To translate from one language to another, you need to know both languages very well, including puns, idioms, etc., and have a deep understanding of both cultures involved. A word for word translation will rarely do; you may even have to come up with new jokes / references to replace ones that don’t work in the target language.

If you have read translations of manga by, say, Rumiko Takahashi, you might have seen footnotes explaining all the puns and references. And even this is not ideal, since it breaks the reader’s flow.

And wtf is Neptune doing in second place.

Pluto and the Kuiper belt.

Note that Saturn is relatively close to Jupiter, while Neptune is far from any other large planets. So while it is smaller, it dominates a much larger part of the solar system.

What exactly is the point of rolling release?

Newer features. At the cost of a higher risk of stuff breaking.

Or is it for security?

No, point release OSs do have security updates. It’s feature updates that they avoid.

Doctors don’t get to turn their patients off during repairs.

If an army is dumb enough to offer me a permanent position when I’m 60, I’d take it too (then immediately retire and live off the pension).

Sectors like pharma require enormous R&D budgets. If you have a free market with many companies, each company will have only a tiny marketshare, and therefore only a tiny budget. So you can’t do without the megacorps. The solution is for the megacorps to be run by the government / non-profits / trusts, or, if that is not possible, for prices to be fixed by an independent regulatory body.

No it’s like a duel where one person keeps shooting himself in the foot and the other gets increasingly confused.

They said:

1. Alkaline water won’t change your body’s pH.
2. Changing your body’s pH would kill you.

Since alkaline water does not change body pH, it would not necessarily kill the drinker.

I just looked up smartphones with headphone and SD card slots on GSMarena, and there are 159 models even from 2025. That’s more than I expected. And most of them are actually affordable and worth the cost - I wouldn’t recommend half the devices on this list purely based on price to performance ratio.

They live in areas that are covered by snow for at least part of the year, such as the Himalayas, Tibet and parts of Central Asia and Mongolia. The animal itself can vary in colour from cream to grey or tan.

So that’s why they’re called voids.

I actually like it. Smartphones in India are usually a little cheaper than elsewhere, since they assume they can make up the lost revenue with ads. And at least on Xiaomi devices, you can stop all OS-side ads by removing just one app.

Nobel prizes cannot be given to the dead.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

Upton Sinclair

you cannot prove a system using the system.

Doesn’t that only apply for sufficiently complicated systems? Very simple systems could be provably self-consistent.

1. If you build infrastructure people will come

2. A 15-hour journey sounds perfect for an overnight service.

Why is there no connection between Niigata and Yonezawa?

Can’t you just switch off Play Protect entirely?

Adding more hydrogen will make the sun burn faster, so I guess spraying water will extinguish the sun a little earlier than it otherwise would.

As far as we know we have not found the colonialism gene, and there is no evidence that Europeans are somehow genetically different at this locus. So we can, at least for now, ignore the possibility that Europeans are inherently evil, or predisposed towards colonialism. Rather, the actions of any people must be understood as a consequence of their circumstances and culture.

due to all that’s happened in history, white people today are, while not intrinsically or genetically evil, tainted by the colonialism that has already happened and are therefore more likely to be the exploiters than the exploited due to their historical advantage.

White people are not only the beneficiaries of the colonialism that has already happened, they are often also the beneficiaries of colonialism that is currently happening. The CIA didn’t coup random Central American countries because they were bored. The IMF and World Bank don’t give loans to African countries for humanitarian reasons.

But human societies are not species and human-human interactions are not strictly ecological. For one, human societies have overarching coordination and collective will that species don’t have, and human societies as a whole often show more characteristics akin to a single organism than a species (though even that is apples to oranges)

I feel that the same principles that govern other animals should apply, more or less, to humans too. Although it might be more appropriate to compare human societies to populations of social animals (such as ant colonies or beehives) than to different species.

Does that imply that Imperial China was less evil than Imperial Europe? Or are they just as evil but in a different way (land-based conquest instead of sea based)? Or did they just not have the resources to do what Europe did but absolutely would have if they did? I don’t know hence why I’m asking.

I think the difference is that historically China had excellent agricultural land, a relatively modern and stable economy, and was surrounded by poorer and less advanced countries. So people had all the resources they wanted, and had little incentive to go far away. In contrast, Europe was fragmented, with Scotland, the Netherlands and Portugal actually having poor / too little land, and so there was a push for both raw materials and markets.