Bay 12 Games Forum

Those aren't phony at all. The EU literally do.

Sweden for example aren't allowed to export any apples to other EU countries because "the peels have spots on them". Because we don't constantly soak our orchards in insecticide so insects leave perfectly harmless marks on the skin at a minority of the fruit. And the frail little Germans have mental breakdowns at seeing such imperfection in their grocery stores or something so the sale of them must be completely banned.

Where Boris lied was that he said the legislation in question banned 'bendy' bananas. Nothing was actually banned. You just couldn't sell wonky-looking bananas and claim they were top grade. The proposed rules actually simplified previous existing rules, standardizing things into grades so that buyers and sellers could know what they're getting more easily between different nations. There were three grades and the bottom grade was a catch-all grade. The bulk of the rules were actually things of the nature of saying you couldn't shipments that have mold and other defects of that nature, which is all common sense but if you don't write it down some asshole will try and circumvent it, but Boris of course didn't mention any of that.

You really do need rules about this stuff. For example say you buy a shipment of "top grade" bananas but when you get them they're half-black with splotches and mold and all different sizes, and funny shapes. You got ripped off. But the term "top grade" isn't defined so what are you going to do? So food labeling laws generally say you cannot use the term Top Grade to describe your product if that's misleading, but you then have to define some set of guidelines about what the hell "Top Grade" actually means, and that of course requires you define what people think a banana is supposed to look like, which guys like Boris can then deliberately misinterpret as trying to " "force bananas to look a certain way". What it's actually about, is about transparency in buying and selling by standardizing descriptions. If Top Grade bananas is a defined thing, and you buy them and they don't match what that's supposed to look like, you can in fact sue their asses off. This is what it's about.

As for the Swedish apples, it's a clear bet that you can still sell splotchy apples as much as you want, you just can't label them as being whatever grade they consider for supermarkets. I'd be sure splotchy apples can still be sold for processing etc. This is about being pissed that the apples they want to sell don't fit the grade you want to label it as: i.e, "they should pay us a lot of money for our apples, the bastards!" But ... if the grade was changed then the people buying it would know it had been changed and they'd pay you no more for it than they do now.  The whole idea of how Germans are too picky about apples and how that's an intolerable affront to Sweden is just ludicrous tabloid bullshit. The only reason you care and they're writing about it is because Germans have money, and your industry wants their money, but doesn't have a product Germans actually want.

What grade they're considered as doesn't change how much they're actually worth in the market, and if the EU let anyone with apples like your ones called them "A Grade" which is clearly what Sweden wants, then the private industry would just come up with their own labeling system to avoid mixing your apples in with the ones they like more. They'd call the better ones "A++ Grade" informally or something, but because it's an informal designation it'd go back to things being less transparent, thus defeating the entire purpose of having agreed-on grades.

Quote from: wierd on November 16, 2020, 01:04:04 am

But the grammarians positively *HATE* it when you use They/them in that manner!!

Those grammarians can go and -- pardon my French -- fuck themselves. If they're not going to update their language to follow new standards, then they should clearly be using a Pentium 4, an Nvidia FX 6800 Ultra and Windows XP as a daily driver. The old standards are just as good, right?

Singular they goes back hundreds of years, much longer than the prescriptivist grammarians have been around.

You know what is actually broken? Singular you. "Thou" originally meant one person vs "You" for groups of people. Hence why "y'all" was invented - it fills the semantic gap left by merging the singular and plural forms of You.

So "You" is broken. The argument against singular they is that it's 'they are". But ... we also have you are, which is in fact a quirk left over from the plural you, so there's really no consistent basis for the anti-They thing.

zero-day patching is governed by a whole other set of nasty things.  Usually involving management, and bullshit deadlines that were intentionally short.  That is not really the programmer's fault.

People also talk about how in the old days they didn't need patches and fixes, things worked out of the box. But that's really good old days thinking. When a game shipped on a couple of floppies or a Nintendo ROM cartridge, they were tiny, and simple enough that one person could know every line of code in the thing. It's a lot different to say you shipped an executable that runs in 64K of memory with all assets drawn by the programmer, and runs on a set piece of hardware, and there were no bugs on launch day, vs shipping a program that's 50GB worth of code and data and runs on any one of possibly billions of system configurations, and there were no bugs on launch day. Sure they could maintain the no-bugs-on-launch day thing, but the problem with that is that with the ever-increasing complexity, nothing would ever get shipped and the companies would just collapse. At some point, you need to ship just to stay in business. For example, consider if Notch didn't release Minecraft until it was "finished".

So yeah, deadlines are shorter than programmers would like, but the programmers aren't necessarily seeing the bigger picture, all the balls that are in the air. So those over-short deadlines aren't necessarily bullshit, even though they were too short for some purposes. If the trade off is between the project having a high risk of total failure, vs the product being perfect at launch, you skimp on being perfect at launch. For example, maybe the managers demanded that this particular product launch by Christmas, so there were bugs in it and a zero-day patch to try and compensate for that. Well, what actually happens if you don't launch by Christmas? It's not just pride, this is about project survival. You end up being Duke Nukem Forever.

Or, consider Daikatana. If Romero had merely launched the game quickly, warts and all rather than a drawn-out project with delays and growing expectations, it would have blown over much more quickly. Those two projects are a result of what happens when the programmers get their way and aren't constrained by money or the pencil pushers. Or it would be one of those games that's never released but people talk about with almost religious reverence, how "it would have been great". Categorically, whatever is it almost certainly would not have been great, it would have the substance of a Peter Molyneux game pitch. But, because nobody was pushing on the "just get it done!" button, the project failed so people can pretend how amazing it would have been. The exact same forces that cause the game to to be launched with some bugs also shape the game as a whole, including the parts people liked, and people don't consider that. It's sort of a mythology that developers are in an ivory tower carefully sculpting their master work and then the evil producers come in and say "launch today" but the brave creators say "but it's not finished, think of the public!" like a scene in a movie. However it doesn't really work like that. What's actually in the game is a drawn-out negotiation between different parties, to design a product that many people will like - so the features that many people like in a game are the same features those "just get it shipped" people were also demanding. They get it wrong, sometimes, but they get it right more often. By definition, or they wouldn't stay in business. Developers left alone without input might perfectly easily make a perfect game that nobody actually wants, or at a time nobody wants it.

Of course, but that's bringing unrelated points into this discussion of whether it's better to unroll fast loops or slow loops.

Eh, I'm working on this account, the caller is complaining that she can't set up an automatic payment with the electric company. First thing she does is blame the bank for a problem with her credit card, then she says she can't do it online because her ISP "fucked up her laptop", then she says she needs to do it over the phone, and makes a point to jab about how flaky this is because the phone company can't get their shit together. Then the electric company person says they don't accept card details over the phone due to security reasons, then the woman says "how come every other company has no problem with that!?" and demands to speak to a supervisor. Seriously, and that's the first 1 minute. These calls are tiring for me just auditing them, let alone the poor dude getting an earful of this.

We/government need to figure out why people do crimes and fix the system so those reasons no longer exist

People commit crimes even if there is no government. If you want "fix the system" so that those things never ever happen, you ultimately end up with mind control.

EDIT: my point is that if you remove all motives for crime you ultimately remove motives for everything. It's not possible to remove motivation itself in a clinical way that only removes things on a list of things we shouldn't do without seriously crippling people in other ways.

Random Question: Why are napkins called napkins?
Google’s answer, nappe=Old French for tablecloth + map (English) + kin (English)

Etymology? Nappe is Old French for tablecloth as stated. The link to English was originally the French-speaking aristocracy of England post the 1066 conquest. See the pattern of Cow / Beef, Sheep / Mutton, Pig / Pork. The word for production is Saxon, the word for consumption is French/Norman, which outlines how the class structure worked post conquest. This is a common pattern in conquered or colonized cultures, with words related to consumption and rulership/governance in English being of French origin compared to words related to commoners/production being Saxon.

"kin" also denotes a diminutive quality, so nap-"kin" might have denoted that they're smaller cloths used at the table, rather than the full tablecloth, the "nappe". A bit about the addition of "kin" to words, which is from German:

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/07/kin.html