a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
lke's comments
activity:
lke  ·  3073 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Doomsday Scam

"Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ" is what I've been told.

lke  ·  3074 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: American Medical Association backs prescription drug ad ban

France, all advertisement must vetted by National Agency for the Safety of Medical products (ANSM). No advertisement for prescription drugs, nor for anything under mandatory coverage of the social security. Also any médication requiring the help of a professional for the diagnostic, the initiation or the surveillance of the treatment cannot get an ad. Ads must be factual and present proper usage of the medication.

Exceptions exist are made for vaccines, and drugs to help stop smoking.

The ANSM also vets publicity done to the Doctor, but with a different sets of rules

(source : http://ansm.sante.fr/Activites/Publicite-pour-les-medicaments/Modalites-de-controle-de-la-publicite/%28offset%29/0 in French obviously)

No the piece doesn't tell you what you should use. But what you need to consider when working with strings.

The author mention using UCS2 (UTF-16) in his products but exporting any products to UTF-8.

lke  ·  3196 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: This site is reporting that self aware robots have been created.

I can't figure if there's any point or purpose in having self-aware robots. Also I'm not sure what a self-aware robot is supposed to be, or what that even means. And I can't tell in which order should these questions be tackled.

Automatons sensing whether they what they say can be heard is not exactly new, that's the core of CSMA but network switches are not considered self-aware.

I agree that for an Automaton to be able to answer the question sense it had answered and correct the answer accordingly is impressive, but I'm king of iffy on what that has to do with self-awareness.

lke  ·  3199 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ireland passes law allowing trans people to choose their legal gender

Well that's about to change it seems.

lke  ·  3200 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Americans United for Life Is Reshaping States' Abortion Laws - The Atlantic

Well the Texas case should come to the court before the end of the year if i understand correctly.

lke  ·  3200 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How Americans United for Life Is Reshaping States' Abortion Laws - The Atlantic

    Thanks to AUL, Arizona doctors are now required to tell women who undergo chemical abortions that the procedure can be reversed midway through if the woman changes her mind. Some pro-life doctors claim to have executed this procedure successfully, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says it is not safe, or even routinely possible

    The law also includes AUL-suggested language instructing doctors to tell women that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks of gestation—even though ACOG says it’s unlikely pain is felt before 29 weeks.

It's kind of terrifying the amount of hypocrisy shown this group who rails against the supposed unsafeness of abortion but won't take the opinion of any medical association into account.

    All Roe v. Wade did was tell states they can’t make abortion illegal outright. Almost every other half-measure is fair game. Roe v. Wade didn’t solve the abortion question, in other words. It just “created 40 years of trench warfare,” McConchie said.

That's an interesting point considering how people riled up by the recent same-sex marriage decision left no wiggle room at all. This make me wonder if the court realizes the mess that the abortion debate became after Roe v. Wade. Speaking of the supreme court they also recently granted a reprieve to the clinics tageted by the laws sponsored by the AUL.

lke  ·  3200 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What Constitutes a Truly Terrifying Horror Game?

I'm not a big fan of horror games. Given the choice to be scared or not, i'd rather not.

This line of questioning reminds me a Extra Credits episode so I wanted to share that. The episode talks about using uncanniness to instill fear. Note that the playlist contains all the shows they did that touch to horror (broadly construed).

I'm not sure darkness is necessary to a good horror setting but it does help a lot in creating creating horror. First it blurs the line between the uncanny and the unbelievable, I believe you'll register first what is familiar and then what is out of place, the uncanniness, but you won't be able to see how ridiculous or over the top what you are looking at is. Second if you create a setting where the player never have a direct encounter they'll fill the void with their own fears, which is more powerful and more universal than anything anyone could design since each player brings in the game what frighten them the more. To do that you need to give a place for the player to put their fears and a dark environment is a good way to give it to them.

An illustration of that limited perception as a vector for horror is how the experience of Silent Hill 2 was transformed when in the remake removed the fog.

lke  ·  3202 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Deleterious community tags

I think every tag should have an user attached to it implicitly. That is tagging a post with a certain tag should also make it appear in #tag.username of the tagging user. But the personal tag doesn't appear in the tag list unless it was explicitly set.

Imagine oscar is a top contributor, posting interesting articles on all sorts of subject, but also a fan of an underwater pan flute group of which he posts videos day in and day out under the tag #music. In this condition following oscar would mean a sizable portion of my feed is now underwater pan flute. But I don't want to filter #music because I actually like music that's not underwater pan flute. If all tag are implicitly attached to the user I could follow oscar and filter #music.oscar without oscar having to used one off this 2 tags as #music@

I don't know if that would work for the matter at hand but it would be very helpful to combine tags & user when following or filtering.