Assorted Mess of Overthinking

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

Okay, that might need clarification. In Honor Harrington, we routinely hear characters calling out time to intercept. A ship at point X, with initial velocity A, acceleration of B, and top speed of C, all on the way to point Y. They’ll call out both a least-time intercept (lay on the gas and don’t stop) and the zero-zero intercept (ending stationary and adjacent to Point Y).

(iirc, some people questioned how bumblebee flight could work within the laws of aerodynamics; turns out they were making some really wrong assumptions about how bumblebee wings worked; no one ever had to revise the laws of aerodynamics or anything, it was just a matter of understanding bumblebees better)

BUT. fast forward to Bee Movie (2007), which begins with a reference to that long-debunked factoid

EXCEPT. It does not say "laws of aerodynamics." It says "laws of aviation."

Which suggests the MUCH more hilarious idea

that since there is nothing in the law books addressing the specific method of flight that bees use

it's therefore illegal for them to fly

...and they do it anyway.

Of course.

The problem was that we assumed that bee wings worked like bird wings. And we did some math, math which seemed to indicate that bumblebee wings just weren’t big enough. Huh.

The solution was the air itself. At the scale of a bumblebee, air is much more viscous than it is to us. That means that fluid currents are felt more strongly. Including the vortex.

A vortex is the technical term for when you make air start spiraling. And in aviation, a vortex is a zone of very low pressure. This can be very useful if you can generate them on command.

Guess what bumblebees do! By holding their wings at a precise steep angle, their wing beats produce powerful vortices that magnify their lift.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page.

Alright, let me explain (this in particular).

Public figures in the US are covered under the Sullivan standard, aka the doctrine of “actual malice”. No, actual malicious intent is not required.

If I, a private citizen, sue for defamation, the defendant has a few defenses. They can argue I didn’t suffer harm, they argue they didn’t say that, or they can argue that what they said was true. That last one is a fairly high bar to clear; they must have pretty conclusive evidence.

1. Drill yourself on hiragana and katakana. These are the phonetic building blocks of Japanese, think of them as equivalent to english letters. This site is a good resource in general. Once you have a solid grasp on this, DO NOT LINGER HERE; move to step 2. You will master kana later.

2. Download Anki. This is a flashcard service. They have a paid app if you’re willing to invest for it, but if not, they have a mobile website (create an account and sync it with your computer).

This is the deck you’re going to download. Import it to Anki and do this every day. I have learned the hard way (twice) that skipping this is bad. If you become overwhelmed, you can change the number of new cards and reviews by clicking the cog next to the name of the deck!

3. Cure Dolly (Youtube, grammar) + transcript. She has kind of a posh accent, you might want to turn subtitles on. Watch a few videos when you feel like it but most importantly set up 4 and 5 as soon as possible

4. Yomitan (must have) is a browser extension that functions as a pop-up dictionary. you need to install dictionaries for it to work. here are some dictionaries you can use with yomitan and explanations of what they do

5. READ. DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET STUCK BEFORE THIS STEP. JUST READ!!!! Most people who fail to learn Japanese do so because they are afraid of not being ready to move on, which is counterproductive. Just read. When you were a child did you spend years on vocab and grammar before reading? No I bet you did not. Pick something to read and learn what you don’t already know by reading in Japanese.

Jiten.moe has a list of novels and visual novels that you can read on your computer sorted by difficulty. So does jpdb. There’s also this document. There’s also this document. Hey look this website is cool too

For visual novels: download LunaHook. It “hooks” to your VN and allows you to use Yomitan on words you don’t know. Turn off the translation feature, it does nothing to help you learn

For literary texts: ttsu e-reader supports epub and htmlz files.

You can also learn Japanese by watching anime, but it’s a little more convoluted and requires a lot more patience.

For manga, utilize Mangatan, but I don’t recommend this right out the gate because when you’re first learning sentence structure you’ll want something with complete sentences.

Set your computer up for mining vocab before you start reading. Once you finish your kaishi deck, you can drill your mining cards (I didn’t do mine until after finishing kaishi because it was too much).

Most importantly: reading is going to be hard at first. It is going to piss you off. You need to muscle through with this because this is where the bulk of your learning will happen. After a while you will just feel like reading because you love reading! Try not to pick something too hard for your first read, but if you’re interested in the story you might be able to muscle through something a little tougher.

2. this is gonna age me severely but i recommend for learning the kana trying out this book too: Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each. it's only like 8 bucks for the digital version but it's so old the pdf has been circling around forever if you can't pay. they are not kidding, over 10 years ago when i first used this i really did memorize it in a few hours, and it took like 3 days total of using flash cards to completely solidify it and ive never forgotten them even when i went years without studying. it uses mnemonics, and i think it can be a good alternative if the brute force method isn't working for you.

3. for other grammar resources, esp if you prefer reading to watching videos, you can try yokubi or the classic tae kim's guide. there's also japanese ammo by lisa for an alternative video series. i don't recommend trying to absorb every grammar point possible before reading- you really just need the absolute basics, and the rest will come naturally as you see them in context while reading hundreds and hundreds of times.

4. for me personally, starting off reading manga for a month or two helped me dip my toes into reading without feeling overwhelmed with literary prose or long dialogue with vns and novels, but it is important to try and graduate to the latter as fast as you can. when i finally stopped being scared to try reading novels i can't tell you how much of a difference it was to enhancing my reading skills- reading actual books, and visual novels too, just blows comics out the water. but! they're still very good for stepping stones. remember your first vn and ESPECIALLY your first novel is going to suck, it's gonna feel like beating your head against the wall. it took me over 30 hours to read my first novel and it was for children lmao. but, every time you finish one it gets easier and easier. anyway, for manga, i recommend the mokuro app there's hundreds of premade ocr'd manga and all you have to do is install them and start reading. it also tracks how many characters you read.

5. game sentence miner + agent agent text hooks games and gsm allows you to use yomitan on the hooked text, it also acts as a repository that tracks your vns and game progress, how many characters you read, and lets you set goals. it even has an overlay you can put directly over your game window so you can use yomitan directly there instead of having to go to your text hook page. gsm also works with lunatranslator. generally you wanna use luna for pc visual novels, and agent for games on consoles. i recommend agent over luna generally, as luna in my experience can be fussy, and agent loads text near instantly to gsm. the switch especially has a treasure trove of visual novels to read.

6. random but do you like tsukihime? there is a 100% browser based version of it with some qol features, and selectable text so you can use yomitan directly in browser with no other resources necessary. you just gotta change the language to japanese in the settings.

it's not necessary to read per say, but i recommend listening as well as reading, even if you don't care about being able to understand verbal japanese in media or never want to speak it irl, it can help reinforce your reading, and figure out the proper pronunciation. you can start with watching shows with subtitles and moving up to pure raw listening.

Honestly? Pretty damn close.

Sun Tzu’s great big book of “here’s all the things about war that weren’t in grandpa’s stories” holds up remarkably well because it’s all about the basics. Now, not everything still holds up (its a lot harder to live off the land when bullets don’t grow on trees), but the philosophy is like 95% sound as long as you apply brain.

For extra credit, read Clausewitz. Clausewitzian philosophy is the higher level study, and he gave a lot of vocabulary to the field. My go to example is friction. In On War, friction is defined as the countless unplannable things that happen in real life, as opposed to the map table. No map table exercise will say that your artillery was late because a gun carriage broke and the resulting traffic jam took 3 hours to solve. But that kind of thing has been the deciding factor in battles. Friction is all things that separate their from practice.

I am begging people to think about WHY this story was written the way it was.

This is the Thermian Argument in a nutshell. Things are in stories because the author wanted to put them there.

We, as an audience, should be interrogating why these elements are present.

The idea that Aang is The One Good Airbender who must Get The Girl so he can avoid The Death Of His People is gross. The idea that Katara has to grin and bear it while picking up the slack from Aang’s ten thousand other priorities is insulting.

Karl pointed out that for all that these mall ninja were boasting about their willingness and ability to suffer and strive for their family and community, as soon as they were asked to do so by wearing a piece of cloth on their face they screamed.

If he was disbarred, the correct form is Harvey Dent J.D.

Xbox

Xbox 360

Xbox One

Xbox S

Xbox: the original. Competed with PlayStation 2/Gamecube.

Xbox 360: next generation, competed with PlayStation 3

Xbox One: released against PS4.

Xbox One S: a budget version of the Xbox One with lower performance.

Xbox One X: a more expensive Xbox One with 4K compatibility. Competed with PS4 Pro

Tolkien was a big-c Classical scholar; he professionally translated works from Greek and Latin, as well as Old and Middle English. Everything from the Iliad and Aeneid to Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales was fair game, and then some. His main area of focus was English history however.

In short, the books show us two wars, each a representative of different times and paradigms. First is the more medieval war of Saruman vs Rohan, then the more Classical war of Sauron vs Gondor. States were larger and more centralized during the Classical period, so armies were larger as well.

But some numbers I can recall:

Saruman had a force of roughly 10,000 Uruk-Hai

Rohan had 1,000 cavalry and roughly that much infantry at Helm’s Deep. They brought 3,000 cavalry to the Pelennor Fields.

Because Dick does very much come at it from the position of both "Tim deserves to be treated as my equal" and "I really need Tim to act as my equal" with both leading to the conclusion of "therefore, it's time for Tim to graduate from being Robin, like I did," and it makes perfect sense that he'd feel that way because at that point he had decades of stories about how he felt like being Robin made him lesser, like it wasn't an equal partnership and it was something he'd needed to move on from. That was the entire justification for making him Nightwing.

But Tim, on the other hand, tended (and still tends) to get more stories where he viewed Robin in the classic Golden/Silver Age sense, as Batman's partner. In his perspective, he didn't need to change to be Batman's equal because they were already equal partners, and that should've been even more true with Dick, whom he'd always had such an easy comradry with, than with Bruce, who is complicated because he's constantly being written by half a dozen different people at the same time. So Dick choosing someone else to be his Robin felt like a betrayal, no matter how he tried to explain it, especially when it happens while Tim is already passively suicidal on a few different emotional vectors and also he's just convinced himself of something that he knows makes him sound completely unhinged.

He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.

lotr, love that the post is like, op: has a funny take on tolkein, reply: here’s a lecture on lotr based on things you could only know if you read the silmarillion like a masochist