I’ll translate: “I find actions of the 1337x admins disappointing. Deleting my torrents causes confusion for the user base, and these actions reflect poorly on your character, suggesting pusillanimity and insufficient discretion when selecting a sexual partner.”

This article is from March of last year, and a quick google seems to show that’s when most outlets covered this story. Am I right in seeing that this is a year-old story? The article mentioning things that happened in 2021 as “last year” caught my attention

To add on, this exact scenario illustrates why BMI is not always the best measure of health, because it only looks at height and weight. Measuring waist circumference and body fat percentage should give you a better-rounded picture of how you’re doing

Oh shit, when they said “around the corner” they really meant it

So these two provisions caught my eye; under the draft agreement, executive branch agencies (the article gives the example of the DOJ or DOD) would have the ability to (among other things)

Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,

In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.

In the case of the former, would that include user data? Given the general US gov approach to digital privacy I assume so, and granting yourself the power to do the things you’re afraid China is doing seems appropriately ironic for us.

As far as the latter, I wonder how broadly “some circumstances” is defined. If the language is broad enough, that would open the door to de facto censorship if a certain trend or info around a certain event is spreading on the site right as the government magically decides it needs to pause TikTok due to, “uh, terrorism or something, don’t worry about it.”

I’m also curious how durable this agreement would be. How hard would it be for the next administration to decide to pitch a fit and renegotiate or throw out the deal pending a new, even harsher agreement?

It would seem to me that this is pretty nakedly an assertion of power over an entity based outside the US, and not an agreement meant to protect US citizens in any meaningful way. I think any defense of this agreement as a way to protect privacy or mental health or whatever won’t be able to honestly reconcile with the fact that these exact same concerns exist with domestic social media companies

This seems like a good opportunity to point out that sunaurus pays for this instance out of pocket, and you can go to the GitHub sponsors page if you want to help financially support this instance!

I had this exact question myself a little while ago, so I’ll share what I learned. I don’t know your level of knowledge with these things so forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know. And spoiler alert, the answer is “technically, but not how you’d like”

An EPUB “file” is really a folder containing a bunch of individual HTML files which hold the text for the book as well as things like the table of contents, and photos (if your ebook has pictures), with CSS for styling. This is the exact medium you’d work in if you were designing a web page, but with en ebook there are different best practices and considerations.

Now assuming that your PDF has a good OCR (optical character recognition) layer, then it will be possible for calibre and other programs to grab the text of the PDF, and even to create an epub with it. But as you’ve noticed, they don’t do a good job of this. The fundamental problem is that creating an epub is something of an art, with best practices and personal choices as far as layout and file structure. When you “convert”, you’re not changing the file type from PDF to EPUB; you’re grabbing the text from the PDF and then sticking it into multiple different files, with HTML and CSS instructions throughout to tell the EReader how to lay things out, which footnotes link to which annotations, where to display pictures, etc.

As far as I’m aware, this basically can’t be done (well) with dumb, automatic programs like what Calibre offers because there’s too much “thinking” involved. Perhaps an AI tool could be created that would handle this better, but I’m not aware of one, and it’s a pretty specialised application so it’s possible you’ll need to wait a while before someone gets around to that.

So I realised that if I wanted an EPUB version, I’d need to make it myself. I used Sigil, a free EPUB creation tool, to do it, which gave me some nice features to help speed up the process, but it’s a big time commitment (unless you’re working with a very short PDF), especially for your first EPUB where you’re still learning what to do while making it. You’ll also need to learn HTML and CSS if you haven’t already.

I did it as a sort of fun side project in my free time to learn a new skill, but unfortunately other than that, I don’t think there’s such thing as an “EPUBinator” that’s gonna take your PDF and create a well-made ebook.

Peering into my crystal ball, I can see that after release there will be at least one post on here showing these guys and their ilk complaining that you have the option to make a trans/nonbinary character. People gave Solasta negative reviews for letting you pick your pronouns

It looks like Party Limit Begone is the only active one right now. I haven’t tried it in multiplayer myself (though that is supported up to 8 players), but something to note is that unlike in DOS2, there are some clear moments in the game where a party larger than 4 will break things; this can be handled easily enough in single player through sending people back to camp, but I don’t know how that would work in a multiplayer game. Also, because BG3 is gonna be receiving regular updates, your campaign will break until the mod author updates each time.

And yes, if you want challenging combat 7 people will make Balanced too easy

An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.

The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.

The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.

FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.

I have the option to multiclass playing on “normal”. Is it confirmed that they don’t permit it on the “story” difficulty? I ask because the level-up screen could be tweaked a bit in my opinion; it’s not super obvious what you need to click on

Yeah that’s basically my view as well. I don’t take issue with posting “old news”, so long as it’s presented as such. This is good for people to know, especially TorGuard users who are unaware, but the lens people use to understand a story changes depending on whether they think it’s a new development or an old fact, so some distinction is good

Ah gotcha. I’d be interested to hear why they made that choice. On the bright side, there’s already a mod to unlock multiclassing for story . I can’t speak to ease of installation or possible issues obviously, but if you’re comfortable using Vortex (the mod manager from Nexus Mods) it should be pretty straightforward

EDIT: I’ll paste the link here at the bottom since link-naming isn’t displaying correctly on my phone

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/546

So I recently listened to an episode of the Data over Dogma podcast specifically regarding angels and demons. It’s hosted by Dan Beecher (an atheist podcaster) and Dr. Dan McClellan (a Bible scholar), and they discuss how angels and demons are actually depicted/described in the Bible, compared to the extra-biblical descriptions of both that we’ve gotten over the millennia. It’s about an hour but should serve as a nice little primer on the subject, with some recommendations for further study.

There’s a decent chance you might not be missing anything, it’s just not for you. Minecraft and Terraria are beloved titles that people put thousands of hours into, but I never got into them myself.

A turn-based CRPG is a very old-fashioned thing (the C stands for Computer), and it’s a pretty faithful adaption of a TT (tabletop, so pen-and-paper) RPG, which is even older (though the current ruleset for DnD is pretty new). I can definitely understand how Skyrim appeals to you but something like BG3 doesn’t; they’re fundamentally different games, and Skyrim is much faster-paced

Yeah that’s what almost 3 years of Early Access can do for you. On top of completely changing the game, they’ve also been able to fix things the players have found over time

It sounds like one solution to this would be having the entire party enter turn-based mode, with members either being in or out of combat. It seems like that would be a very easy change to make, because turn-based mode can already trigger automatically, but the question would be how well that all blends together while you’re playing. I think that should be tied to difficulty; in Story you can cheese like you do now, while in hardcore (or whatever it’s called) you always enter turn-based.

I this is partly the consequence of adapting a tabletop system to a video game. In DND your DM obviously wouldn’t pause combat indefinitely while the rest of the party messes around, but a DM can account for out-of-combat shenanigans much better than a game that must use pre-defined systems.

It’s been my observation that ambassadorships are often given out as rewards or for other domestic political purposes. The career foreign service people whose job it is to do the real work of diplomacy aren’t political appointees

I think OP means in 2001, not in the 80s

I mean the beauty of the fediverse is that if you INSIST on being able to access Threads via a Lemmy account, you can, even if all the big instances defederate. IMO the risks/downsides outweigh any possible benefit in light of the fact that defederation doesn’t remove access for anyone, just restricts it