ChingShih's recent activity
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Comment on My not so nice thoughts on Battlestar Galactica in ~tv
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Comment on The land that doesn’t need Ozempic in ~food
ChingShih Link ParentI'm not experienced in framing this to the standards I would like to hold myself to, so as an example: I know some Swiss and Germans who feel they fit into the zaftig perception of cultural...I'm not experienced in framing this to the standards I would like to hold myself to, so as an example: I know some Swiss and Germans who feel they fit into the zaftig perception of cultural beauty, but not "American" or "western European" or whatever their point of comparison is. These women are, in my view, not unattractive, but they view themselves as being more attractive than what might be considered attractive in the mainstream (i.e. the figure of a traditional fashion model).
Western cultures are doing better about being inclusive of models of other body types. But there are different cultural norms, too. I think OP was talking about just two extremes, but I wanted to point out that zaftig still persists as a concept in some cultures. Certainly in the west we have the "I want to grow up to be fat and happy" saying as well, so that is a carry-over from Old World cultures.
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Comment on The land that doesn’t need Ozempic in ~food
ChingShih Link ParentI get there's some nuance to the food plans. That was not my situation and still seems not to be at some campuses. It's all flex money. Or it's X meal plans per semester, but you can only get...I get there's some nuance to the food plans. That was not my situation and still seems not to be at some campuses. It's all flex money. Or it's X meal plans per semester, but you can only get access to 3 meals a day if your class schedule allows for it, which contributes to over-eating and then skipping meals so you can make it to class on time or buying that third meal and hoping you can eat it at some other point in your day -- such as right before you go to sleep or while driving to class or while cramming for that pop-quiz your professor said they wouldn't do on Friday.
I'm glad that your campus has objectively good food (taste quality and nutrition). Not all campuses have meal plans that make sense or feel accessible. I mean some of this meal plan shit reads like "37 easy steps to filing your taxes." In the case of Sodexo, they are still pushing meal plans that don't add up to 100%, which forces you into spending real money on "flex points" because if you don't, your 175 meals per semester doesn't even net you 2 meals per day for people living on campus.
That was my personal experience with Sodexo-run campus services (who only hired students as food service workers) and that was many years ago. They seem to still be doing it. Also the mandatory meal plans aren't refundable. Texas Tech is the same way. If you don't spend all the money on the plan, Sodexo or the university keeps it. That's a scam. And these prices per semester are objectively predatory. No one possibly needs to spend $3k/semester on food (and coffee, since that's become an essential for many) -- that's $33 per day over a 90-day semester (and that's a generously long and optimistic semester because we know that students are often forced off campus during breaks, which means no access to that meal plan money).
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
ChingShih LinkMichigan woman found living inside rooftop store sign with desk and coffee maker - The [homeless] woman told police she had been living inside the grocery store sign for roughly a year, and had...Michigan woman found living inside rooftop store sign with desk and coffee maker - The [homeless] woman told police she had been living inside the grocery store sign for roughly a year, and had been able to get electricity.
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Comment on EA is looking at putting in-game ads in AAA games — 'We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that,' says CEO in ~games
ChingShih LinkEA started putting in-game product placement and ads into Battlefield 2042 two years ago. They also had the foundation for in-game, location-based adverts in Battlefield 2142 back in 2006 as part...EA started putting in-game product placement and ads into Battlefield 2042 two years ago. They also had the foundation for in-game, location-based adverts in Battlefield 2142 back in 2006 as part of a partnership with an advertising company purchased by Microsoft. Along with the usual TOS and EULA stuff to agree to, you were also allowing EA and its advertising partners to analyze advertising information specific to your experience.
Of course EA isn't the only company that's doing it. Ubisoft is, too. And others past and present have a lot of product placement and cross-over advertising (such as themed Fortnite events and Rocket League). There's a nice little article here reviewing some examples of advertising in games.
What EA is doing is another move towards enshittification. If you haven't already, please stop buying EA products. There are other games to play that are worth your time. Talk to your friends about not buying games from companies that treat you like shit. Shame them for contributing to enshittification because these companies will treat you worse if you let them and they have a history of doing it.
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Comment on Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually in ~games
ChingShih LinkThis is a rumor and so I don't think it deserves to be a separate submission, but it's interesting food for thought: Switch 2 specs leak: 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Certainly plausible as...This is a rumor and so I don't think it deserves to be a separate submission, but it's interesting food for thought: Switch 2 specs leak: 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
Certainly plausible as well. You can find this level of RAM and storage in mid-range laptips that lack the economy of scale that Nintendo would be targeting.
"This information comes from official sources that are tracking shipments happening between component supplies, NVIDIA and Nintendo. This is very likely accurate," the leaker states. Another post claims the "RAM is specifically LPDDR5X" and "Yes, this will be considerably more powerful than a PS4," Centro LEAKS wrote.
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Comment on The land that doesn’t need Ozempic in ~food
ChingShih (edited )Link ParentI agree with the points you make here and just want to touch on something related. There's a cultural change that emerges in many people of all different ethnic and cultural backgrounds when they...I agree with the points you make here and just want to touch on something related. There's a cultural change that emerges in many people of all different ethnic and cultural backgrounds when they start to achieve a level of prosperity. And it's not even a particularly high level of prosperity. It's simply that having more food is better and being able to feed your children more food at a meal (and they better finish everything on their plate!) symbolizes the achievement of that ability to provide for one's family fully.
This creates part of a feedback loop based around food consumption. People over-eat around their parents because the plentiful food is part of their nuclear-family culture and then works backwards into that family's cultural heritage (in the old country your great great grandmother would always make a feast on the holidays!). And I know a lot of people who are in the first generation of that prosperity and when they have kids they are adamant that their kids are going to have 3 meals a day and anything they want from the grocery store.
When kids are given this opportunity to indulge and also to take pride in their family's prosperity, they're unlearning their body's natural ability to sense and reconcile fullness. Which means some of them can't manage their appetites or account for appropriate portion sizes in the future, either.
Edit: I meant to mention I think this has also shaped modern western culture's sense of zaftig. Older, more conservative cultures that were slower to adopt highly processed foods and dispense with communal family meals have a different and more traditional sense of what is an appropriate amount of weight to be attractive in a woman. Whereas other western cultures have varied positive views of a woman's weight that may include "thick or "curvy" or "husky" or "BBW."
Just like folks have mentioned in the other thread here, this unlearning happens on campuses with food plans that are really designed to be predatory -- top up your freshman's meal plan with what you can afford and if they can't reconcile that amount across X weeks of the semester/year, then they have to put more money into the system. Otherwise what are they going to do? Starve? So the parents get milked and the students get unhealthy experiences handling money and managing portion sizes.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
ChingShih LinkOkay, so this is from last week, but who can one-up the emotional support alligator? Loved it. Anyway ... Star Wars’ Mark Hamill hails ‘Joe-B-Wan Kenobi’ after White House meeting - Worth clicking...Okay, so this is from last week, but who can one-up the emotional support alligator? Loved it. Anyway ...
Star Wars’ Mark Hamill hails ‘Joe-B-Wan Kenobi’ after White House meeting - Worth clicking just for the picture of Hamill wearing Biden-like aviator sunglasses.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
ChingShih LinkCitroen Sells a Freak Two-Headed Van, But It Actually Makes Sense - Because they're bolting two van cabins back-to-back and selling them to custom chassis builders (like for an ambulance or an...Citroen Sells a Freak Two-Headed Van, But It Actually Makes Sense - Because they're bolting two van cabins back-to-back and selling them to custom chassis builders (like for an ambulance or an RV), so they're not wasting time or money on building out a chassis that's going to be ripped off anyway. Other manufacturers apparently do this, too. Quirky.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
ChingShih Link ParentHuh. I've heard pillock, prat, plonker, and tosspot in movies and assumed they were Britishisms still in use somewhere. Guess we need to bring these back ourselves!Huh. I've heard pillock, prat, plonker, and tosspot in movies and assumed they were Britishisms still in use somewhere. Guess we need to bring these back ourselves!
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Comment on A big new facility built to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened up in Iceland. It's a stepping stone to bigger plans in the US. in ~enviro
ChingShih Link ParentI get where you're coming from, but a pollutant is "A foreign substance that makes something dirty, or impure, especially waste from human activities." CO2 is being added to the environment by...My big beef is with calling it "pollution"
I get where you're coming from, but a pollutant is "A foreign substance that makes something dirty, or impure, especially waste from human activities." CO2 is being added to the environment by human activities. CO2 is often a byproduct, or waste product, of a chemical reaction (or thermo-chemical reaction, or ... etc.). It sorta fits every part of the definition of pollutant no matter how you cut it. I don't think that's the hill I'd die on, especially in a renewed time of people talking about doing cleanses to flush toxins out of their body or not eating anything with a chemical in it they can't pronounce.
Also, climate change solutions aren't being pushed from the top-down. It's a bottom-up kinda thing, because politicians are always skeptical of "fringe ideas" and "minority views" and that stuff. But as you've noticed, some politicians have bothered to do some reading of reports that weren't commissioned by government agencies. You'll also notice that there are some people in government who aren't fans of telling people how to live their lives directly -- they're not telling people or businesses how to build, what to build, or why to build in environmentally friendly ways. They're not telling people what cars to buy or to purchase power from a specific source, but they are incentivizing those ideas. In fact, I can think of only one group that's telling people what drugs and vaccines not to take and that women shouldn't have control of their bodies and that they should live in a constant paralysis of fear of China/minorities/otherness.
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Comment on Bike brands start to adopt C-V2X to warn cyclists about cars in ~transport
ChingShih Link ParentI agree with your points here. I wonder if it was the same way for horses? The advent of cars made them the technological aggressors (I just made that up but it sounds good, lol!) and the ones...I agree with your points here. I wonder if it was the same way for horses? The advent of cars made them the technological aggressors (I just made that up but it sounds good, lol!) and the ones that changed how everyone else had to interpret the rules of the road. If only horses has stood up for themselves against the horseless carriage!
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Comment on ‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair in ~enviro
ChingShih Link ParentThe Ministry for the Future was such an interesting and almost cathartic read (for us pessimists). I think KSR did a great job of painting a gloomy picture and then providing some examples of cool...The Ministry for the Future was such an interesting and almost cathartic read (for us pessimists). I think KSR did a great job of painting a gloomy picture and then providing some examples of cool things that can be done to avert some very specific crises. I did like the idea of drone swarms shutting down jet travel, with the implication that it might've been nation-state actors, but it might've been a distributed, like-minded group of people. If only because I have romantic notions about airships. :D
But the book is also very optimistic. As I just mentioned in my other post in this thread, I think his picture of a refugee crisis was very peaceful. It was probably more to draw parallels towards current treatment of refugees rather than to paint a realistic picture of a climate change-induced crisis. I hope that more people use fiction as a springboard to take an interest in what's going on around them and starting changing the way people think about the near-term future.
Have you read any of KSR's other recent works? I am catching up on them.
Also, sorry if you got two notifications out of this, I accidentally double-posted.
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Comment on ‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair in ~enviro
ChingShih (edited )LinkI don't know if the average person contextualizes how life-changing a few degrees warmer mean temperatures really is. I think it's important that we get people in all sectors of the economy...I don't know if the average person contextualizes how life-changing a few degrees warmer mean temperatures really is. I think it's important that we get people in all sectors of the economy thinking about how different things will be if the temperature goes up, if life in highly populated parts of the world begins to change for the worse, dramatically.
What climate change means is that people in already hot parts of the world are going to move to less hot parts. If you look at a map right now, you can do some math in your head that most of the world's population lives between the tropics (or adjacent hot areas). China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, that's about 3.5 billion people right there. Unemployment is already high, crops will fail, destitute people without access to AC or bodies of water that are cooler than body temperature won't have any recourse but to migrate elsewhere. Those people are going to migrate with their families because where they live now is uninhabitable. I liked KSR's The Ministry of the Future, but it was a peaceful vision of a best-worst-case scenario. They won't be peaceful refugees and they won't respect border controls. They will be refugees and they will be fighting for their lives and they will be looking to the west for help. And, just as is happening now, they won't understand why we're not helping them.
Look at the cooler and less densely populated regions of the world. Let's call those places North America and Europe. What would Europe look like if its population increased by 10% (65M) in 10 years? 20%? 30%? Is that sustainable? That's still not even close to what half a billion refugees from all of Africa and Asia might look like. Can European power production keep pace with that? Can housing and infrastructure and job market? Can food imports? I didn't say production because Europe is already a net importer.
Everything will change. We need to be supporting solutions that provide a quality of life that allows people, and services and governments, to preserve at least the current status quo for the next 10 years? And we need to do that everywhere, because a major humanitarian crisis in high-population areas will become a problem for the west as well. Humanitarian support becomes a measure of supporting one's own country, it's borders, food security, all that stuff. Even its form of government. You'd think that people who were truly concerned about illegal immigration would already know this and want to make life better in those other countries so people would want to stay there, have jobs there, have families there, solve their own problems there. But that's not the group of people who are working to avert what will be more than a humanitarian crisis. Weird. But we're all in this together and I think we need to be addressing the full scope of the issue with the full breadth of our industries.
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Comment on Expanding upon other peoples' thoughts in discussions in ~talk
ChingShih LinkFor some people it's helpful to have another voice re-contextualize or reiterate on a couple points while listeners are finishing their ruminations. They might have something to add, but need time...For some people it's helpful to have another voice re-contextualize or reiterate on a couple points while listeners are finishing their ruminations. They might have something to add, but need time to work through it, and a bit of "fluff" gives them that opportunity to finish a thought or find the words without themselves ending up in that uncomfortable situation of "should I break the awkward silence?"
Some people are willing to do it and others aren't, even if that topic is sometimes objectively worthy of being brought up. In some cases, people will take a few minutes after a meeting concludes and let any stragglers have a chance to voice something they hadn't fleshed out earlier or that they weren't sure about bringing up in front of the entire group. That's another good way of making sure that everyone's voice is heard and they leave the meeting feeling like it was worth their time.
There may be some other benefits for some people, like helping to keep them more focused on the [Zoom] meeting instead of Minesweeper. Or giving the next speaker a moment to finish gathering their notes without their brain going into "this is so embarrassing that I wasn't quite as ready as I thought I was oh shit" which only further derails the meeting's flow.
Anyhow, filling the void is one of those things where some people will like it and others won't. Best thing to do is always keep the flow going and try to keep everything moving as best as possible. But that doesn't mean there can't be natural ebbs and eddies of deviation from the primary topic. While keeping things professional a little aside or some "fluff" can actually helps people gauge whether they can break in now and say something before the group has moved away from the topic or not. It's one of several ways to make meetings more personable and less intense and also to give some signposting as the topic changes.
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Comment on Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually in ~games
ChingShih Link ParentThe interesting thing about the amount of time between Switch 1 and Switch 2 is that it seems like exactly enough time for a slow-moving company like Nintendo to plan out a major change in...The interesting thing about the amount of time between Switch 1 and Switch 2 is that it seems like exactly enough time for a slow-moving company like Nintendo to plan out a major change in architecture and to map out ways to transition their developers (a lot of whom are either first-party or strongly Nintendo-affiliated) to a custom architecture that's substantially different from other products on the market (i.e. ARM + some nifty features), similar to Apple with their M-series CPUs.
On the other hand, I wouldn't discount that Nintendo could use the successor to Tegra, which is Orin. Orin is relatively inexpensive and its lowest-power variant is exactly the same TDP as the stock Tegra X1 -- a customized version was used in the Switch and it's not farfetched to think a customized Orin will show up in automotive applications, much less a handheld one. It's not impossible that Nintendo chooses to stay with Nvidia and have the added benefit of Nvidia's proven product stack, documentation, and tensor cores. Plus, it looks like Orin is manufactured by Samsung, and that might suit Nintendo just fine right now.
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Comment on Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually in ~games
ChingShih LinkI'll throw my speculation out there. Nintendo will strategically announce the Switch 2 about two to four weeks prior to release-date announcements by Sony and MS ("Brooklin?") about "Pro"...I'll throw my speculation out there.
Nintendo will strategically announce the Switch 2 about two to four weeks prior to release-date announcements by Sony and MS ("Brooklin?") about "Pro" version(s) of their console(s). Barring any unusual delays, Sony will release the PS5 Pro on or just before November 15[1] in time for the holiday season. TI think a Switch 2 release in February or March 2025[2] is the most reasonable.
[1] This is Halo 1's 23rd anniversary. MS sometimes holds their big game announcements for a similar time-frame because it's "their" date now. Sony has attempted to get ahead of this date in the past since it's so easy to plan for. Meanwhile Nintendo has gone full Gendo Ikari.
[2] Nintendo knows they have a winner with the Switch 1's design and games. Whatever they do with Switch 2, its sales are going to strain their suppliers, so this is my most optimistic date. I think it would be best to release the Switch 2, even if it were just 15M units initially, in spring 2025 (and to make sure their FY24 ends with huge revenue numbers). Fall 2025 is my less optimistic date, but then Nintendo's sales seem disconnected from the home console market (and have been for a while) and it doesn't really matter whether they release against other pressures. I just don't see it happening in the summer.
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Comment on Jack Dorsey quits Bluesky board and urges users to stay on Elon Musk's X in ~tech
ChingShih LinkI don't really like posting about what individuals are doing, and their drama, but this is both a short (and somewhat bizarre) read and seems like it is both somewhat newsworthy and going to...I don't really like posting about what individuals are doing, and their drama, but this is both a short (and somewhat bizarre) read and seems like it is both somewhat newsworthy and going to precipitate more changes in the social media landscape.
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Jack Dorsey quits Bluesky board and urges users to stay on Elon Musk's X
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Comment on What are some of your favorite history books and why? in ~books
ChingShih Link ParentThis is great. I highly recommend Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. It's difficult material to get through, but interesting history and has stayed with me since I...Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
This is great.
I highly recommend Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. It's difficult material to get through, but interesting history and has stayed with me since I first listened to it over 15 years ago. The author does an impressive job highlighting the conflicted nature of Kit Carson's relationship with the Navajo and carefully handles Carson's role in carrying out the tragic parts of "Manifest Destiny" along with the policies of the U.S. Army/government in dealing with a culture foreign to them. It would be nice if this were required reading in history classes as it's well-written and an important part of America's evolution.
I haven't read The Anarchy yet, but it's on my list to get around to. It goes on sale on Kindle once in a while, so people should keep an eye out for it there or at used book stores.
Babylon 5 did air later than DS9, but the executives who essentially commissioned DS9 already had their people read through Babylon 5. It's generally felt that the studio skipped buying the rights to Babylon 5 because they could copy it themselves (cheaper) and attach a name brand IP to it that would play better to audiences. It did and unfortunately Babylon 5's history is tarnished as a result.
SeaQuest was another interwsting sci-fi story that attempted to have episodic stories with an almost-over-arching story. They just never really got to the end game, IIRC.