bonsaii
3d ago
This is pretty similar to a suggestion I've heard floated around for tennis to move the service line closer to the net. The serve-return dynamic in tennis is probably the closest sports analogue to the pitch-bat dynamic in baseball. Tennis is always dealing with a similar issue where serves have become incredibly powerful. Tennis has attempted to "solve" this issue by increasing the friction and bounce of court surfaces to slow the ball with some success, but at the cost of killing much of the variety of playing styles (higher and slower bounces favor players who swing hard from the baseline).
I don't know much about baseball, but I've superficially heard that a lot of strategy goes into what kinds of pitchers you send out (fast vs curve vs knuckle; lefty vs righty). Sure, your proposal will weaken the fast ball, but it might end up weakening everything else by more in a way that flattens the game overall. Maybe it's a worthwhile tradeoff to you, but I can say that the changes mentioned above for tennis have significantly diminished my interest.
bonsaii
3d ago
Pinyin makes more sense than English orthography (likely among the worst in the world). At least it's almost 100% regular so taking a few hours to learn the rules will serve you faithfully for almost every case.
Also, "ch" already represents a different consonant sound.
bonsaii
4d ago
It's funny that you mention the "punchiness" of Japanese prose, because I think it's actually a rather un-punchy language.
I'd overall agree with you here. I mainly meant that, when it is punchy (by which I meant vaguely emotionally resonant), the way it does so is more often translatable to English in a way that I don't find to be the case for many Chinese texts.
My hot take is that the Japanese language is not quite as exotic as English-speaking Japanese learners make it out to be. It's still >4x as much work as picking up a Germanic or Romance language, but a lot of that additional work is front-loaded (hence an overwhelming number of people who never made it past the beginner stage and can only talk about how hard it is).
Yes, there is a lot of culturally-determined social subtext, but most of it is just using set phrases to express something you're already conveying with rather universal body, vocal tone, or facial expression cues. Also, a lot of this exists to an extent in English as well. "How are you?" is usually not an invitation to give a detailed update. "Next time, for sure" more often than not precedes a ghosting. We're plenty equipped to pick up on the analogous cues for Japanese with a little exposure or the right finessing of the translation wording.
The honorifics seem exotic and they give indications of the social dynamics in a conversation, but they are definitionally quite regular and rigid. Translations inevitably lose a lot of this, but you're just losing that particular feature uniformly across every text. If I were to hypothesize about why this isn't a huge impediment to foreign enjoyment, I'd posit that it has minimal role in the types of Japanese stories that foreigners find engaging, with most involving interactions between characters of shared social status. Japanese workplace dramas where these things may be more important have nearly zero attention from Western audiences. Shonen anime, one of the larger cultural exports, essentially throws honorifics out of the window. You don't need the specific Japanese first person pronoun used by an anime character to know if that person is fussy or tomboyish or rash or timid. 99/100 you'd guess correctly from their character design alone.
Regardless, a decent chunk of the features that make a given piece of Japanese prose "punchy" still seem to carry over into English. This seems less true for Mandarin. If I were to vaguely gesture at why, it would involve the idea that a larger percentage of Chinese speech feels idiomatic. After all, idioms are the extreme of densely-packed connotation. To explain the ways that hearing a character say "He kicked the bucket." differs from just "He died." would take an essay. To me, Chinese seems to use a greater variety and frequency of such idiomatic phrases in way that affects the visceral impact of more of its sentences, which cumulatively impacts the perception of a given work as a whole.
bonsaii
4d ago
Every country's entertainment sub-industries will naturally have variations. Most Japanese live-action acting performances are unwatchable to me. I find the Korean music scene (and I'm not just talking about K-pop here) to be a barren wasteland ranging from awful to uninspired. On the other hand, Japanese rock is my favorite genre of music right now and Korean movies are frequently among my favorites.
I would also just add a possible contributing factor from my experience studying multiple languages: I find that Mandarin translates particularly poorly to other languages. None of the East Asian languages translate well to European ones, but works translated from Chinese feel especially uncanny valley to the point I can sometimes recognize them as such just by reading them in English. It feels like a language where a comparatively smaller proportion of meaning is expressed literally, such that connotations don't carry over properly. The structure of the language also means that these things get packed quite densely, so you can either try to awkwardly unpack them and become overly verbose or stay succinct and lose the meaning.
bonsaii
14d ago
- Polearms (e.g., most depictions of Guan Yu or Wu Kong): I just find spinning/twirling moves aesthetically pleasing
- Dual-wielding small weapons (e.g., Chaos Blades Kratos or Talim): usually involves fun acrobatics, bonus style points for reverse grips
- Weapon + Shield (e.g., Link from Zelda): a bit too generic for my taste, doesn't feel like there's a lot of room to get creative
- Heavy weapon (e.g., two-handed axe or claymore): usually slow and cumbersome, rarely cinematic
- Shields without weapons: aside from Captain America, I've just never seen this in media
bonsaii
15d ago
US residents, I want to check if I'm stingy. What's your current baseline tip percent (pre-tax) for:
- Take-out, via online order
- Take-out, via self-service kiosk
- Take-out, via human cashier (no other services besides taking order/payment and calling you when it's ready)
- Dine-in, via self-service kiosk
- Dine-in, via human cashier (no other services besides taking order/payment and calling you when it's ready)
- Dine-in, waiter for your table
- Delivery
My current policy is:
- 0%
- 0%
- 0%
- 0%
- varies 0-15% based on my mood (always 0% if the default tip option is >=20% out of spite)
- 20%
- 20%
bonsaii
16d ago
My (admittedly superficial and possibly outdated) understanding is that liberalism has never been a significant ideological force in East Asia. Mainland China and North Korea are overtly single party states. Japan (LDP, ironically not particularly liberal nor democratic) and Singapore (PAP) are de facto single party states. South Korea and Taiwan each have two major parties at any given point, but their core disagreements are mainly on how to navigate dealing with their respective existential threats (for South Korea, whether to align closely with the US and Japan vs being more conciliatory towards North Korea; for Taiwan, whether to be more hardline vs conciliatory regarding the PRC), with economic and social policy disagreements having a much narrower Overton window than in Western countries.
bonsaii
25d ago
What characteristics distinguish your definitions of "engineer-brain" and "scientist-brain"?
bonsaii
1mo ago
Think of some cuisines you've rarely/never had. With few exceptions (Mexican probably the most notable one), the best available in the US will likely be somewhere in NYC.
You could do the standard sightseeing, but if you're limited to outside normal working hours anything outdoors will be dark and cold and really not all that impressive. If you're into art, you could hit the museums.
If you have any specific hobbies, there are a lot of specialty stores for them that might have eclectic offerings.
Otherwise, the US is sufficiently homogenized that there isn't too much that you could only find in NYC.
bonsaii
1mo ago
It's also one of the more likely scenarios, since arresting senescence is likely a more achievable task than reversal.
bonsaii
1mo ago
So in comparing, say, this site to Reddit, there's probably some complex code for managing the orders of magnitude greater traffic that themotte just doesn't worry about? Or are you mainly referring to baseline server reliability?
Question for the software engineers:
Is there anything uniquely innovative or difficult to reproduce about the software/codebase for any of the big social media platforms (particularly Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/TikTok/Youtube) or is their hold on the market mostly a result of network effects and their established large user bases?
Edit: Having clarified my thoughts after early responses, I think the core of what I want to understand is this: I know that there a many very intelligent people being paid handsomely as software engineers for these sites. Given the apparent simplicity and minimal improvement in the basic functions (from a user perspective) of many of these sites, what is it that these engineers are actually being paid to work on? Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?
bonsaii
1mo ago
Not sure if this was meant as a sincere question, but just in case: in my personal experience, I have never smelled urine in a Singaporean elevator. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the US (or even the for US in just the past week...).
bonsaii
1mo ago
Weren't Europeans saying similar things about those other countries back then?
bonsaii
1mo ago
I have a lot of questions about India and the Indian diaspora (whether US, UK, or elsewhere) that I feel uncomfortable asking anyone I know in real life. I feel like I have no sense for the actual role caste plays in life, both in India itself and in its diasporas. I’m in a STEM field so naturally I interact with many 1st/2nd generation Indians. Over the years, conversations have on rare occasion drifted to these topics and people have mentioned things like sometimes when other Indians ask for surnames they’re really trying to figure out your caste, or how their parents are have a pretty low opinion of Indians from X region. I didn’t quite feel right asking for more detail, but it seems we have quite a few Indians here so I figure I’ll give it a shot. These are rather broad questions so shrink the scope as you see fit.
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How confidently could you guess someone’s ancestral state based just on a standardized passport headshot?
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How confidently could you guess someone’s ancestral state based just on their family and given names?
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How granular/significant does regional discrimination tend to get in India vs in diaspora communities? (North vs South, state by state, city by city?)
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How confidently could you guess someone’s caste based just on a standardized passport headshot?
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How confidently could you guess someone’s caste based just on their family and given names?
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How granular/significant does caste discrimination tend to get in India vs in diaspora communities? (North vs South, state by state, city by city?)
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Can you tell what Indian language is their native language based just on their accent while speaking English?
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Do social groups in diaspora communities tend to cut across regional/linguistic lines? As a point of comparison, being in a STEM field I naturally also interact with many 1st/2nd generation Chinese. Obviously caste isn’t really a factor there, but it seems they also make little distinction by ancestral province or Chinese dialect. I’m wondering if, when I walk by the large groups of Indians playing cricket at the park speaking a language I can’t identify, are these groups usually, say, the Hindi speakers hanging out amongst themselves while the Tamil speakers have their own group? Presumably they all speak English being in America so if they were a mixed-region group they’d be using English but I rarely see large groups of Indians speaking English with each other.
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Do social groups in diaspora communities also tend to cut across caste lines?
bonsaii
1mo ago
The future here is incredibly bleak
If you go to various points in the past few hundred years, you could have looked at the then-current situations of China, Japan, or Korea and easily considered their futures rather bleak. Only a few decades ago Lee Kuan Yew was lamenting the cultural habit of people pissing in elevators in Singapore. Today they are all at or approaching the upper ends of most human development metrics. What could you say about India today that you couldn't about those countries then that suggests India couldn't achieve similar?
bonsaii
1mo ago
Personally, I never found it much of an inconvenience. There are trash cans at every place you can buy food and most train stations. Convenience stores have seating and even microwaves to eat when you buy. Vending machines have attached bins for bottle/cans. The only time you'd need to carry your trash around is if you were eating in the middle of walking, which isn't something I personally do much and is culturally frowned upon. I don't think it's a big QoL hit, but others may disagree.
As for restaurant prices, the economies of scale effect certainly contributes. One of the interesting things about many East Asian cities is that it's often cheaper to eat out than to cook at home. Even so, many of these restaurants are almost certainly not maximizing their profit margins in the face of their demand.
bonsaii
1mo ago
From a GDP perspective, absolutely. From a utility perspective, maybe? As a hypothetical, I would obviously benefit monetarily if I worked for an extra hour and put 95% of the net earnings towards skipping an hour-long queue, but sometimes I don't really feel like working that extra hour and would rather stand in a queue reading random stuff on my phone.
I also think more generally that matching prices strictly to scarcity doesn't always improve society-wide utility. Often times you end up restricting to a clientele that has more money than genuine appreciation. Is there really more societal value if most die-hard sports fans end up watching from home because they were priced out by richer people who are there largely because they value money less and wouldn't really care if their conspicuous consumption were directed elsewhere? Obviously true from a monetary perspective, but I still tend to believe that there's more to utils than pure cash flow.
deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities
Could you expand on what you mean by this?
bonsaii
1mo ago
(Incidentally there is imho a huge underrated and interesting question about long-term space colonization, as imho space colonies are likely to be insanely productive due to founder effects, but may also be prone to regimented thinking.)
On this note, I've always thought that one of the greatest advantages the US had was in being able to construct its constitution with significantly reduced baggage/inertia. Trying to reform the US constitution today seems essentially impossible. My hope is that if space colonization ever works out that a new set of founders with foresight manage to take the chance at a fresh start at put together an even better constitution for the modern era. It would be a fun discussion to hear what people would want explicitly included.
I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture
This is a question I ask myself almost every day.
For now, I want to push back slightly on the wealth/GDP comparison. I've posted before about my struggles in thinking about it. The numbers show Americans are at median higher in per capita wealth and GDP, but it is difficult for me to square that with my personal experience actually living in the US vs East Asia. In a phrase, it feels like when I'm in the US I'm always paying more for less. Food tastes worse, interactions with a service workers feel worse, I'm shaken down for tips even on take-out, public spaces are covered in literal piss and shit, public transit is garbage, there's lower trust, principal-agent problems seem to play out with a high rate of defections, etc.
If GDP is the sum total of all money flows, how should I feel about getting paid >3x while I'm also having to shell out >2x for everything but it's all worse. PPP is supposed to account for this, but I don't think it quite captures the full picture, particularly the part where everything is lower quality. Every transaction in the US will nickel and dime you to death. In comparison, I generally feel a much greater utility surplus in places like Japan.
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When Japanese waiters just do their job because it's culturally expected while American waiters drag their feet and still whine about 20% tips not being 25%, that's not captured by GDP.
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When the best ramen shops in Tokyo don't hike up their prices despite massive queues and still put full effort into quality just out of pride in their work while American restaurants are tacking on random surcharges and skimping on ingredients, that's not fully captured by GDP.
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When the city can just delete most of its trash cans and citizens will still largely refrain from littering while Americans are paying several full time salaries to pick up dog feces, that's not fully captured by GDP.
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When restaurants don't have to pay for security guards because crime rates are low, that's not fully captured by GDP.
In the thread I linked above, someone gave the example that his wife could increase national GDP by getting a job and paying a nanny and a housekeeper, etc. instead of being a stay-at-home mom. The sense I get is that similar things are at play in every aspect of society and the US culture is one that lies on the former extreme in almost all of them.
Edit: It was pointed out that I went a bit off on a tangent. To get back to your question, my main thoughts comparing US and East Asia are that 1.) The productivity gap isn't as high as the GDP numbers would suggest and 2.) The advantages and disadvantages largely emerge from cultural differences rather than systemic ones. If I were to reduce it to a principal component, I'd put it along a "trust" axis, with East Asian inefficiencies arising from cultural rituals that may or may not be needed to maintain this trust while American inefficiencies arise from the constant defections in the setting of low trust. Given how difficult culture is to change I don't see much opportunity for a Hegelian sublation between the two but if there is one, I'd wager it'd be easier for East Asia than the US, simply because trust is far easier to maintain than it is to build.
It still seems like a miracle to me that Smash Melee, through what is mostly accident, ended up with 4-5 relatively balanced viable characters with wildly different movesets.
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