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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t necessarily work that way, though. If tests tell you you broke something immediately, you don’t have time to forget how anything works, so identifying the problem and fixing it is much faster. For the kind of minor bug that’s potentially acceptable to launch a game with, if it’s something tests detect, it’s probably easier to fix than it is to determine whether it’s viable to just ignore it. If it’s something tests don’t detect, it’s just as easy to ignore whether it’s because there are no tests or because despite there being tests, none of them cover this situation.

    The games industry is rife with managers doing things that mean developers have a worse time and have the opposite effect to their stated goals. A good example is crunch. It obviously helps to do extra hours right before a launch when there’s the promise of a holiday after the launch to recuperate, but it’s now common for games studios to be in crunch for months and years at a time, despite the evidence being that after a couple of weeks, everyone’s so tired from crunch that they’re less productive than if they worked normal hours.

    Games are complicated, and building something complicated in a mad rush because of an imposed deadline is less effective than taking the time to think things through, and typically ends up failing or taking longer anyway.


  • And yeah, the PETA kills site clearly has an agenda, but their agenda is to try and save animals from PETA’s “love.”

    Their agenda’s to make PETA look bad so people don’t become vegan or demand higher welfare standards from meat producers, and they can continue selling meat to Americans of such low standards that it would be illegal in the rest of the civilised world.

    You know what no-kill shelters try to do when they don’t have space? Coordinate with local foster programs, coordinate with other shelters to see if they have space. There are other alternatives besides taking in a perfectly healthy animal and dropping it in the euthanasia queue.

    As I said, they can’t do that once the foster programs and other shelters are full, too, and then overflow into PETA-run shelters because they’re the ones that still have a capability to receive more animals after they’re full. There aren’t enough shelters to keep every animal in good conditions until it’s either adopted or dies of natural causes, and no amount of coordination can magically create extra capacity.


  • It doesn’t strengthen your point to link Fox News and the literal website for the smear campaign I mentioned: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=PETA_Kills_Animals

    As for PETA putting down lots of animals, that’s no secret. It’s really easy to get people to donate to a no-kill animal shelter, so there are lots of them. However, when you’re a no-kill animal shelter, and you’re full of animals you can’t kill, or are asked to take an animal that can’t be ethically be treated with anything other than euthanasia, you have to turn the animal down, and it ends up wherever will take it. Usually, that ends up being a PETA-run shelter. When a PETA-run shelter is being given all the rejects from everywhere else, it’s obviously going to end up putting lots of animals down. It’d be better for PR if they didn’t, but less ethical, and they prioritise the ethics above the PR.

    If you look at one of your more reliable sources, the Snopes article, it backs up what I’m saying, and not what you’re saying. It corroborates the story from my original post, lists another incident where PETA staff were accused but not convicted, and then discusses that they put down a lot of animals in their shelters, and how it includes healthy animals. The only controversy there is the definition of adoptable - a healthy stray kitten is theoretically adoptable, but if you get ten times as many kittens in a week as you do people wanting to adopt a kitten, 90% of them won’t get adopted, and your shelter will get quickly overcrowded if you insist on ignoring that fact.


  • The UK has a high rate of veganism, and part of that is attributed to the fact that the major vegetarian and vegan organisations in the UK generally recommend persuading people by offering them delicious food that is also vegetarian/vegan and saying it’s more ethical. On the other hand, the equivalent organisations in the US tend to lean more towards recommending telling people that eating animal products is unethical, and it’s difficult to accuse someone of unethical behaviour without being insulting. It also doesn’t help that multibillion-dollar organisations have run successful smear campaigns against groups like PETA - everyone’s heard of the time they took someone’s pet dog and killed it, but most aren’t aware that it happened once and gets reported on as if it’s news every few months, or that it was an accident as the dog’s collar had come off and it was with a group of strays, and got muddled with another dog, so was put down weeks earlier than it was supposed to be, bypassing the waiting period they had specifically to avoid this kind of mistake.


  • The plan at the time was what the film explicitly said. They were devastatingly effective at taking the Tantive IV. They were devastatingly effective at destroying the sandcrawler (to the point that they couldn’t disguise it as having been attacked by sand people). They were devastatingly effective at nearly hitting the protagonists enough times that they believed they were being shot at for real, when actually they were just being herded onto a ship with a tracker on it so they’d reveal the location of the rebel base they’d spend the first half the film failing to threaten or torture out of Leia. They were devastatingly effective at destroying the rebel’s attack force against the Death Star, and were seconds away from destroying Yavin IV and the rebel base on it when someone used supposedly-extinct space magic to make what the film had previously described as an impossible shot against a tiny target.

    The only time they miss is when the film says they did so on purpose.


  • In A New Hope, the only time stormtroopers miss is when they do so intentionally, when they’re chasing the protagonists off the Death Star, and onto the Millenium Falcon, which has been fitted with a tracking device which they know will be taken straight to the rebel base. They easily overwhelm the guards on the Tantive IV at the beginning of the film even when only a few of them have made it through the breached airlock. The myth that stormtroopers miss comes from people not noticing the scene where Tarkin discusses intentionally letting the rebels escape so they can follow the tracking device back to their base.






  • Desktop mail clients all seem to be dire, but Mail for Windows 10 seemed to suck a lot less than anything else. I, too, am a victim of it not noticing new mail for a couple of hours after it’s sent unless I explicitly refresh it, despite it being set to get new mail on push, but I’d still rather use it over Thunderbird, which I tried years ago, and tried again when they started warning about forcing Outlook onto people. Unfortunately, it looks like Mozilla decided that there were a non-zero number of good things about Outlook, and made a clone of it, as it’s got basically all the things I hate about Outlook.





  • The legalese in the US (which might as well be everywhere as you need to have compatible copyright with the US to have a trade deal with the US, and your country is in trouble if it doesn’t have a trade deal with the US) is basically that:

    • If you buy a physical copy, you’ve become the owner of that one copy of the IP contained within. As the owner of that copy, you can do stuff with it like read it, display it, destroy it, or sell it on to someone else thanks to the First Sale Doctrine (but you can’t do other things like copying it, unless it’s a DVD as there’s a specific exemption for the copy your DVD has to make to RAM in order to decode the DVD). There’s nothing the copyright holder of the original can do to stop you exercising these rights.
    • If you buy a digital ‘copy’, you’ve not bought a copy, you’ve bought a licence to use one of the publisher’s copies that they’ve given you permission to have on your device(s). They’ll also have given you permission to do things like read it if it’s an ebook or play it if it’s a video game, but as it’s their copy, not yours, you don’t automatically get rights to do anything they’ve not explicitly permitted you to, and it’s not in their interests to permit you to sell it on unless they think you’ll pay enough more for a resaleable copy that it covers a potential future lost sale.

    I’m sure plenty of publishers would love for the second set of rules to apply to things like books, and from a quick googling, it seems like occasionally academic textbooks have included a licence agreement instead of you actually owning the physical book, but I imagine that most publishers are concerned about bad PR from attempting this with a hit novel and also don’t want to be accused of fraud for having their not-a-book-just-a-licence on the shelf next to regular books and thereby tricking consumers into thinking they were buying a regular book. EA attempted to double-dip over a decade ago with Battlefield 3, which included a copy of the game (with regular First Sale Doctrine rights) and a licence key for the online pass (which wasn’t transferrable) and got bad press because of it. Newer PC games often come as a key in a box with no disk or a disk that only runs a web installer, so you’ve not got a copy of the game to claim you’ve bought and obviously only have a licence, and this seems to have caused less upset. This wouldn’t work with a book, though, as you have to fill in the pages at the printing factory, and can’t magically do it only after the user’s got it home.




  • The perfect, good, mediocre, and just barely tolerable are all enemies. Sometimes bad is better as it doesn’t erode the motivation to solve the problem and means you’re more likely to end up with a good solution later. Often, when people accuse others of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, the option was neither perfect nor good, just mediocre or barely tolerable. The exception is when one solution can go on to evolve into a better one, but it can still be better to wait until it does before deploying it.

    I’m not convinced this is exactly applicable to the story in the OP, though. The compromise would have eroded the motivation to vote for the original legislation in that election, but probably made it more likely that it could have happened in the next one, and made the consequences of putting it off that long slightly less bad.