Hetare King

Subs, always. I don’t really consider dubs an option, unless there’s really, really no alternative. The biggest reason for that is undoubtedly growing up and living in a country where subtitles are the norm for foreign media, but I do think I have some more concrete reasons for it.

Take the line “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!” Probably, you know exactly what I’m talking about and how that line is delivered, even if you’ve never seen Midnight Cowboy (I haven’t). But I can almost assure you that if dubbed in Japanese, it would be thought of as just another line and would never become iconic. If you remove the language and the cultural context it’s spoken in, all that’s left is the literal meaning. And the same is true the other way around, if something is written in Japanese, then it’s going to typically be written with the assumption that it’s going to be spoken in Japanese.

Also, people working on the actual show are going to be involved in the recording in the original language, so it’s typically going to be closer to their intentions. To use an extreme example, Tomino Yoshiyuki (most famous for Gundam) is such a control freak perfectionist, that you can tell he’s directing from the way the voice actors deliver the lines. But the dubs of all the works he’s worked on over the decades are all going to have different ADR directors with no input from him (and even if he did have input, he probably isn’t fluent enough in English to do so effectively), so there’s no consistent (figurative) “voice”.

But most importantly, dubs just make it impossible to do any compensating for losses in translation. There’s a whole spectrum between “This language just sounds like gibberish to me” and “I’m fluent enough in the language to not need a translation”, so as long as you’re not in the former extreme, there are still things you can pick up on: first person pronouns, copulae, honorifics, dialects, levels of formality etc. And especially Japanese is, I think, a pretty translucent-sounding language to people who are used to European languages, so you end up picking up on patterns even if you’re not actively trying to learn it.

I consider these to be the main ethical issues with specifically LLMs and generative AI in general:

1. Using people’s work as training data without consent.
2. The high cost of training a model meaning that only a few entities in the world can actually do so and so, only few people get to decide what the knowledge base and “slant” of the model is. This is true even for open source models.
3. The high resource cost of using a model relative to the value of its output.
4. People with malicious intent being empowered by it far, far more than anyone else.
5. The model producing the response to the query directly instead of leading to the source, leaving both the source without any way to benefit and the user from having any context queues they can use to verify the reliability of the information.
6. Infinite and automated production of misinformation, libel and psychological manipulation.
7. Inducing psychosis in people.

Point 1 can be resolved by the people training AI just making different choices. Many won’t unless they’re forced to, but in principle they could.

Points 2 and 3 could hypothetically be resolved in the future with better technology.

The rest are basically inherent to the technology and you can at best try and mostly fail to reduce the risk. So as far I’m concerned, what it would take to build AI ethically is to train it for very specific purposes and have it be used as statistical models by people who know what they’re doing.

Though I do see some potential for ethical LLMs by using them to perform vector searches instead of generating text, basically turning them into smarter search engines.

I have to say, I was not expecting “making your bike summer-ready” to mean “ricing your ride with urgableds”, even with it being on Adafruit.

Wouldn’t this be more valuable in the winter, though, when it’s dark out for longer?

On one hand, from what I understand, in the 1983 crash there was a real mood of video games being over, that the fad had passed. In North America, anyway. I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening today. On the other, the video game industry is a lot larger now, so there’s a lot more shrinking that can happen without it completely destroying itself. So in that sense it may actually be bigger.

That said, I’m inclined to believe that by laying off all these people, big companies are just creating their own future competition, because there’s no shortage of demand for video games. If anything there’s a greater demand for games that aren’t constrained by the arrogance of big company executives.

If I had to describe it in terms of individual issues:

• The big problem that needs to be solved is this hackneyed blob of pure evil that appears for no reason other than, it just something that happens every 6000 years, and the way to solve it is to follow an instruction manual.
• The way almost all the male characters interact with Leeloo is pretty icky, even when considering the time it was made.
• I didn’t feel the motivations of the characters were always that convincing.
• The acting is generally pretty poor.
• Most of the attempts at humour, which were mostly the usual 90s saucy jokes, fell flat.

I’m a bit wary of critiquing things like this, though, because when I like something, I’m also a lot more forgiving of its flaws, so when I don’t like something, it feels like a rationalisation to convey it like this. But it’s the best I got without resorting to onomatopoeia.

On the positive side, I did quite like the look of the film and the fact that the protagonist and the antagonist never actually meet or have much awareness of each other tickled me. Also, for some reason I just couldn’t hate Ruby.

The Fifth Element.

I first heard about it in the late nineties or early noughties, and I wanted to see it ever since, because liked its aesthetics and science-fiction in general, but for whatever reason, I didn’t end up seeing it until last year. But wow, what a terrible film.

I’m lucky enough that management doesn’t seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they’re pretty hands-off in general) and that I’m a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that’s not very large. So I’m actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.

I can’t offer anything other than armchair hypothesising, but Tezuka Osamu, the most important person when it comes to making manga and anime what it is today, and whose influence can also be felt in video games (e.g. Mega Man clearly taking influence from Astro Boy), liked to do things like having a character rip out the gutter between panels and break it in half in a fit of anger. So these kind of meta-hijinks have been part of modern Japanese popular media since the beginning.

I don’t really understand it. What’s the appeal? Personally, at least, the moment I realise that there’s nothing I can do in a game that affects whether I win or lose, I lose interest in it completely. Well, it’s not like I’m completely oblivious to the mechanisms here, I also get a little dopamine boost when, for example, I get a critical hit in a video game and disappointed when an attack misses, even though I can only vaguely influence the probabilities of those things happening, but that only works as a little constant pleasure differential as seasoning to keep you on your toes, it would be completely pointless as something that cumulates into a single climax.

The closest I’ve come to understanding the appeal is that the thrill of not just possibly winning money but also the risk of losing the fruits of your labour (i.e. “real stakes”, even if small), is pleasurable to some people…? But if that’s what it is, quite frankly, that’s seems less like seeking simple pleasure and more in the realm of depravity.

Anyway, I do think gambling is one of the dumbest dumbass dumb-dumb thing a person can do that doesn’t involve scooping out your eyeballs with a dirty plastic spork. Even putting aside that the odds are never in your favour and so, it isn’t rational thing to do, someone who starts gambling may not know they have the kind of addictive personality that gets them sinking into a bog, because that part of their character may have never surfaced, or only in low-stakes situations. So they’re not just gambling with money, they’re gambling with the very quality of their life.

Also, betting is just an inherently corrupting force. Even if you’re only making small bets, even if you’re not pressuring competitors to throw the match (if you even have the means to do so) or throwing banana peels into the ring to get the person you bet against to slip and fall or something, you’re contributing to the payout to the people who are, incentivising that behaviour. There’s no high payout for betting against the odds (and then working to make the unlikely the inevitable) if there’s not enough livestock contributing to the pot.

Well isn’t that cute…

I knew it as Dommel, but the English version appears to be called Wowser.

I still sometimes use the phrase “Let the archeologists sort 'em out!” from the Terrible Thunderlizards part of the show.

Kami meaning god and kami* meaning paper do have different pitch accent patterns, but that’s never kept Japanese speakers from doing wordplay. In fact, the pun works even better in Japanese than it does in English. However, I think they would be confused why someone would want to name it that for a couple of reasons:

1. The suicide bombers from WW2 would probably not be the first thing on their mind when hearing the word “kamikaze”. In the first place, the reason they were called kamikaze was because they were likened to the “divine wind” that prevented the Mongols from invading Japan twice. And the few times I’ve actually heard “kamikaze” being used in Japanese, it’s always used figuratively.
2. It’s not actually made of folded paper. This is danbooru kurafuto (cardboard crafts), not origami.

*) It becomes “gami” in “origami” because it’s the second part of a compound word, but the word on its own is “kami”.

EDIT: I just realised something: the company making these is called AirKamuy. “Kamuy” is the Ainu word for god. So if you squint real hard, it does kind of invoke kamikaze. Probably not intentional, though.

Reminds me of pattens, except they’re for shoes that already have soles.

Even without the social issues (some of which aren’t really solvable), there are still the matters of the lack of control and predictability, qualities that make it very valuable to fakers, but pretty much worthless to serious artists.

The etymology is a bit different from that. Otaku does mean “your house” (important distinction: it’s always the second person’s house, not your own), but it’s also used figuratively as a formal way to refer to your family or just you. There was a culture, at least in the 70s and 80s, for enthusiasts in non-mainstream fields of interests, whether that be TV manga anime, science-fiction, wargaming etc., to talk to each other in a weirdly formal way, so they kept calling each other “otaku”.

In my pockets, my keys (including a NitroKey for accessing my passwords), which are literally chained to my trousers, my phone and a little towel the size of a handkerchief.

I also carry a little, what to call it, pochette? It’s a little carrying thing around the size of my hand, that is either clipped to the strap of my messenger bag or carried on its own with a shoulder strap. It contains my passport, public transit pass, bank pass, just-in-case-cash, pen, mechanical pencil, cloth for wiping glasses, and a folded ecobag.

As for the messenger bag, it contains a carbon steel folding umbrella, which folds down to around the size of a glasses case and is very light, a larger ecobag, notebook, headphones, a bunch of USB cables and adapters, a USB memory stick, and a teeny-tiny nail clipper. Not for actually clipping my nails, but you know how sometimes a little triangle of skin around the corner of a nail gets loose and all hard and annoying? It’s for that sole purpose. Also, I typically carry the bag when traveling a longer distance (like my commute to work), so there’s usually a book and a 3DS in there.

Doesn’t that make them in violation of truth-in-advertising laws? If they’re marketing it as a serious productivity tool, but legally it’s “for entertainment purposes only” , then their ads claim its something that it’s not.

This looks less like a highway and more like a provincial road, though, which is pretty likely to have its own separated bicycle path.

In fiction, when someone important to the protagonist dies, they’re often buried near the edge of a cliff, which always seemed like a precarious place to bury someone to me. I guess this is what happens to graves like that in the long term.