BahRamYou
3d ago
Well, the translation is all we've got to judge it by. But it doesn't read like someone struggling with translation, it just reads like a fanfic.
It is possible to translate Chinese to English and have it sound good. "the Art of War" got popular because many people thought it sounded cool. A British guy in the 40s won a literary prize for translating (and abridging) Journey to the West. And those are written in Classical Chinese, which is even more difficult to translate than modern Mandarin!
I didn't really like the 3 body problem either, but at least I could tell it had a professional author and editing.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I just took a look and read the first chapter... oof. You're not wrong.
As he said this, memories of his previous life on Earth emerged before his eyes.
He was originally a Chinese scholar on Earth who chanced upon this world. He endured a hard life for 300 years and went through another 200 years; about 500 years of his life flew by in the blink of an eye.
So many memories that were buried deen inside the heart begun to relive themselves, sprouting into life before his eyes.
"I failed in the end." Fang Huan sighed in his heart emotionally, yet there were no regrets.
I'm not a literary snob, I can appreciate trashy webnovels or light novels. But this is breaking so many rules of good writing it's just impossible to enjoy. Telling instead of showing, inconsistent tense, too many adverbs, group dialogue where it's not clear who's speaking, no paragraphs, passive voice, and some parts just seem to contradict the other parts. It reads like the author was just brainstorming ideas for cool powers and fight scenes and never got around to actually writing the novel.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I haven't seen that movie, but in general I feel the same was you about most modern Chinese media exports. It's shockingly bad. It almost seems like everything is made by an AI rather than by professional artists. And I say that as someone who likes China- I grew up loving the old Hong Kong kung fu movies, and I really respect their ability to do high-tech manufacturing. But the Hon Kong movie industry died once the PRC took over, and there just doesn't seem to be left to replace it. It's scary how the PRC just kills that kind of creative energy.
Then again, Hollywood movies are also mostly crap these days, so maybe it's a worldwide problem. Could be smarthpone addiction or something else.
BahRamYou
8d ago
It's a cute philosophical argument. But doesn't it, in practice, come down to the same thing? One person's spending is another person's income. Let's say Alices makes a sale to Bob, for $10. Two ways of taxing it. An income tax, which taxes Alice 10%, so she pays $1 to the government. Or a sales tax, which taxes Bob, so he pays $1 to the government, and he has to go sell something to someone else to earn money. Most likely in the first case, Alice would just raise prices by 10% to cover the difference, so it really ends up the same.
BahRamYou
11d ago
In general it really doesnt matter, you can buy almost any fund from almost any broker these days. Unless you're looking for something weird and exotic? But they should all offer the same broad market funds. You can also reach out to then and ask- the customer service should help you decide which broker you like.
BahRamYou
11d ago
IMO the US military is entering a dangerous period where it's actually less ready in the near future than it is now. 80s cold war stuff is getting used up in Ukraine faster than anything new can be produced, veterans from the Iraq war are retiring while they're struggling with new recruitment, and more ships are being decomissioned than commissioned. That's probably not something that any SecDef can actually fix in the near future.
BahRamYou
18d ago
I dont care about lower wages or environmental rules much. But i do think it its a bad thing when global capitalism concentrates all te production for something critical into a single place. Case in point, some people are joking that we can't oppose Denmark because they control the entire world supply of ozempic.
BahRamYou
19d ago
Are you counting Ukraine as part of Europe? Because right now the rest of Europe doesn't seem to be doing a great job of defending it. They also notably had trouble with Serbia/Bosnia in the 90s and Russia/Georgia in the 2000s. Defense is about more than just "is able to continue to exist." As always, the main problem is that those 500 million Europeans are divided into about 50 different countries that don't agree on much.
BahRamYou
19d ago
That's true, but the situation is different. North Korea did Juche out of necessity. They were a small, backwards nation being embargoed by most of the world, and also completely lacking in oil and other key resources. Today they're... still small and backwards... but they've survived, much longer than anyone thought possible (albiet with a lot of help from the USSR and China). The USA is different. We're large, rich, and have basically every kind of natural resource within our border somewhere. There's no particular the USA should have to trade with other countries if it doesn't want to. The usual econ argument is that free trade and specialization of labor makes countries more prosperous, bu the counterargument is that it leads to income inequality, alienation, and fragility as our entire industrial base moves overseas.
BahRamYou
27d ago
you're just nitpicking. Apple computers were always more expensive than other brands, and the Macintosh was considered expensive even by Apple's standards. There were many, many types of IBM and IBM computers at that time, which mostly cost a lot less. Going from Google... (https://www.neowin.net/news/the-ibm-pc-xt-launched-40-years-ago-today-but-it-got-competition-from-the-compaq-portable/)
The original IBM PC had a starting price of $1,565 when it launched in 1981 according to PC Mag. By contrast, the price for the first model of the IBM PC-XT was a whopping $7,545
So the Pc_XT was also an expensive high end computer. On the other end, you could get a commodore 64 for just a few hundred dollars.
Anyway my original point was that Microsoft isn't some uniquely evil company. They just sold a lot of software to anyone who wanted to buy it, unlike Apple with their little walled garden of Apple-only software.
BahRamYou
27d ago
First, $2500 was still a heck of a lot of money for a home computer in the 1980s. Its main competition were around $1000. Second, the original Mac in its launch state was woefully underpowered (https://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/)
Those realities could be hellish. The single floppy drive combined with the inadequate memory could make the original Mac as excruciating to actually use as it was fun to wax poetic about, with the process of just copying a single disk requiring more than fifty disk swaps and twenty minutes. MacWrite, the Mac’s flagship version of that bedrock of business applications the word processor, was so starved for memory that you could only create a document of about eight pages. Determined Mac zealots swapped tips on how to chain files together to craft their Great American Novels, while the business world just shrugged and turned back to their ugly but functional WordStar screens. The Mac was a toy, at best an interesting curiosity; IBM was still the choice for real work.
Those problems were eventually solved, but they required even more expensive versions of the Mac plus expensive peripherals:
Apple’s empire would be a very exclusive place. By the time you’d bought a monitor, video card, hard drive, keyboard — yes, even the keyboard was a separate item — and other needful accessories, a Mac II system could rise uncomfortably close to the $10,000 mark.
BahRamYou
27d ago
Not entirely a coincidence, since that guy took his stage name after getting inspried by a 1959 movie about the historical John Paul Jones.
BahRamYou
28d ago
Want to read an interesting wiki bio?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Jones
I feel like you could take almost any paragraph of that and it makes an interesting story. People just don't live like that anymore!
- started his career at the age of 13, on a slave ship
- after a few years, started to feel bad about the whole slavery thing and suddenly resigned while in Jamaica
- Started a new career on a normal ship from a lower position, but instantly got promoted to captain (at age 21) because the captain and first mate died
- "This came to an end, however, when he killed a mutinous crew member with a sword in a dispute over wages." Flees to America
- Somehow makes friends with the Continental Congress and is given command of a ship
- Leads a raid on his own hometown. Raid fails because they ran out of lantern fuel, went to a pub to get more, and "the temptation to stop for a quick drink led to a further delay"
- Goes to plunder some nearby Earl instead
- Gets given a larger ship as a reward. Famous battle ensues. Probably didn't really say the quote that's famous for, but it's a good story nonetheless.
- War ends, the US can't afford a navy anymore, so Jones has nothing to do. Goes to Russia instead, and is instantly promoted to admiral despite not speaking any Russian
- Somehow defeats a larger Turkish fleet despite the crappy Russian fleet and his translation issues
- Sneaky Prince Potemkin steals all the credit from Jones. He loses his job again.
- He gets accused of raping a 10-year-old girl.
- Catherine the Great personally intervenes to make sure the trial goes forward
- Jones tries to defend himself by saying that he thought she was 12, not 10, that he had paid her but not raped her, and that the girl's mother "lived in a brothel, and was herself promiscuous." Not the best defense there by modern standards Jones...
- After that he really can't get a job, so he makes money by publishing his memoirs. James Fenimoore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas both write adventure novels based on his life.
- Died in a random French cemetary, unknown and forgotten
- But... luckily (?) some random French guy paid to have his body mummified
- In 1905 a French general spends 6 years tracking down his body and eventually finds it.
- His body is exhumed, placed in an elaborate sarcophagus, and now rests in the US Naval Academy
- FDR tries to write a screenplay about his life, but it's rejected by Hollywood. I didn't know that FDR wrote screenplays...
Just a wild life from start to finish. I liked this quote from his biography summarizing him:
"In sum, Jones was a sailor of indomitable courage, of strong will, and of great ability in his chosen career. On the other side of the coin, it must be admitted that he was also a hypocrite, a brawler, a rake, and a professional and social climber. Although these elements of his character do not detract from his feats at sea, they do, perhaps, cast in doubt his eligibility for a prominent place in the ranks of America's immortals."
BahRamYou
28d ago
The only way it can happen under this rubric is that someone either got lucky through no fault of their own, in which case they'd better share, or else they got a leg up by taking advantage of someone else, in which case they'd better be punished.
When you put it like that, it really does sound remarkably similar to the real-life experience of communism. Got some money? Or any sort of useful property? Here's some thugs coming to confiscate it "for the people."
BahRamYou
28d ago
Even then, it's kind of a strange label. When people do that now, it's basically a historical LARP. The real Nazis weren't larping, they saw themselves as a very modern and revolutionary movement that would lead to the future.
BahRamYou
28d ago
Instagram is still pretty hip IMO. Lots of young people on there posting bikini pics. It's just a matter of who you follow. But I think the instagram format of photo-dominance is well suited for anyone who wants to be hip, regardless of age. Despite it's name, Facebook was more of a text platform.
BahRamYou
28d ago
Yeah, I remember thinking that Google Plus had some good ideas, but it was just too much work to use it properly. It's easier and more natural to just think like "LinkedIn is for work, Instagram is for hot pics, twitter is for politics." Facebook is for baby pics and connecting to my elderly relatives.
BahRamYou
28d ago
Imagine being a young adult moving for the first time away from home and to the big new city and starting your new exciting student life, only that you know no one, everyone is a stranger, and university life is complicated in all kind of ways. If I recall correctly TheFacebook had group chats, like mini message boards, which were made by students for every course (and of course used for organizing partying). You could stay organized. You could connect. This was a very useful and fun service.
This is exactly what it was for me.
... and then they took all of my private posts and photos and made them public to the entire world. I don't think I can ever feel the same trust for an internet service ever again.
BahRamYou
28d ago
Apple, Commodore, IBM, and RadioShack tried very hard to corner the market in the 1980s. It's their own fault that an upstart competitor was able to take it away from them, despite their first-mover advantage, because they did such a crappy job of actually taking care of their consumers.
Isn't that kind of a "programmer" perspective on Microsoft? From a normie perspective, Microsoft brought computers to the masses and made them useful to normal people.
- Instead of typing cryptic commands into a terminal, you could just click buttons with a GUI
- Yes, I know, Apple also had that in the Lisa and Macintosh. But those cost $10,000 in 1980s money, so no normal person could afford them.
- Yes, I know, Xerox had it even earlier. Again, no normal person could afford that or even knew that it existed.
- Instead of trying to choose between 12 different competing brands of computer that all ran totally different software, Microsoft made it easy by dominating the market with one standard that could run almost any kind of software
- Microsoft didn't just sell computers, they came prepackaged with a bunch of useful software so that it would "just work" right out of the box. Tech nerds might call that an exploitive monopoly, but normal people were pretty happy that they could easily write a document, run a spreadsheet, or get an email on this complicated gadget which they had spent a month's salary on, without having to do some complicated "software installation" process. Hell, even just Freecell and Minesweeper were mindblowing to people back then, when the alternative was ordering game installation floppy disks by a mail-order catalogue, or programming them yourself.
- A lot of their security problems were just because they had so many users, and so many hackers targeted them. Nobody bothered to target Unix or Apple back then because it simply wasn't worth it. But I'm sure they also had security problems that could have been targeted if "rich old boomer boss" had started using them en masse. hell, Richard Stallmen in his early years was notorious for hacking into people's accounts at MIT and changing their password because he believed that noone really needed a private password.
- In general, they just did what any corporation does... try to make money. IBM and Intel were exactly the same. Commodore under Jack Tramiel was even worse. The early hackers like Steve Woz were just too naive to understand how the world works. They thought they could just give away everything for free in live in a hippy paradise forever.
BahRamYou
28d ago
So, I agree with you about the "enshittification" of Facebook, and that Zuckerberg is a uniquely influential person. I wrote a post here a while back arguing that Facebook was the only real social network, while most "social" networks today are more like TV, people just watch celebrity influencers with no meaningful interaction.
I think you give Zuck too little credit though. Whatsapp might be small in the US and Europe, but it's huge in developing countries like Mexico. They use it for everything, not just social networking but basic calling and sending money. If it continues to grow, it could end up being more important that Standard Oil.
More broadly, I think Zuck is a guy who knows how to take risks. He doesn't just stay complacent. He saw that Facebook was losing it's zing, and went heavily on trying other things. Instagram worked. The metaverse didn't. But that's fine, he doesn't need to win all of his bets, he just needs to win some of them. Or even just once. I feel like all of his projects attract good engineering talent that looks to high quality networking, security, and AI. That used to be true of Google and Microsoft but is not true anymore.
Mongols started it when they invated Kievan Rus, in my opinion.
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