sohois
6d ago
Moutai is certainly the biggest brand when it comes to Baijiu, but I learned long ago that price and brand has approximately zero relation to quality. For those who haven't tried it, most people tasting Baijiu for the first time describe it as something akin to paint thinner. Considering that many bottles will go for about the same as a beer, this isn't too surprising. However, even when you get into the expensive stuff, the paint thinner quality rarely goes away. I have had some nice Baijius in my time, but almost never the super pricy ones.
Also some super pedantic notes:
- The Bund in Shanghai refers to the riverside (West) street filled with historic buildings, it's not a shopping street. Given it's location, all kinds of shopping streets feed into it, but I'm guessing you are referring to one of the connecting streets; it's been a while so I can't remember which was the main shopping street connecting to People's Square.
- Yuan means Park or Garden, so the correct name would be Yu Park or Yu Gardens, Yu Yuan park is redundant.
sohois
7d ago
This is the culture war thread after all. If there wasn't a culture war angle to this, it wouldn't even be here as a post - it is relevant because UK media and government figures are obsessing over the show, insisting it is vital to understanding young men and should be shown in schools, etc.
I saw someone make a comparison to the film La Haine. That film provoked plenty of discussion in its native France, was shown in a government meeting (IIRC), much like Adolescence. La Haine is now widely regarded as a classic film, but I don't think this reputation would have any bearing on a talk of whether it was relevant for the French government, or whether it had any lasting impact on policy and so forth.
sohois
14d ago
Scanning and OCR is a good one I forgot. As @Ioper mentions, it's been good for a long time, but the advances in OCR in particular are pushing things like translation forwards.
One new app I have got on my phone now is https://recipekeeperonline.com/, one of those paywalled apps you mention. It's allowing me to digitize my entire cookbook collection, and it really is pretty impressive how well it converts a huge number of different recipe formats into pretty perfect ingredient lists and steps, without any involvement from me
sohois
14d ago
various French things but I don’t count them as British food
one problem with this is that once you get past the iconic dishes, you're left with a lot of simple preparations that have commonalities all over Europe, or dishes that have murky origins and aren't wholly any one country's to claim. There are fish stews and preparations for baked, steamed, smoked, and fried fish that all have origins in the UK but can also be found in many other nations. Kipper is perhaps the most British of the smoked fish, although you'll find preserved Herring in much of Scandinavia and the low countries as well.
Tartar sauce, for example, is obviously derived from the French sauce tartare, but the British preparation as served with fish is very much unique from the French approach.
Fish pie itself is definitely one Britain can claim, and is often much more than just cod. One ingredient you'll find in both fish pies and tartar sauce that is uniquely British is hard boiled egg (sounds odd but offers a nice textural contrast). Stargazy pie is another well known fish pie dish, although it's odd appearance doesn't present it well
'Potted' fish, whether crab or many other types of fish, is British but again not only practiced here. Other shellfish preparations for the likes of whelks and cockles are typical of British seafood. One shellfish dish that might not seem overly British is prawn cocktail; the US has plenty of shrimp cocktail recipes, and prawns served with a cocktail like sauce isn't especially British, but the prawn cocktail you would order on a pub menu would undoubtedly be British in origin.
sohois
14d ago
I got a new phone recently. Not a great one, it's a downgrade on my previous phone in several areas and the march of enshittification in phone design is clearly continuing at pace.
But that topic has been done to death and I wanted to ask something else of the community. What uncommon or interesting things can you do with a modern smartphone?
It occurred to me as I was transferring everything over that I have barely changed how I use a smartphone since I bought my very first over a decade ago. I can emulate more games consoles now, and I grudgingly use some of the digital wallet features, but otherwise all the years of development doesn't seem to have changed anything at all. Are there cool features or applications that I'm missing out on?
sohois
14d ago
The English don’t really eat fish either
Aside from the posts below pointing out that these stories are mostly pro-immigrant propaganda, there are loads of traditional English dishes for fish that aren't deep-fried cod. The thing is, British food is not particularly popular worldwide; few people could name more than 10 British dishes.
This also kind of answers the Irish question: what Irish food of any kind can people name? Potatoes, Guinness, and Beef stew (with potatoes and Guinness) are about the limit of it. It's historically a small and poor nation, long a part of Britain anyway with little time to develop their own cuisine.
sohois
26d ago
The Uk's muslim immigration issue is in large part a legacy of the empire. Even before the numbers blew up under Blair, the UK always had a stream of former subjects from the Indian subcontinent. This meant there were big existing communities of Muslim to marry into or find jobs with, putting aside the attraction of having a ready made community.
sohois
27d ago
I recall similar, a graph in one of TheZvi's roundup's showed they were rapidly gaining on OpenAI's enterprise marketshare and were comfortably second place. The Lyfts are more like Google and Facebook
sohois
28d ago
I just used this when I got a windows 11 laptop, ended up basically identical to old windows 10 builds with it: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/windows-10-11-decrapifier/975250
sohois
1mo ago
Agreed, this seems pure fantasy. A battletested army? Well if it's a test it's pretty clear they have failed spectacularly.
I have no idea what Trump thinks, but I'd say the US military and other 3 letter agencies will be largely very pleased with the outcomes of this.
sohois
1mo ago
Even if it did have preprocessed subtitles, presumably "gambler" just appears like that regardless of pronunciation?
sohois
1mo ago
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
sohois
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo ago
Taleb is just another example of the corrupting influence of Twitter. Read his books when he publishes and ignore anything else
sohois
2mo ago
Multiple people have linked it, but no one has yet pointed out that the author is a female (cis I believe)
I wouldn't translate it like that. A simpler translation would just be Mouth Happiness, but the impressive thing about Coke's localization is that it's pronounced Ke Kou Ke Le, so they managed a name which is both phonetically accurate and still has a useful meaning. Most Western brands just go for a rough transliteration without a clear Mandarin meaning.
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