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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Innocent until proven guilty is a mantra used when determining if the state can deploy violence and curtail your liberties, e.g. by physically confining you in a prison. It’s not a universally applicable rule, and isn’t what’s used in civil court, where judgements are made on balance of probabilities (i.e. if they think the evidence suggests it’s more likely that you’ve done something than that you haven’t) and isn’t what’s used in contexts other than the legal system, like when a duty of care exists - generally it wouldn’t be enough to say someone was safe to work with children if they were only probably not a paedophile.

    It’s my understanding that there isn’t enough knowledge available to the public to exhonorate Snoop Dogg, and without that, he’s left looking sketchier than he was before. One dropped allegation could be nothing, or the start of a pattern, and that’s different to there being no allegations at all.


  • You can’t really find out of you’ll get good enough to enjoy a soulslike without buying one and playing it for longer than the two hour refund period. For other products, you usually have something you can do about it or some way to try it first. You don’t need to buy a kayak to find out you don’t like kayaking as you can go for a kayaking lesson first and use the venue’s equipment. It’s understandable that people who hit a wall and can never get any enjoyment from a soulslike will be upset that it cost them just as much to find that out as it costs someone who’ll compete the game and have a great time.

    Maybe it’s enough to just do the refund window based on progression rather than time.


  • Regarding the elf slavery, there’s a guest post on Rowling’s blog (which she must at least have approved even though she didn’t write it) that makes the case that Hermione was wrong to attempt to liberate the elves because the elves enjoyed being slaves, and the point of that subplot was to demonstrate that it’s bad when people attempt to solve other people’s problems without a request for help and bad when people get offended on other people’s behalf. A normal person wouldn’t let something advocating for such a major misunderstanding of their work on their blog, especially if it was claiming they were pro-slavery.

    Most people reading the books would interpret it as implying Hermione was right, but for someone who’s seen that blog post on Rowling’s site and thinks she read it before it was published and could have vetoed it, it’s not a leap to read it again and conclude that it was meant to be pro-slavery and that’s why the other main characters, who you’re usually supposed to identify with, make fun of Hermione.

    On its own, it’s simplest to say it just wasn’t thought through, but when it’s part of a pattern of off-colour opinions, it’s harder to give the benefit of the doubt.



  • If you give a chip more voltage, its transistors will switch faster, but they’ll degrade faster. Ideally, you want just barely enough voltage that everything’s reliably finished switching and all signals have propagated before it’s time for the next clock cycle, as that makes everything work and last as long as possible. When the degradation happens, at first it means things need more voltage to reach the same speed, and then they totally stop working. A little degradation over time is normal, but it’s not unreasonable to hope that it’ll take ten or twenty years to build up enough that a chip stops working at its default voltage.

    The microcode bug they’ve identified and are fixing applies too much voltage to part of the chip under specific circumstances, so if an individual chip hasn’t experienced those circumstances very often, it could well have built up some degradation, but not enough that it’s stopped working reliably yet. That could range from having burned through a couple of days of lifetime, which won’t get noticed, to having a chip that’s in the condition you’d expect it to be in if it was twenty years old, which still could pass tests, but might keel over and die at any moment.

    If they’re not doing a mass recall, and can’t come up with a test that says how affected an individual CPU has been without needing to be so damaged that it’s no longer reliable, then they’re betting that most people’s chips aren’t damaged enough to die until the after warranty expires. There’s still a big difference between the three years of their warranty and the ten to twenty years that people expect a CPU to function for, and customers whose parts die after thirty-seven months will lose out compared to what they thought they were buying.











  • Installing hidden cameras in a public toilet is harmless by that definition as long as they never get discovered, but would still be highly immoral. I don’t think you’ve thought this through. People’s right to decide what happens to their body extends to things like who can see it rather than just who can physically touch it.