sohois
2hr ago
Yeah this narrative seems completely false from my experience. Email has been an abysmal channel for years now. Spam filters killed off much of its efficacy like a decade ago. Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.
sohois
2hr ago
But the thing about self-driving cars is that they are already better than human drivers. There's just a huge wall of tradition preventing them from becoming much more widespread.
Meat processors aren't going to give a shit if robots can only attain 98% accuracy or something
sohois
2d ago
I feel like the simplest answer to your question is that yes, NeZha 2 is a children's movie, with all the baggage that entails. If you asked a film critic about Chinese cinema in general, I don't think they would have any trouble naming plenty of great films and directors (even if you completely exclude Hong Kong). Mass market stuff remains mass market, regardless of where that market is. You bring up Studio Ghibli as a comparison, but 90% of anime remains "I can't believe I was reincarnated as my sister's tampon!" and other such garbage.
I think it is fair to say that, for its size and wealth, modern China punches well below its weight when it comes to cultural output. Music remains completely confined to the domestic market, TV is shockingly bad, and even where they've had some success of late like in video games it's still very much imitation rather than genuine originality.
And undoubtedly, part of this is down to the repressive government structure in place, relative to Korea or Japan. If AI wasn't going to completely upend things anyway, I'd still estimate that it would be less than a decade before Chinese media started to really penetrate international markets
sohois
7d ago
Perhaps, we probably won't ever know. Cummings own story was that Boris simply couldn't bear having the liberal media against him and wanted to bring them onside, but of course he would make himself look good. The best evidence in favour of Cummings is that none of the other Tories have mentioned him or even come out against the Boriswave, with Patel the most recent to defend the legacy. Seems like the Tories are quite happy to own the disaster entirely
sohois
8d ago
To be fair, an advisor who was bounced out as the Boriswave began can't really do anything. He didn't hold "office" in the sense of being an MP who might influence the government.
In the counterfactual where you think Cummings took big actions against the wave of immigration, what do you suppose he would have actually done?
sohois
9d ago
As you're in the UK, you can put 20k a year into a stocks and shares ISA and any gains you make are tax free. Just go open one with Vanguard and then you can pick the stock indexes to follow
sohois
12d ago
The first game was set amongst rural Bohemia, with a handful of villages. It was very much in keeping that the game have no ethnic minorities in such far flung places. The second game is set in Prague, a major city. It is very much in keeping that the game have a few traders from distant countries in the city.
The "chuds" can certainly point to the sudden inclusion of a gay romance as a betrayal from Vavra, but the reactions to this Musa character just look like incoherent rage. As others have pointed out, even his over the top dialogue makes sense for a Muslim character from the wealthy Malian empire
sohois
16d ago
Did he fall into some ideological trap or what happened?
He got old. He's 87. He's also still extremely prolific, especially for his age. If you look at some of his contemporaries, they do a lot less now. The younger Scorsese and Spielberg still put out a decent number but far fewer than Scott. Only Eastwood has a similarly high release rate. Scott put out 7 films in the 2010s and already has 4 films this decade. Some of these films are crap and some are good; The Martian in 2015 received a bunch of Oscar noms while the more recent pair of House of Gucci and The Last Duel both reviewed reasonably well.
When you're pumping out so many films it's inevitable some will be good and some bad. As he ages the balance tilts towards more bad films, which is much the same as Eastwood. If he was a lot pickier like Scorsese he'd probably still have mostly hits
sohois
1mo ago
Taleb is just another example of the corrupting influence of Twitter. Read his books when he publishes and ignore anything else
sohois
1mo ago
Multiple people have linked it, but no one has yet pointed out that the author is a female (cis I believe)
sohois
1mo ago
What about Ireland? I know they have similar issues with unaffordable housing and have seen protests due to some immigrant crime, but I can't recall hearing about massive increases there
sohois
1mo ago
Maybe you have reversed causality here? H1bs can be kept on payroll without having to offer them anything more, you can keep salaries down with no complaints. Americans who learn new skills and gain more experience want to increase their earnings, but companies don't invest in wage growth so people have learned you need to jump ship regularly to keep earning. This is not just an American software thing either, across the Western world salaried employees seem to have learned the lesson that you need to change jobs every 2-4 years to actually make serious progress in earnings
sohois
1mo ago
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Lenovo thinkpad, a personal machine. Windows 11, which was immediately decrapified and since then has largely been worry free. Never noticed any ads, untoward installations, or other issues
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Work Macbook Pro. It's fine, certainly doesn't give me any desire to switch my personal machine though
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Old Macbook Air that I kept from a previous role. Absolute piece of crap, by far the worst laptop I have ever owned, but we kept it around and now my wife uses it.
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Phone-wise I've always stuck with Chinese mid-rangers and don't have any desire to change that. My wife is on Apple for phones as well, she took my work iPhone.
I used to have beefier laptops for gaming, but rarely have the time these days and instead just use Geforce Now streaming on any of the above devices. Pretty flawless experience for me
sohois
2mo ago
No, I don't really care for horror so it probably wouldn't do much for me. I'm expecting Anora to take the top spot once I get round to it given Baker's films are always good
sohois
2mo ago
Typical for most years, there wasn't much at Cannes this time round and a lot of the Oscar bait will come out December/January.
sohois
2mo ago
Just at home on a large TV. While plenty of the film is nice to look at, it's not a film I'd say needs the cinema experience
sohois
2mo ago
Did we ever have a thread for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis? A quick search suggests just one post, but perhaps more people have seen it by now.
Personally, it was the best of films, it was the worst of films. A plot that is barely there, constantly jumping from one thread to the other. Direction which swings from "yes, this is supposed to be so bad it's good" to "hey look how amazing I am at directing". Driver's main character can stop time just for no reason at all. For that matter, Driver and Esposito are called Catilina and Cicero, but the plot doesn't follow the Cataline conspiracy at all, and Catalina is also called Ceasar for some reason. The main macguffin of megalon is never explained, nor is Catalina's plan for the city. At the end there's some bizarre futuristic landscape that you accept, it really comes out of nowhere. None of the characters seem to have coherent motivations.
And despite all of that, this is an incredible watch. It's not been a great year for film thus far, but this was easily the best film of the year, ahead of the likes of the Substance, Challengers, and Mad Max. The cast is near perfect and know exactly how to play it from the serious to the scenery chewing (with the exception of Emmanuel, who should be someone who can act like they can't act, rather than someone who just can't act at all). Jon Voight whipping out a bow and arrow from his giant erection is easily the best scene of the year. After a too indulgent and even trollish first hour, Coppola just goes all out on the screen. It's often stunning and often hideous. I'm still not really sure how deliberate Coppola is throughout the film; some stuff is so blatant you have to believe he intended it to be bad, but when it gets good it gets really good as well. Did he just lose control, lack oversight? Who knows? The bad stuff is often hilarious and the good stuff is just good.
I really can't blame a lot of viewers and critics for not liking or understanding the film, it is really quite incoherent in a lot of places. Nonetheless, highly recommended
sohois
2mo ago
Many men - including many of these men who desire chastity in mates - are quite dissatisfied if they cannot get laid regularly or at least rack up a reasonable body count for themselves in their youth.
sohois
2mo ago
ACX readership is now well outside of the ratsphere.
Not really a surprise that a niche spin off forum isn't super well known amongst the many substack readers. Unless you read SSC long enough to see the announcement all those years ago, or posted on the SSC reddit, it's not got any public advertisement
sohois
2mo ago
But what is today China was, 2500 years ago, just a small collection of states along the Yellow River. Gradually, over the millenia, they absorbed more and more territory into their country.
It's more like the size of the various dynasties ebbed and flowed. They at various had control of north Korea and Vietnam, and of course the Yuan dynasty was essentially the continuation of Genghis Khan and could make a claim for much of Asia.
If you look at recent history China seems pretty non-expansionist, with Tibet the only exception. They famously turned away from the opportunities of colonialism at the peak of China's power
sohois
2mo ago
Because people like to play characters that look like them? If you want women, you add women. If you want blacks or hispanics, you add them. If you want lqbt, you add lgbt.
I brought up LoL earlier and just responded to someone else on the game; it's a good case study. A Riot study found that among female players, 97% exclusively played female champions.
This doesn't mean that it's a good strategy to target what are likely niche audiences, but I don't think it's confusing why people believe in it.
sohois
2mo ago
If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.
sohois
2mo ago
I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.
So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.
sohois
2mo ago
You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"
I should perhaps have added that if I compare email open rates/click through/whatever now versus 2/5/10 years ago in the companies I have worked for, they're pretty much the same. No evidence for any further decline in effectiveness yet
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