kind of a shame that the game wasn’t polished a bit more before launching. Fixing the UI issues wouldn’t be a huge amount of work. And some early-game tweaks could improve that first-time experience quite a bit. … The thematic stuff might be unfixable though, because the nature of how the zones work. (Having randomised zones with bosses and such means that it can’t really give a sense that you’re gradually going deeper into the darkness).
Well, if they are the same game then it would be reasonable to expect that this “new expansion for Diablo 2” actually works with Diablo 2. But it doesn’t. It only works with “Diablo 2: Resurrected”, which is sold separately. People who own Diablo 2 cannot play this new expansion pack without buying another game.
That ladybird gender thing is such a load of crap. I find it hard to even believe that people are genuinely passionate about it. Every time ladybird is mentioned, someone brings up the ‘extreme views’ based on this. But it is the biggest load of nothing you are ever likely to see.
For anyone who doesn’t know, here’s what happened:
To me, that’s a minor error of judgement, with no lasting harm caused to anyone at all. But yet somehow this is constantly used as a reason to avoid ladybird.
How can I take this seriously? Is this some kind of organised anti-competition propaganda campaign? We’re talking about a free and open source project of a highly technical nature, and somehow people are upset that the word ‘he’ existed temporarily in a work-in-progress document with a target audience of essentially zero people. The people making this project are not political leaders or public figures with media training. They are focused on the technical side of things. Yeah, the pronoun was a mistake, but it pretty much the smallest mistake you could possibly make in this context. It not like they are donating to right-wing orgs, or publicly denouncing anyone, or promoting hate. I see far worse than what they did on a daily basis from all sorts of people - including right here in lemmy. And in terms of ladybird, I have not heard of any kind of misstep ever since this instant - which was a very long time ago now. It is honestly bizarre that people have clung onto this incident. I’m honestly not sure I believe that the backlash is entirely organic. It’s just too disproportionate.
[edit] Let me just follow this by saying that I do think there are other good reasons to be upset with this same ladybird dev. I just don’t think the ‘he’ in the docs thing is anything at all.
You’re a liar. No one is that influenced.
There are a lot of people in the world. Some feel passionately enough about certain topics to write long lemmy posts. And it doesn’t stop there. Some people actually physically do stuff in the real world too! So if you think typing a few paragraphs of text is too much effort for any real person, then I suggest you try to broaden your social circle.
Yeah. The idea that tracking should require explicit consent sounds pretty good at first, but we now the result is that users are constantly nagged and harassed and annoyed until they finally “consent” - at which point everything becomes silky smooth.
So yeah, I agree that this kind of thing should be simply banned, to remove any inconvenience or confusion from the whole thing.
You may not like a feature, which is fine, but a lot of people do.
Sure. I agree with that. But I think you’re seeing this in reverse of the point I was trying to make. My point is that you might think this feature is mission critical, but a lot of people do not. The purpose of my previous post was to imply that you are over-emphasising its importance.
I understand that you personally want a fancy clipboard with lots of features; but for me, I actually explicitly deliberately only want a single item clipboard. I want the predictable simple certainty of what is and what is not stored in the clipboard. And if I ever had a multi-item clipboard with a UI interface, I’d be calling that confusing bloatware and looking for how to delete it.
So I don’t think we should rank each OS by how fancy its clipboard is.
In which case average Joe needs people like us to push back against coercive bullshit so that it doesn’t become entrenched.
Ok. There are two broad things I didn’t like. The first is that the plot is highly formulaic. I reckon that from the first time we see Julian, it is possible to predict every major plot point from that time all the way to the end of the movie. So then it’s just a matter of when and precisely how the various things will happen. Like obviously he’s going to get drawn into the rebel group, and obviously they’ll have a pregnant woman that he need to protect, and obviously there is going to be a betrayal, and obviously the people closest to him are going to die, and obviously the child will be seen as beacon of hope - etc. Its like the movie is made by snapping together a selection of off-the-shelf general-purpose tropes.
And the second thing I disliked is that several of the conversations seem like they are performed for the viewer rather than for the characters. For example, early in the movie in the car when they are discussing treatment of refugees… It reflected their views and situation pretty well to the viewer, but it made it sound like they’d barely discussed it with each other before - which I did not find plausible. I think ‘real’ people in that circumstance would already be very familiar with the situation and with each others opinion on the situation - and so the the conversation would be different. Another similar example is near the end, talking about when the miscarriages started in the hospital. It sounds like a sharing of an powerful experience, new information, very heart-felt. But it seems to me that since those events were 18 years ago, and were of critical importance to everyone on the planet, I think everyone would have been highly familiar with that kind of account. It would not be a new sharing of information. It would be an extremely well know sequence of events; and so the conversation should have been different. (And at the end, they made a comment about it beings strange living in a world without the sound of children… like, ‘no shit’ - is that a novel thought? After 18 years? It just didn’t feel real to me.)
One other particular scene I disliked was when Jasper sacrificed himself to let the others escape. I just could not believe that Theo et. al would just stand on the hill in plain sight of their pursuers, while Jasper obviously was ready to give his life to allow them to escape. They made no effort to stay hidden or anything. They’re just standing there watching, while their friend gives up his life to protect them and the one hope for humanity… a simple glance from any of the baddies could spell their doom, but they just stand and watch. Like… what the hell are they doing? I feel like the reason they stayed is that so the movie could show the death and their reaction, and avoid having to jump between different characters’ view points. And Jasper starts doing the ‘pull my finger’ thing… which I feel they only did because that kind of thing is basically the only characteristic the movie had managed to build up for Jasper that they could use as an emotional lever…
By contrast, today I watched Das Boot. Which is a much older and less flashy movie. But in Das Boot, the characters only say things that are realistic conversations for people in that situation. And the plot was not so easy to predict, because since it was not a message of hope or anything like that, it was much harder to guess how it might end. And if you aren’t watching the running-time, this makes certain action scenes fair more intense - because they could very well be the end of the movie. There is no ‘plot armour’ for these characters. So… for me, Das Boot is better than Children of Men. (The movies are very different. The only reason I’m comparing them is that I happened to watch them in succession and I thought it might be useful to help illustrate what I was talking about above.)
To clarify, what I didn’t like about it was not really about it having gaps in the details. I don’t mind that the viewer was not told the cause of the problem for example.
(At this point I started trying to be more specific about what I didn’t like - but I’ve decided to skip that. You liked the movie. That’s good. Enjoying things is good, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind!)
That sounds fair.
I think I wasn’t really in a great mood when I watched it, and so I was probably not susceptible to having a particular feeling invoked. At the time, my own feelings were going to dominate regardless of the what the movie did.
I was mostly thinking about why characters were doing the things they were doing, or saying the things they were saying - and my conclusion was often that it was only for the viewer’s benefit; which I didn’t like. But on the other hand, I can see how what they were doing and saying could help invoke a feeling if I had been more receptive to it; rather than worrying about the ‘why’.
Fair point about the positives. Thanks for that.
Historians, I guess.