tal
@tal@lemmy.today
- Comment on Why does Britain feel so poor? 4 hours ago:
Because we’re heading back to the Victorian era in terms of inequality.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901.
ifs.org.uk/…/IFS-Deaton-Review-The-history-of-ine…
That doesn’t look a lot like Victorian-era levels of inequality to me.
I think that the points highlighted in the article are probably stronger. For example, the author mentions housing:
Advocates of tax rises point out that actually, middle income families face lower taxes than in many other developed nations, and that’s absolute true, but it overlooks a glaring problem: housing costs. Britain’s houses are cramped, ancient and in the wrong places leaving workers with longer, more expensive commutes. And we get to pay more for the privilege, almost single-handedly reversing the relative wealth of many British families versus their European counterparts. It’s a cliché that every other policy problem in Britain resolves to a housing problem, but in this case punishing rents and mortgage payments are consuming a large percentage of the income that other countries would tax.
It’s true that the UK has exceptionally small per-capita space allocated to housing compared to similarly-wealthy countries. I suppose that one could argue about whether that’s a positive or negative — I think that many people have made a valid point that people here in the US are purchasing housing that’s inefficiently large, putting too much of their assets into real estate — but it’s an aspect where the UK really is unusual compared to peers.
kagis
This is just the first result that comes up. It isn’t a per-capita visualization, but I think that it definitely drives home the point:
worldpopulationreview.com/…/house-size-by-country
goes looking for a per-capita measurement
Here we go; I’ve seen this visualization before.
- Comment on I really need these games ported to Steam. What do y'all have on your lists? 11 hours ago:
I’m currently scraping the Steam barrel
tomshardware.com/…/steam-released-a-record-number…
Steam released 18,825 new games in 2024, beating its previous record of 14,311 last year.
That’s a pretty deep barrel.
- Comment on Surprisingly enough, shady USB-C multiport adapters can be dangerous 2 days ago:
I mean, that splitter device cannot be USB compliant, if it’s giving more than 5V to a device that never negotiated more than 5V.
I’d also guess that if it’s just silently feeding the second device from what the phone has negotiated, it’s probably not compliant in that it’s probably drawing more from its power source than the phone has negotiated – USB devices are responsible for indicating what they’ll draw.
You could make that multiport device USB-compliant, but it’d require having the splitter be a DC-DC power source and having it negotiate some PD draw sufficient to power both devices.
- Comment on Police launch urgent search after girl, 11, falls into River Thames 5 days ago:
swim-central.uk/what-age-should-children-learn-to…
In England, swimming becomes a part of the national curriculum around Year 3 or 4.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_1_(education)
Year 1 is an educational year group in schools in many countries including England, Wales, Australia and New Zealand. It is usually the first year of compulsory education and incorporates students aged between five and seven.
Hmm. So she probably should have had swimming instruction by that age.
- Comment on Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft. 6 days ago:
Ooh, I didn’t know that someone had developed a mechanism to move issues and PRs.
I remember commenting on the fact that while it’s easy to move the source repo itself, as git makes that easy and self-contained, issues and PRs didn’t enjoy that.
- Comment on Ninja sword owners will be paid to surrender weapons before ban 6 days ago:
Yeah, i mean if someone really wants to decapitate someone they can just go to the next best hardware store and get a chainsaw.
archive.is/52YjV#selection-515.0-533.242
Butter knife ‘an offensive weapon’
A butter knife can be an offensive weapon, the High Court ruled yesterday.
The decision came in the rejection of an appeal by Charlie Brooker, of Welling, Kent, who had been convicted under the Criminal Justice Act of carrying a bladed instrument.
Mark Hardie, appearing for Brooker, argued that the knife had no handle, sharp edges or points and therefore could not fall foul of a law intended to protect people from dangerous weapons.
But Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice David Steel, disagreed. He said: “I would accept that a sharp or pointed blade was the paradigm case - however the words of the statute are unqualified and refer to any article that has a blade.”
I will bet you that Parliament would be willing to impose a ban on possession of a chainsaw without just cause.
- Comment on Ninja sword owners will be paid to surrender weapons before ban 6 days ago:
This “Ninja sword” is apparently a straight sword:
2.4. The legal definition that we tested as part of this consultation was as follows:
A fixed bladed article with a blade between 14-24 inches (the length of the blade being the straight-line distance from the top of the handle to the tip of the blade) with:
(i) A single straight cutting edge; and;
It sounds like most katanas and such, what I think people probably normally think of when they think of a “ninja sword”, are already banned under existing legislation:
www.katanamart.co.uk/…/27-uk-samurai-sword-law
Samurai and other curved Swords
On April 6th 2008 a law came into effect banning samurai and other curved swords with a blade length of 50 cm or more; there are some exceptions for registered martial artists, re-enactors and even certain genuine Japanese swords.
Here is to the law:
gov.uk/…/import-controls-on-offensive-weapons#imp…
An amendment to this act was passed, which came into effect on the 1st of August 2008. It allows curved and samurai swords which are handmade using traditional forging/production methods to be sold without a license.
Apparently the Japanese did use straight swords for a while.
Maybe the issue here is that importers avoided their previous restrictions by selling straight swords, and they’re making a new class to catch those and for God-knows-what-reason are calling it a “Ninja sword”.
- Comment on Ninja sword owners will be paid to surrender weapons before ban 6 days ago:
- Comment on Finally, a Linux laptop with a brilliant display and performance that rivals my MacBook (from Germany) 1 week ago:
The 15 inch version comes with a 100 Wh battery, which is a rare find.
- Comment on Without GPS: EU researchers develop satellite-independent navigation system 1 week ago:
There’s an already-extant ground-based vessel navigation system, Loran, though I’m sure that it’s possible to improve on it and I have no idea how much of the receiver hardware is still out there.
The introduction of civilian satellite navigation in the 1990s led to a rapid drop-off in Loran-C use. Discussions about the future of Loran-C began in the 1990s; several turn-off dates were announced and then cancelled. In 2010, the US and Canadian systems were shut down, along with Loran-C/CHAYKA stations that were shared with Russia.[2][3] Several other chains remained active; some were upgraded for continued use. At the end of 2015, navigation chains in most of Europe were turned off.[4] In December 2015 in the United States, there was also renewed discussion of funding an eLoran system,[5] and NIST offered to fund development of a microchip-sized eLoran receiver for distribution of timing signals.[6]
The National Timing Resilience and Security Act of 2017, proposed resurrecting Loran as a backup for the United States in case of a GPS outage caused by space weather or attack.[7][8]
- Comment on Without GPS: EU researchers develop satellite-independent navigation system 1 week ago:
Upon actually investigating the article, it appears to mention it as well. :-)
- Comment on Without GPS: EU researchers develop satellite-independent navigation system 1 week ago:
I’m sure not, but even without looking at any technical details, it will have at least a couple benefits:
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First, it’s short range. GPS satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, which is a pretty high orbit. Wikipedia says about 22,000 miles away. For GPS, the jammer is going to be far closer than the legitimate signal.
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Second, I’m guessing — though we’ll see — that this is going to be a civilian system, and I suppose that they could even try to mandate that militaries not use it. GPS was, from the beginning, a military system, and there are weapons being used in Ukraine that use it for guidance. Unless you’re solely out to be a dick — which isn’t impossible — probably not a lot of benefit to stomping on civilian-only frequencies.
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- Comment on Without GPS: EU researchers develop satellite-independent navigation system 1 week ago:
which is vulnerable to jamming
This has, in fact, been a serious problem in the Baltic region, as Russia’s military has been jamming GPS there for some time, and it dicks up navigation for ships and aircraft there.
- Comment on Assassin’s Creed Shadows devs roast Elon Musk amid feud with Hasan 1 week ago:
remember when social media CEOs weren’t like… this?
I think that that’s just Elon.
- Comment on Open Source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries 1 week ago:
They can just interleave requests to different hosts. Honestly, someone spidering the whole Web probably should be doing that regardless.
- Comment on Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law 2 weeks ago:
Ah, fair enough, maybe the target here is default DNS-over-HTTP in browsers.
- Comment on Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law 2 weeks ago:
Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers
I don’t know why Italy is wasting time on this.
Italy is not going to be able to force all public DNS servers out there to block things that they want blocked. Anyone using Google’s DNS servers is already going out of their way to use an alternate DNS and can probably plonk in another IP address if they want. It’s not as if Google has the only publicly-accessible DNS server out there.
If Italy really and truly doesn’t want a DNS server that is doing this to be accessible in Italy, go after Italian network service providers, and instead of playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole until they run into someone who just tells Italy to buzz off, just block it. Now, some portion of Italians are probably going to still get to DNS servers that ignore Italy’s views on things via VPNs unless Italy wants to ban those too, but it’d at least be more-effective than trying to go after every DNS server provider out there, which is definitely not going to work.
Frankly, I don’t even think that DNS-based censorship is very effective in the first place anyway, but if you’re going to do it, might as well at least do it as effectively as possible.
- Comment on AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem 2 weeks ago:
Vidoc posted on local job boards, like the one in Poland. But whoever was behind this operation figured out that it’s profitable to pose as Serbian, Polish, and other eastern European profiles
I’d think that this could be pretty easily resolved by just having a real-life interview, at least for the final interview.
It sounds like Vidoc is in Poland. Maybe it’s just me, but if I were being hired for an engineering position, I’d think that it’d be reasonable to be willing to travel to a final interview, and for the company to cover any costs.
But, okay, say that it doesn’t make sense. Maybe the finances don’t work, maybe they want to hire somewhere in Poland where it’s not practical for people to travel to their location. I’d think that it’d be possible to have an “interviewing company”. That company just obtains some office space, sets up videoconference conferencing rooms, and has their own trusted cameras and suchlike present.
- Comment on Belief in AI as a ‘Great Machine’ could weaken national security crisis responses, new research finds. 2 weeks ago:
Combating “Skynet”-level threats
During the experiment, the professionals were faced with a typical national security threat: A foreign government interfering in an election in their country. They were then assigned to one of three scenarios: a control scenario, where the threat only involved human hackers; a scenario with light, “tactical” AI involvement, where hackers were assisted by AI; and a scenario with heavy levels of AI involvement, where participants were told that the threat was orchestrated by a “strategic” AI program.
When confronted with a strategic AI-based threat — what Whyte calls a “Skynet”-level threat, referencing the “Terminator” movie franchise — the professionals tended to doubt their training and were hesitant to act. They were also more likely to ask for additional intelligence information compared with their colleagues in the other two groups, who generally responded to the situation according to their training.
That’s a human-level (well, superhuman) AGI. I don’t think that we have a good handle on what the limitations or strengths would be. I’d try to gather as much information or thoughts from others as I could too.
In the same vein, if someone gave me a scenario where they said “You’re facing a demonic necromancer. How do you counter them?” I’d probably be a lot less confident about how to act than if they said “you’re facing someone with a pistol”, because this is kind of out of the blue, and I don’t even really understand the nature of the threat. There’s no AI there, but it’s a novel scenario with a lot of unknowns, and it’s not as if I’ve read through histories of how people dealt with that or recommended doctrine for that. I don’t think that it’s the AI that’s so much the X factor here as it is the sheer degree of unknown factors that show up.
- Comment on It Might Be Time to Admit the Great VR Experiment Has Failed 2 weeks ago:
If you’ve already got a VR headset and you’re happy with it, I’m envious. But for the rest of us, it’s worth asking the question: just what is it going to take to get on board?
Speaking for myself, if I can use a headset about as well as I do a regular display, that’ll do it for me. I’m less-interested in a gaming-specific peripheral, though that’d be nice frosting on the cake. If I can just carry a headset in a case and a display-less laptop, that’d probably be sufficient.
There are real benefits to that:
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Privacy. My screen isn’t visible to anyone nearby.
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Wider field of view possible.
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No glare issues.
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Potentially less power use, since one isn’t blasting light everywhere just to get it into one’s eye.
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Able to use in any orientation easily, like lying down.
My experience so far has not led me to believe that this is near. I’ve found HMDs to be twitchy about the location relative to the eye, prone to blurriness if nudged a bit off. Blurriness around the edges. On my Royole Moon, fogging up is an issue, due to shields to eliminate light from bleeding in. Limited resolution. For some, inability to easily see the surrounding world. Limited refresh rates.
I don’t personally really care all that much about price, if the thing can serve as a competitive monitor replacement, since then it’s not just a toy.
I’d also add that I think that there are some genres, like flight sims, where VR has legitimately succeeded. Like, compared to multiple-monitor rigs that some serious flight sim fans have set up, VR is pretty much better in all ways.
I’m sure that there are probably some AR applications where you can find an AR headset making sense. Maybe stargazing or something.
But what the article author seems to want is a transition to a world where basically all or a large chunk of new video games are VR-based. And yeah, that hasn’t happened.
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- Comment on "There comes a time when we all declare the war is over": Former PlayStation Studios boss Shawn Layden on the future of video game consoles 2 weeks ago:
We’re losing the next generation to TikTok. The competition for gaming isn’t Xbox and Nintendo. It’s everything else in the freaking zeitgeist that can take your time away from your gaming activity.
Round two: the television strikes back.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
I’m aware.
- Comment on A Foot Pedal To Supplement Your Keyboard 2 weeks ago:
For their mod, it sounds like all they need is a momentary switch. You can go to any electronic parts provider and get switches.
Probably not the best for a foot, but one thing that is durable — arcade buttons.
Could get yourself a chunk of plywood board, drill holes in it — sounds like you need a 1 1/8" spade bit — and stick a Happ button in. Those consoles are pretty durable.
There are a bunch of momentary foot switches I see on Amazon:
www.amazon.com/s?k=pedal+momentary
These ones look metal:
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Are you familiar with the Tale of Two Worlds mod, which inserts Fallout 3 into Fallout: New Vegas to make them one giant game? If not, it’s a way to add some new life to the thing.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
There is no ending in Realmz. Its just a big open world. And as you dig, you find more, and more and it just keeps going. But there is no particular path to take. You just can go anywhere and find adventure along the way. There are a huge number of random encounters, and the combat style is basically top down tile based D&D, which BG3 is also, more or less.
Just to comment further, if you’re not a big fan of Baldur’s Gate 3 (or the Paths of Exile series), I wouldn’t recommend the Avadon series in the Spiderweb Software bundle, as it has the same sort of streamlined “move you through the world to the right places” thing. The Exile/Avernum series has the Realmz-style “go wherever and stumble onto stuff” model that you’re referring to.
Kind of reminds me of the difference between Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds. Like, both are…technically open world games, but there’s very little reason to ever backtrack in The Outer Worlds, and not much placed content to stumble on outside of cities, whereas in Fallout: New Vegas, I’m running all over the place and running into all sorts of stuff, without having the game really drive me in one direction.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Much as I like C:DDA, it does not perform terribly well battery-wise relative to what it should and looks like it should use. The game re-renders frames even without keypresses, and on top of that, each frame displayed recomputes the world state.
NetHack and Angband don’t do that.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’ll grant the completeness point. Internet access everywhere has kind of lessened what it means to “release”.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
Caveblazers
Thanks, purchased.
- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
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Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
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There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
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The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
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If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
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With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
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The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.
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- Comment on PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now 2 weeks ago:
I’m 30 hours into playing Noita
I kind of want more there. There isn’t DLC, and there aren’t clones.
I mean, yes, the game is large and very replayable, but it’s also kind of the only game in town.
I also play it modded with health regeneration, because the difficulty level on the vanilla game is very high, and encourages very cautious play.
