The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name. Cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name “thagomizer” in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education.

I love everything about this.

Pretty much - they’re lying it would introduce huge production costs, because most people who’d repeat this argument wouldn’t know they’re being lied to.

Not surprised with the lobbying group.

Ross did an amazing job addressing the babble in the statement. Specially because he’s being extra careful on saying things to the best of his knowledge - note how he doesn’t say “it’s false”, or “it’s a lie”, but rather “a German lawyer thinks this is false” and “this sounds like a lie”; gotta respect that.

Some additional comments:

The first paragraph of the lobbying group’s statement might sound like an introduction, but it’s already a straw man - it’s clearly misleading the reader on what Stop Killing Games is about.

as the protections we put in place

Excuse me?

1. Sod off with this “THINK ON PROTEKSHUN!” idiotic argument;
2. let us not forget the main concern when it comes to data protection are companies harvesting data so they can sell it to their “affiliate partners” (i.e. data vultures eager who’ll use it for targetted spam).

Note #1 is a cancer way more widespread than just the gaming industry. Every fucking bloody time some megacorpo wants to fight against some sane customer protection law, they babble shite like this. And it always sounds like “a user/customer is not a rational human being, it’s irrational trash, and if you let it do what it wants it’ll cause itself harm, so We need to protect those filthy things. And how convenient, the way to protect this filth against itself magically aligns with our financial interests!”

these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

This is not even a fallacy. Not even bullshit. It’s simply to be a lying bastard, and to call the readers bloody muppets by proxy.

1M+ sign European Citizen’s Initiative “Stop Destroying Videogames”: Help us protect gamers’ consumer rights!

I think it would be sensible if the word “gamer” was replaced with “citizen” here. Because it’s what politicians care about.

I was almost mentioning that.

By Darwin, Huxley and Haldane: why are our playgrounds the same organs as the garbage ducts? Why???

Leosqualo da Vinci? Johaainnes Vermeer? 鳍白石 / Qí Báishí? …Pi-cação?

Time to cancel my Crunchyroll subscription. Oh wait I don’t have one, I simply torrent my series.

Seriously now. The anime fansubbing scene is one that makes me genuinely happy. It shows me there are plenty amateurs out there that are as good or better than plenty professionals like me.

I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don’t get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It’s like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don’t want to do it regularly!

If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

That “business” is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.

As I mentioned in another thread, São Paulo state’s customer protection organ is basically telling people to not buy Nintendo. Indirectly, with pretty words, but that’s what it’s doing.

[IANAL] Also, note some stuff in the Switch 2 user agreement is legally invalid in Brazil. Nintendo is shielding itself with an “ackshyually we don’t sell it in Brazil lol lmao”, that’s why Procon - SP is calling it out.

22 yards in a chain

What. I had to websearch this because it sounds too silly, but apparently it’s true.

But, really, even if it used saner numbers (like 12:3:24:8:3), it still feels nothing like a “metric dozenal” would look like. It’s missing the two things the metric system did right:

1. All prefixes are unit-agnostic, like they were numbers. For example you can plop “kilo” = 10³ on weight (kilogram), length (kilometre), volume (kilolitre), energy, (kilojoule), etc.
2. All prefixes must be an integer power of the base. For example you could make a 10⁸ prefix, even if there’s none, and it would be OK; but you can’t make, say, a 10^(2.447) = 300 one.

Metric “dozenalisation” would be perfectly viable, and metric-dozenal units would still look nothing like USA units.

I’ll use length for the example. All of them in base 10, just for clarity. (Also the name of the units would be different, but I’m not changing them for this example.)

• metric-decimal: 10⁻³ km = 10⁻² hm = 10⁻¹ dam = 10⁰m = 10¹dm = 10²cm = 10³mm
• metric-dozenal: 12⁻³ km = 12⁻²hm = 12⁻¹ dam = 12⁰m = 12¹dm = 12²cm = 12³mm
• USA units: 1/1760mi = 1yd = 3ft = 3*12 in = 3*12*6 P = 3*12*6*12 p

Are you noticing what the USA units do? They don’t stick to a base.

People are focusing on the Excel part, I’ll focus on the maths.

I wish our societies picked base-12 instead of base-10. Divisions in base-12 give you repeating digits less often, and being able to split exactly by 3, 6, 9 and 12₁₀=10₁₂ is far more useful than doing it for 5 and 10₁₀=A₁₂.

Plus 4chan would stop arguing if 0.999… = 1. It would argue instead if 0.BBB… = 1.

I once had a cat that “elected” one of the beds as her litterbox. I have a feeling that, if she could, she’d blame humans for her shit.

I don’t blame the orcas - have you seen a human? Those things are, like, 1/3 of the size of an orca; they’re clearly malnourished, some good ol’ seal meat will fix’em up real good!

Serious now. I think it’s interesting how they’re interacting cooperatively, with an animal of a different species. And it isn’t like either side domesticated the other (unlike, say, humans vs. dogs and cats); they don’t even live in the same environments, at most you have some humans doing short trips into the sea and that’s it.

“What I think in a sense is more impressive is that humans basically give no credit to any other creature for having a mind,” Safina said. Yet many other creatures, including orcas, understand implicitly that humans have minds. “So they understand us, and give us more credit there, they seem to comprehend the world better than we do, in our self-imposed estrangement.”

I feel like this is a step beyond theory of mind already.

Peer reviewed by my neighbour’s dog. She’d probably add “even if you see no threat, and even if you don’t give a fuck about humans, it’s better to bark anyway just to be safe”. Except in posh paper speech.

Yellowcake, sponge… lemon flavoured sponge cake?

We need a cosmological law dictating harmful to humans = boring-looking. I mean, it isn’t just plutonium, look at uranium yellowcake! It’s lemon flavouring!

Who was this written by, a Brit?

Nope. Likely an American.

When cooking, people in general like to use round numbers, like “200°C”, since a difference of 5°C in oven temperature is not a big deal.

And yet they went with some oddly specific 205°C. That only makes sense if they’re used to Fahrenheit, eyeballed a round value (like 400°F), converted it into Celsius (204.4°C), and then rounded it up to discard the decimal.

I’m also going to say they’re completely clueless when it comes to cooking - 200°C is the oven temperature. The chicken itself reaches a far lower temperature, in the 70~80°C range. By the time the chicken reached 200°C, it’s already dry and close to catching fire. (The self-ignition temperature for biological stuff is typically between 200°C and 250°C.)

I’m glad your day is better because of my shit-edit :)

I tried. Dunno if I should make a sword-shaped hole in the fault or add a “no swords allowed!” sign. (If I got this right you’re mocking oddly combative users, right? There’s always rules to be nice… and they get ignored.)

;_;7