There is a blue van in the right lane,

*car in front of a blue road sign

at 270 km/h (168 MPH), he’s going to be right behind it in a second.

The bollards on the right side of the road are at a distance of 50m from each other, by which we can estimate that the other car is at least 250 to 300 meters away. 270km/h equals 75m/s so they are about 4 seconds behind (if the other car was stationary).

Therefore the lane is not – in fact – free.

To answer this question it is much more important to know what is on the right lane next to or behind the car, which we do not see in this image anyway.

(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have “hallucinations”, no matter their size. What’s your magic way of knowing when that happens?

I think you’re probably saying that’s what an Opinion article is for.

Correct.

But a news article that doesn’t state its biases is not unbiased. And I haven’t seen any news articles where bias is stated.

True, no human produced piece of writing can ever be truly free of bias.

That said:

Normal news article: Best effort of not applying your biases and just reporting raw facts.
Opinion news article: Intentionally applying bias to contextualise the raw facts.

That’s all there is in this distinction, but that’s nonetheless important I would say.

I don’t know what ‘an environmentalist’ is - as discussed, the news made it up. But as one, would you please define it and explain your bias, y’know, like a news reporter would?

As per: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=environmentalist

1 definition found for environmentalist

From WordNet ® 3.0 (2006) :

environmentalist
n 1: someone who works to protect the environment from destruction or pollution [syn: environmentalist, conservationist]

My bias is that I have been hearing from reputable sources that we are destroying or at the very least damaging the ecosystems that supports our species for all of my conscious life. Literally all of it. Doing so seems like a bad idea.

By the way, today I learned there is apparently an older application of this term in the nature-vs-nurture debate amongst anthropologists for people who favour the nurture side of the argument (n2): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/environmentalist

Anyway, people make up new words when they need them, I still don’t understand the confusion…

Mmmnnoo, they didn’t say. You’re suggesting they would? Or that that is normally done?

No, I’m saying they wouldn’t self-identify as such unless it’s an opinion piece, because that would be introducing bias into their articles instead of reporting on the facts.

So the “as possible” part of the statement is really a kind of magic

Not really, it’s just a reminder that every human has inherent biases and writing an entirely neutral article is thus virtually impossible. That doesn’t mean journalists should go around and give into these biases without clearly stating that, and making this effort despite knowing you will fail in it is one of many indicators which can help separate serious news sources from propaganda and advertisement outlets.

Who’s not an environmentalist?

Fossil fuel companies?

It was envisioned as a “neutral” term - as factual as possible - but it said on the face of it, “environmentalists said …” meaning not us.

I don’t know, I see it as media needing a term to apply to a (back then) relatively new societal movement, and environmentalist seems sufficiently descriptive and neutral to me to fulfil that role.

Are you an environmentalist? You know - one of them?

Yes. Are you? I don’t see the problem here.

Maybe the journalist is one themselves. They didn’t say? That’s the point.

This is an Opinion article, not a news article. In particular, the NYT likes to hide behind these

Well that’s very much by design though. News articles are supposed to be as neutral and factual as possible, so with early newspapers a convention arose to mark any article that delivers an interpretation alongside the pure facts as an opinion piece. That doesn’t mean it’s not a news article and I actually think it’s commendable when a news source still tries to follow this convention. Many don’t anymore or never even tried to begin with.

Well if I learned one thing about biology it is that it eludes simplistic notions as the one presented in the meme, so I get where you are coming from here. However I very much doubt the sudden disappearance of viruses would end complex life or evolution, since there are other avenues of intra-species mutation and inter-species gene transfer. It would doubtlessly upset the balance of pretty much every existing ecosystem of course.

That said, don’t overthink it, it’s just a meme about the (slightly modified) Agent Smith reference so neatly lying around in the parent comment.

I’m involved in the development of an addon for the Classic WoW versions (Questie), and the thing I do there is such a convoluted process that not doing it feels like letting my fellow devs and the users down. But you can do development on the PTRs and beta servers, so I haven’t given money to Blizzard in a long time. Now you could argue that this is even worse in regards to supporting Blizzard than just paying for a game, but I rationalise it to myself with the fact that the newer clients will inevitably be used for private servers just like the old ones were (some already are actually).

Neither. Battle.net is Blizzards game launcher and store. They also own that domain, but the name usually refers to the binary.

The WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1 %command% is the Steam launch option you set, with %command% meaning roughly “what Steam would do without any launch options set”.

The whole process was a bit finicky and I did it a few month ago, but from what I remember it went something like this:

• Download battle.net installer
• Add it as non-Steam game to run it
• Locate the newly created prefix in Steam directory
• Add the Battle.net.exe in it as a non-Steam game, then remove the installer (not the other way around or the prefix will be deleted)

Oh so that’s what you meant. Thought you meant don’t use Lutris at first because of how you worded it. That makes much more sense.

AFAIK you can set Lutris up to use GE or Proton builds.

Did that too a while back, but anecdotally it feels lees buggy through Steam, especially regarding updates.

Also clicking the Stop button in Steam doesn’t leave behind zombie processes off Battle.net.exe and Agent.exe, which I had to manually kill when using Lutris. Assume that’s due to Protons(?) pressure-vessel thingy.

it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can’t match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren’t sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.