Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 1.24K Posts
  • 7.94K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • On a mobile phone it’s super easy. Long press the hyphen button and swipe over to the dash.

    On Mac it’s pretty easy still, but requires a little more knowledge. Option-shift-dash. (Without the shift gives you an en dash.)

    On Windows it’s the completely arcane alt-0151, and only possible if you have a numpad. I memorised it like 15 years ago and have regularly used it since, but it’s hard to blame people for not doing so.

    No idea about Linux.







  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldoddly specific
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    1 hour ago

    They are not certainly using int

    Probably why I said “almost certainly”. And I stand by that. We’re not talking about chat_participant_id, we’re talking about GROUP_CHAT_LIMIT, probably a constant somewhere. And we’re talking about a value that would require a 9-bit unsigned int to store it, at a minimum (and therefore at least a 16-bit integer in sizes that actually exist for types). Unless it’s 8-bit and interprets a 0 as 256, which is highly unorthodox and would require bespoke coding basically all over instead of a basic num <= GROUP_CHAT_LIMIT.


  • I don’t think the jury necessarily made a mistake here to be clear. They had access to far more detail than us. I trust that the jury did a good job here.

    Have you watched the SBS reality TV series ‘The Jury: Death on the Staircase’?

    I have not. Is it good?

    It was a frustrating insight into how difficult it is for some people to understand the difference between these two things

    For me I think the problem might be the opposite. I’ve not been on a jury, but I think I might have trouble distinguishing between beyond reasonable doubt and beyond any doubt, and I might have trouble returning a guilty verdict in the face of anything other than 100% certainty. But I haven’t actually been there to know for sure how I’d react.



  • she can still appeal this decision

    She can appeal, it’s important to remember that appeals can only be on the basis of a mistake of law. So for example, if the judge of the case permitted the prosecution to present evidence that he shouldn’t have allowed, or if it’s determined that his jury instructions were heavily biased, that might get up on appeal.

    An appeal can usually* not decide that the jury was just wrong in terms of which evidence they decided was more persuasive than others. Based on the information that’s public so far, there’s almost zero chance of a successful appeal. Just because you or I, or even a High Court judge would have (based on media reporting of the evidence) decided it didn’t meet the burden of “beyond reasonable doubt”, isn’t sufficient for an overturning of the jury’s decision.

    The media hasn’t been allowed to report on decisions made by the judge while the jury wasn’t in the room (which may have included discussions about whether particular evidence is admissible) while the trial was still ongoing to prevent potentially tainting the jury. Now that it’s over we might begin to learn that sort of thing. That’s where appealable factors might be hiding.

    * Pell seems to put doubt into this, and frankly created an enormous amount of distrust in the legal system’s ability to hold power to account. There’s some very shaky legal argumentation behind it (basically: the defence presented evidence that, if accepted, would necessarily result in a finding of not guilty, and the prosecution did not specifically do anything to try to refute that evidence)


  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldoddly specific
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    3 hours ago

    Except that they’re almost certainly just using int, which is almost certainly at least 32 bits.

    256 is chosen because the people writing the code are programmers. And just like regular people like multiples of 10, programmers like powers of 2. They feel like nice round numbers.










  • “recognising” a government seems to be tantamount to acknowledging that government is legitimate and representative of the people

    I agree with your conclusion (recognition should be based entirely on who has Actual Control, in cases where that can be clearly determined), but not with this particular explanation. Nobody “recognises” Taiwan, but it has nothing to do with believing it’s illegitimate or unrepresentative. It has to do with the fact that China has a hissy fit if you do.



  • Were they, like us, trying to solve a mystery as they were reading?

    I’m not completely sure if that’s relevant in this case, because Dracula has already been pretty specific about this earlier. This passage was basically just a reminder of what we already knew. He just made that reminder far more on the nose than I think would make the best story today (possibly because of genre conventions of his day).

    But to answer the question you posed on its own terms…I think yes. Mystery novels were already growing in popularity, with the introduction of Sherlock Holmes a decade earlier, and detective fiction in forms like Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (not to be confused with the song of the same name from the unproduced West End Dracula musical) coming out decades earlier. It would only be just over 20 years after Dracula’s release that Ronald Knox would issue his 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, indicating by that time not only was detective fiction widespread, but so were attitudes of reading them with an eye to solving the mystery.