• 5 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

    Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

    Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.


  • I’m not convinced. Most magic systems in fiction have rules, meaning they can be scientifically proven and studied. Magic is simply when something falls outside your understanding of how the world works. It’s all about your perspective.

    There’s a part in the Lord of the Rings where Galadriel shows Sam and Frodo a scrying pool. To Galadriel it’s normal, simply the way the world is. To the hobbits it’s magic.

    ‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’



  • There’s no point looking for logic. These people truly believe granting a licence restricts the rights of people who don’t agree to the licence, which is the exact opposite of what licenses do. It’s blatant misinformation but if you call them out on it (even by quoting their own link) they literally think you’re an astroturfer for AI, because that makes more sense to them than the fact they’re obviously wrong.






  • There’s definitely some issues that jump out to me on first read.

    1. I’m not sure about “indivisible”. An area should be able to self-govern if desired. More detail needed.
    2. Awful. Removing people’s voting rights in general is bad, and something as nebulous as “a criminal offence” is incredibly easy to abuse. Are people no longer citizens if they steal a loaf of bread? Also, voting age here is 16/18.
    4. No. Guns are incredibly rare where I am. I’d rather not have one, and I’d prefer not to risk getting shot every time some asshole on the street gets mad.
    7. Limiting land to a single use is generally not a great idea. What if for instance you have too much agricultural land and not enough housing?
    10. A central state-owned bank isn’t a bad idea, but abolishing all non-state banks is iffy. Should the government really have so much direct control over everyone’s finances?
    12. Your salary should not be based on the amount of unprotected sex you have. That’s just silly. Other support should be available for those who need it.




  • with extras like […] no lockscreen ads

    What the fuck? Why is that an extra not just the default? It’s great that this product isn’t riddled with ads, but that’s like saying it’s great a burger is not made of human shit; it’s crazy that anyone would tolerate a shit-burger in the first place.

    Maybe ads are normal in the e-reader space for some reason, but that’s just insane to me.




  • I like the idea of splitting timelines if reverse time travel is possible, but it does have some consequences. The biggest one being that it means you can’t actually travel back in time. Time travel may even be relatively simple but as it has no effect on the primary timeline you will never be able to change the past as it appears there; travelling back in time simply creates an alternate reality. As far as the primary timeline inhabitants are concerned, you have either died or vanished (or maybe nothing appeared to happen at all) but you have not travelled in time. It also means it’s impossible to return to your original timeline as further reverse time travel will only create new alternate timelines, the closest you can get is a timeline that closely resembles your home one.

    Another fun approach is that infinitely many alternate timelines already exist (think Many Worlds), travelling back in time simply means you spontaneously form in another world through quantum fluctuations or something equally hand-wavey. The thing I find interesting about this one is that it doesn’t necessarily involve time travel at all. You form with the memories of having travelled in time, sure, but you have just spontaneously formed through quantum fluctuations so it’s reasonable to assume your memories have too; it may have just been a randomly formed memory that didn’t actually happen. Since it’s just random fluctuations there’d also be infinitely many universes where you spontaneously pop into existence with no time travel memory, so I suppose in a way this never was time travel. The original timeline would be unaffected by this kind of travel as you can only move to universes where you have already spawned in.

    The way I see it the only way to actually change the past in your current timeline arguably involves destroying the universe. You’d have a single timeline and each instance of reverse time travel cuts off your timeline’s future and links back to a previous point from which time can continue. You can visualise this timeline as a piece of string, time travel is a loop in that string. If you travel back in time by a year, everything you did in that past year is within that loop off to the side of the primary timeline; the loop starts and ends at the same point. Time travel would essentially delete your future and plonk you back onto the primary timeline. No need to worry about the grandfather paradox; you were born in a loop off to the side of real time so killing your grandfather doesn’t change that loop. It works around the bootstrap paradox for similar reasons; the information was created in some loop somewhere, even if it appears to have created itself on the prime line. It’s a nice thought experiment but the problem here is that if you travel back in time but fail to change the conditions which caused the time travel you may have just ended the universe in an infinite time loop.




  • I’d argue the exact opposite. It’s a fun game to play with new players or in a private lobby with a bunch of friends, but at the highest levels it’s absolutely horrible. You don’t really get more options to make the game more fun as you progress, instead the most effective options are to actively ruin the experience for the other side.

    There was an item in the game that survivors could use to instantly complete an objective. If all four brought one it instantly completed 4 of 5 objectives. It was eventually nerfed shortly before I stopped playing, but it’s a perfect example of the kind of game-ruining mechanics the game is for some reason built around. You don’t level up to have more fun, you level up to screw over the other person.


  • That’ll never work. Say for instance there was a fan fiction community for The Last of Us; is this a gaming community, a TV show community, or a literature community? Really it’s all of the above, so you have to use a more awkward name to fit into one category that doesn’t even fully describe the community.

    No, if you want to categorise communities like that it shouldn’t be done through the name. You’ll need to build a separate tag or label system instead, allowing communities to properly identify with multiple tags.