yesthatsatumbler

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Silly hot take of the night: 🔣 should be the grawlix emoji.

(...I'm not sure if it's at all legible on your screen. I can hardly see it on mine.)

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LOL at "not to be confused with: ham" but also when I originally saw the picture I thought it was a watermelon

(BTW the OP is very carefully dancing around this, but AFAICT they're only sold crownless so that they couldn't be propagated outside the company, which is apparently engaging in some really shady practices by the way)

Pinkglow Pineapple

(ananas comosus 'rosé')

Not to be confused with ham

If you're tired of the same old boring yellow pineapples, the Del Monte company has the solution for you; pinkglow pineapples, grown in south-central Costa Rica. These pineapples have been genetically engineered to 'produce lower levels of the enzymes in conventional pineapples that convert the pink pigment lycopene to the yellow pigment beta carotene' meaning that the pineapples stay pink. Lycopene is also what gives some other fruits and vegetables, like watermelons and tomatoes, their pink or red colour. Why they decided to do this? Beats me! The only information I can find about what led them to this discovery is that it was a happy accident, after which they pursued the pink pineapple.

They're supposedly less sour and more juicy than regular pineapples, with the added benefit of the tingly feeling that you often get eating a pineapple being absent. It took them sixteen years to perfect the 'Jewel of the Jungle', with the first ones commercially available in 2020. They ship the pineapples (which are only available in the US and Canada) crownless, under the guise of sustainability claiming they replant the crowns. I've seen regular pineapples being sold crownless in supermarkets too, recently, so I'll leave up to you to decide whether that really is about sustainability. Considering I won't be able to get my hands on one I can't say whether it's worth it, but I'm honestly fine sticking to 'regular' pineapples, looks aren't everything.

🍍 Reblog to share a fun fruit and to increase sample size! Check out even more interesting fruits here or in the list of all polled fruits. 🍍

[yesthatsatumbler]

I was surprised at the answer, and looking it up there's a few options that sound promising...

Chapaev also appears in multiple sequels to Red Comrades, including Red Comrades IV: Independence Day, which also features Ivan the Terrible. I'm sure you can pull something up for Ivan the Terrible via Civilization or something.

...and Red Comrades VI: New Reality, which apparently also includes Gandalf the Grey. A bit less confident about that. Apparently things got even more ridiculous in later installments and those might provide even easier paths.

Wikipedia tells me that he also appeared in Last Year's Snow Was Falling II (2005), together with a ton of probably-easily-connectable Russian folklore, but it's a lot harder to find good info about that game. (I don't know if it's on Wikidata.)

I have a few other ideas but I'll probably do their own asks for them.

Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev from Red Comrades, based on a real person. There's two avenues that I can think of, and that's either going with either Vladimir Putin or Arnold Schwarzenegger shown on a poster.

Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev does not have a Ryu Number.

(clarification below)

Static images like posters are explicitly disallowed.

[yesthatsatumbler]

Interesting concept, though I liked the Prisoner of Monty Hall version better.

...maybe I'll watch the original some day. It sounds pretty sad, though.

[yesthatsatumbler]

Breaking News: Soccerway is Gone

(...for now; the situation is still developing)

A sad day for sports stats enjoyers, as the premier website for reporting and collating association football results, known by the simple name Soccerway, had elected to "modernize" their design, in the process utterly breaking nearly the entire system.

It had been the only reasonable source for many obscure competitions, and one of the most accessible sources in general for league and other football across the world. (Reportedly it also covered some other sports; I never got around to checking those results.)

We continue to hope that they somehow fix the mistake they have wrought (...or, failing that, at least make the new design usable without all the errors). At the moment it does not look good, though.

Good night, Soccerway, and F in chat for you. We might never see your like again.

[yesthatsatumbler]

Round 3: The Quarterquartersemifinals

(Poll 6 of 32)

@official-boob-posts

(no propaganda submitted)

@haveyouatethisfruit

(no propaganda submitted)

[yesthatsatumbler]

Extremely seconded.

AFAICT the point of the article is "do not use a VPN if you want Actual Privacy, they don't really provide that and they cheerfully collect all your data on the way". Which is... technically kind of true, yes? But AFAICT the vast majority of people who use VPN services are doing it for other reasons, and (if I understand the relevant points correctly, at least) for a lot of those other things commercial VPN is probably a better tool than what the article is recommending.

(Caveat, yes, there are many advertised "VPN" tools that are mostly thin veneers for data mining, or, worse, for straight-up remote-execution malware. Due diligence is recommended.)

In my experience, the most common reason is what I might approximately call "geolocked services". Which, yes, includes the proverbial foreign Netflix (though you'd need a really good data plan for that, and most VPNs don't really give you particularly high speed for that matter, so it would actually probably suck).

But also:

government-ish websites only available in their home country

less restrictively, government-ish websites specifically not available in a particular unfriendly-to-their-home country

videos/articles/other sites not available in a particular country due to legal challenges

anything that blocked EU visitors because it was easier than trying to comply with GDPR (reportedly this was a big problem for a while; not sure if it still is)

websites (frequently online stores, but sometimes also e.g. FAQ sites) that try to redirect you to a localized version even if it doesn't have what you're looking for

in particular, websites that try to redirect you to a localized version even if it's not available in English/in your other preferred language

...I guess a lot of the "blocked by your provider" stuff would also go here, especially if it's for government reasons, e.g. in Russia and China

...but IPs from Russia, specifically, also (on top of the previous problem) get blocked by a lot of sites that decided it would be a good thing to do in protest of the war

it's also common to block large IP ranges pre-emptively just because they're commonly used in spam attacks; this non-infrequently extends to entire countries, or at least entire large providers

This is Serine's points 3, (part of) 5, and (small bits of) 2 - essentially, whenever you need to mislead the service you're trying to access about your actual location.

(I see that another comment in the chain had mentioned that this kind of thing comes up a lot for dual citizens. Having personally dealt with some corresponding problems, I can confirm that yes, it does.)

Other somewhat less common (but still fairly frequent) reasons include local ISP problems (particularly in places like cafes and airports, but sometimes also for bigger ISPs as well) - that is, the rest of Serine's point 5 - as well as, yes, ban/block evasion (another part of Serine's point 2).

[I think that anyone using VPNs for ban evasion is doing a giant disservice to normal users, by making it that much harder to get legitimate services if their ISPs block them, and/or if they happen to be on the same provider as a common VPN exit point - because a lot of those services end up just pre-emptively blocking known VPN ranges outright, to avoid all the ban-evaders - but I understand that it's also a common use case.]

For the other points: I tend to think as Serine's point 1 (not trusting your ISP any more than your VPN) as mostly a subsection of 5 (or maybe vice versa), while point 4 (opening ports) is arcane to me and AFAICT it's a very rare situation if you're not doing serious Actual Programming stuff (but I guess it might be important if you do).

...In retrospect, there's actually a good way of phrasing this in terms of the article itself.

Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy.

...sometimes what you really need is, essentially, a proxy, glorified or otherwise, and VPN services are a convenient way of getting a (somewhat adjustable) proxy.

(If you do need something more than that, then yes, plausibly the claims in the article are warranted. I don't think I ever had that level of problems, so I don't know what it might actually look like.)

P.S. The linked article also links to another, "better written", article (the one with the cat pics), which (though somewhat briefly) makes a lot of the same points about valid use cases. Unfortunately this article fails to mention any.

if i had a dollar for every time i saw incorrect (or at least badly confused) cybsersecurity advice on tumblr i stg ahge;ilahg

i probably don't have the bandwidth to properly beat back against the information environment & anyway you should probably trust me exactly as much as any other pseudononymous rando, e.g. zero

but if you are going to be listening to randos regardless: this old article on why you probably don't want to use a VPN service is right on the money & does suggest an Actual Alternative

[yesthatsatumbler]

My googling tells me that king oranges (a.k.a. cam sành) are not the same thing as Garut oranges (notably they are usually green), and the picture in your post matches the name "Garut orange" but none of the other descriptions including the biological one

(I hadn't previously heard of either - had to look up both, and only bothered with the other names because there is apparently so little information on Garut oranges online)

Garut Orange

(citrus nobilis, var. siam)

Also known as king of Siam, Siam orange, king orange or cam sành

🍊 Reblog to share a fun fruit and to increase sample size! Check out even more interesting fruits here or in the list of all polled fruits. 🍊

[yesthatsatumbler]

with that name they should add it to Palworld if they hadn't already

Flag of Palskoe, Osinsky district, Perm Krai

Isn’t this a Pokemon?

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it is absolutely essential to have friends you can have extremely insane pervert conversations with. this is kind of what makes life worth living

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See also: Irish, which looks even more ridiculous but is actually mostly 1) the thing above + 2) a few rules for how to pronounce the words in different dialects because there's actually a few separate dialects of Irish still (barely) extant and some of them make different distinctions.

But overall, yes, French spelling is actually pretty predictable in the spelling-to-sound direction (though Irish is even more so, at least for any specific dialect). Elsewhere in the world, there's the infamous example of Tibetan that is predictable in terms of "this sequence is pronounced that" but otherwise pretty horrible for mostly-historical reasons.

English is one of the few orthographies where you actually can't derive rules to get from the spelling to the pronunciation (you can try but you'd still get about 15% of the words subtly wrong and about 5% completely wrong).

...from the notes:

I think people hate on French orthography not because it's full of exceptions, but because there are many vowel phonemes, and that combined with the rules about the pronunciation of the ends of words leads to constructions like "eaux" "ious" and "aille" for sounds that are phonetically pretty basic

AFAIK some of the weird constructions are actually for historical rather than phonetic reasons! But yeah, that too.

For an especially awkwardly compounding example, there's a character in Les Visiteurs whose name is Jacquouille (le Fripouille), and there isn't really an obvious shorter way to spell the name "Jacquouille" in modern French even though it has only five phonemes: /ʒakuj/.

french orthography is like technically "not phonetic" but i think its actually not that bad! like there's all sorts of rules about how words are pronounced depending on the words before and after them (mostly after). so if you want a word to always be spelled the same way, it CANT be phonetic in the usual sense, it's literally impossible. so *given that*, the writing system does a pretty good job of indicating how a word should be pronounced in context! like there's a finite set of rules that lets you derive pronunciation from spelling (mostly? i am not an expert in french pronunciation. or spelling), it's just not a rule that works like "always pronounce the sound represented by a single glyph"

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and now I'm imagining an alternate 1912 election where Champ Clark actually won the nomination, and between Clark being (apparently) a bad candidate, Taft being an even worse candidate, and Teddy Roosevelt being actually kinda popular but also awkwardly third party, there was an even more horrible split than IOTL and no one got a majority of the electoral vote (though either Roosevelt or Clark - or possibly both - might have gotten close)

so the House has to choose between three candidates; if everyone voted party line, there'd be 23 delegations voting for Clark, 22 for Taft, and 2 tied - in practice there'd be a few defectors to Roosevelt and it would be even more complicated the Senate is a mess and I can't find good stats on the composition in that specific period but it seems to have a few more Republicans than Democrats, but the two candidates on ballot are almost certainly going to be the Democratic and Progressive ones [i.e. Hiram Johnson and whoever Clark's running mate is], which means a party line vote is impossible; I think the Democrat wins that one but it would be close and could easily end up 48-47 or 47-47 with no one winning (the VP can't break the tie because he's dead)

...TFW this ends up with President Wilson anyway because he's the Democratic running mate and the House is deadlocked so he's elected VP and automatically becomes Acting President (this might not actually happen but I'm not sure what would)

in any case, someone should write that - not me, I hadn't actively dabbled in althist for ages and my writing skills are crap

you know when Champ Clark went out around saying stuff like “I look forward to the time when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America” it cost him the 1912 Democratic nomination

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New ask game:

Reblog if you want your followers to tell you what your trademark ™️ is. Like, what’s that thing that really identifies you.

[yesthatsatumbler]

Pre-emptive warning: I'm not a philosopher, and I write this without having actually seen any of the relevant debate (that I could recall), and as a consequence I'm pretty much cribbing from the Wikipedia article and from your post above. The following might be very wrong from an actually-philosophical viewpoint.

With that in mind: I get the impression that it's probably partly the "which world would I rather be in" option (which, yes, reframes the question in the wrong direction), and partly - perhaps more significantly? as I said, I'm not a philosopher, but this sounds like where I would mostly have been stuck, at least - a possibly-subconscious nonacceptance of the "value existing over not existing" premise at levels corresponding to only-very-slightly-happy people (or, in terms from the Wikipedia article, of the premise that people with only slightly positive welfare would still rather be alive than not exist).

It's pretty hard to imagine a world where people just barely still prefer existence over nonexistence. It's a lot easier (comparatively) to imagine a world where people are sufficiently not-very-happy that they would rather prefer to not have existed, for which, of course, the "repugnant conclusion" doesn't work in the first place. [There are people who would claim that our current world is an example of the latter.] And of course once you try to get into even slightly specific descriptions rather than generic philosophical handwaving, it turns out that the exact boundary where this is expected to happen can differ a lot depending on who's doing the expecting, so one person's slightly-happy is another person's actually-rather-unhappy, leading said other person to read the provided repugnant-conclusion tradeoff as blatantly, well, repugnant.

Assuming the premises as given, though - yeah, that pretty definitively follows, and I don't think it's at all weird. I do think that either I'm significantly overestimating what it means for someone to prefer existence over nonexistence, or (probably less likely) the people to whom the conclusion feels repugnant are significantly underestimating it; unfortunately I don't know how to tell which of those is true. (Now that I think about it, possibly both.)

...a mostly-unrelated problem that also makes things awkward: it pretty easily turns out that the theoretical population of slightly-happy people that is "better" than a normal-sized population of significantly-happy people is supposed to have Actually Quite A Lot of people, and it's significantly nontrivial to imagine that without invoking confounding negative externalities correlating to increased density of people. You're unlikely to get a useful mental image of "a lot of people being slightly-positively happy" if the place you're imagining looks like Coruscant (or, worse, Trantor).

I don't understand the unpopularity of the so-called 'repugnant' conclusion. People seem to often talk about it as a metaphorical bullet they're forced to bite despite not really liking it because all the other options are worse, but to me it seems just straightforwardly good and correct in a non-conflicted-feeling manner.

I value existing over not existing, given how pleasant my life is. It's good that I exist; the people in the past who caused me to exist made the world better thereby, by my values. And my utilitarianism is, broadly speaking, an extrapolation from my egoism: if creating me-living-a-pleasant-life was good, then the same principle generalizes to creating other people living pleasant lives being good too.

There exists a tradeoff-curve along which, for some possible trades of lifespan for happiness, I value living a longer-and-less-happy-per-moment life over living a shorter-and-more-happy-per-moment life. I wouldn't take a drug to make me 10% happier for the rest of my life in exchange for a 90% reduction in my lifespan, for example. This also generalizes: the creation of ten people as happy as I am would be better than the creation of one person 110% as happy as I am.

Given that, the 'repugnant' conclusion follows naturally. Yes, of course there's an exchange rate at which it becomes better to have extremely large numbers of slightly-happy people rather than few very-happy people; that's pretty much directly implied by the prior two paragraphs. It doesn't seem like a bullet to bite; it just seems like a natural shape for a world-better-than-the-alternatives to potentially take, much as a world in which I don't take dramatically-lifespan-reducing temporarily-slightly-happiness-increasing drugs is better than its alternatives.

I don't really get what the opposing viewpoint is here, under which it does seem like a bullet-bite and not just straightforwardly appealing. The closest I can figure out is... some sort of implicit gerrymandering, or something? Asking, not "which world would be better?", but "which world would I rather be in?", thus baking in an implicit premise that the tradeoff for world-residents is between being a little happy and being very happy rather than between being a little happy and very likely not existing (but being very happy if they get very lucky)? But I'm not at all confident in this being the whole answer, and mostly expect that there are additional factors which I've failed to model so far.

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In that one I definitely want an "I learned about the guy before I learned the word" option

(it was a silly onomatopoeic joke about bool-boolean algebras where 1+1=1) (but the relevant terminology works slightly differently in the original Russian so I feel like it doesn't count and I definitely didn't find out about the programming term [which was probably the one you meant] until much later)

[yesthatsatumbler]

al-Khwārizmī

(I think technically it's not actually a surname, but it's probably the closest thing he had to one)

(it's a locative and means "from Khwarazm")