ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
3d ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities?
IMO, the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences.
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did. That is to say, in the "Interstate Anarchy" themed game, you had to build an army, opportunistically raid neighbors, and build unstable alliances against stronger foes. If you didn't, your nation would be overrun and destroyed. If you have an argument against that ("Why can't we just be nice?" etc.), then you can try it in the game and see how well it works for you.
I'm not sure which great works would benefit from that treatment, but I'm guessing there are some. Or maybe those works are "great" because they're perfectly suited to their medium, and we can only make new, distinct ones.
ulyssessword
5d ago
the perfect level of trashy dumb progression fantasy
I'll recommend Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power. It thoroughly earns its 3.5 star rating with its characterization, plot, and prose, but man was it fun.
A few underappreciated positives of stories I'm reading (that wouldn't generally make it into other reviews):
The Calamitous Bob: The world and everything in it is as serious as reality, which makes it an excellent straight man. For example, the first group the main character runs into doesn't have a "V" phoneme in their language, so she becomes known as "Bob". Also, you know the the trope where you can tame a cute animal by acting nonthreatening and giving it food? And animal-like people (eg. cat-people, lizard-people, bird-people)? Well,
Markets and Multiverses: Death isn't final, so the stakes are higher. If the protagonists got into an unwinnable fight in any other story, I'd know they would survive (because otherwise the story ends). However, the worst-case scenario of having to reincarnate doesn't end the story, so it's a possibility: they lost plot-armor in exact proportion to their immortality.
Player Manager: It's set very much in present day London. In-story, it's mid-April 2024, and the earlier chapters included the Queen's death and its effects on English sports. It lends a certain amount of grounding to the story.
ulyssessword
7d ago
Would you call "...openly carry military weapons..." a broad interpretation of that part? From my point of view, that's about as narrow as you can get before you start chipping away at the text. A broad interpretation would exempt American citizens from nonproliferation treaties.
ulyssessword
8d ago
Do you think the cost of self-driving car insurance would be higher than human-driven car insurance? If so, would that cost be spurious or would it reflect genuine harms?
Ideally it should be fine, but I don't trust that the ideal case would happen.
ulyssessword
12d ago
I do not think 'enabling someone to accuse a 5 year old of sexual harassment' is a problem the median therapist has.
I think that's the wrong standard. It's a problem that one therapist that hasn't been stripped of their license has, and that's concerning enough on its own. Given that this story comes from a relatively small pool (compared to swarms of journalists searching the entire nation for one example to prop up their story), I'd guess that there's more than one.
Any decent self-regulating professional body would immediately (or possibly preemptively) distance themselves from charlatans like that. And yet, there they are.
ulyssessword
14d ago
Here are some general arguments for why women are choosing bear over men, trying to not strawman to the best of my ability:
I think I can do better: The framing of the question sets it up as an obstacle, so the respondents are treating it as one. If the question was "Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a guidebook to local plants?" then people would recognize it as a choice between types of assistance, and (more likely) choose the man. If the question was "Would you rather be stuck in the woods with a bear or a guidebook to local plants?" then they would just be confused because it's obviously trivial and arbitrary. If the man could help you in this hypothetical, then why are you even asking the question?
ulyssessword
15d ago
...on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.
I didn't even finish the first sentence before finding "...his thought is more than ever enabling us to see in a new way the horrors of..."
What are your standards for unclear writing??
ulyssessword
16d ago
I'll admit that I have done that before, but I'd still rather have an easy way to return to "fit page to window" zoom level than going way over to the edge of the screen and clicking a button.
ulyssessword
16d ago
Why did anyone make zooming in go in increments of 25% (100% -> 125%) and zooming out go in increments of 25% (100% -> 75%) without having them be discrete steps between states? Nobody wants the 93.75% size that you end up with after zooming in and out once each.
ulyssessword
18d ago
It's visible now, but yes, it was filtered when I commented.
ulyssessword
19d ago
Should the mod-UI be altered to make filtered comments more obvious? I'm seeing more and more responses to them.
ulyssessword
23d ago
Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers.
Let's say that the government sets an annual wage of $31200.01 (just above the poverty line for a family of four). How much would they need to subsidize Amazon to make it worthwhile?
I'm guessing substantially more than $31200 per worker.
A worker that doesn't get any wages (or benefits, or payroll taxes, or etc.) from the company still requires a locker, parking lot space (or rather a bus seat), HR paperwork to keep them organized, training, supervision, and an assigned task in the workflow. Once they show up and start working, they have the opportunity to work unsafely, make mistakes, steal, fight, or otherwise do worse than nothing.
Since your proposal is scraping the bottom of the barrel of people who aren't employed, I suspect that a significant fraction can't be gainfully employed as they are.
ulyssessword
23d ago
You just need to accept that program state and file state do not need to be correlated.
Or I could continue to tilt at windmills.
I just have an odd feeling that, when you're using a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get style editor, when you see something you should also get it.
ulyssessword
23d ago
On the other hand, walking while openly Jewish will get you threatened with arrest in the UK. After all, he could have caused a breach of the peace if he was attacked.
Your view (which I share) is not the consensus in the West.
ulyssessword
26d ago
It was Notepad. I'm comfortable with the synecdoche, but could have been clearer.
clearly marked as unsaved!
Are we using the same program? I can't imagine anyone calling a small grey dot "clearly marked", never mind "clearly marked as...".
For reference, the only visual difference between a saved file and an unsaved one is that the "close tab" location goes from [ ]/[X] to [•]/[X]. If your mouse is hovering over the X then there's no difference.
ulyssessword
27d ago
Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:
- Open a file.
- write some new stuff in it.
- close the file.
- reopen it.
- confirm that the changes were kept.
Did you notice a missing step? I never said to save the changes, so the file was never updated. Instead, the changes were kept in a sort of suspended animation by the editor, and reappeared (in the editor only) when I reopened it.
ulyssessword
27d ago
Such as...
ulyssessword
28d ago
Let's go with "Non- or anti- woke Americans". Which examples are as good as redirecting COVID vaccines to the less-vulnerable?
ulyssessword
28d ago
Care to provide counterexamples? Preferably the official policy of a multibillion-dollar system.
ulyssessword
28d ago
You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.
Spoilers:
They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
From your second link:
A typical validation of the Stefan-Boltzmann’s law of radiation : is done by measuring the radiation from a filament of the incandescent lamp. The filament is enclosed in a vacuum.
A typical demonstration of radiative heat transfer is done in a vacuum, but that isn't a real requirement. You can instead compare the total heat transfer from a hot black plate (emissivity near 1) to the heat transfer from a hot silver plate (emissivity near 0). The black plate will have faster heat transfer despite being surrounded by the same air because it radiates more.
I'd like to see his calculations for "...the conductive and convective effects at the surface are vastly greater than the radiation; by about 240 times."
Venus has a very high albedo. Most sunlight is actually reflected away from the planet. Venus actually gets less net sunlight than earth! GHGE says Venus, without a greenhouse gas effect, should be cooler than earth!
No!!
Even if you assume the emissivity of the object (such as Venus) can be fully described in a single number (i.e. it is an ideal gray body), you're only describing the gross rate of radiative heat transfer. Any ideal gray body that was protected from conduction/convection would reach the same equilibrium temperature given the same surroundings; a high-emissivity one would absorb a lot of energy which is coming in and emit just as much, while a low-emissivity one would absorb a tiny bit of energy and emit just as little.
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Simplify taxes: both in the real sense (fewer rules), and in the paperwork requirements. Personal income taxes are automatically filed, sales taxes are included in the prices, etc.
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Public access to public research: Any publicly-funded scientific study or similar report cannot be paywalled. If any organization puts a paywalled copy of it in an (otherwise) easily-visible place, they will face a fine.
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Browser-based privacy preferences: Users can configure their browser to always accept, refuse-if-possible, or warn-or-block different types of cookies from websites. Websites are forbidden from displaying a cookie/privacy popup if the browser is configured properly.
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Unsubscribe by right: If you put in a reasonable effort to unsubscribe from a service, then you have unsubscribed. If the company tries to charge you an ongoing fee after you have unsubscribed, your bank will automatically block that fee (with a message) if you have informed the bank of your actions. Any further attempts to charge the former customer will be tried as fraud, and ignorance is not a defense after that one warning.
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Brands are linked to traits: Pyrex would be required to make borosilicate glass bakeware (not soda-lime glass), WD-40 would be linked to its 65% volatile organic compound formulation (not 25%), etc. If they want to sell new products, they will need a new name.
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(EDIT: New) Actually support the cause: If you want to display support for a cause, then you have to actually tangibly support that cause. A $100 donation will buy you the right to a bumper sticker, $500 will allow an emoticon in your username. Hashtags are merely topics and therefore unrestricted, but (non-)supporters will be noted with a parenthetical tag in their posts.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Sorry, let me retry.
A law can be Anti-X and highlighting that fact can still be farcical.
As one hypothetical, imagine that there was an activist that promoted the right to bear arms and self defense. If he started pushing for the rights of prisoners to carry concealed weapons (prison is one of the most dangerous places, after all), then I'd call it farcical.
I wouldn't bother mentioning that the law prohibiting prisoner concealed carry is (by a strict definition) anti-self-defense, even though it is.
Go right ahead. What's interesting about those topics, where can we hear more about them, and what are your opinions on them?
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