sohois
2mo ago
Who do you think is voting for all those far right parties in Europe?
People that don't like immigration.
Why do you think Brexit happened?
Immigration.
sohois
2mo ago
For whom? Anyone who relies on the global economy for their livelihoods, which is approximately everyone on earth. Trump doesn't need to care about the wellbeing of foreigners of course, but I'm not sure how Juche thought with American characteristics will produce the desired results of Trump and his team
sohois
2mo ago
I'm sure posters here could provide a reasonable steelman for Trump's position if asked, but forget about providing arguments for a second: are there any Trump supporters here who genuinely believe this is a good set of policies, or even a not-disastrous set of policies?
I can't imagine this will be the final thing to break support for Maga types, but I would give strong odds that this goes down as a major black mark on Trump's eventual record, and a potential torpedo for any future Maga candidates
sohois
2mo ago
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
This answer depends a lot on how old your kids are, no? If they are 16 and looking at university pathways, then there aren't clear answers. If they are 6 and still dreaming of being astronauts etc., then you're just going to wait and see. If AI progress stalls soon, then you'll know that coding, graphic design, and most "writing" occupations are a no go, but there will still be plenty of other positions. Nothing wrong with the old middle class staples like accountants, architects, maybe lawyers if AI doesn't get good enough.
sohois
3mo ago
Syracuse informed me that in China, Coke is called "happy drink for fat people," fair enough.
I wouldn't translate it like that. A simpler translation would just be Mouth Happiness, but the impressive thing about Coke's localization is that it's pronounced Ke Kou Ke Le, so they managed a name which is both phonetically accurate and still has a useful meaning. Most Western brands just go for a rough transliteration without a clear Mandarin meaning.
sohois
3mo ago
Moutai is certainly the biggest brand when it comes to Baijiu, but I learned long ago that price and brand has approximately zero relation to quality. For those who haven't tried it, most people tasting Baijiu for the first time describe it as something akin to paint thinner. Considering that many bottles will go for about the same as a beer, this isn't too surprising. However, even when you get into the expensive stuff, the paint thinner quality rarely goes away. I have had some nice Baijius in my time, but almost never the super pricy ones.
Also some super pedantic notes:
- The Bund in Shanghai refers to the riverside (West) street filled with historic buildings, it's not a shopping street. Given it's location, all kinds of shopping streets feed into it, but I'm guessing you are referring to one of the connecting streets; it's been a while so I can't remember which was the main shopping street connecting to People's Square.
- Yuan means Park or Garden, so the correct name would be Yu Park or Yu Gardens, Yu Yuan park is redundant.
sohois
3mo ago
This is the culture war thread after all. If there wasn't a culture war angle to this, it wouldn't even be here as a post - it is relevant because UK media and government figures are obsessing over the show, insisting it is vital to understanding young men and should be shown in schools, etc.
I saw someone make a comparison to the film La Haine. That film provoked plenty of discussion in its native France, was shown in a government meeting (IIRC), much like Adolescence. La Haine is now widely regarded as a classic film, but I don't think this reputation would have any bearing on a talk of whether it was relevant for the French government, or whether it had any lasting impact on policy and so forth.
sohois
3mo ago
Scanning and OCR is a good one I forgot. As @Ioper mentions, it's been good for a long time, but the advances in OCR in particular are pushing things like translation forwards.
One new app I have got on my phone now is https://recipekeeperonline.com/, one of those paywalled apps you mention. It's allowing me to digitize my entire cookbook collection, and it really is pretty impressive how well it converts a huge number of different recipe formats into pretty perfect ingredient lists and steps, without any involvement from me
sohois
3mo ago
various French things but I don’t count them as British food
one problem with this is that once you get past the iconic dishes, you're left with a lot of simple preparations that have commonalities all over Europe, or dishes that have murky origins and aren't wholly any one country's to claim. There are fish stews and preparations for baked, steamed, smoked, and fried fish that all have origins in the UK but can also be found in many other nations. Kipper is perhaps the most British of the smoked fish, although you'll find preserved Herring in much of Scandinavia and the low countries as well.
Tartar sauce, for example, is obviously derived from the French sauce tartare, but the British preparation as served with fish is very much unique from the French approach.
Fish pie itself is definitely one Britain can claim, and is often much more than just cod. One ingredient you'll find in both fish pies and tartar sauce that is uniquely British is hard boiled egg (sounds odd but offers a nice textural contrast). Stargazy pie is another well known fish pie dish, although it's odd appearance doesn't present it well
'Potted' fish, whether crab or many other types of fish, is British but again not only practiced here. Other shellfish preparations for the likes of whelks and cockles are typical of British seafood. One shellfish dish that might not seem overly British is prawn cocktail; the US has plenty of shrimp cocktail recipes, and prawns served with a cocktail like sauce isn't especially British, but the prawn cocktail you would order on a pub menu would undoubtedly be British in origin.
sohois
3mo ago
I got a new phone recently. Not a great one, it's a downgrade on my previous phone in several areas and the march of enshittification in phone design is clearly continuing at pace.
But that topic has been done to death and I wanted to ask something else of the community. What uncommon or interesting things can you do with a modern smartphone?
It occurred to me as I was transferring everything over that I have barely changed how I use a smartphone since I bought my very first over a decade ago. I can emulate more games consoles now, and I grudgingly use some of the digital wallet features, but otherwise all the years of development doesn't seem to have changed anything at all. Are there cool features or applications that I'm missing out on?
sohois
3mo ago
The English don’t really eat fish either
Aside from the posts below pointing out that these stories are mostly pro-immigrant propaganda, there are loads of traditional English dishes for fish that aren't deep-fried cod. The thing is, British food is not particularly popular worldwide; few people could name more than 10 British dishes.
This also kind of answers the Irish question: what Irish food of any kind can people name? Potatoes, Guinness, and Beef stew (with potatoes and Guinness) are about the limit of it. It's historically a small and poor nation, long a part of Britain anyway with little time to develop their own cuisine.
sohois
3mo ago
The Uk's muslim immigration issue is in large part a legacy of the empire. Even before the numbers blew up under Blair, the UK always had a stream of former subjects from the Indian subcontinent. This meant there were big existing communities of Muslim to marry into or find jobs with, putting aside the attraction of having a ready made community.
sohois
3mo ago
I recall similar, a graph in one of TheZvi's roundup's showed they were rapidly gaining on OpenAI's enterprise marketshare and were comfortably second place. The Lyfts are more like Google and Facebook
sohois
3mo ago
I just used this when I got a windows 11 laptop, ended up basically identical to old windows 10 builds with it: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/windows-10-11-decrapifier/975250
sohois
4mo ago
Agreed, this seems pure fantasy. A battletested army? Well if it's a test it's pretty clear they have failed spectacularly.
I have no idea what Trump thinks, but I'd say the US military and other 3 letter agencies will be largely very pleased with the outcomes of this.
sohois
4mo ago
Even if it did have preprocessed subtitles, presumably "gambler" just appears like that regardless of pronunciation?
sohois
4mo ago
I should perhaps have added that if I compare email open rates/click through/whatever now versus 2/5/10 years ago in the companies I have worked for, they're pretty much the same. No evidence for any further decline in effectiveness yet
sohois
4mo ago
Yeah this narrative seems completely false from my experience. Email has been an abysmal channel for years now. Spam filters killed off much of its efficacy like a decade ago. Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.
sohois
4mo ago
But the thing about self-driving cars is that they are already better than human drivers. There's just a huge wall of tradition preventing them from becoming much more widespread.
Meat processors aren't going to give a shit if robots can only attain 98% accuracy or something
sohois
4mo ago
I feel like the simplest answer to your question is that yes, NeZha 2 is a children's movie, with all the baggage that entails. If you asked a film critic about Chinese cinema in general, I don't think they would have any trouble naming plenty of great films and directors (even if you completely exclude Hong Kong). Mass market stuff remains mass market, regardless of where that market is. You bring up Studio Ghibli as a comparison, but 90% of anime remains "I can't believe I was reincarnated as my sister's tampon!" and other such garbage.
I think it is fair to say that, for its size and wealth, modern China punches well below its weight when it comes to cultural output. Music remains completely confined to the domestic market, TV is shockingly bad, and even where they've had some success of late like in video games it's still very much imitation rather than genuine originality.
And undoubtedly, part of this is down to the repressive government structure in place, relative to Korea or Japan. If AI wasn't going to completely upend things anyway, I'd still estimate that it would be less than a decade before Chinese media started to really penetrate international markets
sohois
4mo ago
Perhaps, we probably won't ever know. Cummings own story was that Boris simply couldn't bear having the liberal media against him and wanted to bring them onside, but of course he would make himself look good. The best evidence in favour of Cummings is that none of the other Tories have mentioned him or even come out against the Boriswave, with Patel the most recent to defend the legacy. Seems like the Tories are quite happy to own the disaster entirely
sohois
4mo ago
To be fair, an advisor who was bounced out as the Boriswave began can't really do anything. He didn't hold "office" in the sense of being an MP who might influence the government.
In the counterfactual where you think Cummings took big actions against the wave of immigration, what do you suppose he would have actually done?
I'm not sure this really maps to right-wing growth in Europe. Le Pen's economics are close to Trump in her economic nationalism, but Farage is an old school libertarian who wanted to make the Brexit campaign all about opening up free trade outside of the EU. Meloni has retreated pretty quickly into bog standard neoliberalism. Can't comment on Wilders or the AfD, but there's nothing to suggest that wider right wing movements are an economic protest
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