Pxtl

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I watched the al Jazeera vid where they pushed that theory and it’s completely incoherent. I honestly lost a lot of respect for AJ there.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Okay but don’t fund the terf.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Because batteries are expensive. So by default you’re targeting a luxury price, whether it’s luxury sports car or a luxury SUV.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

About half the country lives in the Windsor to Quebec city corridor, a region with population density of Spain.

Most of the northern wilderness is unoccupied. It makes no sense to say we can’t have good passenger rail just because Victoria Island exists.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

It’s going to be a mobile game.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

This is overstated.

In the old days, there was a hierarchy of reputability. At the top you had the bluechecks that generally represented reputable sources of information, who had premium billing in the platform. Then you had the normies. Then you had the slush-pit of soft-blocked people that were shoved into the “other replies” box because everybody hated them and they only followed their network of bots.

Now, the hierarchy is reversed. The slush-pit people are now have blue-checks, the algorithmic boost on blue-checks is even stronger, and half of the old reputable blue-checks have left.

This is like saying “Reddit/Lemmy has always been awful” if we made the upvotes/downvotes of all the worst people on the site worth 100X what a normal person’s upvote/downvote was worth. Yes, there have always been problems, but they can get worse.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Yes.

But here’s the thing:

Reddit/Lemmy: those people have equal voice to you or me. Of course they can amplify that voice with sockpuppets, but still - one account one vote.

Old Twitter: those people have downmodded influence. Twitter knew everybody hates them and treated them like the garbage they are.

New Twitter: those people rule the roost, because they’re willing to pay Elon $8/mo for a megaphone for their jackassery.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Okay, but the new Twitter reinstated him, and a bunch of Nazis.

I mean, old Twitter was jokingly called “the hellsite” by its users but its new Elongated form is quite a lot worse.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

“fired” implies “termination with cause”. That is, they believe you screwed up and so you were let go without severance, and in a pinch they’re willing to go to court on that.

“Laid off” implies they did bulk downsizing and unless the company finds a way to weasel out of it, there’s going to be severance and employment insurance payouts and the like.

In the Southern states this is a distinction without a difference because they just shoot you in the face and toss you into the body pit there regardless of the cause of the termination of your employment, but in the rest of the world this distinction is real.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Depending on employment law in his state, that may be actionable.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Honestly I’m wondering what Google’s long term plan for securing their productivity suite is. The amount of spam I get through Google drive share requests is shocking.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Libertarians gonna libertarian.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Have you ever considered not working for a giant corporation to fix their products for them for free?

Pxtl, 7 months ago

There are monopolistic things about the Play Store, but compared to competing platforms it’s a lot better than most. Android allows you to install apps from outside of the store without any extreme hacks. Contrast that vs iPhone or game consoles.

But yes, the fact that Google doesn’t want anybody else to have official stores bundled on Android/Play-services supported devices is a huge anticompetitive action. Also, the Play Store does get some premium support from the OS.

But I’ve used 3rd-party stores in addition to installing direct-downloaded apps and the workflow isn’t bad at all. I just wish you could whitelist a domain when using the browser, so I could say “I only want to download APKs from HumbleBundle.com since their app is gone” without opening up APK installs from all domain names in the browser. Possibly some kind of store-signature system would be better for this instead of controlling by installing app.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Is this like the previous theory that Windows 12 would be subscription based?

“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”

Saying “copilot is like the start button” is not saying “copilot will replace the start button”, the article is dishonest clickbait and stupid.

This is just MS taking another kick at Cortana, this time powered by LLM generative AI.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Lemmy communities need to start banning domains that post clickbait garbage like this.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

This is why I no longer go to loblaws-family stores.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Yes, my regular shop is a Food Basics.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I mean if you’re on GSuite, fundamentally isn’t a loss of control of your personal Gmail account just as likely as a loss of control of your professional account?

It does show how browsers offering cloud-synched password vaults without mandating 2FA to use that feature is grossly irresponsible.

2FA is, in my experience, the thing that would be blocking 99% of this kind of attack. Which shows how if you’re regularly using something that doesnt have 2FA that should be a red flag. In this case it was 2 layers of that:

Their google account probably didn’t have 2FA, and neither did that service account. Now obviously a service account generally won’t have 2FA, but if you’re regularly keying in service account credentials into a web browser something has gone wrong.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Welp, that’s going to be the new way that games raise prices. Game upfront costs have never been keeping pace with inflation, while game development costs constantly rise, so they’re always inventing new ways to raise the price. Going forwards, every game will use this strategy of “oh look, our game is still under $90US, but if you want to get into the “pre-release beta” you have to pay for the $120 PreRelease Deluxe Premium Launch” which effectively will mean “game launch date is a lie, launch date is really just price-cut-to-old-price date”.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I feel like the back action is the one that trips me up. It seems like a coin toss in Android whether “back” is handled as “undo navigation” or “up to parent level” but YouTube seems to do the one I didn’t expect.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

In ac6 it’s about the inventory and not the gameplay. Before the multiplayer unlocks you simply don’t have enough stuff to go online to fight.

Yes, it would be nice if they had some kind of fixed inventory multiplayer mode, but the main game is about getting stuff and early on you don’t really have enough for a decent fight.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Or he could just join the Fediverse and leave the xitter behind.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

The amount of verbal abuse my Google Assistant has absorbed will guarantee I’ll be first against the wall when the machines come. But I’ll know: she really is a distended sack of dumb-ass diodes.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Wait, the “vampires don’t have reflections” doesn’t include their clothes? Which means any fully-reflectionless vampire is nude?

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Therer are people who could be discussing this credibly but a troll like Loreto isn’t one of them.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

So, will all the conservative chuds who were convinced he was going to walk because he donates to the Democrats do any kind of follow-up on that theory?

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Maybe, maybe people just believe that human rights matter? That he belongs in prison but his human right to live according to his creed matters? Do you think Jews and Muslims in prison shouldn’t turn their noses up at ham?

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I’m not vegan.

Pxtl, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Very disappointed to see the federal NDP backing the climate-denying Conservatives in attacking the carbon tax on natural gas heating.

Canada’s carbon tax is (mostly) revenue neutral - if you’ve average heating needs, you break even. So cutting it on heating is a de-facto subsidy on large, inefficient homes.

Revenue neutral carbon taxes won a Nobel prize in economics. Anybody with alternate ideas on fighting climate change: show me your Nobel prize.

But the modern NDP is left-populist. They want simple, brute-force top-down solutions to problems. They’re big believers in “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. Any level of indirection in policy solutions is bad.

If unions didn’t exist today, and Liberals proposed them as a solution for protecting workers, NDP would scream “no, we want direct top-down government workplace inspections, don’t you dare charge me union dues!”

When obviously: do both. Both the econ-based bottom-up program and the top-down legislation.

---

If the Liberals want to reduce the tax on oil, they could make heating fuels a flat rate per BTU (or gigajoule, we’re metric - 1 BTU is 1055 J, so a GJ is about a million BTUs).

Natural gas (CH₄) is 0.0373 GJ/m³. It’s also carbon priced $0.1239/m³ – this amounts to $3.32 per GJ.

Fun coincidence - there’s about as much energy in an L of fuel oil as in an m³ of CH₄ - 0.0383 GJ/L.

Currently, heating oil CTax is $0.17/L. Pricing it per-GJ would reduce the CTax on a litre of heating oil to about the same as an m³ of CH₄ – $0.127/L CTax.

Obviously pricing per GJoule of fossil-fuel would be a de-facto subsidy on less-efficient heating fuels, but it would mean the incentive is not to upgrade from oil to gas, but to upgrade to zero-emissions forms of heating like heat pumps.

And it would be a 25% discount on heating oil CTax, so rural people on heating oil would no longer feel “punished” by the CTax - they’re paying the same per unit of heat.

Of course, this assumes rural grievance is rational.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

The rebate is great, but there are persons for whom it is insufficient.

The whole principle of the rebate is that the average person within a province breaks even. So people in Saskatchewan are only competing with other Saskatchewaneans, not with Vancouverites.

And if you’re polluting far more than the average person in your province, such that the rebate is grossly insufficient, even after figuring in the rural boost to the rebate?

Good.

Do better.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

This. I buy RPi because it’s the cheapest/lowest-power-consumption computer where you can get actual good support and good guides online on how to solve common problems with it, not because it’s the best bang-for-buck. I think about the weird-ass problems I had with my RPis and I’d hate to deal with that crap without access to the amount of help online you get with a Pi.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Oh good, I thought this was about the Linux distro.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Same with toddler toys:

“It can go in the dishwasher, the washing machine, or the garbage”.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I remember those days, having to remind myself that the relief of “whew, it’s just urine” is not okay.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I have 3 kids and do the laundry on Wednesday and Sunday, about 3-4 loads each time. Everything gets hang-dried except towels, socks, pyjama-pants, and men’s undies, which go in one big late-night load in the dryer when the juice is cheap.

It takes 2 small clothes horses in my laundry room. Not a huge basement.

Only time I’m doing lots of drying is when I’m washing sheets, which is probably less often than I should.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Dishwashers are actually greener than hand-washing. Do I have to link the TechnologyConnections video?

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Yes, but in this case there are actual measurable benefits to hang-drying besides financial cost. Unlike the dishwasher, hang drying is measurably greener. And also it tends to prolong the life of your clothes.

This is a case where “being lazy” has a real trade-off, like fixing yourself a meal from proper ingredients vs nuking a TV dinner.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Lol I got banned from one of the world news communities for “genocide denial” for pointing out that Biden might be reasonable for doubting the exact death toll numbers coming out of Gaza’s government in that we should be reasonably skeptical of the claims from both sides of this war since they’re both demonstrably willing to lie to shift blame.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Right? If it were something like Last Of Us I’d get it, but fighting games generally have characters designed to titillate. The ladies are mostly cheesecake pin-ups but with bigger muscles. Getting cranky about nude mods in those is hilariously hypocritical.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I’ve seen plenty of contrarian tankies who are pro Hamas. Often the same “anti imperialists” who hate the West so much they think supporting Ukraine is bad.

Personally I’m of the opinion that both sides are genocidal and anybody with a clear idea what to do there is lying, but I’ve been banned from !worldnews as “genocide denial” for agreeing with Biden that we should be suspicious of the claimed death numbers coming out of Palestine because both sides have a history of lying about violent acts in their conflict.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

Idunno, I don’t fuss about that because I’m perfectly capable of thinking that they’re both terrorists and freedom fighters.

They’re fighting for the freedom of Gaza… but they use terrorism tactics, refuse to abide by ceasefires, and have genocidal beliefs.

Those don’t seem mutually exclusive for me.

We all contain multitudes.

But that said, somebody who goes to “freedom fighter” as their first noun for them, that’s kind of a red flag.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

You probably did use it if you’re a nerd under its old name, Wikia, back before it got enshittified.

Pxtl, 7 months ago

I mean the conspiracy theory side of it is questionable but the basic facts are true:

1. Wikipedia has a policy against non-notable things. They were always embarrassed by the fact that every detailed version of every Pokemon had its own page, whereas the pages for important historical events were stubs. The WP:Notability standard has been the bane of every garage band and open-source game and DVD extra that was booted off the site because trivia cannot meaningfully be checked, trivia that otherwise allows hoax articles to live on.
2. Jimbo Wales decided to profit off of the desire to create fan-encyclopedias or even complete nonsense (like, for example, Penny Arcade’s Elemenstor Saga wiki, which details the history of a novel series and anime and cardgame that never existed) by creating Wikia, the for-profit Wikipedia that had no standards about what you could put on it besides legality. Just create your own Wikia and run it with an iron fist.

Now, the question is whether he did (1) in order to drive profitable users to (2). That’s where the conspiracy question lives. And I tend to assume good faith. People’s morals erode over time, not all at once. Since both (1) and (2) are totally legitimate, but profit motive encourages the millimetre-by-millimetre enshittification of Wikia into the horrible thing it is today.