A key feature of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or Louis XIV, keeping the court close like this is an absolutely essential part of holding on to power. For one they’re too busy with the king to have time to get bored and start scheming against him. For two the courtesans are around each other and competing for attention so they scheme against each other instead. We know that Trump listens to his advisors very haphazardly; it keeps them on their toes, constantly begging for attention (even if the end result is unbelievable political flip-flopping, that’s irrelevant to Trump himself).

People have this image of the Third Reich as super organized, but in reality the top command was a complete mess as everybody was trying to backstab each other and to please Hitler who didn’t necessarily even have a clue what was going on. The utter incompetence of Nazi leadership was always going to cost them the war, but it did keep Hitler in power until the very end even though the outcome of the war was long considered inevitable by his own generals.

Putin does the same. Remember the feud between Wagner guy and Shoigu? Putin intentionally encourages internal squabbles because it means in an environment where everyone mostly hates everyone, the only consistent loyalty is to him.

Anyway, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about Mr. biggest-nuclear-arsenal-on-the-planet going at a Hitler speedrun, but the only saving grace right now is that the whole thing is an inefficient mess and a large chunk (but not all) of them are too dumb to be truly dangerous. When he starts exclusively listening to his war hawks or the project 2025 guys… We’re fucked.

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

If you’ve seen a picture on Lemmy, you’ve almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.

Yeah it’s Ctrl+D. I do use bookmarks on occasion (especially for stupid websites with non-intuitive URLs and page titles I can’t easily find by typing in the omnibar), but not as a way to organize my work.

The reason I mention ADHD for this in particular is I saw a home organization tip for ADHD that I related strongly to: ADHD brains really benefit from having everything spread out on a table, visible and immediately available. Trying to force an ADHD person to constantly put things away is super counter-productive even if it’s apparently good advice for neurotypical folk. Though of course ADHD is not an excuse not to clear the messy table once the project is finished.

My computer desktop follows the same principle. I’ll have as many workspaces as I do ongoing projects, and every workspace has all the tools I need open. And the good news is it’s much harder to run out of virtual space than it is to run out of space on a real table.

I feel like it’s often bad game design from developers who think they need to put in consumables without understanding their gameplay value.

In too many games using up all your consumables is just A Thing That Happens. So the game is balanced to allow you to survive anyway. But then the corollary is that if it works for a bit then you can finish the game without using any of the consumables. The consumables are just a way to make already achievable portions of the game easier, which is just sloppy game design IMO. Bethesda games for instance are very guilty of that.

People not understanding that we understand bookmarks exist is weird to me.

For me it’s a suspected ADHD thing. If I make a bookmark:

• I have to context-switch into “cleaning up” mode. Leaving a tab open is not distracting, having to name it and categorize it is.
• Bookmarks are virtual drawers. Anything I put in a drawer might as well be in a cave in Alaska guarded by a troll as far as my brain is concerned. If I intend to look at this in the next 2-3 weeks, I keep the tab open because it’s a virtual reminder I’ve not yet done the thing.
• Yes, I’ve got tabs open from over a year ago. Those ones don’t serve a purpose, I’ll get around to cleaning up… eventually.

Honestly if I was forced to close my browser sessions at the end of the work day, not joke, not an exaggeration, I’d switch jobs. I’m working on too many different complex things to have to rebuild my mental model of where everything was at from scratch every morning. I would not get anything done.

I looked it up because I already forgot, but you need to do half of the puzzle I’m talking about to do the big one. And that one is annoying as fuck to do because even if you immediately understand how it works (it is very neat) you’ll be looking at it for literal hours getting tiny details right with zero feedback from the game, and the “this is neat” feeling quickly turned into intense frustration for me. Doubly frustrating because I was not in the right headspace after being forced to do a bunch of content filler puzzles to even get there. I just can’t find any joy in the tedium of figuring out a bazillion very similar puzzles over and over again to solve a bigger puzzle I already know how to solve. I figured out your trick, game, where is my damn reward? I guess that’s why I could never get into Rubik’s Cube…

Outer Wilds approaches this very differently, I definitely spent hours wandering because I misunderstood one very specific thing. But once I did understand that thing, everything clicked into place and the game revealed itself to me. Late-game Tunic instead punishes discovery with more grind.

The combat was fine, I never touched the difficulty either. Though I will say the difficulty scaling was a bit all over the place, most of the regular enemies were barely a threat, while the bosses were pretty all over the place in terms of difficulty. But overall the combat progression was quite enjoyable.

It’s more of a “souls-lite” meets Outer Wilds for sure. You gotta be relatively on top of things mechanically to beat it, and on top of that in the second half of the game it switches to puzzles that are (IMO) infuriatingly grindy and will take hours to complete after you’ve figured out the mechanic.

Which is perfectly fine for those who like that, but I was sold “knowledge base game like Outer Wilds” which doesn’t accurately capture how disgustingly grindy Tunic really is IMO. That’s like saying Elden Ring is an “open world walking simulator with gorgeous graphics and compelling combat”. I mean, yeah, it’s all that and it’s a great game. But that’s kind of underselling the fact that if it’s your first Souls you’ll probably break a couple keyboards after meeting Margit.

For me the end-game was the wrong ratio of grind-to-payoff. Everything after unlocking that one secret ability got quite repetitive. I watched a video essay from someone who praised it specifically because they’re a hardcore gamer who loves the grind and pouring sweat into it and the accompanying feeling of accomplishment, but after I discovered 90 % of the secrets of the world it felt really annoying to spend the second half of the game scouring every nook and cranny of the game for the remaining 10 %. Some of these puzzle have very long solutions with absolutely zero feedback if you do even one tiny thing wrong and that’s absolutely infuriating. I think I would have preferred it if credits had rolled at the halfway point.

However I loved Outer Wilds because while it’s huge and full of sometimes very difficult puzzles, it never gets grindy. Either you get it or you don’t, the game never presents you with a “congratulations you understand the mechanic, now go stare at every wall in the game for the next 3 hours”. I get that some people love that but it clearly wasn’t for me.

Doesn’t HP end up a literal magic cop at the end of the series? The whole caste system is also upheld throughout, at no point is revealing the wizarding world to muggles even considered an option despite the fact that little kids are dying from cancer all over Britain/the world that could be magically healed in an afternoon. The whole SPEW thing is just profoundly racist and always has been. “Cho Chang” – nuff said. The whole point of Hogwarts is that it’s a boarding school, which proudly inherits all its real-world British characteristics which are intrinsically linked to the more problematic parts of the British class system.

Rowling has always been a bigot and I will die on this hill. Any progressive messaging that people read into harry potter is at best performative (for instance yes she explicitly denounces “blood purity” pretty early on, but that’s super performative considering her entire worldbuilding is built on the premise that some people are just inherently magical and others are inherently not invited to the party. “Blood purity contests” are only bad when wizards to it to other wizards.).

I don’t think she’s a good enough writer to have done most of the racist/classist/misogynist messaging intentionally, but nonetheless her reactionary poorly thought-out world view transpires through every bit of her writing.

EDIT: Trying to expand on my own thoughts here. I’ve always despised HP as a franchise so to try to be fair to HP let’s contrast and compare with the piece of shit author who did make a book I like, Ender’s Game. I pirated it a couple years back, and I won’t pretend it’s not obvious at times that he’s a homophobe and a religious nutcase with some obvious cognitive dissonance with some of his (at least at the time) progressive views. I guess the good thing about that particular IP is that there’s no new stuff coming out besides one awful movie, so everyone can agree Orson Scott Card can get fucked and move on with their lives. But it’s important to acknowledge that his religious zealousness did impact his writing and to take a step back even if we decide to still appreciate his work.
The problem is that HP fans are in a much tougher situation because the writing just isn’t good so if you drop the flimsy pretense that 2000s Rowling was a champion of liberal ideals, then you really don’t have much left besides a profoundly flawed worldbuilding with shitty characters who only work to uphold the wizarding status quo. Yeah I’d get pretty mad too if I had spend my teenage years obsessing over that heap of trash.

That song is very hard to coordinate with a crowd of untrained singers. It was written to be sung on stage in a theater, not by a rowdy crowd. It can be (and has been) used as a dub over videos of protests though.

The reason why La Marseillaise and its offshoot L’Internationale were so successful is that they’re slower songs, meant to be absolutely belted by a crowd of belligerant drunks. La Marseillaise is originally a literal revolutionary marching song.

Plus La Marseillaise just goes harder lyrically. It would actually have been pretty scandalous if it was written in 1980 for a play.
“To arms, citizens! Form your Battalions! Let’s March! Let’s March! So an impure blood can water our furrows!”

Maybe one of them Angelino theatre kids should do a partial English and/or Spanish translation focusing on rhythmic accuracy.

Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can’t do both right now.

I can’t fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.

US military apologists (even before Trump) will say “but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders” like Abu Ghraib didn’t happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don’t have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device… which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don’t have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn’t be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever “hey BTW this device is at those coordinates”.

Google already uses this with WiFi to help “bootstrap” GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn’t change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple’s database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn’t disable the “enhanced localization” feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There’s lots of room to give additional info in between that and “brake light is on because the driver doesn’t understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights”. It’s like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they’re on when the car isn’t meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they’re like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

If god didn’t want my buttcheeks poopy, then why did he make them hairy?