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Cake day: September 24th, 2024

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  • For those who didn’t follow the link:

    But what was the reason for Henry’s condemnation by the University to five and a half centuries of infamy? It was a murder. In 1242 he and a number of other men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of murdering a student of the University. Henry and his accomplices were fined £80 by King Henry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result, forced to stay away (and allowed no closer than Northampton) at least until the King returned from abroad.

    Further research is needed to discover the exact details of what happened here but it seems that Henry Symeonis had bought the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was willing to allow his return if the University agreed to it. But the University refused and chose to ignore the King’s order of 25 March 1264, resuming its hostility to Henry Symeonis. In fact, it felt so strongly about it, that it gave Henry Symeonis the unique honour of being named in its own statutes, making the University’s dislike of him official and perpetual.



  • I would kind of argue it’s Fox News that lied on this one. They edited down his full response which was a lot more sketchy about whether he would release the files.

    In the interview, co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked whether Trump would declassify “9/11 files” and “JFK files.” He said yes without hesitation. Then she asked, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?”

    His answer, as it initially aired: “Yeah, yeah, I would.”

    But in the full version that only aired later, Trump said, “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”

    Campos-Duffy interjected and said, “Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?”

    Trump hedged again: “I don’t know about Epstein, so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff, I would.”

    His actual answer hedges on how much or whether he’d release any of the Epstein files and especially the actually damaging stuff, preferring to release only the stuff about how he died while casting aspersions about the reliability of the whole … pedo jet and island part. Fox edited him down to a more agreeable position than the one he actually held.



  • If you don’t mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there’s a lot of options these days. There’s the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we’ve got two new methods:

    The PC port of the source code decompilation:

    And the recompilation of the binary:

    For anybody who’s unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.

    Using the old “source code == recipe” analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.

    Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let’s say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64’s MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can’t feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn’t eat the Klingon meal.

    As an end-user, the result doesn’t change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible “recipe” you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.




  • There were definitely backlashes to big popular artists of prior decades, like Elvis and the Beatles. Partly it was couched in that “They’re corrupting the youth” conservatism, but also anything that’s popular with tween and teen girls tends to catch a lot of flack regardless of whether or not it’s deserved. Think Twilight or One Direction. I don’t care for either, but they both became out-sized hate figures for weird adult men. There was no shortage of enraged nerd hot takes when that sparkly vampire guy was cast as Batman.

    I think Coldplay is kind of on the same page. Which is obviously faint praise, but they have a sort of inoffensively palatable sound which is both the reason they’re so successful and the thing people dislike about them. But it’s probably not worth getting angry about.



  • I like a lot of middle evolutions better than final, Charmeleon included. Wartortle with those wing-ears, the Nidoran middle forms are pretty good. Zubat is better than Golbat. Meowth has more going on than Persian which is just any regular cat from Earth. Voltorb is better than Electrode, but in fairness they’re both just Pokéballs–I always thought Electrode should have been modeled after a Great Ball or something.




  • There was a poll last month asking if politics and schadenfreude posts should be banned: https://lemmings.world/post/26744357

    The result was overwhelmingly yes: https://lemmy.world/post/30918729

    I’m not sure whether this story counts as either of those. Mods?

    Technically, the charges against X don’t sound “political” as such:

    The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened a criminal investigation into the platform. In the official filing, X stands accused of the “alteration of the functioning of an automated data processing system by an organized group” as well as the "fraudulent extraction of data from an automated data processing system by an organized group.”

    According to French newspaper Le Monde, these are considered “major computer hacking offenses,” which can carry sentences of up to 10 years in prison and a €300,000 (roughly $350,000) fine under French law.

    However, the purpose of X gaming the algorithm is almost certainly at least partially for political benefit. I think you could technically upvote this because you find it uplifting that sketchy big tech practices are facing pushback without enjoying it as schadenfreude, but personally this story doesn’t really feel “uplifting” to me.





  • Sorry if I’m misreading, but I wonder if you’re mixing up Steve Bannon (71) and Barron Trump (19). The Tweet says “Bannon” and is probably meant to imply the former. Steve Bannon is probably too old to have ever been victimized by Jeffrey Epstein; they are/were the same age.