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Posted on 19-06-17, 00:11 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Stirrer of Shit
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You might be able to piece together some information on the site and find a person who maintains an online social presence. 95% sure it's who you'd think it is - location and some other stuff matches, and there can't be that many people meeting the criteria.

But then you kind of reach a dead end. What are you going to do, e-mail him? Also if you were that desperate you could still contact the developer given the information on the site.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 00:25 in Something about cheese!
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The first one is just (by necessity) unsourced anecdotal evidence. I don't think you can consider intelligence any less immutable given the DNB findings, it just appears to be a very insidious kind of placebo effect.

The Luxembourg paper is not about intelligence. It doesn't seem to be about anything in particular, really. They argue that it's important to be able to solve problems in the 21st century because of technology or something like that. More importantly, it's not a study. It's literally just them writing stuff:
Domain-general problem solving skills and education in the 21st century
1. Executive Summary
This position paper is aimed at highlighting the relevance of domain-general problem solving skills for a comprehensive approach to contemporary education. We argue that education in the 21st century needs to be comprehensive in the sense that it should equip students with domain-general problem solving skills in addition to domain-specific factual knowledge and problem solving strategies.

In this position paper, we argue that contemporary educational systems fall short of addressing the societal and individual needs to teach and to foster domain-general problem solving and that education needs to be extended. To this end, researchers face three main challenges: (1) to increase the relevant stakeholders’ awareness of the existence and the importance of domain-general problem solving skills, (2) to optimize the ways in which such skills can be assessed, and (3) to explore ways to foster students in developing and maintaining these skills.


(it's also four years old)

I don't understand how it proves anything. There isn't any new information in the paper, just 40-odd pages of drivel.

But just to be clear here: you claim is that intelligent poor kids do as well in school as intelligent rich kids, and intelligence is strongly inheritable, and that it is a strong predictor of success, just that it can be trained and that this could be done ad infinitum given enough time+willpower?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 11:20 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
You know, if intellect is genetic, people of similar intellect interbreed because like attracts like, and socio-economic status is dictated primarily by intellect... how come two of my grandparents had children land in all levels of society from poor to comfortably middle class(until the economic crash at the turn of the century wiped out their retirement fund) to literal millionaire*?

I can, with a single generation, disprove your hypothesis.

Their contribution would only have been 25%, assuming you mean their grandchildren. Also, SES doesn't even need to be primarily determined by intelligence. It's enough that it gets selected for little by little to create the class stratification effect.

As you say, there's obviously shared environment and non-shared environment contributors to income too. This doesn't prevent Herrnstein's syllogism from holding, since those would even out on a longer scale.

I don't have the actual data, so there's little I can do to respond to your claim in more detail than that.
Posted by wertigon
Another way to disprove the hypothesis:

Take any middle school class from any "bad" district. Tell the parents these are gifted children, and put *all* of them in a special school where this class has four tutors that challenge them. The students spend an entire year in this school, stay at dorms, and function the same. I can guarantee you, this middle school class at the end of the year will outperform their peers by a long shot. Every single one of them.

According to you though, this should be impossible. It's not. It's only impossible, because we as a society do not have endless resources.

Well, this would be a good way to evaluate it. It also has been done, more or less.

Once, they did what you describe, but for a smaller gap. They took "gifted" kindergarteners whose IQs tested > 157 and did more or less that, and then they ended up regressing to an average of 130 as adults because child IQ tests are a bit unreliable. Not very many of them accomplished a lot.
Then you have their high school, which was selected for in the same way but with IQ tests later on on life. Despite having a less impressive curriculum (e.g. they hadn't been going there for very long), they ended up doing better.

https://www.gwern.net/Hunter

The other way is to look at teacher quality and see what effect it has on students. If you have one group of poor students with a bad teacher and another one with a good, according to your hypothesis, the one with the good teacher ought to significantly outperform the one with the bad teacher, no?

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2016/05/09/my-response-to-the-nytimes-article-on-school-districts-test-scores-and-income/#teacher_quality

Perhaps more interestingly, as he points out, the kids from higher SES families stood more to gain from better teachers. So if one wanted to increase educational equality (which I do not), the best thing to do ought to be to give everyone the worst teachers you could find.

You can also do the opposite: take students from random SES backgrounds, perform interventions to decrease their IQ without telling anyone, and see what this does to educational outcomes.

This was (accidentally) done in 1989, following an accident at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. It's well known that radioactivity during some prenatal stages decrease intelligence. Sweden carried out intelligence tests of her entire male population until 2008, and we can see a decrease for those who had been in those stages of prenatal development around that time of around 0.15 SD (2.25 IQ points). Most likely, this decrease was more pronounced in the areas which received more fallout. And you can see how high school drop out rates in the counties hit hardest by fallout increased: http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/en/ssd/START__UF__UF0506/Utbildning/.

You could probably find better data (e.g. average SAT scores/GPAs by location of birth, and more granular intelligence test results), and it'd be very interesting, but I think it at any rate shows the value of intellignce in education.

Posted by sureanem
But just to be clear here: you claim is that intelligent poor kids do as well in school as intelligent rich kids, and intelligence is strongly inheritable, and that it is a strong predictor of success, just that it can be trained and that this could be done ad infinitum given enough time+willpower?


There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 13:06 in Something about cheese!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
I meant my parent, aunts, and uncles on one side of my family.

Well, 50% then. My bad, sorry. I still can't respond to anecdotal evidence very well, can I?
And your initial argument was in fact that societal standing was determined solely by inherited genetic intelligence. You are moving your goalposts, and I'm calling you on it.

I don't think it was:
Posted by sureanem
Due to assortative mating, [poor people not having access to education] is not as big of an issue one might think. Since intelligence causes socio-economic status, and intelligence (and by extension, SES) is strongly heritable, the people who would make great contributions to science are to a greater extent found within the upper classes. In other words, the potential loss from talented students who can't afford college is commonly overestimated, and in particular when considering social class rather than direct socio-economic status.

I never mention income here, just social class, and I never once claim or even imply the correlation should be unit. I do imply the correlation for SES should be lower than for social class. I don't think that should imply either one of them are unit, but rather the opposite.

This is what you mean by my initial argument, right?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 16:29 in Something about cheese! (revision 1)
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Posted by wertigon
Sorry, you completely missed what my experiment was about.

I was not saying, take a number of "gifted" people and do a study about them.

I was saying, take any class from the 4th quartile of grades (e.g. worst performers), and give them one year with a team of 4-6 teachers. They live the entire week in school, get to see their parents on weekends. No homework on weekends, too - all studies done with once they get to spend time home.

Tell these kids, all of these kids, that they are gifted and have a natural talent for... Something. Drawing. Math. Woodcarving. Whatever you desire. I would say math because math is the most useful skill from my perspective, but what exactly is not important.

I can guarantee you this entire class would go from fourth to second quartile after six months, possibly even get to first quartile after a year.

Of course, this would be a significant amount of resources spent on a single class. This experiment would net around a quarter million, when all is said and done. And education simply doesn't have this kind of money to spend on everyone.

In fact, this has been done a few times, take a look at schools that went from bottom feeders to decent to even competing at the top. Most bottom dwellers just need some support, and they can achieve great things.

Well, let's say for the sake of argument they'd probably be in the first quartile after a year. I'm not even sure this is the case (see the second link in my previous post), but let's go along with it. Then it follows that if you'd expend the same effort on first quartile students, they'd be in the 99th percentile or something along those lines. There's still a difference in ability, even if you throw money at the problem to try and hide it. And if you did have infinite money, everyone would develop to their full potential, meaning that you'd see the same relative ordering of students as before, e.g. 4th quartile students remain in 4th quartile.

To give an analogy, it's like claiming women are as strong as men because you (in theory) could have them do a lot of physical training and then have them exceed the male average. Sure, but they're still innately weaker and they'd still be weaker if both groups exercised as much as they could.

So it'd be vastly more cost-efficient to do these interventions for the best students than the worst; the overall benefit to society of someone going from prominent researcher to Nobel prize winner is greater than that of someone going from tradesman to civil servant, which in turn is far greater than that of someone going from drooling retard to drooling retard who does low-grade construction labor. And in terms of total learning per tax dollar, since intelligent people learn stuff faster, it's apparent that they'd learn more from a given intervention all else equal.

Case in point: Singapore, a country which is extremely competently run and highly values education, #1 in PISA rankings and so on and so forth, they realize this. That is why they doesn't waste money on special education, but rather just exempt the students from compulsory education instead, which is a far cheaper solution. With the money saved from one such student, they can help several gifted students who'd actually amount to something develop further. And they actually invest in such education for gifted students, unlike the West which just flushes the money down the drain with idiotic "No Child Left Behind" programmes or whatever they call it on the other side of the pond.

EDIT: Oops, that's the second last post (>>3400). And on second thought, tradesman -> civil servant is probably a downgrade. But you see what I mean.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 17:06 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Posted by tomman
Archive only has the download links for both the Win16 and Win32 demo versions, as expected.

Oh, I thought they just wanted you to activate.

The author is named Stefan Kuhne, but looking for him is quite tough

Yeah, but there's another person who's a bit easier to find. I don't want to invade anyone's privacy, but a PM should be fine.
Mr. Kuhne lives in California, so any results for someone living in Germany are duds. Likewise for anyone spelling it "Kühne".

StKuhne@gmx.net does not exist anymore: "550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable".

You could use it as a starting point for further queries, although it doesn't seem to be used for very much. HIBP doesn't have it, and that includes spam lists.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 19:19 in Web Browser Discussion
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Posted by Screwtape
If EEE is "stealing something from you", this is "making you return something you borrowed". Just because they both happen slowly doesn't make them the same thing.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. They both take power from the add-on developers and give it back to you, the people! move it to the browser development team. Both work by the same mechanism: change the way you write software so that you're forced to hand over the control to Microsoft/Google in exchange for "performance improvements"/"new features"

It seems very optimistic to say "final stages". "Next stage", certainly.

Well, I reckon their end game is to solve the piracy problem once and for all, and with it the problem of hate speech, just like they tried to do in the early 2000's. And stage one of this end game is to start quelling ad blockers. But stages plural, definitely.

Delivering ads via DRM sounds weird. Does that mean I can hide ads by using a DRM-free display transport like DVI instead of HDMI, just like that breaks Blu-Rays and Netflix?

Yeah, but it'll take the page with it. You might think that it sounds unrealistic, but you'd have said that about YouTube livestreams requiring DRM 5-10 years ago too. The first step will probably be newspapers' paywalls getting DRM-enhanced.

I think Google is pretty confident that they've got the browser market on lockdown and they can now afford to spend effort on what *they* want to do, instead of what their *users* want them to do. You know, like Microsoft did after IE6 was released.

Well, they can't mess it up too badly. They can on mobile. They don't have complete dominance, since something grossly repulsive (e.g. worse than DRM) would get Mozilla to object.
And while they do control Mozilla, pushing through anything too objectionable would probably get it to self-destruct, after which it becomes apparent that they have a monopoly, causing them to receive scrutiny from the regulator. Mozilla plays a very important role for them, and is the only check on their behavior there is.

Well, *obviously* Google has something to do with Mozilla's decline

I'm talking about Mozilla's internal conflicts. There's not that much shady with Chrome taking the #1 spot, in comparison.

The thing that conspiracy-minded observers never seem to understand is that things fall apart. It is the usual and standard behaviour of the universe for things to not go the way we want them to; making some positive thing happen requires substantial effort and organisation. On the other hand, making a bad thing happen requires literally zero effort - let your attention slip for a moment, get distracted, or even just fumble, and your world can change irreparably.

Let's be real here, Mozilla's fall from grace is hardly a case of entropy taking over. They fired their competent people and then put what appears to be loonies in charge, that sounds more like sabotage than incompetence. If one reads their annual report they will find hardly anything about browser development, but a lot about their pet projects and political views.

I can't find the thread now, but I recall reading a Firefox dev (or possibly an ex-Firefox dev) complaining that even though individual Googlers value cross-browser compatibility and interoperability and all that, Google-owned websites keep working really well in Chrome and wind up sluggish or glitchy in other browsers. It's not because anyone's trying to sabotage other browsers, it's just because if a Googler has to choose between cross-browser bugfixing and something they actually get paid to do, they're going to do the paid work every time.

What about the odd empty YouTube div tags to cripple Edge?

youtube-dl gets very regular updates to keep it working, and it only has to handle a tiny fraction of the YouTube API. I can't easily find any stats, but anecdotally it's often a few days between youtube-dl breaking and a new release that gets it working again. If YouTube was entirely unavailable in a particular browser for a few days, that would be a Big Deal.

Well, okay, fair enough. They could opt for some kind of compromise, like using youtube-dl if it works and otherwise YouTube proper.

The whole point of a web-browser is that you implement HTML, JS and CSS once, and then you can handle all the websites. As much as people complain about HTML, JS and CSS being over-complicated and inscrutable, it's still vastly simpler to implement a web-browser than it would be to implement a custom native UI from scratch for every existing website. The idea that browsers should implement a custom UI for the 500 most popular websites without their knowledge or consent, and transparently keep those custom UIs up-to-date as the websites change their backend is... not so much a cat-and-mouse game as it is Sisyphean.

I can't imagine websites explicitly wishing to block Decentraleyes without provocation, but I can't imagine websites explicitly wanting to support it, either. The minute some website gets a support call because Decentraleyes has loaded the wrong script, or the wrong version of a script, or even just interfered with the reliability of their analytics, I guarantee they will figure out a way to fix their problem, and it won't involve reporting an issue to Decentraleyes and waiting for them to release an updated version.

Couldn't you say this about compilers too? Theoretically, GCC needs no comprehension of the standard library at all, but in practice it very definitely wants to know what strlen is and how it differs from any other size_t(char*) function. And it seems like even if you could never make a perfect compiler, you could still make one which used some tricks to get ahead some of the time. Against an actively adversarial website it may not be possible, but I can't see the others caring about your optimizations. They could even pull a Judo move and do special optimizations for some stuff that's otherwise extremely slow, then bait web developers into using them. Considering web developers do not appear to care much about performance as long as it runs fine on their test rigs, it would be a winning short-term strategy. In the long term, of course it doesn't matter. Mozilla's only ace up their sleeve is that they don't have to suffer under antitrust legislation, but they have been unwilling to leverage this and now it's too late.

But as a counterfactual example of what they could have done: In the next update, Firefox ships with a built-in opt-out ad blocker. They whitelist "acceptable ads" like ABP, which doesn't include Google but does include Yandex. Collect $X million where X > XGoogle from Yandex, do pass go.

For reference, Google makes something like $200 billion a year from ads and gives Mozilla about $200m a year. Firefox has a 5% market share. 0.200/(200*0.05) = 0.02. As long as their cut from this Yandex deal would exceed 2%, they profit. As a bonus, Yandex has a vested interest in the failure of the Chrome platform (e.g. willing to subsidize Mozilla and perhaps even turn Firefox into a Chrome), the support of a major national government (like Google), and are not really subject to antitrust/privacy law or the GDPR.

I'm sure someone who's better at thinking could come up with some even better idea, but it's abundantly clear they're not using the resources at their disposal effectively.

Writing them by hand would indeed be a lot of work, but surely you could at least do something like PGO to get a rendering engine specially optimized for nytimes.com whenever you load nytimes.com? And Decentraleyes' script repository should of course be updated via the browser's built-in surreptitious auto-update mechanism without user consent or knowledge.

For extra breakage of non-Firefox browsers competitive edge, it could just go ahead and load jQuery et al into the global namespace each time you open a new page, or at least lazy-load it. Then some pages would start to rely on it, then Google would have to implement it, and Mozilla will have landed a small blow and gained an equally small share of users. Rinse and repeat, in theory.

The point is that Google is trying to balance their operational goals with preserving user good-will. If independent measurements show that Google's claims are substantially correct (adblockers do slow browsers down, and can be slimmed down without losing their effectiveness) then everybody wins - Google gets to do their thing, users get faster adblocking. If independent measurements do *not* agree with Google's claims, or even contradict them (adblockers aren't very slow, and they really need very large lists), then Google will need to sacrifice their operational goals even further (good for users) or go full Palpatine (probably a very poor move, at least today, so still good for users).

Is it really going full Palpatine to ignore what some obscure group nobody cares about has recommended? Joe Q. Public won't care and it won't make CNN, that's for sure.

Or they could just say that they've read the complaints and will review their suggestions, and then stall for a few months and go ahead with it anyway.

I just don't see the point.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 19:28 in Something about cheese!
Stirrer of Shit
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Education being a function of IQ does not entail the correlation being unit. If you take someone with 130 IQ and lock them in a room and wait a year, of course they'd be behind someone who went to school for a year, although of course they could catch up. To claim that I claimed otherwise would be a strawman beyond belief.

Conscientiousness does play a role, definitely. They find that too. I'm not going to dispute that, it's common sense.


Well, education is mostly a function of IQ, but deficiencies in IQ can be compensated for by increased conscientiousness up to a point. Or if you wish infinitely, but then there is a limit to conscientiousness.


If we assume for a moment that education is solely a function of intelligence


It might disprove an unrelated third party's theory that knowledge cannot be taught, but certainly none of mine.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-17, 21:12 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-mo96i_4iI - holy shit, I never knew a guy in a suit could be so honest

Posted by tomman
what an unfortunate timing!

Or great, depending on your perspective. I mean, good luck immigrating to the US just after 9/11.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-18, 09:26 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
How could he do that if your claims are correct? It's a direct contradiction.

Do you want me to just quote my previous post on the matter again? That would feel somewhat pointless and rude. So I'll ask instead, is there something in >>3407 you disagree with?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-18, 22:01 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
How many times have you heard this story?

"Yeah, so I was approached by this guy who wanted me to invest in their company. Scruffy looking college kid, heck he had even dropped out recently. Of course I didn't invest a penny. That person was Mark Zuckerberg, and his project was Facebook."

A lot of times. You hear it because it's uplifting, not because it's true. Zuckerberg scored a perfect 1600, and apparently was bright enough to get into Harvard.
At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, where he won prizes in science (mathematics, astronomy, and physics) and classical studies. In his youth, he also attended the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer camp. On his college application, Zuckerberg stated that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team.

Sounds like whatever the polar opposite of a late bloomer is.

More importantly, there is no such thing as a late bloomer here. Or, sure, you could have someone who's really smart but for various reasons doesn't go to college until he's 25. But there's no such thing as your IQ magically taking a leap of a standard deviation or two after you've already hit adulthood.
There are way too many anecdotes like that which tells me, no it's not enough to simply focus on the brightest and the best. Everyone benefits if all children could understand Calculus. Not just the academically bright.

Really, anecdotal evidence (which also happens to be wrong, mind you) as a source?

I don't understand what you're saying here. Of course everyone would stand to benefit from everyone being able to learn calculus, since 'everyone' would include them, and the statement that it's beneficial if you can understand calculus is just plain tautological.

The benefit to society, however, from spending inordinate amounts of time and money on teaching everyone calculus is a lot less clear to me. Given limited resources, it's more efficient to focus on the brightest students and drop spec ed, giving resources in roughly direct proportion to their skill level.

Unfortunately there are no silver bullets, but hard, nit gritting painstaking work that is straight up undermined by armchair nay-saying scientist such as yourself. But hey, don't let me ruin your fun. :)

Well, how is anything getting undermined here? I am just claiming that there are innate differences in ability, that no amount of training can "fix," just as no amount of training may make women stronger than men. But surely, what I claim can't actually warp reality one way or the other?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-18, 23:23 in Board feature requests/suggestions
Stirrer of Shit
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OK, so guest editing was a bit too edgy.

But shouldn't you be able to guest post threads?

Also, shouldn't the board name in Last posts link to the board? For instance, Discussion -> /bboard/forum.php?id=2

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Oftentimes, when enquiring about (Japanese -> English) translation, you hear that a certain game can't be translated because of the pointers. As in, you need to physically relocate the string, because the current buffer it's in isn't long enough.

But why is this the case? Why can't you just edit the strings in-place? English is a very predictable language, and with a custom alphabet you could encode it very efficiently.

Take for instance the string: "ウィキペディアへようこそウィキペディアへようこそウィキペディアは誰でも編集できるフリー百科事典です". This is 49 characters long. The official English translation, "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.," is 64.

But the Japanese glyphs are physically bigger. What prevents you from just taking two characters in one glyph? The sprites are physically editable, and with such alterations it becomes trivial. "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Say you gave the top 30 digrams (from this page) a glyph each.

Then this example string would collapse to "Welcome _ Wikip_ia, _e f_e _cyclop_ia __ _y_e c_ __." - 52 characters. If you have several thousand slots, then you could probably use the top 100 bigrams, and you get "W___ _ Wiki__a, _e f_e _cyc___a __ _y_e _n __." - 46 chars. You could get this down even further if you had a better bigram list that considered spaces, trigrams, etc, or even an editor which dynamically generates one based on the game script and tells you what compresses well and what poorly.

And even without all this, you could just abbreviate your writing: "Welcome to Wikipedia, a free lexicon you can edit" (49 chars, same as Japanese). Or take a page from the journalists' playbook: "Welcome –free editable lexicon WP" (35ch)

So why is translation for some platforms considered impossible? PSX is the big one, you hear a lot about games being untranslatable because of the tools not being there to find all the pointers and move them.

I mean, someone ought to have had this idea before and scrapped it for some reason, but why? Тоо fеw glурhs? Or do es the ker nin g beco rn  e unbea rab ly   u gly?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-19, 00:41 in Board feature requests/suggestions
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I'm not sure. Because it's part of the UI? So that you should be able to select the post ID on mobile? Because there's no header?



There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-19, 14:36 in Something about cheese!
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Posted by wertigon
This is one example of many, however. While Zuckerberg is the extreme end of the spectrum, there are plenty of geniuses and successful men with an average IQ. Heck, even Albert Einstein was overlooked at first glance, and was a constant underperformer until 1905.

Underperformer?
Einstein always excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers. The twelve-year-old Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer. Einstein also independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem at age 12.[23] A family tutor Max Talmud says that after he had given the 12-year-old Einstein a geometry textbook, after a short time "[Einstein] had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high I could not follow."[24] His passion for geometry and algebra led the twelve-year-old to become convinced that nature could be understood as a "mathematical structure".[24] Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he says he had "mastered integral and differential calculus".[25]

At age 13, Einstein was introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Kant became his favorite philosopher, his tutor stating: "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him."[24]

In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH). He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the examination,[26] but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.[27] ... In September 1896, he passed the Swiss Matura with mostly good grades, including a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematical subjects, on a scale of 1–6.[30] At 17, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Zürich Polytechnic.

I really don't think that sounds like someone of average intelligence.

In fact, I don't think there are any geniuses of average intelligence at all. "A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality," Wikipedia says. It's a bit difficult to display exceptional intellectual ability when your intellectual ability by definition is average, don't you think?

(That there are successful people of average intelligence is not something I have ever disputed)

I know it is possible to lift any school class out of the trajectory it is set on. But it requires the right guidance at the right time.

If you do not believe me, then perform this experiment. Take one of the worst, underachieving classes in your town or county. Offer them one hour a week of your time for a year. I can guarantee you these kids will achieve a lot better at the end of that year.

However, you do have to approach these students with the mindset that they are not idiots - just poorly taught. And frankly, I do not think you are the kind of person that is up to that task.

I have never claimed otherwise. Of course it would (probably) be possible to teach them mathematics and have them reach a given benchmark, but it would be a far better use of time to help the gifted ones. In practice, I think both would be pretty bad because I have next to no teaching experience, but I digress.

Anyhow, it stands to reason that if both groups were given the extensive support they needed to reach their full potential, the gifted students would come out on top. In effect, all such a project would serve to accomplish would be to create the intellectual equivalent of womens' soccer.

Now, I'm sure you have all kinds of objections, but save them. I could pull out a hundred real world examples of where you are proven wrong, but finding these is like finding proof that water is wet. It is frankly not worth my time or effort, because you are not open to that kind of evidence. Which is a shame.

This means I am done here. :)

Real world examples such as the mediocrity of Einstein and Zuckerberg? Or the class of dull kids where "most did pass Calculus" after extensive coaching? Or the poor kids who don't have time to do their homework?

I have yet to see one of these supposed hundreds of real world examples that held up under any scrutiny.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by Kawa
Did you really just imply that using some weird digraph encoding with frequency analysis and custom tools and all that is easier than shifting some pointers around? Cos the difficulty of pointer shifting varies per system -- GBA is absolutely lovely for example.

And what about player input like hero names?

On some systems it ought to be easier, since finding the pointers is supposedly nigh-impossible.

The tooling wouldn't need to be custom per-game, since the basic operations are the same: gin up the character sprites which most efficiently encode the game script (knapsack problem), edit the game script to use them (knapsack problem again), then patch in the edited game script.

Player names would probably not get any digraph encodings and just have to deal with having the same max length in alphabetic letters and syllabics. An ambitious translator could put in code to try to merge letters as they are written, but it would be a lot of work.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Well, yeah, then it's easy. But for some platforms, it can supposedly be much harder.

Seems like someone else had a similar idea:
I was aware they made a custom font which had only specific combinations of 2 letters and wondered how many different sentences would even be writable with that limited set, but that just allows for a 2:1 ratio.


For older games, it would also make the need for proportional fonts less pressing because you could vary the character density as long as you still had room to spare.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
Congratulations. You just invented dual-tile encoding.

Well, I reckon it'd be a common technique, but I couldn't find anything.
So why isn't it used more? This site suggests it's used in RPGs, but why never in fan translations?
Posted by Kawa
Pokémon TCG on the GBC.

Note how the player's name is wide.
Note how the opponent's name is not.

How's that work? Do they store player names as wchar_t's but game text as chars?
Posted by creaothceann
Posted by sureanem
But the Japanese glyphs are physically bigger. What prevents you from just taking two characters in one glyph?

That's called VWF (variable-width (proportional) font). Multiple BG or sprite tiles are treated as a canvas onto which the characters are drawn at runtime.

No, at compile time. You have all the 26 letters of the alphabet, then fill up the remaining slots with di/trigraphs. The drawing routines see opaque monospace characters, but some of these "characters" contain multiple letters.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Posted on 19-06-20, 12:09 in Something about cheese!
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by wertigon
Education is mainly a function of intelligence, but unintelligent people (e.g. poor people, since SES and IQ has a strong correlation) would become highly educated if given the chance? And you do not see this as a contradictory statement? 'k, fine. :)

Passing calculus is "highly educated" now?

Also, "given the chance" is misleading. They'd have far more resources spent on them than the normal students, so it wouldn't be as if they'd be competing on equal footing. All you'd end up doing is spending inordinate amounts of money to replace conscientiousness.

If both would be given the same resources, or even resources in the same order of magnitude, the smarter people would end up far ahead. And curiously, this advantage grows as the resources assigned increase, even if both end up getting more.
... I... Just... Wow.

"Hey everybody, I have an idea! Let's create a soccer team with 10% the funding and a second-rate coach and then wonder why everyone think they suck!"

Noone is taking them seriously because noone is taking them seriously because noone is taking them seriously because...

...they suck.

The national teams consistently get beaten by teen boys. The reason I can't find any links for normal teams is simple: they don't even bother playing against them.

Utter shitholes with hardly enough money for food manage to scrape together half-decent soccer teams, so I don't think it's about money. And surely, not all teen boys' teams can have better coaches (let alone funding) than the bloody national team, even if they're women?

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
Stirrer of Shit
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Posted by CaptainJistuce
" So why isn't it used more? This site suggests it's used in RPGs, but why never in fan translations?"
Because it is a fairly limited technique, and if you're going to be making new code anyways, either code a better compression system* or relocate the text to somewhere you can actually fit what you need.

It does get used when a game already implements it... sometimes. I think I've seen fan translations that removed the dual-tile encoding to add in something better.
It turns out that people capable of doing fan translations tend to also be fairly well-versed in what you can feasibly do with a system while it is running the game they're working on.
Yes, there are exceptions where the script is stored in plain ASCII or the text to be translated is all present as uncompressed images, but... a lot of the time it requires a good deal of assembly and platform knowledge to even extract the script in the first place, and a good deal more to get it back into the game later. Sometimes you even have to rework chunks of the game engine(I recall one title where the text was printed in vertical text boxes on the right side of the screen, and the hackers had to completely replace the text drawing code to get something that was useful for english)

Your fundamental assumption that rawmhaxxors don't know what they're doing and are leaving even the most basic optimizations on the table is... questionable.




*Exception for when RAM limitations or available processing power prevent you from using something better.


Well, all that makes sense. But how come it never gets used in games where you can't move the pointers around? I get that there are better compression methods, but those aren't used either. For Nintendo 64, the strings usually have printf-esque format specifiers and are stored uncompressed, so I'd imagine those issues you outline wouldn't be an issue for N64, PSX, and later.

Not saying they're leaving optimizations on the table, of course they're not. There must be a good reason why it's not a good way to go at things.

There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.
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