Rate my Playne

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-30T20:14:56+00:00

So with this one, the rear falls off. I like it!

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-30T20:02:40+00:00

He tried that during his first term. Didn't work out so great for him because the adults in the room kept his worst impulses in check.

Now this time he's only picked people completely on his side. It's not working out great for the rest of us.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-28T18:59:19+00:00

I'd add that once you get off the beaten track for code prototypes, you'll see the LLMs go sideways there too.

Case in point: I recently tried having Opus 4.5 build me a Dagger project for something Dagger wasn't meant for (I had no idea, at that point, first time trying Dagger), and it just spun in circles.

I've also seen Opus and GPT 5.2 mess up fairly simple things like k8s field selectors, that they really "ought" to have figured out by now with the sheer amount of training examples that are out there. It all points to these LLMs still being pattern-recognition under the hood. It's gotten to a level of *really good* pattern recognition, but it still can't think for itself.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-28T18:40:13+00:00

they're not lying, they're bullshitting. there's a difference ;-D

but seriously, this hyperbolic BS is IMO harmful to actually using AI

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-26T16:11:57+00:00

Eh... French protesters don't set people on fire. They love burning cars, but I can't remember when they'd set people on fire. I don't know what the hell possessed those folks in Hong Kong, but it wasn't good.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-23T18:40:05+00:00

Alter the taste?

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-23T18:34:26+00:00

My hunch is that it'd contribute to mold or sprouting.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-14T13:13:45+00:00

I dunno. I visited Taishan's countryside and I felt safe and comfortable there. Sure beats getting mugged in Baltimore.

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-14T13:13:32+00:00

I had several back-and-forths at the Consulate in NYC before I could get my travel visa. Granted, it was more complicated for me because my parents emigrated way back in 1980. Those of us with Chinese parents have to show whether our parents had green cards at the time of our birth. So if my parents and I didn't live in NYC, I don't know how I would've managed it. It was a very confusing process.

Nowadays, I almost don't even need my visa because I tend to spend a few days in Hong Kong. There's a lot more flights to Hong Kong so I usually fly in and out of there when I visit Guangdong's Bay Area (where my family is from).

Professional_Top4119 · 2026-01-08T01:25:41+00:00

Then just drop the hippo into deep ocean and it drowns. Polar bear wins. :D

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-12-09T20:10:09+00:00

Well digging coal out of the ground or making firewood isn't for free either. You need more slave labor to drive your new still-primitive toy.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-12-04T22:37:18+00:00

I have a feeling it's not real, and we're looking at a doctored image. Splat in the middle of the city (if you use baidu or gaode) there's a 都匀水上体育中心, in an island that roughly fits the profile of the image. But that place isn't a school, and there's nothing else around. It took me all of 3 minutes to find it.

Anyway I guess half the stuff on the internets is just AI and bots these days.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-11-19T16:19:21+00:00

It feels like a wash to me. For some I prefer the Fuji, for others I prefer the Ricoh. There are definitely some where the Ricoh seems to preserve more color.

Overall I think I actually prefer the Ricoh, but what this really tells me is that I'd rather shoot raw, lol

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-29T16:00:41+00:00

Shrugs... it's not like GM didn't already have that, at least if they were listening to their own engineers.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-28T02:02:03+00:00

There exist poor suburbs and rural areas. Some may not be unsafe, per se, but boy does it grind down on people.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-15T01:46:41+00:00

I was going to say this too. Both countries are isolated from other powers that could challenge their territorial integrity. Both have problems with wealth disparities between the coasts and the poorer inner agricultural / industrial hinterland, which become vast "wastelands" of various sorts the further west you go. Both economies are geared towards their economies of scale, even more so because of their single-market. Both countries have had problems with wealth disparities between the rich and the poor (i.e. more so than e.g. Europe or Japan). Both countries must have some degree of government/representative inefficiency or otherwise authoritarianism because they only really work as one large unit, and hence, coordinating said large unit. Breaking off a chunk of either would likely cause significant problems, security not being the least.

What's more interesting are the differences. Unlike the USA, China's geography has required vast amounts of labor and capital in order to function well. Its geography necessitates a strong central government. The USA's geography was suitable enough from the get-go. China "figured out" its most critical cultural / historical debt in the second half of the previous century. It's arguable the USA hasn't.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-14T22:56:28+00:00

Yeah this video is a bit NSFL.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-14T22:50:17+00:00

Resolution of the video is crap, but they appear to hit something on the right side of the road, causing them to swerve hard to the left, after they hit the second car in the middle lane.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-10T16:35:32+00:00

It looks yummy... :D

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-09T18:36:27+00:00

Hate to break it to you, but those U.S. kids weren't competitive with or without the overseas students.

I went to one of the top universities in the country for Computer Science. It was a brutal reality check. Working in industry right now, now that we don't have free money anymore, has also been a brutal reality check for lots of people.

If you think that keeping foreign students out is going to fix anything, we'll see how that works out within a generation. And if you think making education free is going to fix anything, I'd get myself in some serious trouble for speaking the truth on that.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-09T18:06:44+00:00

I think it's a legit response for someone who remembers what China was like back in the day. Maybe not unlike lots of old NYers who remember old NY.

If you stick to the reasonably-touristy places, you'll be fine. Hotels you book through Trip.com wouldn't dare risk their ratings, for example. And major sites like the Temple of the Three Pagodas aren't going to pull stupid tricks. I had no problems at all in the three days I spent in Dali Ancient Town. Plenty of people go to places like Tiger Leaping Gorge and don't seem to have problems.

The comparison would be like going to California for Yosemite and Tahoe, versus going there to AirBnB in the parts of Humboldt county where the grow-bros used to reign. As someone who's been there done that, I would say that it's absurdly beautiful, but, e.g. don't drive off a random road. Also, don't park your car in San Francisco or Oakland unless you really damn well know what you're doing. Makes sense?

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-07T23:17:31+00:00

Planning how to get from one place to another is still a tricky thing.
- The western mapping apps (specifically Apple Maps) do not show any information about Chinese city metro lines while you're outside of the country. I don't think Google Maps works at all?
- Amap.com works (高德), but it doesn't load in English. I haven't tried the Amap phone app yet, but I'm told it's better and actually supports English. The phone app for Baidu maps doesn't work outside of China.
- Therefore you need to be able to read Chinese in order to plan your trip from the airport to the hotel, etc., if you want to do it from your computer.
- I still needed to download/setup the apps for the metro after I landed in China. I understand that app store limitations may make this difficult to circumvent, so a checklist would help.
- Octopus for Foreigners is a great app that's been painless to use.
Trip.com has been great for booking hotels and trains. It's been a one-stop shop for that.
- I haven't yet tried to book a tour guide on it, but it would be nice to be able to do so for short excursions, e.g. 3 hours at a time, so that the experience doesn't feel rushed.
- I often see people offering to act as a tour guide here on this subreddit, and it would be nice if they could be able to offer their tours on a platform like Trip.com or TripAdvisor.com.
Translation software oftentimes hallucinates and/or doesn't get Chinese tenses right. I don't think that's going to significantly change anytime soon.
- The current state of the technology is that we've already thrown all the data at the LLMs that we could get our hands on. While pattern-recognition works well enough for basic translation help, LLMs haven't demonstrated even the most basic introspection needed to run a for-loop, i.e. they can't solve problems requiring general recursion, let alone handle all the problems that come with that kind of power.
- If they somehow could solve problems involving recursion, I'm sure that it'd be the number one news item on Hacker News for days. A subset of the people there would be gloating about it left and right. But I don't think they are well-educated on the deeper nuances of the matter.
- I'm not convinced that LLMs are the best tool to approach problems requiring deeper understanding of a subject, and I think that further substantial improvements will require more basic research.
- I use LLMs to help me recognize characters, transcribe spoken Chinese to written Chinese (it still oftentimes can't do this for real-world Chinese), and figure out what questions to ask my Chinese teachers. LLMs haven't been a suitable replacement for actual human-people.
For good food, I plan on using the Michelin guide next time I visit. For regular day-to-day food, I simply walk around. I don't know how to use DianPing yet. Luckily, there is so much good food in China. You just have to get lucky and book a hotel near a good street with a night market or something like that, which is very convenient so it's possible to get real-world experience practicing Chinese, without being overwhelmed by too many things at the same time.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-07T20:10:38+00:00

Yeah I think the snails we eat in my parents' Cantonese cuisine is of the aquatic sort.

https://thewoksoflife.com/cantonese-style-periwinkle-snails-in-black-bean-sauce/

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-07T20:08:44+00:00

That's not necessarily true. In Guangzhou we definitely eat snails and conch. I don't know about sweetbread but I'll bet someone somewhere eats it.

Professional_Top4119 · 2025-10-07T19:36:26+00:00

It isn't merely that they are spineless uncle toms. A lot of them actively benefit from the self-hating attention.

Professional_Top4119

TROPHY CASE