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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • No, I don’t think they’d have to make an alias for every Pokemon. The person you’re responding to is correct.

    Assuming that the original poster wants to continue to specify which Pokemon they want to see, they’ll at least have to type that in, right?

    If we’re comfortable with that as a requirement, then an alias setting “k” to equal “krabby name” will work when you enter any Pokemon name after “k”.


  • This study is garbage and I suspect there is some culture war bullshit going on here.

    This is directly from the study:

    1. Limitations and future work

    This study had several limitations and was built on many approximations for which there could be errors. For example, the volume of email sent by richer nations like Canada would be expected to be much greater than poorer countries. In this way the calculations for the number of premature deaths would be underestimates because the Canadian fraction of the population would undercount actual email use. There are headers on emails that contain metadata that is sent with every email, which includes text with information, such as the sender, receiver, route, timestamps, addresses and more. Thus, even an email with no information if sent and opened there would be a transfer of data, energy used and thus emissions. This metadata was not considered in this study. The size of that metadata varies widely and the impact on these calculations is left for future work.

    Future work can: More carefully quantify the impact of meta data on email emissions along with investigating ways to minimize this information. •Perform surveys to obtain more accurate values for Cp-e(x) and Cla-e(x) by obtaining more accurate values of the percent of the population that amends additional information to their email signatures. •More accurate values for the number of words most commonly used for pronoun identification will perhaps slightly improve accuracy from the 3 estimates used here, however such surveys will be far more important for the number of words used in land acknowledgements.

    The carbon emitted per email will also vary with time and location based largely on what type of energy is used in the systems handling that email. More green grids will have a lower impact, while those that are powered with coal will have a worse impact. These can be carefully clarified with a granular future full life cycle analysis.

    Finally, there is also clearly potential errors in the 1000-ton rule, as all the values going into it are order of magnitude estimates. It should be pointed out that there may also be life savings created by using pronouns in emails that may for example reduce suicide rates among transgender associated mental health issues. There is no evidence in the literature of this protective role of pronoun use available at the time of this writing. In fact, the greater public virtue signally in relation to transgenderism appears to be inversely proportional to considered and attempted suicide rates among transgender people in the U.S. over the last two decades [44]. It is not clear why this is the case, although based on the data available email signatures are expected to play an extremely small role in these rates in either direction.

    These are huge limitations. The metadata in an email header is often enormous! Significantly larger than most land acknowledgements and several orders of magnitude larger than listing preferred pronouns.

    On top of that, email signatures are typically only found on emails that are letter-style communications that have been sent manually by a person. I think it’s dangerous to assume that the bulk of emails being sent are in that category. I believe the vast majority of emails sent are marketing style messages, with embedded style-sheets, headers and footers, and links to images if not the images themselves. All of this adds up to far outweigh the impact of listing ones pronouns.

    After saying all that, the author of the study persists in saying that the results represent useful guidelines.

    With all of said the limitations of this study, the results of this study still provide useful guidelines for reducing environmental impact at the individual, firm, and national level. There are clear guidelines that can be given to email users to reduce the environmental and human impact of email use. In addition, by switching to a purely sustainable source of energy for our IT infrastructure and ensuring it is reusable/recyclable the impacts of email signatures can have a substantially reduced ecological and human mortality impact.

    I am suspicious of the author and the website this is hosted on. Why would the author single out “pronouns” and “reputation signaling” as a problem here? They are claiming expertise in the area, but should know that they have picked a very small portion of a relatively small category of email. They are making claims about various numbers of people dying each year because of this “problem”. That’s a wild claim, designed to engage people emotionally instead of intellectually.




  • You’re both totally right here. The article you linked was well written and had a bunch of good ideas about what players in the handheld market could do to make their products competitive and consumer friendly. I don’t think many of the people commenting here actually read the article, which is too bad.

    And yeah, I think Nintendo has and will continue to make hardware that is compelling to gamers of all kinds. There’s plenty of room in the market for PC and Nintendo devices.















  • So like, yes, I totally agree.

    I want to take a second to tell a story though, about the graphics in this game. I hope to explain why this game actually has the best graphics ever.

    Context for some folks: the game is entirely rendered using ASCII characters (for the purpose of this story. I know, I’m leaving out detail, it’s okay). So the goblins in Dwarf Fortress look roughly like this

    g

    A dog looks like this

    d

    And a dragon looks like this

    D

    Learning to play Dwarf Fortress can be tough at first because there’s a soup of letters and other typing characters on the screen and your brain needs to convert that into a scene that makes sense. But here’s the thing … eventually that’s exactly what your brain does! You stop seeing the semicolons and hyphens, the letters and the strange formatting characters like “╥”. You start to see rivers and grass, tiny people working hard, a bustling metropolis, an invading horde.

    And the creator of this game hasn’t simply cut corners on making the game look good by using ASCII tilesets. The grass (made of commas or single quotes) sways in the breeze. Running water shimmers. Cherry trees gently rain cherry blossom petals during certain seasons. There’s actually a ton of little details there for your brain to pick up and immediately upscale into high def for you. It’s delightful. And sometimes terrifying.

    Sometimes something new will happen. A creature you’ve never seen before will approach your little community. It will be represented by some letter and your brain will render that for you in the way it has been taught to do. Your eyes see a d and you see a dog. Your eyes see a D and you see a dragon. It’s bigger than a dog. Most things are, no big deal. But you’ve been deceived.

    You watch as a band of dwarfs approach the dragon. The creature is quite still, right next to the round trunk of a tree that looks like this O. The brave warriors are still far from the creature. You’ve built whole dinning halls, with wooden chairs and stone mugs and carvings decorating the walls, that could fit within the space separating the warriors from the capital D dragon. One canny dwarf let’s loose an arrow at the beast. It zips through the air like this -

    As it approaches the Dragon, which is surely just to Iike a dog but a bit larger and green right, time begins the slow. It ticks. And ticks. And hell is unleashed. Flames jet from the Dragon. Unending flames pouring like red ink in billows that quickly fill the vast space and enrobe the dwarven warriors in a superheated death that pushes in and flows past and even through the band until flickering flames fill virtually all space to one side of a capital D that you will never, ever, mistake the size of again.

    My scalp tingled and it felt like my skull was over heating when my brain spontaneously supplied all the extra graphical details for that particular scene. I’ll never forget it.