scratchee
@scratchee@feddit.uk
- Comment on Prospect of £5 pint leaves bitter taste for some pubgoers 6 days ago:
Londoners looking at this article in utter confusion
- Comment on poor little mousecell 6 days ago:
Our society runs on our stomachs
- Comment on poor little mousecell 6 days ago:
It sort of still works if you imagine they’re talking about the descendants of the dinosaurs which form the primary meat of human society (chickens)
- Comment on Anti-acknowlegements 2 weeks ago:
I’ve certainly been there, shocked to realise my personal slice of reality was unusual. At least in this case, it’s a good problem to have.
- Comment on Anti-acknowlegements 2 weeks ago:
But surely equality has been achieved in the last few months, this all feels so very January. People are so much more open minded now than in those dark days of the past. Why waste time even discussing such outdated attitudes that totally and completely disappeared in February and are certain to never return?!
- Comment on Anti-acknowlegements 2 weeks ago:
It may be in a scientific paper, but this is more of an anecdote about the various issues the author encountered, rather than something intended to be actionable and clearly delineated as you’d expect in the body of a scientific article. Therefore a more literary style is appropriate for this section.
My mental model is that bullet points are for when you expect a reader to go over the points with a highlighter, prose for when you want to produce an emotional response. This feels more like the latter.
- Comment on Police admit arrest of anti-monarchy heckler in Oxford was unlawful 2 weeks ago:
Ironic that his polite human-scale protest wouldn’t have gotten much attention if the police hadn’t turned it into national news.
- Comment on 👁👄👁 3 weeks ago:
You’re not actually wrong. The Goa’uld were indeed far too slow moving, and it was their ultimate weakness, they weren’t able to keep up with the pace of change around them, even despite a lack of competition in their evolutionary niche.
Or possibly because of a lack of competition. Another object lesson in the dangers from having a lack of biodiversity in our ecosystem.
- Comment on GARBAGEOLOGY 4 weeks ago:
I once had to stay in Birmingham after a cancelled train. On leaving the station I was accosted by a drunk demanding cigarettes, who started swearing at me after I admitted I didn’t smoke. That’s my only experience of Birmingham, I have to assume it’s typical.
- Comment on Bloodletting recommended for Jersey residents after PFAS contamination 2 months ago:
I imagine they can’t because their blood is too ironic
- Comment on IEEE 754 2 months ago:
Well, rules like “all integers can be represented up to 2^24” and “10^-38 is where denormalisation happens” are helpful, but I often have to figure out why I got a dodgy value from first principles, floating point is too complicated to solve every problem with 3 general rules.
I wrote a float from string function once which obviously requires the details (intentionally low quality and limited but faster variant since the standard version was way too slow).
- Comment on IEEE 754 2 months ago:
In game dev it’s pretty common. Lots of stuff is built on floating point and balancing quality and performance, so we can’t just switch to double when things start getting janky as we can’t afford the cost, so instead we actually have to think and work out the limits of 32 bit floats.
- Comment on Vegan drink Oatly can’t call itself ‘milk’, judges rule 3 months ago:
Honestly prefer it to milk in tea. I still use milk at home since I can’t be arsed to have fancy milk for porridge and tea only but at the office I’ll go for the oat milk by preference.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
The restrictions are pretty reasonable. The obvious “risk” of abuse is that this is a slippery slope and both the rules get relaxed and the safeguards lose their funding and attention over time, but the chance of that happening increases over time, there’s no way in hell they’ll be making a dent in the benefits bill for the next few years.
So I don’t think your suggested link between this and the current governments goal of reducing benefits is the truth, or even particularly credible.
Maybe there will be problems in 20 years, it’s certainly a reasonable fear and I don’t blame anyone who argued against it to avoid that risk, but I can’t seriously believe that anyone thinks the government is going to use this to start killing off benefit claimants in job lots.
Tldr: your ”truth” is a pretty dumb take
- Comment on Guys, what did you buy during the Steam autumn sale? 3 months ago:
Just be glad you don’t have to swap the cd every 20 clicks. Riven was basically 1 disc per cutscene when it first came out and I remember getting very frustrated as a kid when I accidentally triggered an island switch and knew it’d be 10 minutes until I could get back.
- Comment on Let me at 'em!! 5 months ago:
How big was that knife originally?!
- Comment on Campaigners tie baby slings to statues in call for better UK paternity leave 6 months ago:
We’ve already lucked into a solution to the population boom, the numbers will level off around 19 billion. Given how intractable population control is, we’re very lucky we’ve found this without some dystopian shitshow.
In the developed world we are approaching the opposite problem, we’re currently dependant on immigration to maintain our societies, but as the rest of the world stops growing we’ll have more trouble getting that immigration and won’t have the local young population to care for our elderly.
Given that we should be trying to figure out how to encourage a sustainable population whilst we still have time to do so. If we can choose between 1.9->2.2 children per couple as needed then we’ll be in a healthy position to slowly reduce the population to a comfortable level.
Right now our natural population decline in the developed world is too fast, probably because our society has made being a parent quite an individual burden. Of course, totally moving the costs to a societal model would be a disaster, but presumably there’s a middle ground where people are comfortable keeping the society going at a healthy rate.
- Comment on Protection zones around abortion clinics in place by October 6 months ago:
That’s exactly the answer given to you above - the line is murky and grey, there is no clear point that everyone agrees is the right point.
In such a circumstance, the right answer is open to interpretation, and the right solution for a society is to accept that the best person to make that decision is the person involved.
If you want my answer, it’s when brain cells develop enough to start looking like a functioning brain (somewhere around 16-20 weeks). Before that it’s just a brain dead mass of cells regardless of how it looks.
Clearly you have a different moment, and that’s fine, but you don’t get to ignore that the issue is open to interpretation. Otoh, I admit that both sides are guilty of trying to railroad a “simple” interpretation as the only right answer, it’s always tempting to force a simple answer and declare the problem solved, it’s harder to let people decide for themselves what the right answer is, but that’s the right thing to do when we as a society cannot reach a consensus, and we certainly don’t seem to have a consensus on this one.
- Comment on Can you trust Valve? Honest criticism of Steam. 6 months ago:
I trust Valve to be lazy and swim in their sea of profits rather than go searching for more.
They have thus far avoided serious levels of enshittification because they don’t seem motivated in maximising immediate profits and killing their golden goose.
The day they get replaced by a competitive non-monopoly is the day it becomes a race for the bottom, who can invent the most predatory way to drain profits from users? Nobody else will be able to compete, so they’ll all be copying each other on their way down.
Streaming services all over again.
Not all monopolies are bad.
- Comment on Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Outer Wilds 7 months ago:
On the one hand, if you don’t enjoy the game that’s fine. It’s a masterpiece, but that doesn’t magically mean that everyone will enjoy it.
That said, if you want to enjoy it more, focus on one thing per loop, everything is designed to be completable in a single loop, (or maybe a few for the more complicated puzzles if you get stuck). And if something is frustrating, do something else.
Things really go wrong if you keep smashing your head against a brick wall or if you keep jumping around and never manage to finish anything.
We’re trained to think of death as a major failure by other games, it’s not in this one, it’s just jumping back home, repairing the ship, and starting from a central location and a known state.
- Comment on T. rex 7 months ago:
That does make sense, though I read it as:
[the new, expanded] upper body size limits…
Is how I read it, but your interpretation works well too, so I don’t really know now.
- Comment on T. rex 8 months ago:
I don’t think that’s what the meme is claiming.
I think instead it’s just claiming that all fossils have the same implied increase in maximum size implied by the paper, not just T rex.
I’m guessing the illiterate paleo fans were excited that maybe T rex was king of the dinosaurs again, but the logic fails if all the dinosaurs get bigger max sizes…
- Comment on Shocking 8 months ago:
That guy was running his own study. “How many times can I shock myself before I breach the ethical limits of the study and they cut the session short”.
He underestimated their resolve though, clearly.
- Comment on Linguistics 8 months ago:
“Divorced from the context that brought them about” Ahh, so you’re complaining about all the Germanic words in English, or the Latin words? The whole point of their diatribe is that the “brain rot” words you hate are little different from most words. It’s just that for some words the “in group” is Latin speakers, and for some words it’s some group nerding out about their own topic that spread their word to the rest of us… actually, I’m still talking about Latin speakers.
- Comment on Let's address the significant issue confronting the nation today.. Which Mr/Mrs Men are you? 8 months ago:
I got “little miss naughty”. I am a man in my mid 30s, I never do pranks, I don’t go out of my way to cause trouble.
How can it see parts of my soul that I thought were lost?
- Comment on Rover 9 months ago:
I always liked the extended version: extended version with distant future where we see it again
- Comment on Jimmy Carter : The Most [Unfairly] Hated President of the United States - Documentary 9 months ago:
It’s also been used for hundreds of years, it’s not a post-internet concept.
The t might be a youtube title, or it might be quoted Greek or Latin text. Or various other uses in between.
- Comment on natural sciences be like 11 months ago:
Hay-fever and melanomas: no, the beauty is not for you
- Comment on Switch performs better running games through an emulator emulating the switch than natively. 1 year ago:
Yeah, the switch has an entire core locked off and everything is downclocked to improve battery life and control temperatures. No doubt this emulation gives everything more clock cycles (and perhaps an extra core?). Probably very short on battery and possibly very hot too.
- Comment on Attempted right-wing takeover of National Trust backed by Nigel Farage fails! 1 year ago:
I heard that woke figures in key positions meet at their secret woke clubhouse where they discuss their woke evil plans on controlling the world and making everyone woke.
Honestly I want to start the secret society of woke, not because I expect it to get a single influential member, but because just existing will make every right wing nutter blame every single thing on the secret woke society 😄
