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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.

    That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.

    Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!




  • Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.











  • Definitely agree with a lot of the listed games but wanted to add some I haven’t seen yet:

    • Monster Hunter: Rise. The Monster Hunter series’ most recent main series instalment sees you playing as a Hunter of massive creatures, carving them up and using the parts to craft stronger and better equipment. Multiplayer only available with multiple switches, but is still a very rewarding solo game.

    • Cadence of Hyrule. A Zelda and Crypt of the NecroDancer mashup that sees you play as Link or Zelda in a musical world where everything moves at the speed of the beat of the music. Very novel and interesting game, but relatively short.

    • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX. This is a true roguelike and a remake of the first game in the offshoot Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series made by the same creators of the Shiren the Wanderer series. Gameplay is turn-based and grid-based, with randomly generated dungeons for you to conquer, and you play as a human who’s been turned into Pokémon alongside many others you can befriend.


  • I feel like a lot of people haven’t ever played Rogue and so struggle understand what Roguelike actually means. Fair call, it’s a very old game with essentially no graphics, but to understand the genre properly everyone needs to give it a go at least once in my opinion.

    Side note; love me the whole Mystery Dungeon franchise. I still need to pick up the Shiren the Wanderer series.


  • I like your idea of using 3 as an approximation to get ballpark figures - if you wanted to add a smidge of extra accuracy to that you can just remember that in doing so, you’re taking away roughly 5% of pi.

    0.14159265 / 3 ≈ 0.04719755

    Add in around 5% at the end and your approximation’s accuracy tends to gain an order of magnitude. For your pizza example:

    108 in^2 x 1.05 = 113.4 in^2 which is accurate to three significant figures and fairly easy to calculate in your head if you can divide by twenty.

    You could even fudge it a little and go “108 is pretty close to 100. 5% of 100 is obviously 5, so the answer is probably around 108+5=113”


  • Oh it’s definitely an echo chamber in every sense; there’s no doubt that opinions that tend to be popular on Lemmy are not really representative of true public opinion. The important thing is that we maintain awareness of that and never let ourselves think that what we agree upon, society at large will also agree upon. That awareness helps inoculate against some of the worst effects of an echo chamber.



  • I think you underestimate how small differences have large results when we’re talking about nationwide or population-wide issues. If there are a million cars on the road and this change makes suspensions wear 5% faster, then every X years (however long it would usually take for them to wear) there are an extra 50,000 cars needing replacements. That’s not an insignificant amount. Scale that up to larger countries that have tens or hundreds of millions of cars and the result gets even larger.

    Small differences make large impacts. 1.5°C average global warming is having disastrous effects on the environment and our capacity to thrive. COVID-19 has a Case Fatality Rate of around 1% (depending on country) and it has caused nearly 7 million deaths - more than the amount of Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust and similar to the Holodomor.



  • My wife and I took part in the survey as people who aren’t in programming and have never used LLM art generators before, and we scored quite poorly. I got all of the photorealistic images correct, but the painting/drawing pictures were much more difficult.

    I think a better test would be to give four real artists and five LLM art generators the same prompt, show all nine of those together in a square and you have to pick the real ones. Then we’re comparing like-for-like as opposed to trying to spot an LLM image out of the blue.