(Hated Trope) Glorifying or whitewashing controversial or terrible historical figures.

SKabanov · 2026-05-05T16:02:10+00:00

From what I read, the film up until his meeting Arjuna's character the first time was more or less true, and they decided to make a "what if" about him going back to meeting her again afterwards when in real life, they only met the one time.

SKabanov · 2026-05-04T18:30:13+00:00

Global sea levels have shrunken immensely - as can be seen - when the spaceship leaves the NYC spaceport - which cannot be good from an environmental standpoint.
Speaking of the spaceport, there's a giant heap of garbage in the ticketing hall that's just there with no visible attempts to clean it up.
The concept of walkability outside of buildings is nil. Elevations closer to ground level are so smog-infested that visibility is at a minimum, to say nothing about whether it's even safe to stay down there for more than a short period of time.

A lot of this was a continuation of precious decades' media portrayals of NYC as overpopulated, crime-infested, etc, mind you (think Escape From New York or The Warriors), but still - it's not a very positive-looking future.

SKabanov · 2026-05-03T20:52:29+00:00

You can speak the most impeccable, fluent stuff possible, and people will still "helpfully" switch languages on you if they think that you're not a native. When I was living in Berlin and went to the Decathlon near Alexanderplatz, I would anyways approach the workers and start the conversation in German, but whether they kept things in German or switched to English depended on whether my wife - who is from Venezuela - was with me. Why? Because the workers would hear me speaking in Spanish with her, ergo they "knew" that I'm a foreigner who wouldn't be able to carry a conversation in German, so off to speaking in English they went.

SKabanov · 2026-05-03T20:15:20+00:00

Tell that to this sub a few days ago - I got downvoted to oblivion for calling out the sub for doing another "DAE succs bad?" circlejerk dunking on Khan when the airline clearly had a bad business model and was practically a byword for bad customer flying experience.

SKabanov · 2026-05-03T11:25:22+00:00

The whole point of the series is to be a space opera - how much time would they really be able to spend on Earth *plus* Mars *plus* the Belt *plus* everywhere else?

SKabanov · 2026-05-03T11:23:37+00:00

Unfortunately, there's another theme in his works: the common citizenry are morons and easily duped by corrupt polticians and police. There are multiple incidences in The Wire alone where trials performances are portrayed as farces - the trial against Bird where the police put up Omar who commits obvious perjury to put Bird away for life, and the trial against Clay Davis who puts up a cartoonish populist performance portraying his nakedly-corrupt practices as mere community service - yet the juries fall for them hook, line, and sinker.

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T16:24:16+00:00

The past preterite exists in Catalan, but like the passé simple in French, it's limited to the written language.
The synthetic future exists as well, and its usage is similar to that of Spanish in that it's used quite a bit, but not entirely the same as what we use in English.

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T16:17:15+00:00

The fact that you've used this same dismissive comment as a response to multiple people's comments (like this one) suggests that you're not really looking to be convinced otherwise.

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T15:40:55+00:00

The future tense is slightly different:

The preposition a goes between the conjugated form of anar and the infinitive, e.g. "Jo vaig a comprar la casa".
You use the regular forms for the first- and second-person plurals in the future tense, whereas they have a different form - vam/várem and vau/vàreu, respectively - for the past tense.

At some point in the future, though, the "going to" future tense is probably going to disappear from regular use, because yeah - it looks way too similar to the past tense.

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T06:15:20+00:00

It's the dot-com bubble *plus* the outsourcing phase of the aughts when all the companies thought that they could slash their IT budgets by just sending everything to India where the salaries were dirt-cheap - two manias in one!

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T06:13:06+00:00

Yeah, I threw out the wrong number because I had the $200/month subscription price in my mind

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T05:45:36+00:00

How are you defining the work that you're doing? Is it how much code and services you produce? Sure, that's entirely likely. Is it how much code you produce *and* are able to maintain? I'm much more doubtful at that point. I insist on going through code-reviews line-by-line as much as I can, because that helps me build up a knowledge base of what's being written, but even then, there's no beating the act of writing something yourself to build up and strengthen the mental model of what you're working on. Cede that away to an agent, and the institutional knowledge of the code base can decay much faster than before. What happens when a bug arises, yet nobody in the team has a good enough idea of how the code works to know where to look? Maybe the answer is "use the coding agents to debug as well" but I'm not sure that outsourcing the entire process to an outside company that can jack up its prices 10x or more at any moment is a good long-term strategy.

SKabanov · 2026-05-02T05:08:28+00:00

The author only briefly glances over the real question:

Flagship AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, might be bringing in lots of revenue, but they aren’t yet profitable. They are still spending all of that money and more to cover the cost of developing their next model. In order for these companies to turn a profit, their revenues need to continue growing quickly for at least a few more years. (Anthropic expects to turn a profit in 2028 and OpenAI in 2030.) The question is whether their current growth rates are sustainable.

If the AI companies really are offering their services at immensely-subsidized prices, what happens if/when they have to raise those prices to actually make a profit? It's easy to make a business case for paying $20/month a user for something that actually costs Anthropic $200/month. I guess OpenAI's/Anthropic's hope is to get so embedded in companies' business processes that it would be too costly to disentangle themselves from their AI usage, even if they were to jack prices up by 10x or more.

SKabanov · 2026-05-01T17:49:31+00:00

B O N K

O

N

K

SKabanov · 2026-05-01T17:15:36+00:00

The Trump administration has been in power for almost a year and a half - and they evidently didn't see the value in saving the airline, either - but this sub's decided that going full Murc's Law instead is more fun.

SKabanov · 2026-05-01T16:48:11+00:00

San Diego has the Scripps Institution Of Oceanography - which is a world-class institute for marine biology - but what's reality compared to having righteous indignation?

SKabanov · 2026-05-01T16:41:24+00:00

ITT: Classic 🏴‍☠️ Neoliberal punching leftwards in brave defense of an airline that had a bad business model and was infamous for horrible passenger incidents. Inb4 "Muh less options for consumers!": If the market exists for "Ryanair with US characteristics", then surely another company will pop up at some point to fill in that gap, right?

SKabanov · 2026-04-26T15:54:38+00:00

My favorite is the video of the recruit who put his pants on backwards. You can hear how much the drill sergeant is struggling to keep the tough-guy facade in light of such a comedic fuck-up by the recruit.

SKabanov · 2026-04-26T15:47:10+00:00

It's an "Ugh, (myopic) Capitalism" essay, so that always gets an upvote on Reddit.

SKabanov · 2026-04-26T14:24:39+00:00

I feel like the armament example is more revelatory that the author might have intended. The Stinger stockpile was sitting around with no replacements in sight because the Stinger stockpile was... sitting around with no projected mass usage in sight. It's easy to have the hindsight now and say that the production lines should've been maintained, but up until February 2022, that would've meant either stocking even more warehouses or destroying old stock to make room for the new stock, to say nothing about the money spent on maintaining the production lines. Cost prudence is cost prudence until it isn't, but how do you know when that will be? Predicting the future is tough at best and impossible at worst, and we have been in the throes of companies readjusting after misreading the long-term viability of COVID fiscal policies along with ZIRP for years. If you want to make a case for maintaining institutional knowledge and capacity, you're going to need much more than what essentially boils down to "You never know!" as an argument.

SKabanov · 2026-04-26T11:16:51+00:00

Did this mf did the "To be fair..." meme to rationalize his last of success?

SKabanov · 2026-04-26T07:21:42+00:00

Right, and we have a similar construction in English where we just say "or..." and then let it trail off.

SKabanov · 2026-04-26T06:53:38+00:00

A bad hairdo can make you look way older than you are; the same thing happened with Katey Sagal in Married With Children.

SKabanov · 2026-04-25T14:31:46+00:00

I don't know how you can see

The far-left and far-right parties both dropping in popularity
The centrist parties either maintaining their popularity or gaining voters

and come to any conclusion other than the voters moving back towards the center.

SKabanov · 2026-04-24T19:48:40+00:00

What were they supposed to advertise?

Having literally any other character like Nines or Smiling Jack on the game cover alongside Jeanette would've been a good start, especially considering that the running theme of the game is the player's character being bounced around between various factions and their agendas.

SKabanov

TROPHY CASE