“Vilifying billionaires is popular. Losing them is expensive.”

Certainly, in the same way that failing to catch a bank robber and allowing them to skip town is expensive.

I see a couple of major practical reasons why game (engine) devs are under no threat from this even if it gets better in the future:

1. Scale. Like all things AI, this is not going to scale well. This doesn’t generate code, 3D models and textures, both making games and playing them requires running the model. So if you want a game to have a persistent environment where the world behind you doesn’t get regenerated into something different after taking 8 steps, the context window is going to get real large real fast. And unlike programmed games, you can’t make choices about what’s worth remembering and what isn’t, what can be kept on persistent storage and is only loaded when it becomes relevant etc., because it’s all one big, opaque blob of context, generated by a black box; you either have it remember everything or it becomes amnesiac in a way that makes it useless. Memory availability also isn’t increasing at a rate where this becomes a non-issue any time soon.

2. Control. Manipulating the world though a text prompt gives a lot of control, but it’s also very course. It’s easy enough to tell it that you want a character that can run and jump, but how fast does it run? Does it accelerate and decelerate or start and stop instantly? Does it jump in a fixed arc or based on the running speed and duration of the jump button being pressed? How far and how high? You’re going to run in the limits both of what you can convey and what the language model will understand pretty quickly. And even when you can get it to do exactly what you want, it would have been faster and more practical to manipulate values directly or use a gizmo place things. But there’s no way to extract and manipulate those values, because again: big, opaque blob of context.

The needs of the kitty outweighs the needs of the few.

I’m still fond of the classic “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine!”
Those kids going on about 6-7 like it’s some kind of power couple don’t know what they’re doing to poor 6.

Same idea as behind “Enough is enough, an egg is an egg.”

Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.

Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.

Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.

Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.

It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.

Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.

As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.

It’s funny you should mention automobiles, because it’s actually a pretty good analogue. Sure, the car itself was probably not invented with some kind of political goal in mind, but the complete redesign of many cities to be car-centric, because “cars are the future!”, making people dependent on cars and destroying neighbourhoods to build highways along the way, was (and continues to be) very much a political project.

As for the “paradox”, whether or not AI is actually capable at replacing jobs is not that important. What matters is whether or not the pretense that it can (and therefore the pretense that workers don’t have any leverage), can be kept up for long enough that the networks workers use to consolidate their leverage, like unions, fall apart. As an example of a similar strategy, see Elon Musk promoting the Hyperloop to prevent the construction of high speed rail.

…? We’re not the producers of the shows, how is that any of our concern? They’ve got plenty of bean counters at Paramount, if a show isn’t hitting their financial goals, they’ll either cancel or retool it. All we can do is watch the shows that get made and express and discuss our opinions about it, there’s no point in the fans engaging in bean-counting themselves.

Well, that’s what the text says, anyway. It describes “Kahiitan” Golovinn as 7 shaku (30.3cm) and 2 sun (1/10 shaku) tall, and whatshisface behind him 7 shaku tall. But it’s most likely an exaggeration.

I looked some things up. This drawing depicts the Golovnin Incident and the person in front is Vasily Golovnin. Not sure how they got “Karoitan” from that, but anyway.
I can’t find anything about his height, but I imagine if he really was 2.18 meters tall, it would be written down everywhere, so it’s probably exaggerated.

EDIT: I misread, it’s not Karoitan, it’s Kahitan, meaning they thought his name was “captain”.

Karoitan (?) and Movoiri (?) here are apparently 2.18 and 2.12 meters tall, which is huge even by modern standards, so if those measurements are accurate, the height difference between them and their captors might not be that much of an embellishment as it looks.

MAGA is an American thing, but there are plenty of people sharing their dumb opinions outside of the US.

Also, MAGA nutters aren’t actually less intelligent than anyone else, just cowardly and resentful. They don’t want to think about what’s causing the problems in the world, because then they might have to reconsider parts of their worldview and that’s scary. So they want someone to just swoop in and fix the problems without fundamentally changing anything, or failing that, gives them the feeling they have permission from society to lash out against anything they consider “abnormal” and is therefore a potential cause of the problems. And so they’ll resent anyone who criticises them for that or tries to undermine that feeling of societal permission they want or already have.

But not wanting to think about certain things is not the same as being unable to, and any intellectual capacity not spent on actually thinking about real problems and how to solve them can then be spent on how to create the impression that their opinion is dominant and therefore they’re not doing anything wrong.

Anyway, the point is that while there are definitely legitimate criticisms to be had about the newer Star Trek shows, your metric isn’t very useful for demonstrating that. To begin with, why hide behind numbers at all? It just makes it look like you’re trying convince people that your criticisms carry more weight because the world agrees with you.

I don’t actually know, but if I were to guess, someone trying to use a Dendy or something as a cheap alternative to a test pattern generator?

I suppose if a bee collects nectar exclusively from camellia sinensis and bergamot blossoms, it would be an Earl Grey bee.

I think the story reboots every few games, so it’s not like say, the Mega Man games where every game is part of one big continuity. There’s a setting and recurring characters that’s built up over the years and that’s about it; everything else is specific to that game or subseries. Basically, the Bombermen (M/F), who may or may not be siblings, are some kind of space police from the planet Bomber and they have to fight a villain, usually but not always Bagura/Buggler, to protect the peace in the galaxy.

There is a bit of a rabbit hole (puddle, really) you can go into where some of the earlier games have a connection to the Lode Runner games, because Hudson Soft did the Famicom port of Lode Runner. What it boils down to is that Lode Runner used to be Bomber Man. This connection hasn’t really been relevant for a long time, but the fact that Lode Runner is a Galactic Commando may have influenced the current setting.

I have a collapsible silicone bucket with a lid for popcorn making that goes into the microwave. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require any fat, also serves as a bowl and you can just throw it into the dishwasher. Size-wise, it’s probably not that different from an air popper when collapsed, but it’s easier to find a spot for; mine is on top of the stack of roughly bowl-shaped things. And you could also use it as a bowl for other things, so it’s not necessarily single-purpose.

I’ve seen both in full. I’d say that the new series is never as bad as the old series at its worst, but also never as good as the old series at its best. As someone who like Urusei Yatsura, the new series was a decent watch, but it hasn’t replaced the old series for me.

My biggest complaint about the new series is that it never seems to really manage to convey that sense of chaos that’s central to Urusei Yatsura’s comedy as well as the old one. My second biggest complaint is that untz! untz! untz! BGM they like to play during fast-paced scenes (especially early on) that to me doesn’t really match up with the show’s timing.

I also generally prefer the old voice acting. Now, the new series has an all-star cast, and they’re all great voice actors that do a good job embodying the characters (though Kamimiya Hiroshi as Ataru took a while for me to get used to), but I think the old cast was more willing to go all the way for the sake of comedy, whereas the new cast seems more careful about walking the tightrope between exaggerated expression and breaking character. This comparison video someone made does a good job of demonstrating this, I think. That said, I can definitely imagine some people preferring the more naturalistic acting of the new cast compared to the more theatrical and stylised performance of the old.

I do like what the new series did with Lum’s hair. A kind of combination between her iconic green hair from the anime and the oil-like refraction her hair is implied to have in the manga. And just in general, the colour palette is very pleasant.

This was in elementary school. It was pretty cold, even inside, so I was blowing into the inside of my elbow to get warm air into my sweater. I’m not sure how, but I messed up the alignment or something and ended up making a loud fart noise. And without getting any opportunity to explain, I was made to stand in the hall.