Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 6 Posts
  • 164 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • This is what really shits me. “Oh, the sports companies won’t be able to fund themselves.” If that’s true, too fucking bad. Our laws shouldn’t exist to arbitrarily prop up certain industries even when we’ve decided that the industry is causing harm.

    But also, it’s just fucking not true. You can make an argument and say “oh but gambling companies fund 60% of the sport league” or whatever number it is, and pretend that banning gambling would cut the NRL’s budget by 60%. But that’s just not how it works. They’re sponsors because they were the highest bidder, not the only bidder. You’d just go to the next highest bidder if gambling sponsorships weren’t allowed. In the short term, maybe a 10% loss of revenue at most. Realistically, in the long term, it’d be negligible.

    Same goes for pokies at local pubs and clubs. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population and 18% of the world’s poker machines. And if you look specifically at poker machines not located in casinos it goes up to a ridiculous 76%. The entire rest of the world doesn’t allow poker machines at local clubs like we do, and their venues do just fine. The cries that venues would die off if they couldn’t have pokies are just nonsense.


  • Riding in a road race or crit, or even a time trial, is very different from a commute ride.

    But even on commutes it’s really good, depending on how often you expect to be stopping at lights. It’s great in rainy weather where my flats often slip off the pedal, or climbing up the many hills on my commute that necessitate getting out of the saddle.

    Edit: also, you backslashed one of the underscores, which is great, but forgot to escape the backslash itself.




  • I think you’re somewhat understanding what Platonic love is. In modern usage, I’d say that Platonic love is a really strong form of love, stronger than could be called friendship, but which lacks a sexual or romantic dimension (or at least lacks enough of those to characterise as a romantic or sexual relationship).

    But it might also be interesting to look at what Platonic love meant to Plato. I’m not an expert. Not even close. But my understanding is that he might have meant it to be the most perfect form of love. We have the phrase “platonic ideal” that we use in other contexts to refer to something that is the most perfect version of that thing, and I think Platonic love likely originally meant that, for love. It was love of the body, the mind, and the soul. Not less than romantic love. Not equal-but-different like the modern usage of the term. But instead encompassing everything that romantic love is and more.

    But I’ve only read extremely shallowly into this matter, and would love to hear more from someone who really knows their stuff.



  • I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.

    And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.

    Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.


  • A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

    True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

    But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.






  • While I still maintain my stance that anyone who votes 3rd party in a FPTP election is a moron, this does seem unfair.

    The challenge was brought by Republicans, but it’s a challenge based on Libertarian Party rules of how they choose who to nominate. The only people who should have standing are Libertarian Party members.

    If they had put in their nomination forms late or made some other error with the process of doing the nomination, then it would be fair for Republicans or Democrats or independent voters to challenge to get them removed. But an internal matter that the article says was completely uncontroversial internally should not be brought by outsiders.




  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzJet Fuel
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    7 days ago

    It’s a bizarre and (afaik) unfounded conspiracy theory, but I don’t think this reasoning works as a refutation. It’s still very possible that the experiment got out, and even if not they still needed policies to protect all the people they didn’t want to be affected because the targeting isn’t perfect.



  • I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

    How much of that sounds familiar…?