kbal

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

Cross-country skiing is fun! I think so, anyway. Take it easy, don't expect to be super good at it right away, et cetera, but maybe try out whichever winter sports appeal to you. What everyone else said, but also don't forget to go outside and enjoy yourself sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

The Featured Snippet quoted an article from the Mayo Clinic, highlighting the words "Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure." But when she looked up "no link between coffee and hypertension", the Featured Snippet cited a contradictory line from the very same Mayo Clinic article: "Caffeine doesn't have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure".

On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they've learned anything at all about medicine, it's hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they're given are biased or accurate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Overclocking

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago

This seems unfair to sharks.

 

The TL/DR is this: The allegation that David Pugliese is a Russian asset has floated around Ottawa for about a decade — often with various degrees of evidence behind it. It was in recent years that these documents, which appear to be real and which were furnished by Kyiv, were sent to Canadian intelligence agencies and were seriously investigated. While Pugliese has proved himself to be a willing customer for Russian disinformation, and while I believe he hasn’t appropriately disclosed his relationship with the Russian embassy, the idea that he is a paid agent of the Russian government is probably false.

But recent Kremlin influence operations have blurred the lines between asset and useful idiot. They invite us to, as I said repeatedly during my statement at committee, get serious.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (4 children)

... and people calling themselves communist still leaping to its defence, for some inexplicable reason.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 days ago (6 children)

Any talk of communism is a "red" herring when it comes to this topic. Russia isn't in any way officially, notionally, or superficially communist.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago

Is there any truth to the allegations? Beats me, but seeing the possibility dismissed as as a preposterous notion that can only be part of a "New Red Scare" does not decrease my estimation of the chances of it.

This was just last month.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Town square vs a bush behind the abandoned lighthouse.

"Town square"? More like shopping mall food court. What self-respecting anarchist wouldn't go for the abandoned lighthouse instead? It can only be that they're unaware that it exists and even has working plumbing sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Just think of all the juicy benefits of replacing journalists with machines. They'll never stumble or cough while presenting the news, they'll never call in sick, never age, never get mad as hell and decide to not take it any more, never resign from the editorial board in protest no matter what garbage you tell them is the news. Machines are just better suited to the job, it's inevitable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They're Canadian politicians. Their entire careers have been built in a world where everyone who matters believes that party loyalty is super important, or at least acts as if they believe it. They're trying to do what they think is best for the Liberal party.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Iceraven is one alternative worth considering.

 

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

 

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

 

Not only did Ichiriki win the finals, he won it 3-0! I love it that a Japanese top player was finally able to win the most prestigious international go title (for the first time actually), after decades of Japanese pros having a reputation of not really being a match anymore for Korean and Chinese pros. I enjoyed watching this review Michael Chen 1p AGA made about all the games in the match: That video is more than 2 hours long, but it’s not boring at all ...

 

https://github.com/Abev08/VolumeControlExtension

That's two longstanding items on my firefox wishlist taken care of by an extension: Actual working volume controls on the built-in media player, and a volume control for other crappy web players that don't have them.

#firefox

 

phase 1: Don't care about diet. phase 2: Try to lose weight. phase 3: Don't care at all about diet. phase 4: Ascetic diet of mostly rice and peanuts. phase 5: Vitamin A deficiency. phase 6 (current): Carefully fine-tuned diet designed with nutrition calculator.

I can't explain it, that's just how it went.

 

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

 

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

 

Today is the 97th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

 

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

 

If anyone has a debian/windows dual-boot laptop and has been waiting until Microsoft's secureboot surprise is defused before booting into Windows, and you don't want to wait any longer, what you need is shim-signed_1.39+15.7-1_amd64.deb from bookworm-proposed-updates.

 

The problems on this site were created using neural nets to automatically extract positions for each rank from high-level games where the neural net thought the next move would be instinctive for a pro but might be educational or non-obvious for players of that rank.

Trying to get back into the game a little, and I've just noticed that https://neuralnetgoproblems.com/ is still online! Whole-board positions from real games, asks you to predict the next move. It's really good if you enjoy that sort of thing.

view more: next ›