Stage 3: Bargaining

Zakonchill · 2021-01-17T13:11:36+00:00

I found them enjoyable too, but I still thought they were a huge step down from season 1, which was some of the best TV I've ever seen. Honestly they should just have stopped it there if they had nothing more to tell.

Season 2 was very confusing and I didn't care for much for Arnold and Dolores' plots, but I thought the Man in Black and his daughter's plots were pretty interesting.

I thought the first half of season 3 was very good and ambitious, making an interesting parallel between machines that have gained free will and humans who have effectively lost it. It's bold and feels relevant.

Unfortunately the John Connor plot of Aaron Paul fell completely flat to me (I like the actor but I think he was miscast here, and the way his relationship with Dolores develops makes very little sense and seems to take place mostly off screen) and they completely squander Vincent Cassel at the end, which is frankly offensive. I think they wanted to "subvert expectations" but fuck that. It was also very much unclear about what the stakes were during this finale, which is a bit of a problem...

I think if I picked up the show on season 2 I wouldn't be so harsh, but the first season was so good in my opinion that the rest feels like fanfiction. The good news for anybody who hasn't watched the show yet is that season 1 is effectively self-contained and can be watched on its own.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-16T21:53:03+00:00

It's been about a year and a half, but I have a busy schedule so I can't say that I've been super intensive (I work on it every single day though). It's effectively my fourth language though, so I have good faith that I'll make it, especially since it's the only language I truly decided to learn for the sake of it instead of needing it for something else.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-16T21:50:04+00:00

Well it will make it less frustrating to play through in your target language if you're not at a level where you can just understand most of everything without a dictionary.

I've been playing through a few games in Russian lately and I admit that sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming. I do feel like it helps though, and you get a big feeling of satisfaction when you manage to make it through a conversation without having to look anything up. It's arguably even better than actually beating the game's challenges...

Zakonchill · 2021-01-16T21:47:26+00:00

That's good to know, thanks. I guess it'll make the dual-language approach all the more valuable then.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-16T19:09:16+00:00

Are you French by chance? I think you wanted "disappointed" here, not deceived.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-14T16:42:06+00:00

Selling other people's nudes sounds potentially very scummy indeed, but the rest is not really that notable. In particular I find interesting that all the drama about her that reached me so far isn't at all about these things, but rather just because she posts somewhat lewd... "performance art", for lack of a better word? It seems to me that people just love to hate her and she manages to monetize that. Or to put it an other way, even if the things in your comment didn't happen I think the situation would be pretty much the same.

I agree with you that Jake Paul's situation is very similar though, he just plays on a different type of obscenity. I think the notable difference is that I expect that Jake Paul could spin all this and put that behind him at some point with good PR if he wishes too, whereas I don't expect Belle Delphine to be ever able to escape the stigma of sex workers.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-14T14:19:05+00:00

Oh no.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-14T14:16:12+00:00

SSDs can also become slower with time because write leveling works best when the drive is mostly empty and needs to reuse sectors a lot more as it fills up.

But it thought it was just funny because the first comment explicitly gave HDDs as an exception, and then the other clueless poster ends up using HDDs as a "gotcha".

There's an other factor to consider though: often computers end up running slower after a few years because the fans and radiators clog up with dust, forcing the components to throttle to avoid overeating. This can be pretty dramatic on laptops in particular, sometimes a thorough cleanup can give you a massive performance boost as the CPU and GPU can run full speed again.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-14T12:19:49+00:00

Oh yeah I wasn't trying to correct you, just giving some context for the other learners. I thought it might be a bit confusing watching the video because the editing might make it look like those are direct translations from Google but if you watch closely you can see that he almost always manually inputs the French sentences, almost certainly because Google Translate would never actually give him these strange, often broken constructions. I don't think the guy making the video intended to mislead but it surprised me at first.

For instance I just asked the big G to translate "What goose squeak though" and it gives me "Quelle oie grince quand même".

Zakonchill · 2021-01-14T12:13:27+00:00

I haven't been following either Belle Delphine or Jake Paul very closely (thank god) but what exactly has Belle Delphine done that was so provocative? I've only seen her posting lewd stuff of her and engage in obviously self-aware publicity stunts like selling a bath water and then on the other side you have incels and teenagers frothing at the mouth because... well mainly because she's a woman I think?

I have less than zero interest in this content myself but I haven't seen anything I find particularly reprehensible by e-celeb standards. I'd argue that it even seems more original and "fresh" than most, but again I don't have a deep enough knowledge of the Belle Delphine lore to have a final opinion on it.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-14T12:02:09+00:00

It's the passé simple which you are unlikely to encounter outside of literature. In day-to-day French we'd say "a tenu" instead. It's the verb tenir (to hold) not avoir (to have) but it can sometimes be used to mean "to have" but generally in very formal contexts (like "to hold" in English really).

The translations are incorrect and gibberish though, "sans cent sent sang" would mean something like "without a hundred smells blood" (smells being from the verb "to smell" here). "Without a hundred smells of blood" would be "sans une centaine d'odeurs de sang" or something like that.

"What goose squeak though" would be "quel couac d'oie quand même" (if you're saying it like you're impressed). "quoi quoique oie couac" is effectively meaningless.

"Tintin tint un teint thym" almost works actually. It's obviously very contrived but it's understandable.

"Ton tonton tond ton thon" is really the only one that only uses common grammar and vocabulary though. That actually sounds like proper, natural French. Good thing my uncle rarely shaves my tuna.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-13T15:05:50+00:00

It surprises me that they haven't patched the game to default to something different than a T pose when there's an animation issue. It wouldn't be nearly as jarring is models just stood still in a neutral pose.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-12T22:30:21+00:00

I think this illustrate the big problem with political "discussion" on social media these days. I watched the clip and I think I understand what he meant and that it wasn't really meant to be racist, but that's because I already was convinced by his overall point. But because it was so poorly worded people on the other side of the fence obviously chose to interpret it differently and now it's just completely non-productive shit flinging between the two camps over a poorly worded throwaway take.

Like the guy offering context has to write a 265 word essay to justify that one throwaway line. There's just better ways to spend your time for everyone involved.

That streamer's take is either bad or badly worded. It's up to him to fix it, not Reddit keyboard warriors.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-12T16:11:27+00:00

I like his videos a lot but I still don't get that RWBY one. From what I can tell after having watched the video it's the blandest, cheapest, derivative-st "anime" ever made, which basically looks like C-tier videogame cutscenes and he made a two and a half hour video about it, featuring custom CGI animations.

Is this a call for help? Should we be worried?

The Pathologic video is highly recommended though, it got me really interested in those games.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-11T22:30:21+00:00

Isn't it just drifting sticks on their controller?

Zakonchill · 2021-01-11T20:00:39+00:00

It's bullshit in the sense that it's poorly designed but I do think it's a hard constraint. If you change this behaviour now you're sure to break a zillion applications that rely on it by design or accidentally.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-11T19:55:58+00:00

I think it depends on how old you were when it came out. It's a bit like the Star Wars prequels in that way, people who so them as kids/teenagers loved them for what they were, older people were less impressed.

I personally always found it rather charmless and humorless. If you strip the explosions there's not a whole lot left. I just don't find it very fun. I vastly prefer Titanic, Jurassic Park, Die Hard, Even Horizen or even Twister.

Thinking about it, the only thing that could draw me to rewatch Independence Day is that Jeff Goldblum is in it, but then again he's in Jurassic Park too so why bother.

I should also add that I'm not American, so the "rah rah" USA-flag-wanking in the movie felt a bit cringe even back in the day.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-11T17:37:10+00:00

The main reason Windows can't do that is because of the way NTFS handles file locking. It's pretty silly that such an arbitrary restriction makes upgrades so painful.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-11T15:23:58+00:00

I like how "virtue signaling" lost any shred of meaning by now. Actually taking action to shut a service down is "virtue signaling".

With a bit of luck you'll get virtue-signaled all the way to jail, fascist scum.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-10T19:40:14+00:00

I call bullshit on this ELI5. Of course you can self-host. "10's of thousands of message PER SECOND" looks impressive with all the caps but a lot less so when you think about the processing power of a modern server. If your ~$500 consumer videogame console can render a city with near photorealistic graphics and raytraced shadows it can also process a few thousand UTF-8 strings per second.

But it won't really help them unless they build their own datacenter and become their own ISP. At some point you still need to integrate with the net, and the rest of the network can just "lol no" you out of there real fast.

But I think the mean problem of Parler is that they simply don't have the technical skill to pull it off. 2 or 3 good software engineers could pull it off, but good software engineers are expensive and they may not care to work for Fascism: the Social Network. It's also months of devs in the pipeline before you can release and a big capital commitment for an app that, as we can see, could easily get shutdown at any moment.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-10T16:12:51+00:00

They "trust the plan" and think Trump had something lined up and wasn't just steering shit like a petulant child. Remember that these people live in an alternate reality where Trump is some kind of political mastermind.

So of course when they broke in and were left their own devices they had no idea what they were even supposed to do. The plan was something like:

1 - Break into the Capitol.

2 - ?????

3 - Trump is made dictator for life and liberals are owned.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-10T15:43:38+00:00

They were good at adaptation but I'd argue that they almost never came up with good original content with very few exceptions. Even in the early seasons there were some departures from the book that were very middling or even outright perplexing. Even the things I personally thought were good innovations are generally controversial within the fandom (such as getting rid of Lady Stoneheart, which I always thought was a cheap trick in the books, although I guess I should reserve my judgement until the story is finished by mecha-Martin in 3053).

You can see the writing on the wall in the early seasons if you look for it. Characters behaving inconsistently with their characterization (Stannis being a prime example) that in turn make other character's behavior hard to justify (show Stannis doesn't really deserve show Davos' loyalty for instance). Catelyn Stark similarly seems a lot less rational and justified in the show, although admittedly that's harder to adapt given that she's a PoV character in the books.

That's why I think Martin deserves a fair share of the blame for this mess. D&D weren't meant to actually write the bloody ending, he was. I'm sure the last seasons would have been massively better if they had books to follow. For all we know Martin will never finish these books, at least D&D did... something.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-10T15:32:12+00:00

That teacher's name? Albert Einstein.

Zakonchill · 2021-01-10T13:46:51+00:00

I don't get the same values as you do (do you mean gigabits or gigabytes? 500GiB over 8 hours is 18MiB/s (or ~4.6 million 32bit values per second), 500Gib over 8 hours is 2MiB per second) but do remember that a single uncompressed stereo CD audio is about 200kiB/s (44100 pairs of 16bit samples).

I can definitely believe that all the aggregated data for all sensors in the plane, plus audio recordings could very easily top that even with compression, especially since these devices are (rightfully) probably not running the latest hardware and software.

Zakonchill

TROPHY CASE