phantasmish

The US (where “open borders” are often characterized as national “suicide” by right-wing figures) had open borders well within living memory.

By ship? No. But you’re from Argentina and made it all the way up to the Rio and want to cross to work on US farms or whatever? Yeah whatever man, totally fine, just walk in. Anyone from the Americas was welcome, no waiting, no la migra hunting them, no nothin’

We didn’t change that until the ‘60s, and the only reason it didn’t cause a ton of problems immediately (farms at that time were already heavily dependent on migrant labor operating a bit under the table, and their lobbies were not quiet on the issue) was that enforcement was and has been, at times (and especially at first) mostly rather half-assed.

> > The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.

> Says who?

The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props, and stuff like that. (as if I'm not already aware of that stuff, LOL) That's where most of the CG is in movies for the last decade or so—they're right about that. It's replacing prop construction, set design & construction, and location shooting.

> This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.

No, I'm just not impressed when CG successfully (I disagree it's successful as often as proponents say, and to them I say "give it ten years and a lot of this 'good' stuff will look awful to you", as it's the same ride we've been on with CG the entire time so far, the "look, CG's finally entirely convincing!" movie seems about as convincing as Jason and the Argonauts' stop motion a few years later) does something mundane that wouldn't even have been an effect before.

I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.

> People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.

The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over, it was a pretty brief window between "you can always tell the model is a model" and "now it's all computers".

(This should irk you too: CG blood spatter harms every single action movie where it replaces squibs, the movie may survive the harm but that part is terrible every time)

Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies? I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those (maybe the least in 1917? And I haven't seen Ford vs. Ferrari, but I have all the rest). A few entire scenes or sequences in TG:M look awful, and it's usually the mundane ones that wouldn't even have been effects in a pre-CG movie, not the aircraft action stuff. Alien: Romulus looks fake practically the whole movie (that one didn't ruin it for me or anything, but it had an effect like the Riddick movies, of being obviously mostly a cartoon, though of course not as awful about it as those were).

Well, I guess it wasn't exactly distracting in Barbie because that's practically a marionette movie a la Thunderbirds, so it's not really trying not to look off.

I think eliminating the need to think and work around reality is part of the trouble. Not that it ruins everything (people take HN posts as so maximalist even when they factually are not; see: the rest of this comment tree) but I think the lack of the odd limitation or need to think about how to solve a problem without resorting to “render it in a computer” causes significant harm to cinema overall. I’m not (see above parenthetical) claiming it’s net-negative, but there’s a kind of film-making skill and genius that was once on display pretty widely, and now is not.

I mean for fuck’s sake, they’d probably CG the paint buckets in Home Alone if they made it today. And we’d get some tasteless can-cam shot, because you don’t have to figure it out, you can just do it. And they’d look fake because they’d move too perfectly, lacking the kinds of little off-seeming movements that a real paint can in a real take might do. Never might the can obscure a few frames of face when the directors might choose otherwise, and the result will be obviously CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.

Excessive perfection and too many things moving the optimal way for the shot or exactly the way the viewer expects are under-appreciated tells of CG, and they’re deadly ones, present even in a lot of “perfect” CG (give it a few years, we thought the CG in Lord of the Rings was convincing and now it looks like trash). They need to start CGing their fake environments sometimes doing something slightly less than ideal to an actor’s jacket, or something, and not to call attention to it as a comedy relief moment, but because “that’s just what happened” (not really, but it’d make the effects more convincing)

The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot. We don’t usually call that an “effect” when it’s not done with a computer. And even then… it continues to deliver “bad matte painting” often enough that spotting such failures in the wild isn’t hard (nor was it hard with bad matte paintings!)

[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.

[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.

Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.

I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional.

Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.

It'd be kinda nice if they exposed whatever queuing is going on behind the scenes, so you could at least communicate that to your users.

The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.

I was recently gifted an Apple Watch and it forced an update on me, so I jumped straight to the x.1 patch, and I'd still call this beta-quality, even setting aside my strong disagreements with the design and UX direction.

I've seen other releases much complained-about online then found them to not bother me much, or even at all, when I upgraded, but this one's an exception. It really is very bad.

I've seen soooo many rendering errors in Safari. And bugged-out keyboard + inputs (input touch location offset from its visible location on the page after the keyboard opens—a real problem if you're trying to paste). Never ever seen it 1/10 this buggy after any prior release, and I've been on iOS since... 5, I think? And did some development work on the platform as early as version 3 or 4.

That's in addition to so many dropped frames in the animations that I disabled as many as I could because it was driving me crazy, and to a bunch of word-based buttons becoming confusing icons. I think this has topped 7 for my least-favorite iOS release, and the gap widens by the day. It's terrible.

[EDIT] What it most reminds me of (I was on early Android and have done even more development work on Android over the years than I have for iOS) is Android. The jank, the pile of little confusing UI choices that all add up into an overall off-putting experience. The uncertainty what kind of bad thing might happen when you touch anything. Feels like an above-average 3rd party Android skin, like from Samsung or someone (so, pretty bad). The stuttering animations. No other iOS release has ever felt like Android to me.

I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)

Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.

[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.

Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.

Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.

Try The Four Feathers by AEW Mason, if you haven’t. There are also two or three film adaptations, can be fun to see where and how each deviated from the book. And maybe King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard.

More British old-timey adventuring, though without so many ships.

If you want an antihero-rake and a tale told tongue firmly in cheek, see if the Flashman novels by Fraser are to your liking. Fraser takes a rich school-bully character from a more wholesome series of books and imagines his military & adventuring career in adulthood.

I just used “less” to read them, if I were to do it again I’d find something that at least kept my place on program close. I think I only accidentally closed it like once in that three months, but over time it would have been a problem worth solving.

At one job where I was under-worked but had my back to a major walkway and to my manager’s glass-walled office I put Project Gutenberg txt files in a terminal and any time I might have looked at HN, I did that instead.

Three novels in three months.

Ah, the inevitable "meh, give up, it's hopeless" post, to go along with the "why don't parents do their fucking job and leave us alone?" posts. No thread on HN related to parenting and technology is complete without a healthy dose of both sorts of post.

Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.

"This is good for this" doesn't mean it's the only thing we use?

People are real eager to tear down a point that was simply "maybe don't let kids use algo-feed social media, because it's an actual garbage fire". The vast majority of the Internet does not have the same problems, to the same degree, as places like Instagram and TikTok. Some of it may have other problems and may be worth looking out for! But most of those other places also have, like, some redeeming features.

Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? I'm pretty surprised at the kind of push-back this is getting. I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok. I also don't have time to supervise them playing with boxes of rusty razor blades, so I try not to give them access to boxes of rusty razor blades, either [edit: I can predict the disingenuous replies to this part, so further suppose the blades are bubble-gum flavored and literal hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on packaging and presenting the box and blades to encourage kids to put them in their mouths; there, that's closer to algo feed social media, pretty much no reason to engage nor allow your kids near it, loooots of reason to keep it way the hell away].

This seems really straightforward and reasonable to me.

You've misunderstood this conversation and/or are applying statistics extremely poorly. This is not serving whatever point you're trying to make, and is a distraction from productive discourse.

> You're talking about cutting kids from

> all online services

Not even close? I don’t know how you got that.

> including multiplayer games

Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those)

> community wikis

Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.

> 1) Given that it just says you're a "child", how does that work across jurisdictions where the adult age may not be 18?

It's a client-side flag saying "treat this request as coming from a child (whatever that means to you)". I don't follow what the jurisdiction concern is.

[EDIT] Oooooh you mean if a child is legally 18 where the server is, but 16 where the client is. But the header could be un-set for a 5-year-old, too, so I don't think that much matters. The idea would be to empower parents to set a policy that flags requests from their kids as coming from a child. If they fail to do that, I suppose that'd be on them.

That's a good point—counting them may not matter, but might meta-matter.

> A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".

[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.

I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social media", which has worked so far. They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. That's plenty.

Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd let my kids hang out unsupervised, and the amount of time I intend to spend watching (supervising) them scrolling Insta or TikTok on anything like a regular basis is zero, and the likelihood of their choosing that as a thing they want to do if I'm otherwise available to do something fun with them is also probably somewhere around zero, which means... no social, since it ain't happening supervised.

Like I also wouldn't take them to a bad part of town and leave them there for hours. Why would I do the digital equivalent? Even if we talk about it afterward... why? Maybe occasionally as a "here's how to spot shit" lesson but not enough that they'd need an account or anything.

Given the apparently-terrible injury-to-death ratio, another angle to attack the legality of the action might be that the weapons were first and foremost effective at maiming, not killing, which is generally frowned upon by the laws of war (if they were intended as lethal, their success on that front was so bad it might fall into "guilty through incompetence" sort of territory)

(I agree the targeting per se seems to have been remarkably good for the world of asynchronous warfare—or even conventional warfare)

They could do that now and it might be legal under international laws of war.

We've massed forces for an attack, attacked their ships, violated their airspace with combat aircraft (that's today), and extensively and publicly threatened them. They'd be in their legal rights to strike preemptively, including possibly a decapitation strike (this is why the Dubya administration kept repeating the term "preemptive strike", even though it was obviously nowhere near applying in the case of Iraq—it was a way of asserting its legal basis)

[edit] As thereisnospork points out in a sibling comment, however, this doesn't mean it'd be a good idea.

If things aren't close they don't need to be counted.

It's a fact of voting that most folks can vote in every election they can for their entire lives and never make any difference whatsoever, as in, change zero outcomes.

We have social pressure and propaganda otherwise to get people to do it, because if too many people rationally stay home then the system works poorly (in aggregate, that does change outcomes). It'd be much better to just mandate voting, because it is individually irrational and it's not great to base a system on tricking everyone into behaving irrationally.

This feels different because they're not bothering to even count them, but it's not materially different from any voting.

(barring the "sometimes not even counted then" part, of course)

The administration can just keep coming at him as long as they're in power, and that is itself effectively a punishment. If each case takes just 90 days to play out, they can bring four or so of those per year, on the taxpayer dime (while themselves getting paid, by us, to do it, in fact!) and waste tons of Comey's money and time, while also stressing him out.

The safeguard against this is supposed to be that Congress would eventually put a stop to it, or that the people wouldn't vote someone in who'd abuse the power of the executive branch to extrajudicially punish opponents. Neither of those safeguards have worked. Courts can tell them to stop but they have to keep telling them with each case, after everyone goes through all the motions (so to speak).

My in-laws are like that.

My parents were like that, in a different way. They couldn’t sit in a room without a tv on, even if they had visitors and everyone was talking and not paying attention to the TV. Living room TV was on at least 16 hours a day, just about every day, I bet. So weird. Also had TVs in every bedroom, including rarely-used spare bedrooms. Like they had six TVs in their house at peak. WTF.

(Actually, my in-laws also do the TV thing, or else a laptop playing YouTube trash… plus phones)

The billionaires seem to have settled on New Zealand as the right combo of “stable-enough liberal democracy that they probably won’t seize my treasure hoard” and “hard enough to reach that climate and political-instability refugee waves cannot get there”.

Votes in many contests for many citizens already don’t matter, due to our system of elections being really bad.

Last I checked only about half of US adults understand how marginal income tax rates work.