I started learning Japanese and it quickly became clear where that accent comes from. This comment is about the mechanics, as I understand them, so skip if you dgaf.

Most of their consonant sounds are paired with a vowel sound that follows, eg: ta (tah), te (teh), ti (tee), to (toe), tu (too), though they aren’t always audibly pronounced (eg, in Naruto, Sasuke is the spelling, but it’s pronounced like Saskeh). That’s where the “su” sound sometimes replacing an “s” sound at the end of words comes from, or “ru” replacing an “r” sound. It’s correct with and without audibly pronouncing the “u”, so Japanese speakers might add or omit it based on preference.

They also don’t have all of the consonant sounds we do. Most notable is their lack of an “R” or “L” sound, but they do have a sound that is like a mix of the two. Sasuke’s voice actor pronounces “Naruto” with that sound instead of an “R” sound. It’s like an R with a slight roll, not as pronounced as in French, but from making an R sound and briefly touching your tongue to your teeth as if you were making an L sound.

They are also missing the V sound, their closest would be the B sound. Their word for GPS navigator is “Nabi”, for example.

And they have so many loanwords from other languages that they even use a seperate alphabet (katanaga) for them. It’s a one-to-one translation from their other alphabet (hiragana). Though even two alphabets wasn’t enough and there’s kanji on top of that, which is another set of over a thousand symbols that help disambiguate their many words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently (basically which syllable the rise in pitch changes to a drop in pitch).

Also, their sentence structure is very different. Like a typical english sentence might go: Subject verb object. Jaoanese sentences are more like: Subject object verb, though, like English, their grammar allows for many variations, and also omissions. Like they can drop the subject entirely from the sentence. Like I could introduce myself as “Buddahriffic desu”, but I could introduce you as “SaraTonin desu”. A direct translation would be “SaraTonin is” or “Buddahriffic is” and you’d need to figure out who the subject is using context.

The end result is that I’m impressed with any Japanese person who can speak english well enough to communicate, let alone if they are fluent, because it’s a lot more than I was able to do with theirs, unless the necessary communication is very basic.

Oh one more tidbit: the Japanese use “ne” (neh) similarly to how Canadians use “eh”, which works like adding a “right?” to the end of a statement (or an audible extra question mark to a question).

I mean, if you’re bored with life, an expensive and time-consuming hobby might be exactly what you need.

If it makes you feel any better, you would have turned 30 today regardless of what you have done in the past (unless you don’t make it to 30 (unless quantum immortality is real)).

Happy birthday! And if you aren’t happy with your efforts so far in life, better to tackle that looking forward than regret it looking back, though be kind to the yourself of today so you don’t regret spending your life preparing for the future instead of enjoying the moment.

I don’t think the bubble bursting will slow AI that much, it’ll just be a round of hot potatoe over, the losers will lose their money and others will come in hoping to be profitable since they can skip a bunch of R&D costs.

AI is overhyped, but just like the internet after the dotcom bubble burst, it’s not going anywhere.

Plus I suspect that this time will be a dollar collapse rather than stock market collapse, which would mean prices would go up even more.

The Great Sage, Heaven’s Equal, the handsome monkey king Sun Wukong.

Not sure he’d care to fix things, but it would be different if there was a benevolent unbeatable power in the world.

You realize your dentist doesn’t actually have any authority over you, right? Dentists who are friends (heh) of assassins notwithstanding.

Do people actually admire people in memes?

I’ve always thought of them as like stock photos.

Yeah, I can say that covers most of the “troubleshooting” I’ve had to do with games that don’t work. I usually go in thinking “uh oh, maybe it’s time for me to have to check a bunch of proton versions, this will be a pain” only to see that it’s trying to run it natively and switching to proton at all resolves any issues.

The only other thing that comes to mind is that I use dvorak and something about the way keyboard layouts are handled means it tries to “preserve” the bindings when I switch layouts in game, so it keeps the messed up QWERTY keys but dvorak layout even when I switch (and can tell it’s switched from typing things like in chat). Most games let me rebind the keys so I just need to go through the bindings, hitting the key currently bound each time as if I was using QWERTY and it rebinds. Though I suspect that due to the “preserve the layout” behaviour that keyboard input is handled specially by proton and maybe I can tweak settings to get the desired behaviour (ie, changing layouts in game means I want the bindings to change).

It is a translation layer, but the bit you added “to native code” sounds like you’re misunderstanding what translation layer means.

Games use a collection of APIs (DirectX is a set of APIs, but there’s others to handle offer operations like network access and such) to interact with OS functionality, and also receive communicarion back from the OS (the windows message loop). Proton and wine are implementations of those APIs that translate the API calls to their equivalent in linux, as well as setting up their own message loop that translates messages from the linux kernel and UI system into their windows equivalent before sending them to the registered windows messaging loop functions.

A simple example would be if a function header in windows looks like int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ), but looks like int32 SomeFuncLinux( std::string name, int64 index ), then the translation would be something like:

int32 SomeFuncWin( int64 index, char* name ) {
std:string TranslatedName( name );
return SomeFuncLinux( TranslatedName, index );
}

So it doesn’t change/translate any of the code of the program itself, it just provides the environment that behaves exactly like a windows environment by translating the “hey could the OS do this for me?” requests from windows to linux. Note that not all translations are that simple, there might need to be more processing on the values, missing arguments might need to be filled in, irrelevant arguments ignored, sometimes data needs to be translated to another format, etc.

The speed ups can come from improved efficiency in the underlying implementations (which Vulkan has, as I understand even using a translation layer from DX to Vulkan in windows can result in better performance) or having fewer services running in the background.

I’m more fond of “String that is too…” being displayed in the UI and then a tooltip with the full string being displayed when you mouse over the string in the UI.

Or winamp had a marquee that you could click and scroll manually, I liked that method too.

I really like the theme song for Dan-Da-Dan.

Naruto/Boruto had some good ones over their runs, too.

You. You have. You have me.
You. You hate. You hate me.

The song is a German pun, a delightful example of German humour.

Then you come in with basically an expertly placed, “what if medical science has no solution to their uncontrollable stench?”

You think a quarter of people are suidical or contemplating it to the point of talking about it with an AI?

Yeah, when I got my most recent GPU, my plan had been to also get a 4k monitor and step up from 1440p to 4k. But when I was sorting through the options to find the few with decent specs all around, I realized that there was nothing about 1440p that left me dissapointed and the 4k monitor I had used at work already indicated that I’d just be zooming the UI anyways.

Plus even with the new GPU, 4k numbers weren’t as good as 1440p numbers, and stutters/frame drops are still annoying… So I ended up just getting an ultra-wide 1440p monitor that was much easier to find good specs for and won’t bother with 4k for a monitor until maybe one day if it becomes the minimum, kinda like how analog displays have become much less available than digital displays, even if some people still prefer the old ones for some purposes. I won’t dig my heels in and refuse to move on to 4k, but I don’t see any value added over 1440p. Same goes for 8k TVs.

Yeah, those were CDs. I don’t think I got to the DVDs, since my sense of urgency faded after I saw the older ones seemed ok. I’ll have to check them out after you said that, though lol.

Yeah, it’s probably best you maintain some distance from winamp, especially if it’s been drinking.

I recently learned of MDisc (there’s a CD and DVD version, too, iirc) and decided to get a burner and convert my old data CDs.

While I haven’t verified every single bit, I did check that the files copied off of it were still functional and didn’t see any issues. Also didn’t get any errors. I was surprised because I’ve had some of them for over 20 years now and didn’t do more than put them in CD binders to protect them (during the days when I didn’t even consider the longevity of the media, other then obvious things like scratches.

Only disc I wasn’t able to get the data from was a packet CD, which was a special format that facilitated treating the disc more like diskettes, where you could read or write at will via the filesystem rather than writing the disc as a special package from the start (or having multiple sessions if there’s still room on the disc after one such write). I was able to find references to the tech, though not if it was a standard or just a name a few different companies used for different implementations, but I wasn’t able to find Linux drivers that could do anything other than rip the ISO and a few strings or tell me it can’t find anything. Though it’s possible that corruption is really what happened here because I’d expect RW CDs to last a shorter time than the write once ones.

Though I suppose I could try it on my old windows machine and see if drivers are more readily available there.

Is that last bit a dig at German humour?

Winamp! (Winamp!) Winamp! It really whips the lamma’s ass!