• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • While calling him ā€œthe dude who hacked Rockstar gamesā€ is a catchy meme, Arion Kurtaj was sentenced to indefinite detainment in a secure hospital after being found unfit to stand trial after being arrested a third time for violating the terms of his parole and committing further offenses (only one of which was hacking Rockstar Games.) Rockstar is basically entirely incidental to what happened there, and it’s disingenuous to pretend it’s more important to the outcome than the previous convictions or other acts involved in the trial. He’s also since been deemed fit to stand trial and will be tried in November.

    If you must make comparisons, it would be better to pick someone like Aaron Swartz instead of laundering the reputation of a convicted fraudster and extortionist.









  • I’m very suspect of the arithmetic here. Given the economic climate I’m not at all convinced that an 8% increase in revenue will result in an 18% increase in profit…especially since to get 2025 to only a $150K shortfall it looks like you have to ignore $250K in property taxes, on the assumption that their application to become tax exempt will be granted.




  • Your behaviour is indistinguishable from that of someone who is defending them, since you’re arguing their side of the lawsuit. The magazine is legally required to publish a reply which is ā€œsucĀ­cinct and conĀ­fine[s] itĀ­self to the subĀ­ject matĀ­ter of the conĀ­tenĀ­tious repĀ­resĀ­entĀ­aĀ­tion,ā€ not any given reply that Palantir wants to make. As quoted at several removes, ā€œRepublik’s managing director Katharina Hemmer said Palantir had wanted the magazine to publish a very lengthy counterstatement to each article. Republik believed the proposed statements did not fairly address or rebut the reportingā€




  • You can’t prevent client-side cheating with a server-side implementation. For instance, making enemies on the other side of a wall visible uses data that the server has to supply to the client in order for the game to work, just in an unintended way. The server also has no way to verify whether the client is accurately conveying the results of user inputs or gently correcting them to move the aim to an enemy’s head instead of a gazebo.

    It would still be nice if all game companies supported Linux, but it requires active effort and isn’t something they can get for free by being better programmers.


  • Well, I guess you’ve chosen the path of not knowing what a pronoun is, since all of the examples you’ve given use chat as a noun. Good luck with that; I don’t think we can have a productive conversation without shared meanings of words, so I’ll bow out.

    No one’s getting particularly heated, we’re just saying that someone who spews obvious nonsense in an area of supposed expertise probably shouldn’t be trusted about other things.



  • No, don’t be silly. ā€œChat, is this true?ā€ does not start with a pronoun. Here ā€œchatā€ is a noun, just like the nouns in ā€œPeter, is this true?ā€ or ā€œDude, is this true?ā€ or ā€œFriends, Romans, countrymen; is this true?ā€ or ā€œLadies and gentlemen, The Weeknd.ā€

    Addressing someone does not require them to be present or real, so the presence or absence of a literal chat does not somehow transmogrify this noun into a pronoun.


  • I’ve rewatched the video in case I was being uncharitable. Nope. He accepts the premise (direct quote: ā€œthat’s kind of trueā€). He then does the exact thing I said, which is argue that it’s not acting like a normal pronoun: ā€œthe ā€˜fourth person’ can also refer to a generic pronoun […] it doesn’t refer to a specific referent, like ā€˜he’ or ā€˜she’. […] if ā€˜chat’ is being used to refer to nobody in particular, then arguably it is a new fourth person pronoun.ā€ This is complete and utter nonsense packaged as exciting linguistic concepts, which is not at all ā€œcool and good.ā€

    (As a bonus bit of wrongness that I didn’t catch on the first watch: he says that chat used like ā€œy’allā€ is third person plural, which is another thing that maybe you shouldn’t get wrong in a supposedly educational video.)