commandar

@commandar@kbin.social
0 Post – 30 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.

It explains a lot.

Refusing to cooperate with Democrats is what sank him.

He needed support from Democrats to keep the Speakership. He's spent the entire year giving them no reason to trust him -- including going on the Sunday shows this week knowing this vote was coming and trying to blame Democrats for the near shutdown.

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This AI ruling is also actually completely in-line with existing precedent from the photography world.

The US Copyright Office has previously ruled that a photograph taken by a non-human (in this case, a monkey) is not copyrightable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey\_selfie\_copyright\_dispute

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Easiest way to kickstart it is arming at-risk minorities.

California's strict gun laws have their roots in white conservatives' reaction to the Black Panthers marching with rifles while St. Reagan was governor of the state.

The upside of this strategy is that if the gun laws don't change, then at least those minorities will have some means of protecting themselves.

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The US has 11 out of 22.

This is only a partial picture.

The US has 11 supercarrier groups that individually rival the power of most nation's entire airforces. These are unrivaled by anything else in the world.

The US additionally has 9 America and Wasp class amphibious assault ships that have an airwing capability that rivals most other nations' carrier groups. The Navy plans for this force to eventually be made up of 11 America class ships.

So the reality is that the US' secondary aircraft carrier capability rivals that of the rest of the world combined. The total power disparity of the combined supercarrier and amphibious assault fleet is mind boggling.

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It's why all the appeals to "what would Aaron think" with the whole API thing were really off the mark.

spez and kn0thing were college buddies. Swartz was kind of pushed onto them by YC. I've never had the impression that they felt any particular attachment to him; he was a business partner that became involved at the behest of the people funding them, who left in the first couple of years.

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Fitbit is owned by Google and has the same policy of not repairing cracked screens.

I owned a Sense 2 and was in a bicycle crash. Screen hit the pavement and shattered. Absolutely no options from Fitibit/Google to get it repaired.

I switched to Garmin and couldn't be happier.

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Worth noting that ATC is unusual in that there is both a maximum age that you can start (30) as well as a mandatory retirement age (56).

There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law.

Only the former should be legally enforceable. If you start enforcing the latter regardless of the former, the legal system stops being about rule of law and more about the subjective whims of those enforcing it.

If the letter of the law doesn't capture the intent, then the law needs to change, but laws shouldn't be subjectively enforced on the basis of what someone feels like they should mean rather than what they actually say.

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The transmission in those things is an amazing level of suck, too. It's this bizarre automatic manual thing that's just awful to drive.

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The reality is that they already have all the excuse they need.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the side that's perfectly happy with pursuing genocide having the perception that they have a monopoly of violence.

A lot of gun rights groups have been champing at the bit for a good chance to challenge that section of Form 4473 for a while now. A common point of contention is that e.g., holding a medical marijuana card would be a disqualifier if truthfully filling out a 4473. It's so rarely actually prosecuted that finding a test case isn't particularly easy, though.

It will be interesting -- and telling -- to see how they react to this case.

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Hall effect has been the norm in all but the cheapest sim gear (sticks, throttles, etc) for a very long time now.

Hall effect gimbals on radio control/drone controllers have been pretty common for some time, too.

It's mostly that this is a solved problem that more general purpose controllers are just now catching up to after the problem's been exacerbated by the smaller gimbals used in modern controllers.

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I would assume it's companies that are running computer kiosks, point-of-sale systems, or systems that would otherwise be extremely locked-down (like bank teller systems).

As an example, we're currently evaluating it as an option for doctors to access certain EMRs offsite where it doesn't make sense to provide them an entire workstation, e.g., community doctors working from their private practices.

It's SEO-optimization nonsense.

Something like a body panel is going to expand/contract a couple of orders of magnitude more than 10 microns just from the weather changing day-to-day.

FedEx ground are all contractors. It depends on who has the contract for your area, but they tend to be pretty bad IME as well.

The USDA and FDA, which both lean conservative in their recommendations, consider whole cuts of pork safe down to 145F (roughly equivalent to cooked to medium):

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2011/05/25/cooking-meat-check-new-recommended-temperatures
https://www.fda.gov/media/107000/download

This has been the case for over a decade. Pork should be cooked but the old 160F recommendations have been gone for a long time now because commercial pork is relatively safe.

Also note that this is the one-minute pasteurization temp; meat can be held at a lower temperature for longer to render it safe.

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Restricts Freedom to Use the Software

I've always found this particular one somewhat frustrating. It's essentially the intolerance paradox repackaged into a software licensing analog:

"You are restricting the freedom of users by taking away their ability to close the code and restrict the freedom of other users!"

It's always read very "I got mine" to me.

That said, while I lean copyleft, I also don't find just barring commercial use entirely interesting. The goal is to ensure source code remains available to users; I think there are better ways of addressing that than trying to delineate and exclude commercial use.

If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?

It depends on how it's defined in the law. States generally don't write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.

Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens.

Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn't defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.

The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn't.

I'm not even saying that it's impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers -- the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That's basically the parallel to what's being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.

The difference is that Congress hasn't given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.

The point wasnt that you can't enact a particular law or even that you can't allow for enforcement to be adaptive -- it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It's totally okay if the law says "it depends and here's who decides." It's not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of "this is what I feel like the law should do" even if the actual language of the law doesn't support it.

Chiming back in here to say that yes, that was exactly my point.

To maybe make it a little clearer, a hypothetical: imagine a Republican-controlled state enacts a law banning late term abortions and makes it punishable with jail time for women to receive one.

That hypothetical law includes a clause defining a late term abortion as one taking place at any time past 37 weeks from conception.

A woman has an abortion at 36 weeks pregnant. Anti-abortion activists insist that she should be culpable under the law; an abortion at 36 weeks is functionally the same as an abortion at 37 weeks and 36 weeks is very obviously late term pregnancy, they claim.

If the local sheriff then arrests that woman, is the sheriff behaving lawfully?

That's why the government being bound to the letter of the law is so incredibly important. A law can be stupid, harmful, regressive, or otherwise bad in any number of ways, but if the government must act within the law as written, then at least we know what rules we're playing by and can work to change them.

If the government is allowed to arbitrarily and capriciously ignore the letter of the law in favor of what the people enforcing it wish the law were, that will be abused by bad actors. That sort of thing is more or less a universal component of authoritarianism.

tl;dr - we shouldn't do it because allowing it will allow it to be used against us.

That's a really great point and another reason I've really enjoyed the Garmin experience -- Garmin doesn't try to sell your own data back to you.

Getting anything more than the absolute most basic of real time data out of a Fitbit requires an annual subscription. With Garmin, it's just there.

“Canceled” is a term assholes came up with to rebrand “consequences” to make it seem like something that isn’t their own fault.

Not sure I agree with this particular take. My recollection is that this usage of cancelled started in progressive internet spaces and was absolutely used to describe consequences for being an asshole.

It's the exact same trajectory woke took -- it was language used by left-leaning people that got co-opted and intentionally diluted by conservatives.

There’s literally someone in this thread right now saying you can eat raw pork in America without worry…

The correct response to that is to provide the actual guidelines based on actual data, not to fearmonger while quoting lines referencing wild game.

A huge part of why commercial pork is safe -- that you're consistently leaving out -- were major changes to how livestock are raised. Trichinosis transmission in pigs is primarily caused by the consumption of infected meat; US standards were changed to more strictly control what's fed to pigs, which led to the decreased risk. The risk remains in wild boar because they're omnivores that will scavenge whatever they can find.

145 is still a limit people need to follow, lots of people don’t.

145 isn't a hard limit. It's the recommended holding temperature for one minute.

Nevermind abroad. A lot of them would do well just to get some actual exposure to larger cities in their own states.

Part of the urban/rural divide is fueled by the pervasive belief that cities are lawless hellholes because they've never had real exposure to it.

Stakeholders are people with any kind of interest in the company doing well

Corporate social responsibility as a concept is even broader than that -- it's not just anyone who has interest in the company doing well, but broad consideration of anyone impacted by the decisions of the company.

A company might be able to save operational costs by dumping toxic sludge in a river, but within a CSR framework, people living downstream would be considered stakeholders and the potential negative impact of the decision on those people is supposed to be taken into account when decisions are made. The corporation is supposed to have a responsibility to do right by anyone impacted by their actions wherever possible.

At least that's the theory. It shouldn't be surprising that the language of CSR gets pretty commonly coopted by companies looking to whitewash what they're actually doing.

Swap caps lock and left control. It's the first thing I do on most of my computers, especially notebooks.

The newer versions of Windows Powertoys from Microsoft makes it easy on Windows.

Been easy on Mac and most Linux distros for years.

The NRA is pretty low on the list of organizations that would have tried to push the issue if this involved someone not named Hunter Biden. They're very much a culture war outlet that won't go to bat for anyone they consider an undesirable.

There are other advocacy groups that have been talking about this issue for a number of years, though. And there have been lower court rulings this year that make whether that provision of Form 4473 is going to be able to withstand scrutiny questionable.

Like I said, where these gun rights groups land on this case is going to be pretty telling about where they stand generally. The culture warriors will come up with excuses. It should be an interesting barometer for whether these groups actually believe in universal application of what they consider rights.

I am by no means a fan of DWS, but this is a tired old narrative that's always been questionable at best.

DWS and the DNC absolutely had a personal preference for Clinton and definitely did Bernie no favors, but the fact of the matter is that Bernie has simply never been popular enough with Democratic voters to win the nomination. He has always over performed in caucuses and underperformed in primaries in more diverse states. And that's without getting into the fact that caucuses are less democratic and have real accessibility issues in the first place. He lost the popular vote among Democrats by more than 3.5 million votes.

Unfortunately, the story has become "the DNC stole the election" when the reality is that a cranky old man from Vermont who has always had trouble connecting with the black voters that are a core part of the Democratic voting bloc didn't have the popularity needed to make it out of the primaries, twice.

It'd be more helpful for progressive politics to focus on why that was and finding a candidate who can message in a way that appeals more broadly to the party as a whole, but instead we're constantly relitigating how the DNC magically pressed buttons that caused Bernie to lose within the party by millions of votes.

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