Hetare King

That reminds me, in the first draft of the script of The City on the Edge of Forever, there’s a scene in which an orator on a literal soapbox makes a speech to a crowd about how foreigners are to blame for all the country’s ills, yada yada yada, the usual bullshit, and when seeing Spock and believing him to be a foreigner, sends the crowd after him.

Spock gets quite… emotional over it.

Elegant and well-executed, but, and this is probably just my lack of imagination as someone who is not colour blind, I’m having trouble coming up with uses cases, and most of the examples on the site aren’t really convincing to me.

Usually when we try to communicate something with colour, it’s not the colour itself that matters, but the colour being distinguishable and/or the associations we have with it, which someone who is colour blind may not even have. Like, if you have a big, red emergency stop button, it being red isn’t really what matters; it’s red because it stands out and because we associate it with danger. Adding a dot isn’t going to help with that, so to make it accessible to colour blind people, it needs additional features to make it stand out and instantly convey its purpose.

That said, I did bookmark the site, in case something comes up where it’s the colour itself that’s important.

Wouldn’t his mom also be British? And in order to pound her, wouldn’t she have needed to court her first, i.e. talk to a British person?

Waiter! There’s an internal inconsistency in my absurd joke!

Not quite the same, but there is a game called Zwei!! (German for two). Its sequel is just called Zwei II, though.

Yeah, that’s the big irony of this all: natural language is pretty much the worst way of conveying information for any task that’s even slightly technical. There’s a reason why architects don’t just tell the construction workers what the building is supposed to look like.

The one thing it does have going for it is accessibility, but unfortunately, it doesn’t lead to transferable skills. Like, if you do something like building with Legos, cardboard crafts, make collages from magazine clippings etc. and you want to start doing something more advanced, say, carpentry or graphic design, then what you’ve learned previously is still valuable. But if you just vaguely order an AI around until in produces something that “looks about right”, all you’ve gained is the skill set of a clueless executive and the limits of the model are your limits.

Even listening to an audiobook is a worse experience in a car though, because you’re distracted from it, I would hope, by paying attention to traffic. And of course, there’s also lots of other things you can do in a train that you can’t in a car: read non-audio books, watch videos, play video games, take a nap, etc. Depending on what kind of work you do, it might even be possible to do some work and go home earlier. Even as a passenger, doing most of these things in a car is a good way of getting car sick.

The point is that almost always, the time spent on a train is of considerably higher quality than the time spent in a car.

Huh, that’s interesting. I already expressed my thoughts on consumers making their own physical media in another post (tl;dr: I don’t think it makes much sense), but if there are recordable discs with lifespans comparable with pressed discs, maybe a print-on-demand service could be a solution for developers that can’t afford to order a batch of a thousand discs and cases and rely on digital distribution because of that.

It feels like it would kind of defeat the purpose. If you like the ritual of physically picking a game and putting it into your machine, there are more practical ways of going at it, like those NFC card-based systems like Zaparoo. If you like having a physical collection, it seems to me that having a bookcase full of labels made with a home printer and with none of the legitimacy of them being “the real thing” would feel rather empty. You can’t legally resell it or lend it to others and if you care about preserving the game without being dependent on an external service that can go down at any time, you’re probably better off keeping several backups of your hard drive than counting on flaky recordable media (hard drives don’t last forever either, but you’re more likely to regularly check on the health of a couple of hard drives than potentially hundreds of BD-Rs and SD cards).

Basically, very few of the advantages of physical media would end up remaining.

All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.

Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.

I have to say, some of the song and dance around money is just baffling to me. Aren’t the Scottish and Northern Irish pounds already legally defined as being equivalent to GBP and accepted as legal tender?

I get that some English and Welsh businesses might be suspicious of them because they’re unfamiliar, but what is having a piece of paper with the boss of the bank’s signature on it in a safe somewhere that most people don’t even know exists going to do about that? It seems to me that this is a problem better solved with an information campaign. If they can’t take the Bank of England’s word for it that this is real money, then the very existence of a £100,000,000 note or even the value of the British Pound itself become suspect.

This is the cover art for the single of the first opening theme, so the artist might be Oota Kazuhiro, the character designer of the show. This is not guaranteed, however.

Also, you can get a better version here. It doesn’t look like it on the page, but it’s actually pretty high resolution.

I always have a hard time putting things into rankings, because different games have different qualities that make them hard to compare to each other, but if I had to choose, there is one game that I keep coming back to and is pretty much my “comfort food” game: Twinkle Star Sprites.

I don’t remember the details, but they definitely mentioned that you can’t just copy the doctor. The real reason is, of course, so that there’s some actual tension when the doctor gets sent off the ship and to avoid having to deal with the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from that (it’s also probably just the writer of an episode shooting from the hip as usual), but if I’m allowed to switch over to my thick-framed glasses and come up with a plausible in-universe reason:

Perhaps in order to properly reproduce human-like intelligence, you need to take advantage of quantum phenomena, so the state of the doctor’s program is in a quantum state. And since it’s not possible to perfectly copy a quantum state without destroying the original (Nebula), even with a Heisenberg compensator that works very well, any movement of the state of the doctor from one device to another would have to be a “transfer” and not a “copy”.

However, even if the state of the program is in a quantum state, the program itself may not be. In present day attempts at quantum computing, the program itself is still written in plain old text. If that’s the case, it would be possible to create copies of the doctor in their initial state, without any memories or experiences, which explains the miners and the EMH on the Enterprise-E.

As for undo, it may be possible to undo removing something from the state of the program if the data doesn’t actually get destroyed but the program is just blocked from accessing it. Similar to how if you delete a file from a drive, it doesn’t actually the destroy the file, it just removes the entry from the file system, and if you’re fast enough you can often still restore the file.

Throwing bricks through windows provides markets for glaziers, so clearly we need to incentivise this behaviour. My recommendation to the government is to subsidise the purchase of bricks for the purpose of throwing through windows as well as take measures to prevent brick-fraud, so that people don’t secretly build houses with subsidised bricks.

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.

That’s interesting, when I watch something that was in English from the start, I often turn on English subtitles to reduce the cognitive load.

That’s the thing, though: they don’t, usually. Falsetto doesn’t simply mean forcing your voice to be higher than it is naturally (which is, of course, very common in anime), it’s a particular way of using your voice. You can also create a higher pitch with a head voice or even a chest voice. Falsetto is the easiest way to do it, but it’s also the hardest on your voice, which makes it hard to listen to for prolonged periods of time.

It’s not just the squeaky little girls either, even the young men are always very throaty.

I’ve been told that English dubs are way better now than 10 years ago for the last 20 years, but every time I hear something from a new dub, it still ends up having the same old problems. Like, my throat ends up aching because they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.