Hetare King

They actually use the term NEET in Japan as well. There’s a lot of overlap, but I don’t think they’re quite the same. What makes a hikikomori a hikikomori is that they’re a shut-in, a social recluse, whereas a NEET can in principle have an active social life and spend a lot of time outside.

Subs, always. I don’t really consider dubs an option, unless there’s really, really no alternative. The biggest reason for that is undoubtedly growing up and living in a country where subtitles are the norm for foreign media, but I do think I have some more concrete reasons for it.

Take the line “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!” Probably, you know exactly what I’m talking about and how that line is delivered, even if you’ve never seen Midnight Cowboy (I haven’t). But I can almost assure you that if dubbed in Japanese, it would be thought of as just another line and would never become iconic. If you remove the language and the cultural context it’s spoken in, all that’s left is the literal meaning. And the same is true the other way around, if something is written in Japanese, then it’s going to typically be written with the assumption that it’s going to be spoken in Japanese.

Also, people working on the actual show are going to be involved in the recording in the original language, so it’s typically going to be closer to their intentions. To use an extreme example, Tomino Yoshiyuki (most famous for Gundam) is such a control freak perfectionist, that you can tell he’s directing from the way the voice actors deliver the lines. But the dubs of all the works he’s worked on over the decades are all going to have different ADR directors with no input from him (and even if he did have input, he probably isn’t fluent enough in English to do so effectively), so there’s no consistent (figurative) “voice”.

But most importantly, dubs just make it impossible to do any compensating for losses in translation. There’s a whole spectrum between “This language just sounds like gibberish to me” and “I’m fluent enough in the language to not need a translation”, so as long as you’re not in the former extreme, there are still things you can pick up on: first person pronouns, copulae, honorifics, dialects, levels of formality etc. And especially Japanese is, I think, a pretty translucent-sounding language to people who are used to European languages, so you end up picking up on patterns even if you’re not actively trying to learn it.

If I had to describe it in terms of individual issues:

• The big problem that needs to be solved is this hackneyed blob of pure evil that appears for no reason other than, it just something that happens every 6000 years, and the way to solve it is to follow an instruction manual.
• The way almost all the male characters interact with Leeloo is pretty icky, even when considering the time it was made.
• I didn’t feel the motivations of the characters were always that convincing.
• The acting is generally pretty poor.
• Most of the attempts at humour, which were mostly the usual 90s saucy jokes, fell flat.

I’m a bit wary of critiquing things like this, though, because when I like something, I’m also a lot more forgiving of its flaws, so when I don’t like something, it feels like a rationalisation to convey it like this. But it’s the best I got without resorting to onomatopoeia.

On the positive side, I did quite like the look of the film and the fact that the protagonist and the antagonist never actually meet or have much awareness of each other tickled me. Also, for some reason I just couldn’t hate Ruby.

The Fifth Element.

I first heard about it in the late nineties or early noughties, and I wanted to see it ever since, because liked its aesthetics and science-fiction in general, but for whatever reason, I didn’t end up seeing it until last year. But wow, what a terrible film.

I’m lucky enough that management doesn’t seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they’re pretty hands-off in general) and that I’m a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that’s not very large. So I’m actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.

I don’t really understand it. What’s the appeal? Personally, at least, the moment I realise that there’s nothing I can do in a game that affects whether I win or lose, I lose interest in it completely. Well, it’s not like I’m completely oblivious to the mechanisms here, I also get a little dopamine boost when, for example, I get a critical hit in a video game and disappointed when an attack misses, even though I can only vaguely influence the probabilities of those things happening, but that only works as a little constant pleasure differential as seasoning to keep you on your toes, it would be completely pointless as something that cumulates into a single climax.

The closest I’ve come to understanding the appeal is that the thrill of not just possibly winning money but also the risk of losing the fruits of your labour (i.e. “real stakes”, even if small), is pleasurable to some people…? But if that’s what it is, quite frankly, that’s seems less like seeking simple pleasure and more in the realm of depravity.

Anyway, I do think gambling is one of the dumbest dumbass dumb-dumb thing a person can do that doesn’t involve scooping out your eyeballs with a dirty plastic spork. Even putting aside that the odds are never in your favour and so, it isn’t rational thing to do, someone who starts gambling may not know they have the kind of addictive personality that gets them sinking into a bog, because that part of their character may have never surfaced, or only in low-stakes situations. So they’re not just gambling with money, they’re gambling with the very quality of their life.

Also, betting is just an inherently corrupting force. Even if you’re only making small bets, even if you’re not pressuring competitors to throw the match (if you even have the means to do so) or throwing banana peels into the ring to get the person you bet against to slip and fall or something, you’re contributing to the payout to the people who are, incentivising that behaviour. There’s no high payout for betting against the odds (and then working to make the unlikely the inevitable) if there’s not enough livestock contributing to the pot.

Well isn’t that cute…

I knew it as Dommel, but the English version appears to be called Wowser.

I still sometimes use the phrase “Let the archeologists sort 'em out!” from the Terrible Thunderlizards part of the show.

The etymology is a bit different from that. Otaku does mean “your house” (important distinction: it’s always the second person’s house, not your own), but it’s also used figuratively as a formal way to refer to your family or just you. There was a culture, at least in the 70s and 80s, for enthusiasts in non-mainstream fields of interests, whether that be TV manga anime, science-fiction, wargaming etc., to talk to each other in a weirdly formal way, so they kept calling each other “otaku”.

In my pockets, my keys (including a NitroKey for accessing my passwords), which are literally chained to my trousers, my phone and a little towel the size of a handkerchief.

I also carry a little, what to call it, pochette? It’s a little carrying thing around the size of my hand, that is either clipped to the strap of my messenger bag or carried on its own with a shoulder strap. It contains my passport, public transit pass, bank pass, just-in-case-cash, pen, mechanical pencil, cloth for wiping glasses, and a folded ecobag.

As for the messenger bag, it contains a carbon steel folding umbrella, which folds down to around the size of a glasses case and is very light, a larger ecobag, notebook, headphones, a bunch of USB cables and adapters, a USB memory stick, and a teeny-tiny nail clipper. Not for actually clipping my nails, but you know how sometimes a little triangle of skin around the corner of a nail gets loose and all hard and annoying? It’s for that sole purpose. Also, I typically carry the bag when traveling a longer distance (like my commute to work), so there’s usually a book and a 3DS in there.

The big one is going to be once it stops being subsidised and people have to start paying the actual cost.

Wouldn’t it be the home they lived in the longest for most people?
Wait a minute, I know what you’re up to! You’re trying to discover whether there are any bears on the internet, aren’t you!?

In order to be able to get information on the web, people need to put it on the web first. And for that to happen, there needs to be something to motivate them to do so. What those motivations are is going to differ between people and situations, could be a pure desire to contribute to the commons, could be part of how they make their income, could be any other number of things. But if putting something on the web means accepting that you’re going to be helping vile companies achieve their goals and the way most people may see this information is in a perverse form, riddled with falsehoods and with no attribution (or maybe worse, mostly falsehoods attributed to you), and there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s going to put a damper on a lot of those motivations, and the ones that aren’t tend to be the less desirable ones.

And it’s not just information that’s on the web, it’s also collaborative efforts like open source software. Why do people release source code under licenses like the GPL? Because they believe those constraints lead to a better outcome than if they had just put it in the public domain. That their contributions to the commons lead to more contributions to the commons, even from people who may not be inclined or incentivised to do so. If it becomes trivial to undermine those licenses (and for the record, those licenses do get enforced and there have been companies that had to release the source code of their products because they violated the license), that may undermine the reasons for many to contribute to the project.

You can be all cool and cynical about how social contracts are made up and whatnot, but let’s be honest here; if someone beats you to a pulp because they didn’t like the way you looked at them, you’re not going to just coolly accept your broken nose and displaced ribs as just the way things work.

Unfortunately, all I can say is that the link in the post works for me and it doesn’t appear to be forwarding to anything. Somewhat ironically, it’s on the Internet Archive, though, so maybe that works for you.

Bubble will burst, many AI companies will go under, the ones that remain will have to price themselves out of reach of most people. Lack of investor confidence will trigger a third AI winter, which will affect even actual valuable uses of machine learning models and the further development of locally-run models. People who graduated college between 2023 and 202X will have a harder time getting a job. AGI will still be a far-off dream.

There’s no need to pave a road to hell if you’re already in hell because you’ve surrendered to bad intentions and now they’re all that’s left. The logical conclusion from acceptance is that it’s in nobody’s interest to put anything on the web (or anything equivalent) and have it become even more of a consumption-only medium than it already has.

Also, what’s happening right now is, in fact, the flow of information being controlled; to primarily flow towards a few powerful entities, that is. You’re neglecting to consider the effects of power differentials. Those powerful entities need to be constrained for the flow of information to actually be free.

Granted, the solution proposed in the blog post seems a bit too technical and high-friction to really be feasibly, but at least people are thinking about it.

I’m still fond of the classic “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine!”
Those kids going on about 6-7 like it’s some kind of power couple don’t know what they’re doing to poor 6.

Same idea as behind “Enough is enough, an egg is an egg.”

Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.

Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.

Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.