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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s gotten a lot better in recent years tbf in terms of those kinds of resources. Beginner recommended languages like Python are still a pain because it’s super easy for a beginner to bork how they set it up, but on the whole there’s plenty of online code sandboxes and other ways to get started.

    Your point is definitely valid though. Why on earth would we want someone who’s just showing an interest in programming to write their own compiler??? Wtf? If someone wants to get into baking you don’t send them out into the fields for 6 months to grow some wheat.

    When I was a kid I mucked around with html and css to make some GeoCities sites. I decided I wanted to learn how to code so I got a book from the library called “how to code games for beginners” or something. The thing never told you how to set up an IDE or compile the game. So I was just frustratingly typing out the code examples into notepad without a clue as to what to do. I think this was during the dialup era so it wasn’t like there was a wealth of info online.

    I ended up abandoning programming for quite a few years. It just seemed like nonsense because writing graphics libs for C in notepad does feel like nonsense to a child. I wonder what life would be like if I had some better resources at that moment in time and decided you continue pursuing it.



  • You have to remember a lot of the people posting that bs likely aren’t Americans and either have an anti western agenda or are being paid to post divisive shit. It’s annoying because Lemmy is such a small community that these accounts appear wayyyyy more than they really should, so it gives the impression that there’s loads of them, but really they are a minority. Chances are they also have a bunch of smurf accounts so it could literally just be one room of guys posting mountains of bullshit every day.





  • Again that figure is the “total outstanding” amount and isn’t the yearly cost. If a mistake during childbirth causes permanent disabilities for that child over the course of their life then the compensation will be a decent sum paid out over a long time. There are other better targets for saving budget or raising tax revenues.

    We need to grow the economy from the bottom up. Trickle down has been proven to be bullshit. There’s plenty of scope to raise taxes on corporations and via asset/investment returns marginally to offset investment in growing the economy and helping the worst off. The report you linked says that the UK has a lower total tax burden than many other developed nations. We don’t need to go crazy, but at the moment the tax burden is too heavy on big workers and too light on capital.

    Rather than ask “how can we afford this?” try asking “how can we not?” The country is in a dire state. Cutting taxes on the wealthy and cutting services and benefits haven’t worked, trying it again is daft.


  • We found billions and billions for daft tax cuts and juicy contracts to Tory donors for dodgy services and contacts. No one asks “how can we afford this?” when it’s tax cuts for corporations or selling off profitable public owned assets. I think we can afford to spend a little more on helping people survive. The money spent on welfare also doesn’t just disappear, it goes straight back into the economy. The very poorest people can’t afford to have savings, it all gets spent on essentials.

    Growing the economy is very difficult when people don’t have any money to spend. It’s a giant weight around the economy’s neck. If the Tories hadn’t been burning the country down for the last 14 years we wouldn’t have as many people struggling in poverty and wouldn’t have to spend as much. Unfortunately they have so we do.

    How about we raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and reinvest that money into supporting the people of the nation and trying to grow the economy?

    It’s also not one third of the NHS budget. The total “cost of harm” to the NHS Inc legal costs was £6.6bn in 2022-2023, the total budget was £180bn. That’s around 3.5%. Just use some common sense and think about what one third of the budget would imply. Is one third of the NHS made up of lawyers? Do you know just as many NHS lawyers as you do nurses and doctors? Double check “facts” that sound unbelievable and via outrageous before spewing them out for others to be misled by.


  • I was cautiously optimistic about this episode but it was a real let down to me. Lots of plain dumb stuff.

    My main criticism is still that the scope and scale felt way too small. Reach is supposed to be one of the most heavily populated and militarised planets in the UNSC. There’s a few dozen transports getting all the people off and a few hundred marines with 1 tank. The stakes are still not clear to the audience either. The whole blasé “we’re giving up reach without a fight” thing certainly doesn’t help. It definitely doesn’t feel like the death blow to the UNSC that losing reach would be.

    Somehow, Makee has returned. Dumb. I was glad she was dead. Stupid character. Chief better get cortana back off of her.

    The lack of armour is mostly just confusing to me, how will chief leave reach to head to the ring if he doesn’t have his armour? Are all they Spartans going to be in the shirts going forward?

    The complete lack of space action is very upsetting to me. Probably due to budget concerns, but in my mind if you can’t afford do do a story justice - don’t bother!



  • Yeah it’s a bit concerning as I was planning on doing a balcony grow. If that leaves me exposed to a “justifiable” police raid to check if I have >= 51 grams of product then it feels much less legal than it should be. Hopefully they change that up, but with how long it took to get to this point and the lower political capital of the coalition that might be a long time coming.



  • Woo hoo! It’s a very watered down version of their original proposal, but it’s great that it’s finally happened! The reactionary arguments against it are always depressing, but progress is progress.

    I need to see about ordering some seeds to start a balcony grow. What happens if your 3 plants produce more than 50 grams though? Surely a single plant will produce more than 50g?


  • Yeah it’s maddening. Just a short couple of minute segment even would have helped massively. On the other hand they’d probably butcher that too.

    Here’s the “story so far” segment from halo CE which is pretty succinct. I still remember being excited reading it as a kid. You could cut a bunch of stuff out to do a “show don’t tell” approach in some episodes, but you can probably imagine how great a sequence it would be showing humans spreading out across our sector of the galaxy, then shots of humans getting stomped by the covenant, then cut to the present day.

    The year is 2552. Planet Earth still exists, but overpopulation has forced many of her former residents to colonize other worlds. Faster-than-light travel is now a reality, and Earth’s unified government, through the United Nations Space Command, has put its full weight behind the colonization effort; millions of humans now live on habitable planets in other solar systems. A keystone of humanity’s colonization efforts is the planet Reach, an interstellar naval yard that builds colony ships for civilians and warships for the UNSC’s armed forces. Conveniently close to Earth, Reach is also a hub of scientific and military activity.

    Thirty-two years ago, contact with the outer colony Harvest was lost. A battlegroup sent to investigate was almost completely destroyed; only one badly damaged ship returned to Reach. Its crew told of a seemingly unstoppable alien warship that had effortlessly annihilated their forces.

    This was humankind’s first encounter with a group of aliens they eventually came to know as the Covenant, a collective of alien races united in their fanatical religious devotion. Covenant religious elders declared humanity an affront to the gods, and the Covenant warrior caste waged a holy war upon humanity with gruesome diligence.

    After a series of crushing defeats and obliterated colonies, UNSC Admiral Preston Cole established the Cole Protocol: no vessel may inadvertently lead the Covenant to Earth. When forced to withdraw, ships must avoid Earth-bound vectors—even if that means jumping without proper navigational calculations. Vessels in danger of capture must self-destruct.

    On Reach, a secret military project to create cyborg super-soldiers takes on newfound importance. The soldiers of the SPARTAN-II project rack up an impressive record against the Covenant in test deployments, but there are too few of them to turn the tide of the war.

    Existing SPARTAN-II soldiers are recalled to Reach for further augmentation. The plan: board a Covenant vessel with the improved SPARTAN-IIs and learn the location of the Covenant home world. Two days before the mission begins, Covenant forces strike Reach and annihilate the colony. The Covenant are now on Earth’s doorstep. One ship, the Pillar of Autumn, escapes with the last SPARTAN-II and makes a blind jump into deep space, hoping to lead the Covenant away from Earth.


  • After turning off season 1 in disgust when it aired I thought I’d give season 2 a go. I watched season 1 to catch up and the disgust returned.

    Season 2 is markedly improved over season 1, and feels a bit like a reset, but it does still have that taint attached to it. As I was watching S2E1 I realised there’s not really anything from season 1 worth preserving, you could just start the show off here in S2 and not much would be missed.

    The show still hasn’t effectively communicated the universe it’s set in at all. There’s no info on the scale of the human or covenant empires. There’s no info on how long the war has been fought or how big a disadvantage the humans are in. There’s almost no info on the navy, and any halo fans know that the war was being lost in space, not on the ground. At this point in the timeline tens of billions are dead. Hope should be lost, except for the myth of the Spartans. Everyone’s just carrying on as if the war isn’t a big deal or existential threat.

    Halo is also meant to be a military sci-fi/space opera. But the show still spends way too long on boring interpersonal drama and people whining and feeling sorry for themselves. I’m pissed about the treatment of the marines too. The marines are supposed to be the “heart” of halo, these plucky underdogs standing and fighting against the genocidal aliens but they are always portrayed as unsympathetic jackbooted thugs. Crying about how cruel it was that the Spartans were kidnapped as kids is one of the worst things 343 have done to halo and it’s even more egregious in this show.

    Ultimately they’ve created a bit of a mess. Theres a load of really weird messaging about how humanity aren’t worth saving, how terrorists and pirates are innocent “freedom fighters”, where our heroes are new to having emotions and cry about everything, and where the soldiers supposedly defending humanity are evil fascist stormtroopers.

    The biggest flaw though is they’ve created a world with unclear stakes and unclear objectives. I’m watching an interpersonal drama with a few CGI sequences, rather than a military sci fi space opera.



  • HDR support is supposedly fixed on kde and should be getting fixed in most other distros soon supposedly.

    Unity worked for me on pop os after some fiddling and installing of dependencies, but it didn’t fully work. There was a bunch of tools (like animation keyframes) which just didn’t display correctly for me though. Checking out the source code of one the util did a check to see whether it was running on windows or Mac, then exited if it wasn’t either of those. Would be good to run it via proton if possible so we get full support without the Devs needing to write tons of code to support a small percentage of users. That experience is pretty common when running Linux as your main, but the other benefits make up for it.