sp3ctr4l

Japan, more specifically, the Harajuku district of Tokyo, has a number of ... very aesthetically bold subcultures, which certain people take extremely seriously.

One of which is basically exagerated 1950s American Rockabilly.

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/01/07/the-tokyo-subculture-of-1950s-rockabilly-gangs/

A good number of these guys are in actual Rockabilly bands.

I dunno if this guy's PS1 blocky haircut really fits into an existing subculture, or if it is a joke off of this subculture... or if it is totally unrelated to all that...

But there actually are a good number of very dedicated aesthetic subcultures in the Harajuku district, Rockabilly is one... the 'gothic lolita' style almost certainly came out of Harajuku... there are many other niche identity/aesthetic/lifestyle cliques.

That is what I was referring to, not just... psycho/rockabilly generally around the world.

I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).

I can ... read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level... very much out of practice.

I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it ... basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.

The first time I dated ... a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it...

She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question...

And I responded 'Osu!'... and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for 'yes', that would be 'Hai', and that Osu ... basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.

Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners... but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.

EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf... I later encountered a man who told me he was ... a yakuza, specifically a yakushi... we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.

He explained to me that... there had been a fuckup on his part, but his... direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side... and then exiled him.

Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.

Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why... most Japanese say 'yon' instead of 'shi' to mean '4' ... is because 'shi' is also the character/sound that... basically means 'death'.

Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a 'yakushi'.

As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.

... I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza... but he did tell me these things and seemed very serious about them.

It is astonishingly easy to get basically any LLM to output a simple iteration from one to ten function in all of those languages, and more.

Here's Assembly:

    newline db 0xA  ; Newline character

section .bss
    number resb 1  ; Reserve a byte for the number

section .text
    global _start

_start:
    mov ecx, 1  ; Start with 1
    mov edx, 10 ; End with 10

loop_start:
    cmp ecx, edx  ; Compare ecx with edx
    jg loop_end   ; If ecx > edx, jump to loop_end

    ; Convert number to ASCII
    add ecx, '0'  ; Convert number to ASCII
    mov [number], ecx  ; Store the ASCII value in number

    ; Print the number
    mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
    mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
    mov ecx, number   ; Pointer to the number
    mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

    ; Print newline
    mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
    mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
    mov ecx, newline  ; Pointer to the newline character
    mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

    sub ecx, '0'  ; Convert ASCII back to number
    inc ecx        ; Increment the number
    jmp loop_start  ; Jump back to the start of the loop

loop_end:
    ; Exit the program
    mov eax, 1        ; sys_exit system call
    xor ebx, ebx      ; Exit code 0
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

Here's FORTRAN

program iterate_from_one_to_ten
    implicit none
    integer :: i

    ! Loop from 1 to 10
    do i = 1, 10
        print *, i
    end do
end program iterate_from_one_to_ten

Here's COBOL

PROGRAM-ID. IterateFromOneToTen.

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
    01  WS-Counter PIC 9(2) VALUE 1.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    PERFORM VARYING WS-Counter FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL WS-Counter > 10
        DISPLAY WS-Counter
    END-PERFORM.

    STOP RUN.

It ... may have been upgraded to 'death camp' now.

Satellite images... seem to show a massive pile of human bodies and a giant pool of blood in a courtyard.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/el-salvador-cecot-satellite-images

(ironically this is actually the most comprehensive breakdown of these images and discussion around them I can find)

The courtyard does not always have ... these visual features. You cannot directly pull it up via a search for CECOT in google Earth, but the exact coordinates will still get you there... and view sat images by a timeline... and this uh... what certainly looks like a massive pile of bodies and pool of blood... are not always there.

I will be shocked if the Dem establishment doesn't run Newsom and do their damndest to ratfuck AOC like they did with Bernie.

Sure, there's a lot of time between now and a theoretical 2028 presidential cycle...

But I have learned to set expectations pessimistically and be surprised in the optimism direction, not the other way around.

As someone with an actual Econ degree:

... Yeah, a whole lot of 'technical signals' aka, chart reading that a lot of 'retail' (ie, amateur) day traders use... is basically astrology.

Its not quite as absolutely nonsensical as astrology, which is just absolutely 100% bullshit... like, a 50 MA crossing a 200 MA downward... definitely does indicate that stock is not having a great time right now... but as far as the "power" of such a signal to reliably indicate future trends?

No, basically no. There are some technical indicators that have a slightly higher correlation coefficient of being a reliable leading indicator, but the correlations are not really that strong... there are just way too many other confounding variables.

...

Even the quants who work for hedge funds... who use some of the most advanced and complex mathematical models in the world to try to untangle all of those confounding effects....

...well, they are on average, over a decently long timescale, no better, or even slightly worse than random chance at picking stocks, bonds, a portfolio that will grow more than just the average.

Part of this is because... if a technical trading strategy that actually works to generate outsized gains... is actually figured out by one of the big boy quants... the other big boy quants will notice this and reverse engineer it from analyzing what their rival is doing.

Then, once all the big boys are using the same strategy... well now it doesn't return outsized gains anymore.

... Which is why all your 401ks are basically index funds for their stock component, which is just a weighted average basket of whichever particular market, usually the DJIA or SP500 as the Nasdaq is historically a bit more volatile.

...

Now, all that being said... one arguably 'technical indicator' that always has been correct in the last 100 years... is when the bond yield curve inverts... the economy and stock market generally suffer a downturn roughly proportional to the time and magnitude of the bond yield curve inversion... soon after or right as the bond yield curve uninverts.

Except for right now, the last few years.

We have now, in the last 4 or 5 years, had 3 periods of yield curve inversion, 2 uninversions... and the broader economy has technically not yet entered into a recession, a period of negative GDP growth.

But it looks like we are heading now for basically something akin to the Great Depression, as the latest inversion is pretty widely being interpreted as 'investors no longer see the US Bonds as the defacto save haven, the USD as the defacto world currency'... which means the dollar will devalue as demand for it goes down... which means even if the tariffs went away and never came back, all our imports would be more expensive... and our exports won't be worth as much... and our external debt to other countries will become even more onerous...

And we are kind of massively reliant on importing material things and exporting services or non physical 'products'.

(Great work Mr. Trump -.-)

So... yeah you can't really make a day trading strategy out of that.

...

Beyond all that, its probably also worth mentioning that GDP per capita is not a reliable measure of actual wellbeing of the population of a country when it has enormous wealth disparity.

Ah, I was using the uh... food industry sense of the term (which is admittedly a fuzzy definition), not the chemistry definition.

Yay for domain dependent meanings!

A foot like this is a blend of decorative and functional, imo.

You end up with more surface area than if you had just gone with a straight column, and that helps with stability, slightly lessens the pressure.

Many modern tables or desks have... much less ornate footpad type structures, if the thing itself is quite heavy, or intended to hold a decent amount of weight.

Of course... I have no way of knowing if this old... desk? table? whatever it is, was intentionally designed with that in mind, but the function is still there, at least to some degree.

Couldn't you... use basically moonshine?

Like, set up a distillery, get your grain mash and sugar... now you have very high proof alcohol.

Now, you could just strap basically a pilot light to ... a more seriously designed super soaker... and you'd have to add some kind of ... jellying, gelling? agent to the moonshine to get it to act more like a flame thrower than a squirt gun...

This would not be a 100% organicly sourced entire flamethrower, but you could at least make the fuel mostly, if not fully, from organic, non petroleum products.

Ah ok, so you were even earlier to the Deck modding scene than me, and it has evolved toward being even easier since.

Whew!

I appreciate your pointing this out and explanation, I wouldn't want to have been unintentionally spreading misinfo.

... Nor would I have wanted to get my own Hall Effect 'no soldering' kit and then learned... actually there still is soldering in some other step or on some other component, that the 'no soldering' kits actually just mean 'less soldering'.

I have heard about that being a thing, and honestly I would have no problem getting a small soldering kit and learning how to solder....

https://www.handhelddiy.com/products/steam-deck-oled-tighter-hall-joystick

https://www.amazon.com/Joysticks-Steam-Deck-OLED-Thumbstick-replacement/dp/B0D2P24S9P

So these are for the OLED, which has a very slightly different internal board layout than the LED...

But both of these say they are pre-soldered, no soldering required, and they still have capacitive touch working.

... Am I missing something?

EDIT: These seem to be basically self contained, All in One, small board, stick/base and thumbcap units.

Maybe earlier 3rd party Hall Effect sticks were... not so comprehensive, and required the soldering?

Or maybe I am confused?

Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable... 'class' system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of... allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of 'classes' that... could either focus on one main 'class', but augment it with certain abilities from other 'classes'...

And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.

Also... being a Jedi/Sith used to be... exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.

IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive... but you wouldn't even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a 'gray' jedi.

Finally... SWG ... still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo... as a core game mechanic of a player 'class'.

Though I haven't played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.

... Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like... administrative capacity and zoning laws.

Do MMOs even... do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to 'you have a house in the set aside 'suburb' instance'?