𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

The transphobic argument isn’t that you’d be gay for dating someone who used to be a dude, in their view you’re currently dating someone who still is a dude.

These kinds of imaginary clapbacks are fun but usually end up fairly unconvincing to (transphobic) people.

Counterpoint: If there’s anyone who doesn’t promote Windows and actively dislikes it, it’s Windows users.

I used to think this too, but using a global time means the date also ticks over to the next day at odd moments during the day. So in the end it feels like timezones with extra confusion.

Yeah but that’s precisely the thing isn’t it: you need to know Winboat, Gnome Boxes, VMs etc… exist, you need to know how to configure it and how to use it.

I’ve installed Bazzite a while ago for my sister after my old gaming PC didn’t support W11 which I donated to her. Took 2 reinstalls because apparently it’s very easy to mess with hard drive mounting in a way that bricks the OS into an unrecoverable boot loop. Then, I needed to get her games working through Lutris, which did eventually work but updating those games then became an issue. I know how to do it, but she still has difficulty getting the steps right. Had I left it to do it herself, she would’ve been far too intimidated to even get started properly (and she’s above-average when it comes to computers). And of course 90% of computer work happens in the browser, but people are unlikely to switch if that remaining 10% doesn’t also just work out of the box.

Arguably this all isn’t Linux’ fault, but that doesn’t magic the issues away. Windows is just a lot more familiar and harder to brick beyond repair. Of course it’s less powerful and more bloated, but managing to get a Linux install to that point is often still quite hard for many people. And the average person has very little patience to make something work.

I know people like to joke this, but there’s plenty of “I use distro X because it works well with Nvidia gpus”, “I had to use XYZ to make the drivers for my steering wheel work” and “I use software XYZ which doesn’t quite work (fast enough) through Wine/Proton”.

Windows entire shtick is that due to its market dominance, companies will make sure their product works with Windows, hence it’s a very plug-and-play OS.

Sure, Windows does shit users don’t always want or like. But it doesn’t generally outright break things these days. And if it does, the instructions online on how to fix it are generally a bit easier to follow than those for Linux.

Linux being a bit harder to set up isn’t really Linux’ fault. And these days the chance that your distro outright works without tweaks is fairly high. But it’s not at the same level as Windows is yet.

Nice avatar

It does. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9679229/

We compared behavioural tendencies between 8 breeds that are subject to legislation in at least one country and 17 breeds that are not subject to legislation using two validated psychometric tools: the Dog Impulsivity Assessment Scale (DIAS), which scores elements of impulsivity, including a tendency for aggressive behaviour, and Positive and Negative Activation Scale (PANAS), which scores sensitivity to positive and negative stimuli (which may trigger aggressive responses). We found that the two groups of breeds do not differ significantly in the specific DIAS factor relating to aggressive behaviour, “Aggression Threshold and Response to Novelty”, or any other DIAS and PANAS factors. We found large variations in all behavioural tendencies measured by both psychometric scales within both groups and within each breed studied. Taken together, our findings indicate that breed alone is not a reliable predictor of individual behavioural tendencies, including those related to aggression, and therefore breed‐specific legislation is unlikely to be an effective instrument for reducing risk.

Accordingly, a recent genomic study showed that although most canine behavioural traits have relatively high heritability (h2 > 0.25), breed explained only 9% of behavioural variation among individuals (Morrill et al., 2022).

Breed‐specific legislation has been heavily criticised for its poor scientific basis (Mills & Levine, 2006; Ott et al., 2008) and lack of demonstrable effectiveness, e.g. hospital admissions for dog bite incidents have continued to rise since legislation was introduced (Creedon & Ó’Súilleabháin, 2017).

For example, Creedon and Ó’Súilleabháin (2017) found no significant differences between legislated and non‐legislated groups of breeds with regard to either the type of bite inflicted or whether medical intervention was required, indicating no difference in the nature of bites received from the two classes of dog. Other studies have found that behavioural responses of dogs from legislated breeds during a temperament test were classified as appropriate in 95% of individuals tested (Schalke et al., 2008) and did not differ significantly from the behavioural responses of Golden Retrievers (Ott et al., 2008), who are widely considered good family pets.

The cultural aspect is 90% of it. If you look at the statistics over longer periods of time (eg several decades), you can tell when a specific dog breed becomes the “fashion choice” for irresponsible owners. Those dog breeds suddenly become “more dangerous” than other breeds.

Great Danes, Labradors, many breeds were considered the most dangerous in the past before Pitbulls were. In some countries you also get different “most dangerous” dog breeds than other countries.

And there’s quite a bit of research suggesting that although some bites are obviously more physically dangerous than others (a Chihuahua doesn’t cause injuries as severe as a Pitbull could cause), the dog’s aggressiveness or personality is actually not that genetically predetermined. Sure, there’s a bit that is, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain the dog bite statistics with purely the dog breed as the cause.

Ignoring that the UK isn’t part of the EU, the EUs privacy laws extend to all European citizens, and it has treaties with most of the world (including the US) allowing it to enforce those.

I suggest you look at someone else for reviews because this review is both inaccurate and somehow also blindingly stupid.

I hear a lot of Germans say this but I do hear a difference between the English V and the German W. They don’t sound exactly alike. Sounds more like a [ʋ] sound in German which is a bit more in between.

The point was that they haven’t always held themselves up to those standards and have sometimes only used professionals espousing a single viewpoint (where multiple exist).

I should mention this isn’t bias, iirc the channel did release a video apologizing for some of the issues (though not all), so it wasn’t even up to their own standards by their own admission.

There’s a wikipedia entry listing some of the controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzgesagt#%3A~%3Atext=While+some+commentators+have+praised%2Cand+use+of+emotive+language.

Looking things up now, I see that the plagiarism case was slightly different: they had published a video on addiction, which was fairly explosive in its claims. Turns out it was citing basically just one fringe researcher who was also accused of plagiarism. The claims did not seem to hold up to scrutiny.

When another channel doing a series on how pop-sci influencers can sometimes spread misinformed ideas asked some questions to Kurzgesagt, they were immediately a bit apprehensive but agreed to do some interview questions, though with the caveat that they were busy with other things and needed a few weeks before it could take place. Then before the interview took place they suddenly put out their own apology video and took the addiction video down. At no point was it mentioned that another channel prompted this action, it was presented as some kind of inward reflection that they had come to themselves.

I mean there’s been some controversy surrounding a number of their videos. Some were under fire for poor research or demonstrating a singular, not widely-held view on certain topics. And I think for one video they were accused of plagiarism iirc. This was when it was still somewhat early days for the channel, haven’t followed them since so not sure what the state is now.

The original only has Batman speak, and only has Raphael in the panel (and Batman doesn’t misspeak).

Though I must say I’m quite partial to this version myself:

UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there’s no time for optimization, and these fancy options “just work”, so there ya go.

The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it’s out on schedule I guess.

Nuclear power requires a lot of water for coolant. Usually they use river water and release the heated water back in the river, which quite heavily disrupts the ecosystem.

Additionally, during heatwaves (which we’re getting more and more of) the river water may get too warm to use, so the reactor has to shut down (happens in France almost every heatwave), which is bad as that happens when power usage tends to spike.

Nuclear is also extremely expensive, costs many years to build, not to mention we don’t have enough educated nuclear engineers nor build capacity to keep up with the demand for new power. It’s why investors generally don’t bother with nuclear much, outside of specific niche cases. Not to mention the carbon footprint of building a power plant.

It’s also likely going to get more expensive to run in the future. As renewables keep contributing more power to the grid (since they’re so cheap and getting cheaper still), power generation will also fluctuate more. Meaning, other power sources need to be very flexible in when they output power themselves. Nuclear is famously quite inflexible, it takes time to spin up and wind down. There are reactor designs that are better at it, but even for those shutting down the reactor for a couple hours tends to be economic suicide as well. This exact reason btw is why gas is still used a lot; it’s cleaner than coal at least, but also very easy to spin up or wind down without creating much extra cost. And it’s much cheaper than nuclear (leaving more money to invest in renewables).

Nuclear could be great, if it was A) cheaper, B) faster to build and C) more flexible. And no, so far SMRs have not proven to be any of those things yet.

No, it was Iron Sky (2012), with the Swastika-shaped lunar base.

… Let’s not give Elon any ideas.

They accidentally added a zero, it’s supposed to be 1000m (doubke 500m).

Isn’t Stephen Crowder the guy in the change my mind meme?

It’s poorly optimized UE5 slop. Looks like shit, plays like shit.

Hard pass.