AnyOldName3

@AnyOldName3@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some of the worst actor miscasts in TV?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Other people took the role for short periods of the first season due to the whole premise of the show being body switching, and they were all competent at being Takeshi Kovach. If the second season had been as competently executed as the first season, the recast wouldn’t have been a problem (but probably wouldn’t have chosen Mackie unless it turned out the problem really was just the director making him act badly).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Least extreme biophysics phd⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it’s stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who’s been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren’t much use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not so much a loophole as they’d reasonably have expected mods that chopped up voice lines to make new sentences, and mods have been doing that for Bethesda games for years, sometimes with surprisingly effective results, but that’s obviously super time-consuming and not as good as someone just reading aloud, let alone actually acting. Generative AI can suddenly chop up voice lines to make newer ones way faster with next to no effort, and give comparable quality to the original voice actor reading lines aloud, even though it can’t do the acting part.

  It’s no skin off Bethesda’s nose if people use generative AI to voice modded dialogue, but it could be a problem for the voice actors. Wes Johnson’s done voice work for mods before, so mods aren’t operating in a completely separate space to the voice actors who worked on the games. From a quick search, it doesn’t seem like he charged for any of the work he did for mods (one was specifically for a charity fundraiser), but it wouldn’t be immoral of him, or any other voice actor, to take paid commissions for mod dialogue. That’s not as viable if generative AI can compete.

  Anyway, none of this is really relevant to OpenMW specifically - sound files are game content, and we don’t deal with game content

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You have made a mistake and in doing so summoned an OpenMW developer to this thread. Lua is not an acronym, it’s Portuguese for moon, so should not be written in ALL CAPS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a fringe example where it’s legally okay as the Construction Set EULA that you have to agree to to use the original engine’s modding tools grants you the right to make derivative works of the game’s assets (including the sound files) provided it’s only to make mods for Morrowind (and some other restrictions, e.g. not charging any money). For nearly any other game, no one’s granted you that right, so it’s not legal, but any other kind of modding that requires you to make things based off the game’s original files and distribute them wouldn’t be legal either.

  Morally, it’s dicey as a modern voice actor contract would either have a clause about being unable to use the recordings to train voice synthesis, or charge more for the privilege, so the voice actors for Morrowind signed a right away that they didn’t intend to because their agents failed to realise it was something they could do or predict that it would ever become relevant. No one tricked anyone, but it’s not what would have been agreed to if everyone involved was clairvoyant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Entropy? Never heard of it.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Developers: "Yes, the users love cluttered homes, just put everything there and ignore guidelines"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything’s Unix. You’ll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that’s the one that’s ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There’s no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re connected to an RCD, as modern UK wiring has all sockets connected via an overall RCD in the fusebox, but the switches on the socket are just basic on/off switches.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All modern wiring in the UK has every socket in the building connected via RCD (the more common name for GFCI outside America), but they’re usually in the main fusebox/consumer unit rather than individually per socket. These are just normal on/off switches for the convenience of being able to turn things on and off.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are already slats so the only hole you can get a fork into is the earth, unless you’ve already got something convincingly shaped like an earth pin in the earth hole to open the slats over the live and neutral. If you’re going to that much effort to zap yourself, the switch isn’t going to be much of a hurdle.

  I’d suspect that it’s largely because it’s more convenient to have a switch than to unplug things and plug them back in again, especially as our plugs are a nightmare to step on to the point that Americans complaining about stepping on lego seems comical to anyone who’s stepped on lego and a plug.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you do Onlyfans if needed the money?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of the inactive accounts will be people who signed up and started, but made no or too little money, so abandoned the idea. They’re still worth counting when working out how likely a new person will be to make money. Other inactive accounts will be bots or catfish where there was never any intention to make money the way people expect the site to be used, so you can still discount a lot of them, but it’s not all of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon's strict mom⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What better time for prank signs than right after a real flood?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon's strict mom⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Printing off those signs and sticking them in the showers is a common student prank, so I wouldn’t assume they were real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal that I get wet water all over myself when taking a shower?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wet water is the water with added wetting agent used for firefighting. That stuff shouldn’t be coming out of your household plumbing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon hates Apple⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a scandal years ago because the moisture indicators were found to be wildly over-sensitive, and changing colour in inappropriate situations, e.g. it being a bit humid because it was raining, being in someone’s pocket when their clothes were a little too warm so they sweated, or having been brought into a bathroom within a couple of hours of someone showing. Some were already showing water damage immediately after leaving the Apple Store when journalists investigated.

  If the Genius Bar staff are told the water damage indicators indicate water damage, then they don’t have to lie to say they can’t repair a phone. If some percentage of phones have indicators that simply don’t work correctly, then people will have repairs rejected when they know their phone’s never been near water, so it’ll look like the staff are lying.

  The situation must have improved because this was headline news years ago and I’ve not seen it mentioned since, but even if it’s a fixed problem, it still gave Apple a reputation for refusing to do repairs for nonsensical reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam”⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It adds the executable permission (without which, things can’t be executed) to all the files in the game’s directory. You only need to be able to execute a few of those files, and there’s a dedicated permission to control what can and can’t be executed for a reason. Windows doesn’t have a direct equivalent, so setting it for everything gives the impression that they’re trying to make it behave like Windows rather than working with the OS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GOG reportedly suffering from staff turnover and poor management: “Current business model is likely running out of steam”⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Selling old games and new games isn’t mutually exclusive, and more money tends to be spent on new games than old ones. It’s not unreasonable to expect that selling new games too could subsidise the work to make old games run on modern platforms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If investing in the S&P 500 is such a surefire way to make money, then why isn't everyone doing it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Something I’ve not seen mentioned here yet is that one of the reasons it’s such an effective way to make money is specifically because loads of people are buying into it. When you buy a stock (or a derivative like an S&P 500 index tracking fund), it increases its price. If you’re just one person with a normal-person amount of money, it won’t be enough to register, but if you’re part of a group of millions of people, or an investor with billions at your disposal, it’ll make a visible difference, and if people see that happening consistently, they’ll want to join in and there’ll be a positive feedback loop. It only stops when there’s a big enough panic that lots of investors can no longer afford to maintain their investment and have to sell at the same time, and then you can even get a positive feedback loop in the other direction when people see the price plummeting and decide they need to sell before it plummets any further.

  Stocks are supposed to represent the value of a company’s current assets and expected future profits, but this kind of feedback loop muddies the water. With something like Bitcoin, which intentionally has no inherent value, because enough people have agreed to pretend otherwise, it’s gained effective value, and can be exchanged for money, or in some cases, goods and services. That’ll remain the case until everyone agrees that they don’t want Bitcoin, so could go on forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evil⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, looks like I’d remembered it backwards. It’s still an easily solvable problem by not using a load everything as whatever type you feel like function.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evil⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re allowed to charge before you give access to the software, but then can’t restrict the people you give it to giving it to more people. The beer licence sounds like those people would be on the hook for beer, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evil⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  no doesn’t become false, it becomes Norway, and when converted to a boolean, Norway is true. The reason’s because one on YAML’s native types is an ISO country code enum, and if you tell a compliant YAML implementation to load a file without giving it a schema, that type has higher priority than string. If you then call a function that converts from native type to string, it expands the country code to the country name, and a function that coerces to boolean makes country codes true.

  The problem’s easy to avoid, though. You can just specify a schema, or use a function that grabs a string/bool directly instead of going via the assumed type first.

  The real problem with YAML is how many implementations are a long way from being conformant, and load things differently to each other, but that situation’s been improving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evil⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s generally accepted that file formats aren’t protected IP, so you can write a compatible reader or writer and be in the clear as long as you reused no code from the original reader/writer. The specification may have licence terms that restrict who you can share the spec with, but you don’t necessarily need the official spec to come up with a compatible implementation. Plenty of file formats have been reverse engineered over the years even when the original didn’t have a written spec.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ewww⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think bacterial excretions count as farts, so it’s probably more like 800 million years worth of farts as that’s when animals started existing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The torque better not be too strong with this one⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s pretty likely that you’ve seen loads and never known they were different. The difference is small enough that you wouldn’t realise it was significant until you were told:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The torque better not be too strong with this one⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pozidriv is intentionally not backwards compatible, and one of the biggest problems it has is looking enough like Phillips that people assume it must be compatible, use a mismatched screw and driver, and strip a head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Binary search⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If this is Cambridge in the UK, both times I reported a bike theft, they confidently told me that they recover and return most stolen bikes. They absolutely do not recover or return most stolen bikes. Bike theft is so rarely sorted out by the police in Cambridge that nearly no one bothers reporting it as everyone knows their bike is gone forever, even if they parked it in good view of a CCTV camera and the frame was engraved with contact details all over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨flouride⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Real men make chlorine pentafluoride anyway. We have no use for pathetic hypergolic oxidisers with only three fluorine atoms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did something about mass produced ice cream change like 10 years ago?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.

  Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.

  Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.

  Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.

  Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.

  Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Row as Starmer suggests landlords and shareholders are not ‘working people’⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A plumber or a sparky doesn’t just maintain one house, and if they’re just doing maintenance, probably work on hundreds of houses a year. Maintaining your own house takes a fraction of the time and effort of working a housing-related trade full time.