The problem stems from supposed "realism". It used to be that acting in movies and TV had roots in theater - where actors are used to projecting their stage voice. Also, I sort of have thought that they are using less ADR these days.

Anyway, you can see this at work even in later productions - watch Picard, for example. Patrick Stewart still brings his Voice - you do not need subtitles to understand what Picard is saying. Compare to the younger actors in the same production - yes, they talk more "realistically", but the voices sound like they are coming from your random home video recorded on a phone or something.

The other issue is technical. It used to be that all the voice acting was placed via the front-center channel. That's why I have set up my amplifier so that in my 5.1 setup the center speaker has +3dB more than the others - it brings out the actor's lines out much more clearly - in OLDER movies ("Older" in this case meaning anything before about 2005 or so).

With the newfangled Dolby Atmos, however, you get "spatial audio" instead of discrete channels, so you can apparently no longer get that nice and easy way to isolate the speaking parts. Yes, the characters voices are coming from the "correct" location in relation to the screen, but they are mixed in with all the background sound effects. I can no longer explicitly bring out the lines by fiddling with my mixer settings.

And I have a 5.1 setup. If all of this is shunted via a soundbar, or TV speakers, or even (shudder) an iPad or a phone, it gets much worse.

So, these days I'm watching spoken English movies with English subtitles, despite understanding the language.

Give me a technical means to say to my mixer "Increase ADR tracks by +6dB", and I do not need subtitles anymore.

The article does not really say (or I'm missing it), but I can imagine an AI host just spouting random crap between your typical playlist songs or adding minor commentary to news or something (that's what LLMs are for!). But did she answer calls, e.g. random callers just commenting on songs, or competitions "our nth caller gets the prize!"?

Obi-Wan was okay (not good enough for rewatch, but enjoyable), mostly because, well 1) Couple of references to Andor (like Mon Mothma), and actually *good* series and 2) Ewan McGregor carried the protagonist.

The others, hard agree.

I hate Google because whenever I travel. My browser clearly sends Accept-Language header. Why do they proudly ignore it and assume I want their page - and search results! - in whatever language the local majority uses?

Oh, right. They want me to log in to an account.

Naah, the "modern movies/books/games are crap" is really just your typical generational thing. What you are watching/reading/listening/playing when you are in your teens are the Best Thing Ever for the rest of your life. This has been true forever.

I remember when the Star Wars prequels first came out 25 years ago. All of us old SW fans hated Jar Jar. But what do you know, the kids who saw them then thing they are the best things ever.

Same applies everywhere. I played Elite on my 8-bit and was hooked for 2-3 years or so. My daughter is now playing Minecraft.

I have older (near 60) friends who find Monty Python's flying circus from 70's funny enough to get a laugh just my mentioning a quote ("It's pining for fjords!"). Doesn't work for me, I ask if that's supposed to be funny. But if I show them Secret of Monkey Island's (from 1990) sword fights with insults, they just stare "Is that supposed to be a joke".

So yeah, everything gets shittier as you get older.

Indeed. I'm not sure what exactly is the problem with the current boarding passes. Most people these days seem to be using their phones for it already, showing the blob of pixels to a card reader. For long-haul trips, I prefer a hard, printed copy myself in case I happen to drop/break my phone or it runs out of battery just at the wrong moment. But what's the supposed advantage here? Skipping ID check at the gate by agents? When boarding planes, especially for long haul, the ID checks have *never* been the bottleneck, it's literally been the folks boarding and getting their carry-on into place and crowding the aisles.

Coming from Europe, I travelled quite a lot to the US between 2006 to 2012 or so, when I was visiting conferences and the like. Loved every trip *once I got in*. I mean, in general friendly people, lots of wonderful sights you have seen in movies, great outdoors (still would like to visit Grand Canyon and Yellowstone), but until you get to that point it's a pain.

Even coming from a visa waiver country, the whole ordeal at border was just painful. I don't particularly have a problem with them taking fingerprints and whatnot as such, but always the 2-4 hour lines, in general hostile attitude from the agents and the overall paranoia just gives the first impression where the whole country says go away. Lessons learned after very first trip where after landing at JFK I was to change planes bound for San Diego: Always transit at European side of the pond so you are on your way to your final destination directly, because there's no telling how much time you'll be spending waiting to even get processed.

Anyway, that was traveling for "work". I was getting paid and reimbursed for my time. As a tourist, especially with family, I have just been back for the two solar eclipses in 2017 and 2024. It takes literally a celestial event to go through that ordeal which is getting into the US when you are paying for your own trip.

Frankly, on every trip, I have always been worried that some clerical error or just nastiness from an agent who needs to fill out some quota suddenly results in ENTRY REJECTED stamp and spending a day or two at the airport before getting departed.

But.. until now the general expectation has been that at worst case they'll just put you on the next flight back home. Now you might apparently be stuck on some detention center in the middle of nowhere for a month and just disappear if they have a bad day. And yeah, I'm a white guy so even the Family Guy meme with the color chart doesn't isn't part of it. I'm sure people with darker skins have even more to worry about.

I hope that by the time I'm retiring and have lots of free time, things are looking up again. A long-time dream has been to just visit every state in the lower 48 - just fly in to Boston or Miami, buy a car, drive through east coast and then start heading west in some funny zigzag pattern until departing from somewhere in the west coast several month later. There's just so much to see and experience, and having a common language and connected highway system to make transportation easy is a huge perk. Here's to hoping.

get cast iron

- Doesn't really tolerate dishwasher
- Even when handwashing, need to be extra careful, first scrub and then put in a protective coating of oil
- Non-sticky only if you absolutely flood it in cooking oil or grease, and even then it's borderline. Unless you have really exact temperature controls (gas/induction), you cannot even fry an egg without leaving bits behind

I use cast iron *only* when cooking on open fire, but for anything else, there are PFAS-free non-sticky options. See e.g. https://heirol.fi/en/collectio... - just have to know what to look for.

Check out Open Shell, https://github.com/Open-Shell/...

It makes Windows 10 (and especially 11) tolerable to use.

Also Windows Powertoys - https://learn.microsoft.com/en... - the most important bit is that I can assign that stupid Copilot key to whatever.

As long as we are in the realm of sci-fi, you can always send up a cleanup crew...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pm...

The value of dollar (or euro, or yen, or maybe RMB in the future) is the backed by the idea that US economy, military and stability are strong and are going to stay that way, so ultimately when you get money in US dollars, you can trust that the aforementioned facts mean that you can use those same US dollars years later and get stuff of nearly equivalent value. (Nearly, in this context, meaning that inflation stays low).

Same applies for Euro, Yen, and even for bunch of smaller currencies like Swedish Krona and the like. With the smaller ones the risks are of course higher.

If you look at BTC to USD graph over past five years, it has had occasional valuation differences higher in a day than US dollar in a year. What's backing up BTC?

I don't deny that you can make a ton of conventional currency by investing in crypto, but I wouldn't really want to stash it for decades. Gold? Sure. USD? Sure. Dividend aristocrat stocks? Definitely. BTC...yeahno.

No it's not. It's supposed to be equivalent to cash.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pres...

Of course, that whole post could be just a big lie, but if the schema allows offline transactions then there bound to be some privacy built in. Of course it comes ultimately down to trust, but if it's technically possible to transactions offline - even daisy-chained ones - there's bound to be technical means for privacy protection too.

" European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane warned that Europe must develop a digital euro"

Wow, that is not the solution, I promise. What are you thinking??

Basically, they are questioning the fact that VISA/MC - American companies - get a cut every time any European buys groceries at his local store. In Finland, not *that* long ago, we had national debit cards that were completely internal to FI and used FI brokers. These days the debit card offering is Visa Debit. (Credit was always handled by VISA/MC/Diners/Amex/etc).

Chinese have their Alipay and similar systems, so might as well set up our own system. Of course there's a bunch of mobile payment apps - but I think even those are still backed up by a credit card company. I mean, when you set up Paypal/Venmo/whatever account, the most common setup is that they ask for credit card number. You can theoretically transfer funds using wire transfer instead, but, well, then you either have to do that for every transaction or if you do a larger at once, you lose the interest.

And frankly, credit cards are just so darn convenient and come with additional protections (e.g. if you have booked a travel and the airline/hotel goes bankrupt - you get your money back from CC organization).

Considering Elon is axing thousands of people from those agencies I'd say you are soon going to need to run a local AI on your basement RTX 4090 to get that tornado alert during the windy season.

Take a look at Eutelsat stock. They are much smaller company, yes, but look at that stock price. Look at the 1-month graph, not the daily changes (today is down)

https://finance.yahoo.com/quot...

That's over 550% gain in one WEEK from 1,20 to 6,91. In a Week.

Market at least is seeing that trustworthiness of US tech is going down.

Same with Rheinmetall https://finance.yahoo.com/quot... - YTD up 100% or so.

US has recently shown that they simply cannot be trusted. Frankly, this should have happened years ago, but I guess everyone expected not to be living in the ridiculous timeline.