Pxtl

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Give me an F-zero 99 + Mode7 Mario Kart Mario Maker game. Simple 2D maps.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

The highlight on new comments is ugly as sin. Do not want.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

They seem determined to destroy one of the top 3 most prestigious universities in Canada.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Or an agent orange business.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Right? Seems like there are ways they could make that less one sided. “Unnamed Canadian man killed in Cancun; Mexican authorities say he had a record of gang activity”. And the preview contradicts the headline – was he killed at the resort or at a mall?

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I was thinking it’s not too late but the Bloc would never support a system with PR outcomes since it’s the FPTP system that gives regional-intense groups like them outsized power.

A shame. I still insist that a regional-based open-list MMP would be the ideal fit for Canada.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I have trouble believing that petition matters since it reads like business as usual for the CPC. The only thing that stands out is that it doesn’t specifically call out the carbon tax.

Pxtl, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I love STV but imho it just doesn’t work for Canada. We have too many massive wilderness ridings. If you had a heavily-urbanized province like if Southern Ontario was its own province, I’d say it would be the perfect system for that area.

Here’s why: The northern areas of every province are extremely low-population and are enormous. For example, if BC had 5-seat-riding STV federally, the entire province north of Kamloops would be one massive riding. It’s possible all their MPs would be from the populated end of the riding, so that people in the ass-end of the riding live over 1000km from their “representative”. Ontario would look similar - Northern Ontario is probably the most sparsely-populated area outside of the Territories. That’s not an acceptable outcome – being 1000km from your MP means you are not represented.

Contrast this vs Mixed Member Proportional, where local ridings still exist - under MMP, 2/3 of the seats are normal-ass ridings that work exactly like we do today. Then we group them together in “regions” and back-fill the most popular party-members within that region to make it proportional. A lot of people get upset about non-local representatives, or “unelected party staffer MPs” in MMP, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

The plan that was floated for BC is actually really awesome – imho it should be applied Canada-wide. It’s basically a vanilla MMP plan but there are details that do great work to mitigate the main complaints about MMP:

1. Take the map of Canada and carve it up into regions of 14 ridings (obviously for provinces with less than 14 ridings, just take the whole province). These are our “regions”. So, for example:

   • Saskatchewan is one "region"
   • Peel Region (Mississauga + Brampton + nearby towns & exurbs) is one “region”.
   • Niagara Peninsula (including Hamilton) is one “region”.
   • A big city like Montreal would probably be 3 different electoral “regions”.

2. Within each Region we have 9 ridings (or 2/3 of the total number of Seats if the Region is smaller than 14 seats). Those are normal-ass elections. So Calgary Centre still has its own MP, and so do more remote areas like Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine. These ridings are only about 50% larger then our current ridings.

3. The other 5 Seats within the Region are backfill seats, that are used to fill up the Region until the proportion of party-members roughly matches their % of the vote within the Region. So even though the back-fill people don’t represent a riding, they’re still somewhat local. Flin Flon’s non-riding members are still from Manitoba. People in Markham will still have a local MP, but also will have regional MPs from the rest of York. So locality is still good for the regional representatives, and we have a proper local riding MP, we’re not losing that guarantee of locality.

4. Avoid the “nobody elected this asshole” problem with open-lists. The ballot is simple, it has 2 sections:

   1. A section to pick your local MP, which is exactly as it is today. Pick 1 person here.
   2. A section to vote for your regional MP, grouped by party, which has multiple options per-party. Pick 1 person here. As a side-effect the person you select here is also your party PR vote.

5. So, we figure out how many seats to back-fill by % of votes per-party (on the regional section) - so if there are 14 seats in a Region, and one party gets half of the regional MP votes, got 5 local seats? They’ll get 2 Regional seats. And which of their Regional candidates get those 2 seats? The 2 that got the most votes.

So it’s not like they’re unelected. They still have to be the most popular people within their party and within the region.

So let’s think a concrete example - imagine Southeastern Quebec region, which includes Quebec City. Generally not a very Red area except for the city itself. The Liberals continue to run Steven Guilbeault in Quebec City itself as a local MP, but to drum up interest they also run Stephane Dion and Joël Lightbound as regional candidates in the Quebec City regional area, including a massive amount of rural and suburban area they expect to get a little support from but generally lose. To pad out the rest of the list, they also run Ricky the Pigfucker as a regional candidate. Now, this is an open list - if the Liberal voters outside of Quebec City really hate Dion, they can still vote for Ricky. And so instead of the expected three MPs for the Quebec region being Guilbuealt (elected directly by Quebec City), Dion, and Lightbound, it’s an upset and they get Guilbeault, Dion, and Ricky the Pigfucker.

And Independants “I don’t want to run as a party” types? They can still run as a local riding MP. They’re not frozen out like most people think of about in “Proportional systems” that are very “party-oriented”.

It’s not a perfect system. It’s very party-oriented in the way that STV isn’t. It’s weirdly complicated. But it works. It’s used IRL in real first-world countries like Germany and New Zealand and Scotland. There’s lots of fiddly knobs to argue about like whether it’s okay to add more top-up MPs beyond the fixed size to preserve proportionality (true-MMP vs AMS - personally I’m on the fixed-size side AKA AMS) But with Canada’s geographic considerations, I strongly think it’s our best option.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

angryflower.com/513.html

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/56af01a7-474e-4681-84e3-51f2bc7b1a2f.jpeg

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Which is why immigration is still important, as long as we’re focusing on bringing people who will be filling needs to help with our various crises.

Doctors, nurses, builders, etc. Not business students.

Pxtl, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

The problem is that 70 years ago a massive baby-boom happened and there aren’t enough people in Canada to keep the economy and healthcare system running properly as those people all become systemic burdens. Immigration is the only thing that keeps our demographic system from being as upside-down as every other 1st-world country.

4 example demographic pyramids

And student-immigration is actually the best kind, because they’re young and healthy and already finished the expensive free-education-schooling-years and are ready to go right into the workforce after they dump a crapload of money into the educational economy.

The problem, of course, is that in order to make this work, you have to make sure there’s enough housing. And instead, we stopped building government-funded housing 30 years ago, and we let municipalities declare new housing basically illegal (well, it’s legal if you Know A Guy, which is why all the builders are mobsters now). And also we don’t have enough people to build as much as we need.

So yeah, the Fed has some good ideas and a reasonable top-level economic plan but they’ve screwed up the details catastrophically.

Basically, the “no immigration” path is either Logan’s Run or every young person gets taxed to the gills as we try to support an elder-heavy country on an increasingly anemic economy. How much “opportunity” does that sound like for your kids?

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I love the concept but that gameplay looks hella repetitive. Combined with a black and white art style that could get tiring, I’m worried about longevity.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

This. They could’ve offered literally any other plan, like saying “we’re charging fuel-burning home hearing per BTU so oil doesn’t cost much more than natural gas and offering more subsidies for heat pumps.” or something.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

That’s Capcom. It was a Dreamcast flagship game but resurrecting it still isn’t up to Sega.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Powerstone 2 was basically a Super Smash Bros-style 4-player fighting party-game but with the 3D-platformer gameplay of a Wrestlemania game. Instead of Smash Balls, there were a set of “Stones” where you’d get an ultimate if you got 3 of them. Very fun party/fighting game, much like Smash.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I think I saw some co-op in the Golden Axe. If they lean into the multiplayer I could see it being good fun as a co-op soulslike without the oppressive grimdark atmosphere that tends to define the genre.

Shinobi looks cool, but there are enough amazing pixel-art platformers out there already.

No interest in Streets of Rage.

Crazy Taxi looks like Crazy Taxi. Which is neat but I don’t really have nostalgia for that.

I’m mostly disappointed they missed how awesome Armored Core 6 was and didn’t jump onto that bandwagon with a new Virtual On game.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Uh, have you not seen how many game studios are collapsing? It’s more likely an “oh crap we’re bankrupt interest rates jumped and we can no longer pay our loans’ carrying costs”.

The interest rate jump screwed a lot of businesses that depend heavily on loans to make it to profitability.

They probably took one look at their launch-day take, compared it against their loans, and said “fuck this we’re filing for bankruptcy and I’m and going to go get a regular-ass job”.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Why would they intentionally screw up so badly idk.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

They probably started with an overambitious design, took some ill-advised short-cuts, and pivoted the to the “extraction” format after they’d already marketed it as a different concept, and made a bad gamble or two. Normal gamedev stuff. Same as every Molyneux game.

A few years back this could’ve been another No Man’s Sky story where they fix it after launch… but that means going deeper and deeper into debt while you salvage the mess you’ve made. Post-COVID interest rates make that impossible. So now they’re broke and the project they spent the last years on is a stinker and they don’t have enough runway to fix it.

So they’re done.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Problem there is the gas cost of blockchain is too high. Recording transactions on chain is expensive. It might be worthwhile for full game transfers, but for cosmetics? I doubt that.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Yes, but crypto keys recorded with an owner in a public ledger, so there’s a clear single owner.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

What blockchain doesn’t have high transaction costs once it scales up to large usage? Fundamentally blockchains are about hyper-redundant indestructable storage with expensive costs for writing to that storage to prevent flooding it with garbage. The most mature and sophisticated blockchain that doesn’t involve burning down a forest to solve sudokus is the Ethereum network, which is probably the one to point to when we’re talking about a large blockchain, and that’s one that uses the subcurrency of “gas” to model paying for recording into that ledger.

Are there any blockchains that could handle transaction volumes on the scale of a game-store like Gog or Epic (much less Steam) without putting non-trivial prices on writing the transactions to the ledger?

Pxtl, 6 months ago

My solution: stop holding public consultations.

We are a nation of laws, not squeaky wheels.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I know Harris argues against Google automating enforcement, but like Google does have an index of all of the text on the Internet including knowledge of when the Google Bot first saw that text, as well as auto-generated transcripts of the videos on Youtube, right?

Pxtl, 6 months ago

They’re gonna get minivanned again. You can’t pick somebody with her record of NIMBYism while running one of Ontario’s biggest cities when there’s a housing crisis going on.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Vader has The Force, but Wolverine can recover from whatever injuries he gets. Vader has been removed from battle by serious wounds at least 3 times so far.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

It’s kind of a moot point anyways? I mean, how good do you think they’re going to be at parrying under this circumstance? They’re both gonna get stabbed in the chest.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

If they don’t want to offer checked bags for free they should at least offer some kind of group deal for checking bags. Like each traveller gets a coupon for 33% off on a checked bag on the same flight, and those stack so any group of 3 or more is checking a single suitcase for free. When flying with family it often makes sense for us to just use knapsacks and one big suitcase.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Oh, did he keep slaves?

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I have one of those Lenovos for reading comics, and they’re great. Nothing amazing but you can’t beat the bang for your buck.

Pxtl, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

e-ink isn’t (edit: good) color.

Tablets are the ideal form factor for things that would traditionally require a large, full-color book. That is: passing around a photo album, reading magazines, textbooks, comics, playing turn-based games like board-games and strategy games. If you use a stylus they’re excellent for things that require free-form pen-and-paper like math homework and creating art.

Now, when they were a $600 luxury item that didn’t really make sense as a product. But now that they’re like $150 for a solidly good tablet they’re absolutely a worthwhile purchase for those use-cases.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Ahh, yes, well I suppose if you’re mostly reading comics that were made in the '70s and you really want to capture that faded 32-colors-Ben-Day-dot-printed-on-newsprint feel, that’ll be just perfect.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Fair point. Will correct my above post. But either way: unless you find screens particularly eye-straining or have extreme battery-life desires, I don’t really see e-ink tech as worth the downsides at this point, at least for non-text content. For a watch where I want an always-on screen and endless battery and I’ll never watch video on it? Yes, I want more e-ink and low-power LED tech and the like. But for tablets? I’m good with the vibrant colors of a glowing LED screen.

Pxtl, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Huh, that’s disappointing. It’s funny how everybody keeps experimenting but nobody seems to have topped the Pebble for watch form-factor: low-power gameboy-ish LED screen and more of an old-school micro-controller chip instead of a phone-like chip and just use the “shake to wake” functionality to brighten the backlight.

Pebble might not have been the smartest smartwatch, but it was definitely the watchyest smartwatch. Always-on screen and week-long battery.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Robeo and Julieceus the Ochre Lord of Time.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

We all have hundreds of games that are $0, it’s called “all the games in your steam account you already own that you haven’t played yet”.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

They should run proper goddamned metrics. I go to considerable effort to ensure good quality wifi.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I only played it briefly at my nephew’s house back in the day but it actually seemed really janky. Was it actually good or was this just “omg GTA but with Simpsons I’m 11 and this is cool!”?

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Imho the big challenge is just lack of throughput. I follow many communities, and it’s still not at the point where my front-page is consistently new content every day.

Feed the beast. Until then, quit whining about how repetitive the content is - there just isn’t enough of it yet.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

The high volume of unoriginal Linux content is getting old, and that’s coming from somebody who uses Linux.

I can’t really complain about the content being a bit stale when it feels like the alternative is nothing. So many communities that had vibrant counterparts on Reddit struggle to get one post per week. If it’s ditto-memes on Lemmy, I’ll take it.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

I do that occasionally but since the stale “Active” is the default it’s easy to forget.

Ooh, I just found you can change the default!

edit: isn’t this kind of a “you’re holding it wrong” problem? I mean, the default behaviour on Lemmy is awful, not just for this but also since iirc it didn’t default to showing my subscribed communities at the start either.

Pxtl, 6 months ago

Deep Rock is good at letting you ignore what you don’t care about. I’ve never needed a wiki for it. It’s just fun and silly co op action, with massive complexity mostly about trivial things.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

The fact that this meme makes sense to anyone demonstrates how dynamic typed programming languages cause brain damage.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

JS is the one that’s built into the browser. If JS wasn’t built into the browser, it would go onto the trashbin of bad old languages that only survived because of their platform like VBA and ActionScript and .bat batch scripting. You can’t compare JS to any other language because JS is the one you don’t get a choice on.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Stockholm syndrome.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

There’s an AJ video where they claimed what he describes. It’s… not convincing. In fact it retroactively destroys some of the respect I had for AJ.

aljazeera.com/…/what-hit-ahli-hospital-in-gaza

It tries to use the video from the local cameras to show that the rocket was intercepted.

From the commentary “That video clearly shows how the iron dome intercepted these rockets”

But the images it shows don’t really back up their claim. We’re not really seeing any “intercepted” happening.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Anybody remember Nexus Q?

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Even for experts the user experience is shit. Too much has to be done manually when the default should be automatic, like fetching before pull, recursing when working with repos that use submodules, allowing mismatched casing on case insensitive filesystems, etc.