Valorum

general recent conversations

Discussion on answer by Alfred: What …

Imported from a comment discussion on scifi.stackexchange.com/...

Valorum

Jun 18 05:18

@J-J-J - Like any tool, it's amazing at some things and useless at others, despite the fact that you can abuse it for that purpose. You wouldn't use a hand-drill to drive in a nail, but you certainly could

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Jun 18 05:18

@J-J-J - OP shouldn't be using it, period, regardless of the prompts that he gives it.

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Jun 18 05:18

Ah, ok. It's not acceptable to use chatGPT generated text in your answer.

Valorum

Jun 18 05:18

Where is this synopsis from?

Valorum

Jun 18 05:18

Is this the story published in 1899, or an account of the real events on which that story was based?

Discussion on question by Peter - Rei…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...

Valorum

Mar 18 19:40

@Trish - It's irrelevant if the statement is made after he left office.

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Mar 18 19:40

@Martheen - He is, however, no longer in office.

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Mar 18 19:40

@Peter-ReinstateMonica - "That's a question that can easily be answered by the man himself" Really? This is a man who's been found to be mentally incompetent. I don't think his word is exactly the most reliable.

Discussion on answer by user111403: W…

Imported from a comment discussion on politics.stackexchange.c...

Valorum

Mar 12 22:23

@user111403 - Keeping in terms with our nightclub analogy, Ukraine doesn't have any money to pay for bouncers, so it agrees to pay their salaries out of the profits from the sale of drinks to customers. Are the bouncers now mafia?

Valorum

Mar 12 22:23

@user111403 - Sure, but in this instance the protection is offered by someone who's happy to simply walk away and leave you to your fate. That's not how mafia protection works, unless you consider every private security company in the world that refuses to work for free to be some kind of protection racket.

Valorum

Mar 12 22:23

I think you've misunderstood how the mafia works. If you don't pay them, the people they're "protecting" you from are their own thugs. If you're paying someone to protect you from the mafia, that's known as "hiring security" and is legitimate.

Valorum

Mar 12 22:23

@Dúthomhas - Trump isn't going to put US troops on the Russian border though. He's dead set against that.

Discussion on question by templatetyp…

Imported from a comment discussion on space.stackexchange.com/...

Valorum

Mar 2 19:01

@controlgroup - That was hilarious when it came out. Still funny now.

Discussion on question by Bob: why do…

Imported from a comment discussion on scifi.stackexchange.com/...

Valorum

Feb 20 18:25

The last two on your list are a bit of a reach

Discussion on question by galacticnin…

Imported from a comment discussion on movies.meta.stackexchang...

Valorum

Jul 21, 2024 16:00

@NapoleonWilson - Honestly at this point it's just seeming like sour grapes from yourself. The community has firmly given you its preferred direction of travel.

Discussion on question by Todd Wilcox…

Imported from a comment discussion on movies.meta.stackexchang...

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@NapoleonWilson - Gosh, If only there was some way to ignore tags that you don't like :-) You should propose that on Meta SE

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@NapoleonWilson - "policies aren't simply a direct reflection of votes to a specific post" - I'm pretty sure they are.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@NapoleonWilson - Is it? Surely the appropriate course of action is to change the policy to reflect the clear vote, and then for those who disagree with the voted for policy to then campaign to have it changed back.

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Jun 17, 2024 12:06

In the absence of a clear consensus on this being off topic, I am going to now vote for these to remain if I see them in the close queue

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

On a related note, about 30% of all closed/deleted questions are ID-this questions. Clearly there's still a strong desire from the userbase to ask them, even in spite of an outright ban. Reinstating them would result in an immediate uptick of people who are likely to get answers to their questions and remain on the site in future.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - How often do we revisit meta policies? That's a difficult question. I'm going to go with more than never, but less than often.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - My rep is twice yours. I should get two votes to your one.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - Everyone gets a vote. Simple and clean.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - I have seen this argument used before, and it didn't convince me at the time either. Occasional users are not any less 'members of the community' than people who visit more regularly. We need both in order to be successful as a site.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - ultimately, there are a few points in favour; lots of people enjoy the challenge of actually identifying a movie from a description, It genuinely helps the asker (far more so than learning what the laser pistol in Alien is called) and ultimately, it also serves a signpost to other people who are trying to find the same property. I've lost track of the number of "Thank you!!. I was also looking for this!!!!" answers that I've had to delete over the years. Hundreds probably. Maybe thousands.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - ID questions on SFF:SE are extraordinarily well tagged. If you set the tag to ignore, I would be astounded if you saw 1 in 100 unless you are on the site constantly

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - that was what was frustrating about people wanting to ban ID-this-Movie questions. Lots of people very clearly do like them. Quite a few people clearly do not like them. But the people who do not like them were unwilling to use the tools available to hide them, and instead chose to destroy them utterly

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@ToddWilcox - You are, of course, aware that you can select a tag and "ignore" it.

Valorum

Jun 17, 2024 12:06

@galacticninja - What is most frustrating is that not only were the questions declared off-topic, the moderators then salted the ground by asking for the wealth of existing questions to be utterly destroyed, so even if they would allow the decision to be revisited (spoiler, they won't), we'd have to start over from scratch.

Discussion on question by IAG: Can an…

Imported from a comment discussion on academia.stackexchange.c...

Valorum

Apr 27, 2024 20:18

I do worry that you're this dude; academia.stackexchange.com/questions/56220/…

Discussion on question by Mitsuko: Is…

Imported from a comment discussion on academia.stackexchange.c...

Valorum

Mar 29, 2024 15:34

You can stop them using AI tools by make them write the essay in a quiet room with people to make sure they aren't cheating. I call this examination of their skills a "Valorum Chamber"©

Discussion on question by Mark: What …

Imported from a comment discussion on christianity.stackexchan...

Valorum

Mar 27, 2024 19:52

Historically the Church's response has been "Come here so that I can torture you to death, you heretic"

Discussion on answer by Valorum: How …

Imported from a comment discussion on movies.stackexchange.com...

Valorum

Mar 22, 2024 19:33

@BuckThorn - as to who knew that Luke was Darth's son. The simple answer is that the entire Jedi Order was destroyed on the day that he was born, so none of them did except for Yoda and Obi-Wan.

Valorum

Mar 22, 2024 19:33

@BuckThorn - if you are asking 'in universe' then it is a perfectly acceptable question.

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Mar 22, 2024 19:33

@BuckThorn - You're welcome to ask how a simple wooden pyre could melt durasteel.

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Mar 22, 2024 19:33

@RANSARA009 - At present there's no answer, but a future work may solve it for us.

Valorum

Mar 22, 2024 19:33

@RussellBorogove - Frankly, I think you're overthinking it.

Discussion on question by d-b: Can so…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...

Valorum

Jan 28, 2024 18:27

@Bib - I like to think I'm reasonably even-handed. I wouldn't have any issue with him being found to have committed a sexual assault if there was a scintilla of evidence.

Valorum

Jan 28, 2024 18:27

@Bib - I was referring to the earlier court. As you say, this (current) jury was directed to consider his guilt as already having been proven.

Valorum

Jan 28, 2024 18:27

@Bib - Typically a jury, when confronted by an absence of evidence would find in favour of the defendant. That didn't happen in this instance. It's arguably because of who he is, rather than the strength of her case that the jury found in her favour.

Discussion on question by Someone: Wh…

Imported from a comment discussion on law.stackexchange.com/qu...

Valorum

Jan 6, 2024 21:34

@GerardAshton - English names in England, I mean. What the colonials do with the English language is their own beastly business.

Valorum

Jan 6, 2024 21:34

Special characters (aside from apostrophes and hypens) are not allowed in English names, nor is unusual capitalisation. Robert Drop Table Students would probably make it through the registrar process, but not the brackets or semi-colons.

Discussion on answer by Paul Johnson:…

Imported from a comment discussion on skeptics.stackexchange.c...

Valorum

Jan 3, 2024 00:30

@IMSoP - I'm reasonably certain that an element heater that was 100% efficient at converting electricity into heat energy would kill everyone for miles around.

Discussion on answer by Valorum: Why …

Imported from a comment discussion on movies.meta.stackexchang...

Valorum

Dec 12, 2023 14:21

@FreeMan - Sorry, this question was posed rhetorically. I was referring to the decline that came about as a direct result of banning ID questions. It would appear that a significant portion of the site's userbase stopped showing up almost immediately afterwards and Movie:SE has never recovered since.

Valorum

Dec 12, 2023 14:21

Obviously the next question is "What happened in 2018 that resulted in such a precipitous decline in questions and answers?"

Valorum

Dec 12, 2023 14:21

@Laurel - If there were more questions, there would be more questions to vote on. If there were more answers, there would be more answers to vote on. I think the major problem is that there's simply less quality content all round, and that stems from the decline in the active userbase.

Valorum

Dec 12, 2023 14:21

@AnkitSharma - I'm at a loss why you're clinging to the Winter Bash thing when the query is annual and it's been trending downward for multiple years

Discussion on question by jw_: Have i…

Imported from a comment discussion on movies.meta.stackexchang...

Valorum

Nov 23, 2023 21:44

@NapoleonWilson - There are none so blind, etc. We now have excellent tools to allow people to simply ignore their least favourite questions.

Valorum

Nov 23, 2023 21:44

Personally, I'm surprised that a moderation team that's presided over such a dramatic decline in readership hasn't looked long and hard at what they've done wrong. Perhaps smugly excluding thousands of users wasn't the smartest idea...

Valorum

Nov 23, 2023 21:44

@NapoleonWilson - the overwhelming majority who voted the last time we asked also said that they likey. It's only a small group of curmudgeons (who tricked the system) that don't. And most of those haven't bothered to hang around anyway, after screwing the others over.