• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • So, I think it’s pretty stupid to argue whether “convicted felon” should be in his opening lede line for Wikipedia.

    True though that may be, I don’t think it’s surprising that this would happen, and since making the post I have been falling down a rabbit hole of finding out how Wikipedia is handling situations like this, partly through taking more than a glancing look at the talk pages for the first time ever, and it’s fascinating.

    Currently my deepest point of descent is this sub-thread on the Admin board about the “consensus” boxes on top of talk pages being an undocumented and unapproved feature.


  • In Germany, Mein Kampf is banned except for educational purposes, eg in history class.

    Strictly speaking this is incorrect, although the situation is somewhat complicated. There are laws that can be and were used to limit its redistribution (mainly the rule against anti-constitutional propaganda), but there are dissenting judgements saying original prints from before the end of WW2 cannot fall under this, since they are pre-constitutional. One particular reprint from 2018 has been classified as “liable to corrupt the young”, but to my knowledge this only means it cannot be publicly advertised.

    What is interesting though is how distribution and reprinting was prevented historically, which is copyright. As Hitlers legal heir the state of Bavaria held the copyright until it expired in 2015 and simply didn’t grant license to anything except versions with scholarly commentary. But technically since then anybody can print and distribute new copies of the book. If this violates any law will then be determined on a case-by-case basis after the fact.



  • I take it you didn’t play ranged weapons then. :D They tried to modernise the combat and kind of made it worse, except ranged combat though. Free aim was just a lot better than target locking in earlier games. But melee in 3 wasn’t really fun. That said, huge battles generally worked better in 3 and there were a lot more of them with a lot more NPCs involved, so that was kinda cool. Magic was also a bit more fun. But yeah, the game was overly ambitious in many ways and that hurt it a lot, even if you *disregard the clusterfuck of a release and its aftermath…



  • I think Gothic 3 was actually quite a solid game with the community patches. That said, the official state of the game is simply insulting to this day, because after the catastrophe of a release it had the developer and publisher parted ways and the game was never properly fixed by either of them.

    This messy and very public divorce is also the main reason the Gothic series died, the publisher (Jowood) retained the rights and gave it to other developer studios which created games that more or less flopped (G3 expansion, Arcania). But what do you expect from a publisher that lets the game get fixed by fans instead of actually paying people for it. I mean at least they gave them access to the source, so that’s something, but still…


  • Muehe@lemmy.mltotechnology@hexbear.netmarkdown
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    3 months ago

    WYSIWYG means there is just one window and it correctly displays however the end result will be. Like using Word.

    The only thing WYSIWYG means is “what you see is what you get”. If you have a live preview you see what you get. *shrug*

    Anyway, I’m pretty sure I have seen an editor that does it in a single pane, but couldn’t recall the name of it right now for the life of me. Also not sure if it used Electron…

    Split window + live preview is presumably much easier to program

    Yes, obviously. It’s actually so simple that I once built this myself in a few hours, with a bit of Qt and a call to pandoc. You can skip building, saving, and updating an abstract syntax tree, as well as expanding the nodes the cursor is in to the markdown source, which is a whole lot of complexity.

    I’m not sure if it’s impossible to create a proper WYSIWYG editor without electron or just nobody has bothered.

    Of course it’s possible. But by now there are like hundreds of markdown editors around, so the problem will be finding the one that meets your specifications between the avalanche of those which don’t.









  • It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.

    I’d prefer that over having to change clocks when you travel, and having to have knowledge about the location and possibly having to flip the date when you encounter a reference to a specific time, yes.

    Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.

    Yes, you would obviously do the latter. No sense it going back to the bad old days.

    Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary.

    Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.

    And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week.

    Yeah but none of that has much impact on the timezone debate.

    If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in.

    Fair enough. I acknowledged this point in my other post, that there are historical reasons for timezones mostly rooted in administrative requirements. But I don’t think this is a good reason to not adopt a better system per se.

    All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.

    Exactly! So out with the old, in with the new. Sure this will create some other headaches, especially given how deeply rooted some of the relevant nomenclature is in most languages, but the sooner we change this the less it will hurt. I see that it might be a non-starter given the inertia and disunity of globalised society working against it, but it still seems desirable nonetheless, to me at least.



  • And when it does happen it’s usually clarified. In more automated contexts (e.g. a scheduled YouTube premiere) the software converts it automatically - the author inputs the date and time in their own timezone, and viewer sees the converted date and time in their own timezone.

    My point exactly though, this is a whole lot of complexity we could just get rid of by using a single timezone, with the added benefit of that working without any automation or clarification. Next Tuesday 14:00? Same time for everybody, regardless of locality. Everyone will know what part of the solar day that is for them by habit.

    When it does happen it reminds us that the date and time falls on a different time of day for different participants.

    The complexity of coordinating different solar cycles is there either way and unavoidable. So why not use the simpler system?

    Meet me here tomorrow at 01:00

    Yes, semantic drift in these terms would be unavoidable, but I still see the long-term benefits to clarity outweighing the short-term costs in it.


  • We already have that for technology to use - the unix timestamp.

    A unix timestamp is an offset to a UTC date, not a timezone. But fair enough, there is UTC. It’s not used by default however, except by scientists and programmers maybe.

    Maybe I’m missing something. What do you think the benefits would be?

    Removing ambiguity from casual language. Currently when you state a time you are almost always implying your local timezone applies, which might be unknown information to the recipient, especially with written sources like these comments here. With everybody using the same timezone instead you would always make an unambiguous statement about the specific time by default.


  • What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say “lets meet on Tuesday”, which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)?

    Given how +12 is at the front of the “date wave” currently they would probably take it to mean the Monday/Tuesday noon.

    People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.

    Yeah fair. To me the benefit is clear, there is no good rhyme or reason to timezones as a totality, we should come up with a better system. A straightforward approach like using UTC offsets seems best.