bonsaii
1mo ago
If I could digitally project my consciousness on and off by choice to free myself from neck/back pain so I can just read/think without concern for posture, hunger, etc. I would probably do it for >70% of my day.
But if it had to be a permanent one-time decision then no (at least not unless my physical condition deteriorates much further). There are too many real-world physical sensations that I can't imagine giving up: snowboarding down a powdery mountain, making perfect contact on a full-force tennis swing and knowing you set your feet in position perfectly and watching the ball go exactly where you willed it, cutting through the water with a well-executed freestyle rhythm.
I felt similarly to you about many things before trying out the above. I would say try out some physical activities that have that sort of instant and unique tactile feedback if you haven't. Rock climbing is another that seems popular for it, though I never really felt drawn by it. People talk about runner's high, or a sense of relief after an intense lifting session, but I absolutely hate running and weight-lifting. It'll be different for everyone.
bonsaii
1mo ago
It seems the real issue is letting people make decisions when they aren't (or don't realize they are) the ones to face the consequences.
bonsaii
1mo ago
So I’ve been asked to take an MBTI for a work activity and was told that we would be assigned to teams based on our results. Mildly surprised to see it used this way since I’m in a STEM field, but whatever. It’s not a significant project by any means (a few hours per week at most) and I self-reported my results honestly (INTJ).
They likely want to mix personality types. I don’t buy into MBTI, but I think the I-E and T-F axes are at least somewhat consistent. Based on the quiz they sent us, EXFX types appear to be people uninterested in logical thinking, impenetrable to reasoned argument, and less organized (literally had questions like "I tend to miss deadlines" and "I go with my emotions over logical thinking").
So if this were actually an important project for your career progression, how would you self-report to get the best potential team?
bonsaii
1mo ago
I have great contempt for most so-called ethicists, and as far as I'm concerned, mutually positive sum transactions between consenting individuals should be accepted, if not celebrated.
Would you say the same about the sale of heroin between a dealer and a buyer?
If your answer is anything but yes, doesn't that suggest there are at least some cases where making the option of something available is a net negative to at least one of the individuals in question, even when they are able to consent?
bonsaii
1mo ago
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.
bonsaii
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo ago
What characteristics distinguish your definitions of "engineer-brain" and "scientist-brain"?
bonsaii
2mo 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
2mo ago
It's also one of the more likely scenarios, since arresting senescence is likely a more achievable task than reversal.
bonsaii
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
Weren't Europeans saying similar things about those other countries back then?
bonsaii
3mo 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
3mo 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?
Forgive my ignorance: if globalization suppressed the wages of
blue collarmanufacturing/farming workers, why didn't it then commensurately suppress their cost of living? Naively, if the cost of labor inputs to everything made by those workers goes down, the prices of all relevant end products should go down. I get that a significant part of the cost of living crisis is housing, healthcare, and education, which are all affected by various forms of natural and artificial scarcity, but have most other goods actually gotten any more affordable than pre-globalization?If not, where did all of the savings and productivity gains of globalization go?
If so, then is the "cost of living" crisis more accurately just a "cost of specifically housing, healthcare, and education" crisis?
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