I actually really like the black black. And they didn’t use red red (assuming that term is supposed to mean FF0000); it’s quite a dull red, which I find works quite well. I prefer the high contrast mode though, with white white on black black, rather than slightly lower-contrast light grey text. I’m told it’s apparently evidence-based to use the lower-contrast version, but it doesn’t appeal to me.

Though I will say I intensely dislike the use of underline styling on “WRONG”. Underline, on the web, has universally come to be a signal of a hyperlink, and should almost never be used otherwise. It also uses some much nicer colours for both unclicked and visited hyperlinks.

The most important difference between 1 and 2 is, IMO, the width limiter. You can actually read the source yourself, it’s extremely simple hand-written HTML & (inline) CSS. max-width:650px; stops you needing to crane your head. It also has slightly lower contrast, which I’m told is supposedly better for the eyes according to some studies, but personally I don’t really like as much, which is why “Best” is my favourite, since it has a little button to toggle between light mode and dark mode, or between lower and maximum contrast.

The original is terrible. It works ok on a phone, but on a wide computer screen it takes up the full width, which is terrible for readability.

If you don’t like the colours, the “Best” lets you toggle between light mode and dark mode, and toggle between lower and higher contrast. (i.e., between black on white, dark grey on light grey, light grey on dark grey, or white on black)

See also: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

See also: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

And: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

Both of which are vastly better.

Yeah I think this one became particularly tricky and wormed its way into a lot of people’s minds even who would otherwise be wary of it, because even Labor and the Greens stood in favour of it (with some minor tweaks), due to poor tech literacy.

Happy cake day!

I’d be happy for the Australian government to take them to task over this one. But I’m afraid you’ve fallen for Murdoch propaganda with the journalism thing.

They weren’t “using our journalism”. They provide a direct benefit to the news organisations. It’s a mostly symbiotic relationship, with people going to Google and Facebook because it’s a good way to find news that interests them, and news organisations being funnelled traffic directly to them for free. But honestly, if money should be flowing in any direction, it’s to Google and Meta. The financial benefit for news organisations of the existing relationship is far greater for news organisations than it is for Google and Meta. People would still be Googling things and sharing on Facebook even if news didn’t make up part of that.

Jeff Jarvis is a great thinker and communicator in this space, and he moderates a great discussion on the topic here. About 34 minutes into the video they hear from a QUT professor who is pretty scathing towards the NMBC.

I remember spending hours tinkering with Linux in my bedroom as a kid

I feel like the environment of subject-specific forums and IRC chat that Millennial geeks grew up with is very different from the centralised, generic, algorithm-driven social media that Gen Z grew up with, and non-geeky Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers adopted in the late aughts & '10s. That was really the best of what social media could do, with far fewer of the unhealthy downsides.

Late last year Australia passed a ban for the use of social media of under-16s. In principle I think this is a really good idea.

Unfortunately they rushed it through without any thought as to how it would actually work in terms of age verification. It’s now been 6 months, which means we’re 6 months away from when it’s supposed to come into effect, and we still don’t have any idea how it’s actually supposed to work. But the principle behind it: the idea that social media is actually really not healthy for our brains, especially at a young and vulnerable age, is a sound one. And there’s only more and more research coming out to support that.

Wait, lemmy.zip can’t even federate with UK instances? I knew UK users couldn’t use it but I assumed that wouldn’t be a problem with federation.

I asked elsewhere, but this is probably a better place for it.

Wait, Piefed migration doesn’t just work from Piefed to Piefed, but even from Lemmy into Piefed?

Yeah, I’m always rather sceptical and have my guard way up when I come across a creator talking about religion. If it hadn’t been for the greater trust I automatically have in a creator being added to Nebula (which is where I first came across this channel), I don’t know if I would have started watching it. But I certainly don’t regret it.

I agree. It’s rarely going to turn something abjectly terrible into a masterpiece, but it’s much easier for it to ruin something. Watch the clips of Darth Vader with David Prowse’s voice and ask yourself if that version of Star Wars would have been as iconic.

I’ve decided I don’t like his pet review videos and these days I just skip them, but I’m a huge fan of Clint’s phylogeny videos! And even though he’s obviously a Mormon (he’s never explicitly said it, but he’s open about being a Christian, and he’s based in Utah, so…), his videos debunking some of the worst of conservative Christian anti-science bullshit are great too.

Historia Civilis—excellent history videos. Primarily their story of the fall of the Roman Republic, which does a shockingly good job of making you feel emotions for a little coloured square with the channel’s iconic simple animation style. Good if you’re interested in the intricacies of the politics and culture of the time.

Extra History—shorter historical overviews of a much wider range of topics than the above. Quite transparent about their process with their “Lies” episodes at the end of each series, where they explain any errors that slipped through, as well as aspects they left out for the sake of keeping the story focused within the time they had.

ReligionForBreakfast—a scholarly, secular take on religion and religious practice. I think the first thing I saw was their series on American Civil Religion, which is the idea that Americans’ attitude towards their country and its processes is similar to religion belief and practice.

UsefulCharts—history and religion, told through charts. The ones that interest me the most are the ones that touch on the creator’s PhD in religious studies, such as about the historicity of various aspects of the bible, and on his actual thesis topic on the Psychology of Atheism.

And since you said “informative”, I’ll add some that I probably wouldn’t have included solely under the “educational” category. Not Just Bikes, CityNerd, Radical Planning, Oh the Urbanity!, among others. Urbanist channels across a range of the political spectrum (from Oh the Urbanity which are relatively libertarian, to Radical Planning which is quite marxist). But all of them deal with the problems inherent to the way cities are designed especially in the anglosphere (and among that, especially in America) and how car-centric design creates miserable places while also being economically ruinous.

White ant is another name for termites. Just as termites literally destroy the structure of a house from the inside, a person “white-anting” is acting from within to take an institution down. In the case of Rudd, the goal wasn’t to destroy the Labor party per se, but to take down the Gillard government by, for example, leaking details of what were supposed to be closed internal discussions to the press. And it had the effect of helping Labor lose the following election, giving Australia 9 more years of conservative rule.

Rudd is probably correct about this, but You Should Know that he’s also an arrogant fuckwit who tried to pass climate legislation that his own treasury modelling said wouldn’t reduce emissions for 25 years (since this was in 2010, that means we’d still be a decade away from emissions falling). Since the conservative Coalition was never going to support any climate policy, and the left wing Greens refused to suppose such a lazy token effort, that meant his centrist Labor party’s policy failed to pass.

And because he’s such an arrogant prick, he absolutely refused to negotiate to bring about a better policy. Instead, he eventually got ousted by his own party, and the replacement leader did negotiate and did pass real, meaningful climate policy. Until those fossil fuel interests helped the Coalition win the next election, Australia had world-leading reductions in CO₂ emissions.

Oh, and that election loss was not helped by Rudd’s own white-anting from inside the Labor party…

Actually the Chinese models aren’t trained to avoid Tiananmen Square. If you grabbed the model and ran it on your own machine, it will happily tell you the truth.

They censored their AI at a layer above the actual LLM, so users of their chat app would find results being censored.

Uhh, what?

Animal predators can now auto-attack villagers.

Glad to see this is back! A lot of people were disappointed when it was removed at the start of Retold.

Ra: Monument area empowerment no longer affects other monuments.

It was a fun trick to be able to do, but probably too powerful, so this is a good change.

While the Spearman buffs were welcome for Set & Isis, it created problems in certain matchups like against Norse, who relied heavily on raiding cavalry to help deal with the Egyptian barracks army. Transitioning the spearman more into a generalist infantry (similar anti-cav potential as before the previous patch), but bulking them up to be more pop efficient this way they can still function as a good frontliner.

Am I missing something? The changes were:

• Damage reduced vs cav
• Cost increase
• Train time increased

No “bulking up” occurred.

And there’s studies proving that’s the reality is, the vast majority of people are at least somewhat honest when filling out a Score ballot

1. It’s never been used at the scale of an actual large country’s national election. The stakes are so fundamentally different than any small-scale study.
2. Even if true, that’s not necessarily a good thing. It just makes the vote of those who do vote strategically all the more powerful.

Cardinal systems devolve into approval, and approval doesn’t allow expressing preference. And being unable to express preference lends itself to some of the worst strategic voting and reintroduces the spoiler effect in the place it’s most important to avoid the spoiler effect: serious 3-(or more-)way races. If I’m an A voter, B is centrist, and C is worst, then under approval it’s fine for me to approve of A and B if I know A can’t win. But the moment A is a serious contender, choosing to approve of B decreases the chance A might win. But not approving of B increases the chance C might win. I’m stuck with having to make a terrible decision.

Ordinal systems don’t do this. Some ordinal systems might be better than IRV and avoid the biggest criticisms of that system, but ordinal systems beat cardinal systems nearly every time.

But the main thing about all of this is that every single-winner system is always worse than proportional multi-winner systems. Moving to any system other than FPTP should be the first priority, but if you’re going to spend time knocking down suggestions to improve to the most well-proven alternative, you might as well go all the way and advocate MMP or direct proportional, and on shoring up some of the weaknesses of that system (such as problems with party lists letting parties choose who gets in even if people don’t like the candidate of the party they like, or how minimum thresholds can lead to some people’s votes being effectively wasted).