the Esports Olympics

I had never heard of it, but I went to find out who won the SC2 gold medal and found out instead that they only included video game versions of established olympic sports, i.e. the fortnite was target shooting mode because target shooting is a sport that’s in the olympics.

Thanks, but I’ll wait for the Skyrim mod version.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41295395

When students want to cheat their way through the education system, the fault is not solely their own. Perhaps this will drain some of the excess credentialism out of the system.

I’m so old that I still remember when working in the fields picking fruit was a thing that local teenagers would occasionally do. And I’m not really that old, it was the 1980s. It’s been quite a rapid change.

The URL to which the target is redirected is typically a webpage crafted by the attacker to look like a genuine login page for the target’s email service

DO NOT enter your password after clicking on a link you got in an email, or an emailed pdf, or an emailed word document, or a link you got in telegram, or a strange url that came to you in a dream, or anything else like that. Why is it so difficult to get people to remember this?

[How do we bring back free speech?] "The answer is journalists getting eyeballs so they can sell subscriptions and advertising, get sponsorships and do what media have done for, I don’t know, 3,000 years.”

3000 years, huh. 10th-century BC journalists be like Word has reached us that Tiglath-Pileser II is now King of Assyria, succeeding his father Ashur-resh-ishi II. He promises to be a strong leader who will increase spending on the military and keep the resulting rise in tax rates as low as he can. Subscribe today for more vital stories like this one, and don't forget to tell your friends that you like us. This clay tablet was brought to you with the support of Ashur-Ekil Baked Goods. When you think ḫuḫḫurtu, think Ashur-Ekil!

If I was shopping for speakers right now

I would buy speakers that are just speakers, which do not collect any data about me, do not rely on any computer networks, do not involve any monthly subscription fees, and do only the job of being speakers. I’d connect them to audio sources with cables, probably through a suitable mixer and/or amplifier. Not the platinum-plated $300 cables, either. It’s not that complicated everyone, give it a try some day.

The nerve of all these foreign influence campaigns, coming in without permission and taking jobs away from hard-working patriotic American influence campaigns.

If I were looking to assign blame, I’d start with the coal and gas operators who are digging up fossil fuels that would otherwise remain in the ground just to fuel their bitcoin mining rigs, those who peddle specious arguments claiming that it somehow isn’t a problem, those who turned the whole thing into a machine for separating the gullible from their money, and those who’ve built the shaky, buggy, mostly proprietary, convoluted, half-finished, untrustworthy, horrible mess that is the software ecosystem surrounding the whole cryptocurrency sphere. Perhaps none of that could have been foreseen by whoever designed bitcoin. On them we can instead put the blame for the failure to make it anywhere near sufficiently scalable, and the ridiculous choice of mechanism for the bitcoin monetary policy which serves to make it function only as a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme and not a durable currency. Regardless of who’s to blame, it’s got to go.

Perhaps there’s already an alternative out there somewhere which is actually useful and not based on avarice, fraud, unsustainable resource usage, or unsustainable hype, but if so it’s currently hidden under such an enormous pile of shitcoins that it’s impossible to identify. At least the internal combustion engine was good at doing the thing it was supposed to do.

If you can afford more than a small plot of land in this economy, you’ve probably been hoarding too much wealth. I know it’s a very popular hobby, but it’s quite bad for you if taken to excess. But this is getting somewhat off-topic.

Some kind of technology that resembles today’s cryptocurrencies may or may not have a future. As they exist right now none of them are anything like a good investment opportunity or a safe store of value.

A small plot of land with good soil and a steady supply of fresh water, a good education, and a sturdy pair of boots.

Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, which are far more energy efficient than Bitcoin

Calling those that don’t depend on proof-of-work “more energy efficient” is understating it to the point of being dishonest. The difference is not that they’re more efficient in any conventional way. It’s that they don’t have the amazing bitcoin feature of relying for their operation on the practice of deliberately wasting enormous amounts of energy for the purpose of being able to prove that you’ve wasted enormous amounts of energy.

All the way through the cryptocurrency crash which the average reader of headlines might’ve thought had put an end to it by now, the bitcoin network has kept on burning up absurd amounts of power.

Canada just gave them another big copyright term extension a couple years ago. The more you give in, the more they’ll want. I say they should get nothing more out of Canada for the life of Bob Iger plus 70 years.

Just use your VPN provider’s DNS.

Perhaps, but that seems unlikely to have changed so much since last year. Something else has shifted to make Poilievre and the Cons seem more acceptable to people than they did. Perhaps their party leader has learned to stop saying ridiculously stupid things in public quite so often. Excepting those carefully selected ridiculous things which have proved popular of course, such as “axe the tax” and “common sense.”

Conservatives projected to equal the sum of Liberal + NDP in the popular vote. When was the last time they were that popular? Brian Mulroney? That wasn’t even the same Conservative party, but people seem to have forgotten that.

Elected officials, journalists, activists, it’s gradually becoming clear that everyone who uses centralised social media is part of the problem. Promoting the fediverse and keeping it resistant to takeover by fascists or anyone else ought to be a national security goal.

The problem isn’t merely that Elon Musk is manifestly unsuited to the job of unelected social media tsar. The problem is that no one should have that job.

Canada is pretty bad, but if Russia and Saudi Arabia are not on your list of petrostates, you’re doing it wrong.

Not really. Now they’re old and controversial.

What a story. If only it were possible to share articles like this on social media somehow.

“I was well within my rights and I was not doing anything unjust,” Dsta’hyl told reporters on Wednesday. “We were seizing equipment that was destroying our lands.”

He may well have been within his rights. But it also seems clear that he was not imprisoned “solely because of his political, religious, or other conscientiously held beliefs.” I don’t understand the rationale for this declaration.

I’m an Xfce user, in the habit of dragging windows around with the “super” key + left mouse button.

For instant access to the browser back button, I have it positioned in the far top-left corner so that just swiping the mouse in that direction hits it without having to look at it. Unless it’s on the other monitor, which is mildly annoying when it happens but you know, probably not by enough to change my decades-old habit of buying the cheapest and simplest mouse that’s easily available and looks like it might not fall apart in a week, much the same way as I tend to shop for socks: reluctantly, when it’s necessary.

Yeah it is mostly the extra buttons that annoy me personally, I don’t really know why. I have better ways of doing the things you mention but I’m sure there could theoretically be some use for them. I’ve played games where they might’ve been useful, but it seems like no software is designed to rely on them and I always found their placement made it too easy to hit them by accident. Maybe my hands are the wrong shape or something.

• A third mouse button showed up
• A scrollwheel showed up
• Optical sensors showed up.
• Better optical sensors showed up
• Polling rate improved

… and then everybody joined me in thinking that this would be a good place to stop and actively avoided the continued attempts to sell us on new features that further complicate things.

I’m using a Logitech mouse from probably 15 years ago that gets daily use and works just fine. I’m not sure how much it cost, but I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than about $20 for a mouse and probably the only reason I’d have picked one from Logitech is that it was the only one available at the shop I happened to be in at the time that wasn’t a ridiculous overpriced “gaming” product.

Canadians tend to watch a lot of television from the USA. As the country lost its connections to the British it became more easily influenced by the Americans. For now I think a majority are still relatively sane, but there’s probably a solid 20% who are hoping that our next president will be Donald Trump.

I didn’t mean to imply that their top stories aren’t of interest, only that I wish it were easier to see more of the many things they publish.

The problem with lite/news?sort=latest is that it as of right now for example it’s showing only 2 hours worth of the many stories they publish, and there’s no option to retrieve more. If you check it once a day you’re missing 90% of what they publish.

If you choose the “editor’s choice” link instead you’ll get all the many stories about the Olympics, US politics, and wildfires, and you’ll miss most of the stories that might actually be interesting on any given day.

It’s a stripped-down low-bandwidth microcosm of this dysfunctionality of the whole news industry.

Maybe. When Reuters publishes such a thing it just makes me wonder what crazy new law they are trying to gin up support for. As they say “When authorities restrict one chemical, suppliers and traffickers just switch to another.” It worries me to imagine what kind of “solution” they might dream up for that problem.

That seems like a lot of trouble to go to just for one clickbait headline.

66%! I’d have guessed more like 85.

In the future, maybe AI will improve sufficiently to allow them to pretend to respond to petitions like this one instead of what appears to be the current practice of providing a wall of text that does not address the proposal in any way except in that it matches some of the right keywords.

[François Legault] says his government will form a committee of experts to look into issues surrounding gender identity. He said he understands the concerns on both sides of the issue …

[…] Dough Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce for suggesting that public educators are trying to “indoctrinate” kids who decide to use different pronouns.

It’s the easy way to spend 2% of GDP on the military: Lower the GDP.

If all of civilisation collapses into ruin, at least we will have the consolation that “tipping” will be abolished along with everything else.

I left r/canada even before I left reddit. The final straw was when I saw links to a report from Citizen Lab, a very respectable Canadian research group at U of T, about a foreign government interfering in Canadian affairs, getting deleted for not being “relevant to Canada.”

la zone Chamouchouane est d’une superficie d’environ 5 000 km2 et se démarque par la qualité et l’ampleur de son potentiel éolien.

Yeah, that’d be where it came from. Anyway I was just trying to mentally compare the size of a wind farm to the size of a typical hydro reservoir. Conclusion: They’re both pretty big.

Is that normal now? The ones pictured in the article and all of those I’ve personally seen are more closely spaced. But guess they’ve been getting bigger over time and it would be on-brand for Hydro Québec to go for extra large ones with a few kilometers between them.

… just looking at numbers from around the web it seems like even the largest turbines around don’t normally require that much area. 5000km² seems like roughly an order of magnitude more space than might be expected. I imagine it’s probably the total area of the region they’ll be built somewhere inside of.