getoj

Apropos of the curse, an explanation that I heard from a reasonably famous Scottish stage actor:

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most popular play, cause it’s got sex and blood and poetry all over, a really tight plot, and it’s not too long. It is pretty well guaranteed to fill a theatre. Also, every actor knows the script so you can find a cast in no time.

So if your current play is not selling a lot of tickets and is about to be cancelled, the theatre is going to put on Macbeth right after you to try to make its money back quickly. That’s why thespians hate to hear the name ‘Macbeth’ — because if there’s talk of that play going about, you could be out of a job next week.

I accidentally a word, which I’m allowed to do but only at the weekend

I’m a lawyer (but not your lawyer, not this kind of lawyer and not in your jurisdiction). Based on what I can recall from law school:

> Can an AI model intend harm?

No. The last time we attributed liability to non-human things was the deodand of the Middle Ages.

> Can a company, or company employee, intend harm by creating an environment that would knowingly encourage (but not force!) an AI model to do harm?

Absolutely. This is why we have the concept of recklessness. If you shoot a gun into a crowd without regard for whether it hits anyone, you’re getting charged with some crime whether it hits someone or not.

There is also a major difference in the common law between criminal liability and tort liability. Criminal liability generally requires a combination of mens rea (intent) and actus reus (actually committing the crime). Liability for a tort, which is where you harm someone in a way that falls short of being a crime, does not require mens rea. The OG tort is negligence, where you harm somebody by forgetting to do, or deciding not to do, something you ought to have done to protect that person from harm.

Even if AI companies somehow escape criminal liability for their cyber-shenanigans, any court in a civilised country would be happy to find them liable in tort for damage to computer systems.

As you can probably tell, I think the common law is already more than equipped to deal with AI technology based on well-established principles.

> None of these necessarily imply the speaker has actually done something wrong

You’d be surprised. The culture of kidzukai has two core tenets: (1) You must anticipate and cater to the other person’s every need and whim. If you fail you must apologize. (2) You must not allow the other person to do (1) for you instead of you doing it for them. If you fail you must apologize.

This means that every interaction between people who are even slightly close to each other in the social hierarchy is 3D chess which always ends in one or both of you apologizing to the other.

p.s. Gomen kudasai is “please permit me” to enter your house, not really an apology like gomen nasai.

I agree. In fact they are not even the most familiar opening lines by this poet:

“Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table”

What sites/communities keep up with things like this more actively? I’d love to read them too. Drop a link!

You're right of course - I realized my mistake several hours later, but much too late to edit...

→ Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around some other glaciers

A google image search for "木漏れ日" gets me about 50% beams and 50% patterns on the forest floor, so I don't think the difference is as clear cut as all that. But even on that basis, we then have two words--sunbeams for the beams and dappled light for the pattern--where the Japanese have only one. By the logic of the usual breathless linguistic fetishism that we see everywhere online, that means English has twice the reverence for the natural world that Japanese has.

Allow me to be pedantic and say that English has a perfectly good two-word phrase for this exact phenomenon, "dappled light."

The internet is very big on Japonisme (not to say Orientalism) so I feel obligated to present a contrary viewpoint once in a while.

>"gochisou-sama", literally "Mr. Feast" (yes really)

Sorry to nitpick, but not really. If we're being literal it's "honorably rushing about on your horse": chisō describes the work that had do be done to prepare the feast, running here and there to gather the ingredients. The "sama" doesn't mean Mr., it's just another honorific tag like go-/o-.

For what it's worth (not much), the line can be extended with similar error bars to include:

- St Michael's Church in Bengaluru, India

- Gereja Katolik Santo Mikael in Surabaya, Indonesia

- St Michael's Catholic Church in Kilcoy, Australia

- St Michael's Church in Auckland, New Zealand

Perhaps the real data challenge here is to find the straight line with the most St Michael'ses globally.

>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care

As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).

The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.

The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!

>If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution

I believe what GP is getting at is that if you didn't have a die, and you truly ignored all your previous attempts to the point of genuinely forgetting that the question had been asked, then your answer would likely be the same every time. Imagine asking a person with severe Alzheimer's to pick a number, then asking again a few minutes later. You'd probably get the same answer.

RPS got bought out about five years ago and all of the old guard left. The new RPS is about 70% run-of-the-mill reporting that you can see anywhere, 10% awful promos for hardware sales, and 20% starry-eyed young journalists trying to emulate what RPS used to be.

Despite all that it’s still the best single site for gaming criticism, sadly.