scratchee

@scratchee@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨same, honestly⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago⁩:

  Tldr: drones/uavs spook bears, probably not a good tool for bear based science, or indeed for anyone else to observe bears.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your favorite case of a game making fun of you?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Outer wilds, if you manage to

  Tap for spoiler

  Break the universe

  You get the end credits but with a kazoo rendition.

  Like, “well done dipshit, I guess this is the end”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MPs urge minister to adopt definition of Islamophobia amid rise in hate crime⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Assault is already a generic crime. But random assaults whilst serious are just a form of crime that hurts the country a bit but not a lot (individuals might get badly hurt, but a low level of assaults is just a nuisance from a societal level).

  But hate crime is different, hate crimes beget hate crimes, and even a low level can grow rapidly, and once you have a racial/religious/whatever conflict you’re stuck with that for a few generations, so hate crimes are incredibly dangerous for society, so get stomped on very hard.

  That’s the theory anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that matches my understanding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Golden⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Treasure insects! Broach type iirc.

  Good eating on them!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NHS makes morning-after pill available for free across pharmacies in England⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on your specific denomination of pro-life. I think some consider even the morning after pill to be a form of abortion.

  But yeah, for everyone else it’s a definite win, including the less extremist pro-life crowd.

  Tldr: a very hard change to hate, but of course the most hateful people will manage to somehow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Show your pride⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In everyday context yes, but it’s pretty common to use “colour” to refer to frequency outside the visible range, and it’s interesting to consider what interesting “colours” we are missing out on because they’re outside our visible range.

  Silver/grey implies even response across the spectrum, and is the normal expectation.

  If we couldn’t see yellow (red/green) then gold would presumably look silver to us, so are there silver/grey metals that would have an interesting colour if only we could see it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm fine with being stupid⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re free to put the center vertex anywhere, then I’d think you could position it to avoid that…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rachel Reeves ‘plots tax raid on solicitors and GPs in crackdown on UK’s wealthy’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Serious answer: the actually wealthy are too good at tax dodging, so taxing them is rarely effective, plus they can scare governments by threatening to fly their private jets to some other country if they were actually threatened with effective taxation.

  I’ve heard it claimed that the only effective way to run a wealth tax is to do a single massive one off tax with no warning or lead time, that way the cockroaches wealthy can’t run and hide in the woodwork quickly enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ba bum tsst⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ankle [eeoh] sore [us]

  De-emphasising the bracketed bits

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨crop candles⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I admit that when you said “big fan” I imagined a wind turbine in reverse.

  Zooming into the picture, I see it’s more like desk fans on sticks. I’m sure they’re bigger than that really, but is it really too much to ask for a windmill that does work that way?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨oh cool⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The big sci fi win in stargate is how highly they rated internal consistency and having a scientific basis where possible. Apparently that was mostly because the actress playing Carter absolutely refused to tell bullshit gobbledegook and forced the writers to do it properly.

  It’s subtle, and not always perfectly followed, but if you take the episode where they gate to the black hole, they have significant screen time justifying why the time dilation is so strong when the gravitational effects are so weak. It shouldn’t work that way and they acknowledge that explicitly, but obviously they wanted a fun time dilation story so they call it out and explain it as an unexpected side effect of the gate wormhole. So sure, they sometimes make science do what they need it to do for the story, but they try hard to justify it.

  Star Trek meanwhile barely follows its own rules most of the time, let alone actually acknowledging real physics

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doot doot⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Plus they cleverly evolved ahead of time to be camouflaged against all our plastic pollution, so all their predators keep choking on plastic bags.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hello there⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey now, we have an unfair disadvantage, all the nutters are lumped in with us and bringing the side down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s fair

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Felt cute, might kill 4 people by radiation overdose later idk 🤪🤪⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The company did many things wrong, it’s an almost idealised example of total failure to take software seriously.

  Most importantly they decided they didn’t need to test the software on their new machines because they’d already shipped previous machines running the software, so they “knew it worked”. The previous machines had hardware interlocks that made it impossible for the software to cause a massive dosing errors, the new machine was entirely software controlled.

  Also they had exactly 1 “very smart” engineer build the software, who obviously wrote it for a hardware-safe machine. To be fair, I’m sure he was very smart, but safety critical and solo projects are not a great combo.

  Also they had no mechanisms to ensure failures would be communicated to their engineers for investigation (failures were reported to them and then dropped into a black hole and forgotten about).

  Also they didn’t even have any capability to test their machines after failures started popping up, because they knew the code worked perfectly so they didn’t need to waste any time or money on qa capability, massively slowing down their ability to fix things once people started dying

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'An embarrassing failure of the US patent system': Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo's latest patents on Pokémon mechanics 'should not have happened, full stop'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Software patents are pretty close to universally bad. Software moves fast and twenty years is ridiculous, when video codecs have grown to be biggest format and then been overtaken by their successors which in turn are overtaken by their own successors before the first codecs lose their patent then you know something is going wrong. Hardware patents have their place as you say, but software moves very quickly and can innovate just fine without the need for patents.

  In theory you could make them viable by shortening the life, to just 5 years or something, but at that point the cost of administering them probably outweighs any benefits (if there would actually be any).

  Copyright is another matter, I think we probably need that in some form (though the stupid length of copyright at the moment is even stupider for software)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four arrested in terror raids in West Midlands, Derbyshire and Yorkshire⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this actual terrorism or just supporting a group that blew up a parked military plane again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess the original claim works if you imagine it along a specific axis only (1 dimensionally) in that perspective you either fall quickly then leave slowly or fall slowly and leave quickly, matching up to a change in velocity along that axis.

  But yeah, I wouldn’t have explained it that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You mentioned “from the perspective of the planet” before, and I think perhaps that’s the key, from the planet’s perspective you fall and rise with equal velocities and equal accelerations, but crucially the planet is moving relative to other things and curves your orbit, so whilst you might might have the same falling and rising speeds relative to it, they’re not in the same direction, so you’re velocity has changed, and from an external perspective you’ve gained velocity from it.

  Imagine you start stationary relative to the sun, with Jupiter barrelling towards you (not on a collision course!). From Jupiter’s perspective you fall towards it, and so from the suns perspective you gain velocity opposite jupiters orbit, but you’re not directly head on so it twists your course (let’s say 90 degrees to keep things simple) then as you leave Jupiter it indeed decelerates you relative, but crucially you’re in a different direction now, (from jupiters perspective) you’re pointed right towards the sun, so as you pull away Jupiter is decelerating you in the sun direction (aka accelerates you away from the sun). So you were both accelerated in the anti-Jupiter-orbit direction and then again in the anti-sun direction. Added together those give you a vector which is non-zero, so you’ve gained speed from Jupiter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Over 450 Diablo developers at Blizzard have unionized⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Industries are made of people. People require goods and services. Goods and services are purchased with currency. Currency can be extracted from companies more effectively with the use of collective bargaining.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve just made an enemy for life!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who is the enemy?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Damned software devs, they ruined software!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘It’s gruesome’: fears of grave-robbing amid rise in sale of human remains⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Stealing human remains is illegal, but selling (correctly sourced) human remains is legal.

  I think their point is that it’s very hard to prove bones are illegally sourced, meaning they can only prosecute if they’re able to prove the bones were sourced illegally.

  If instead it was always illegal to sell human remains (presumably with exceptions for medical/educational purposes), that might make policing them somewhat easier.

  An alternate strategy might be to require strict tracking for human remains - you can sell a skull but it must have a certificate listing the full chain back to its original owner (presumably deceased). Failure to retain that chain of custody gets you in legal hot water regardless of how you obtained it. Possibly with a little extra security to prevent duplicate use of legitimate certification. (eg each sale is logged with a trusted 3rd party so you can’t keep claiming that every skull you sell is the same guy until one of them gets inspected, forcing you to find a new legitimate doner to act as cover).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe no blind spot, which is the place where all the nerves bundle together and pass through the sensing layer, leaving a hole in our vision (the brain works hard to hide this hole from our perception, but it’s still there and can cause accidents) Also maybe better vision in general?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Protester arrested over ‘Plasticine Action’ T-shirt: ‘How ridiculous is this?’⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Technically it’s nothing to do with Palestine itself, you can protest that fine.

  The issue is the group Palestine action, which the gov declared a terror group because they wrecked some military planes, and we have a law forbidding the support for declared terror groups.

  An overreaching dumb law applied badly by m a way to overreach even further. I admit this is not much better than arresting Palestine protestors directly, it’s a pretty thin cover…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your thoughts on this?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair point, after some googling I see I was significantly overestimating ais impact despite your comment previous comment, my bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your thoughts on this?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It currently is negligible. Depending on how long this hype train lasts it may stop being negligible. Coal is on the decline. Private jets and careless billionaires are growing problems, but not as fast as ai. All need handling one way or another.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Farage adviser said UK would be better off if it had not fought in WW2⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, but to be fair Britain had no access to the nazi leaderships’ private writings at the time, and really couldn’t be sure if they felt that way, and we can’t be sure the nazis might have changed their minds in the face of a meeker and weaker British response.

  So overall, I think perhaps the British response was pretty close to forced out, despite the theoretical full knowledge scenario of coexistence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyclist injuries dropped by half after “hated” cycle lane installed, but mayor still claims scrapped lane largely used as “bike run” for drug dealers to “get through traffic"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Criminals are famously environmentally conscious, and never have any spare cash for a pricy car as a mode of transport. Of course.