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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlForest of trees
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    2 days ago

    That’s not relevant to being a tankie as the US, Israel, and other states backing Israel, aren’t claiming they’re building communism or are the successor state to another which claimed to be building communism. It’s the part where communism is an excuse that means the bad things didn’t really happen and would be fine even if they did that makes tankie-ism its own distinct thing.




  • Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user’s legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.

    Georgia has simple rules where a child’s forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.

    Tenessee seemed to only require that a child’s name was writable under some writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.

    At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn’t enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.





  • Fair use only covers critique, parody and education, and only with a whole bunch of extra nuance (e.g. you can’t just put a clip of yourself saying you didn’t like a movie at the end of the movie and get away with hosting it on your site by claiming it was critique, and you can’t download a PDF of a textbook and get away with it by claiming it was for education). Fair use lets you do a lot less than people think.



  • Quantum dot LED TVs don’t actually use quantum dot LEDs (yay, marketing). They’re built like any other LCD, but instead of having a white backlight (typically a blue LED with a phosphor to fluoresce the blue to green and red, too, making white) and then a colour filter behind each pixel subelement to only let the right colour through, they have a blue LED backlight, and then a quantum dot film that fluoresces the blue to the right colour.

    The advantage of this is that you’re not making light in colours you can’t use just to get absorbed by the filter and turned into heat, so can make the backlight brighter, which, when combined with other techniques to make good LCDs, is enough to make them comparable to OLEDs in quality and price.

    Actual quantum dot LEDs let you make light at practically any frequency you want, like OLEDs (traditional LEDs only make light at bandgap frequencies for atoms of elements, and there’s not a huge choice of suitable elements, hence blue LEDs taking decades to materialise after other colours were cheap). In theory, quantum dot LEDs won’t have burn-in problems, but they’re currently not practical to make a TV out of, giving marketing people plenty of time to weasel out of their fuckup with naming existing QLED TVs.



  • Despite how it’s often framed, the NHS doesn’t get to make recommendations one way or the other in this kind of case. Once the patient’s doctors are no longer sure that it’s in their best interest to continue being kept alive, they make the legal system aware, and a court will take evidence from the patient (if they’re in a fit condition to give any, which they usually wouldn’t be), doctors, family members, relevant experts, and any other appropriate witnesses, to determine what is and isn’t in the patient’s best interest. One the court has made a decision (which might involve a lengthy appeals process if the family are upset about the initial decision), the NHS does what the court tells it to. If the patient is capable of experiencing anything other than pain, it’s unlikely that it’ll be in their best interest to die, so the court will order them to be kept alive.

    It’s relatively common for anti-abortion and anti-state-funded-healthcare political campaign groups from the US to pay for expensive lawyers to argue in favour of keeping child patients alive and persuade the parents to keep appealing as upset parents saying the state killed their baby makes an evocative headline that can easily be pivoted to make the most merciful option look cruel and callous, and sway people’s votes.

    There’s a chapter on this in one of The Secret Barrister’s books - I think the second one.




  • The way I like to think of it is that non-copyleft licences are like giving everyone freedom by saying there are no laws - suddenly, you can do anything, and the government can’t stop you! However, other people can also do anything and the government can’t stop them, either, and that includes using a big net to catch other people and make them their slaves. The people caught in the nets aren’t going to feel very free anymore, and it’s not unreasonable to think that a lot of people will end up caught in nets.

    Copyleft licences are like saying there are no laws except you’re not allowed to do anything that would restrict someone else’s freedom. In theory, that’s only going to inconvenience you if you were going to do something bad, and leaves most people much freer.

    The idea is basically that you shouldn’t be able to restrict anyone else’s freedom to modify the software they use, and if you’re going to, you don’t get to base your software on things made by people who didn’t.




  • It’s not unreasonable to think that the inertial dampeners can perfectly compensate for any planned movement, but when you’ve got the equivalent of a hundred nukes going off a few tens of metres away when a torpedo hits, it might take a couple of nanoseconds to react, and that kind of force for a couple of nanoseconds would jostle things about a bit.


  • We only reimplemented the engine, not the game. You still need to own a copy of Morrowind so there’s something for the new engine to actually run. That said, it is possible for it to run other potentially-open-source games, such as OpenMW’s example suite (which isn’t finished enough to even call a game yet) or the Robowind demo (which I can’t remember the licencing details of) .