I was recently at the kiosk at an Odeon cinema in Norway and I noticed that their popcorn buckets were helpfully labeled S, M, and L. Stor, Middels, Liten. No X-sizes in that case though. At least with popcorn you can plainly see that S is much bigger than L is when you pick it up yourself.
Ah, yes, for foodstuff one does often use S, M and L as localized sizing labels, Burger King does the same, I think. However, in the context of localizing XS as being extra large, and XL being extra small, that's still wrong. Anecdotally, wherever XS to XL sizing labels are used it's always been direct counterparts. XS bring extra small, and XL being extra large.
It's a fun read in a fan-fiction sense, but when you look at the out-of-universe story of the events of Tolkien's life and his writing process it becomes clear that Tom is not meant to be any kind of evil.
Tolkien wrote a silly whimsical poem about one of his children's toys that they had named Tom Bombadil. In this tale he lives in a dangerous environment, but he is able to overcome the dangers and get his happy ending.
When Tolkien later was writing LotR, he drew upon his former work and put in the silly whimsical Tom as an early encounter for the Hobbits just as they are leaving the Shire and starting their adventure. This story arc delivers some early exposition about the world in his dialogue, it shows that the Hobbits are hopelessly unprepared to stand up against any foe such as Old Man Willow or the Barrow-Wight and need rescue (this way they can have character growth and become Heroes by the time they return to the Shire) and it gets the Hobbits armed for their quest towards Rivendell (and most importantly to put the right kind of blade into Pippin's hands for later).
In a more thematic sense he is just part of nature, not evil but also not actively looking to do good, just existing. He is master of his domain in the same sense a big moose might be the "master" of his local forest, he's the biggest around and isn't threatened by anything else, but he has no human desire for expansion and doesn't push back when civilization comes around to turn the land nearby into farmland either, just keeps to himself. He doesn't try to tame the angry trees because it's just protecting it's territory, as is natural, nor does he try to "exorcise" the barrows because nature doesn't actively go about trying to undo the evils created by man.
The thing about Tolkien (and I think good story telling in general), is he gives a feeling of consistency, depth and complex choices. But that's completely different from needing fine-grained consistency between chapters of a long book. I'm not a Tolkien expert but I think are a whole variety of "plot holes" one can point to but these don't particularly matter for the development of the story, where the main thing is the suffering and redemption of the main characters which only has to feel real and as well as feeling dramatic.
I think Elrond hadn't heard of Tom just because that made the council scene more dramatic, for instance.
There was silence. At last Elrond spoke again. [...] The Barrow-wights we know by many names; and of the Old Forest many tales have been told: all that now remains is but an outlier of its northern march. Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew. But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern Men, and other names beside. He is a strange creature, but maybe I should have summoned him to our Council.'
> In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew. But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name.
My takeaway from this was that Elrond wasn't sure if this was the same person - strongly speculated to be, and probably correct, but not someone Elrond had personally known or corresponded with. It felt like this was the first time he'd heard the name Tom Bombadil, and made an educated guess that it was probably old Ben-adar. Tom, meanwhile, had contact with Gildor at the very least.
It's interesting that this description is apparently "evil", even if in this framing Tom predates all, and everyone lives on his unceded land. You'd become "particular" about your role after living through several ages of that, too.
Rather than evil, it's more "biding their time until that injustice can finally be rectified". In this post's framing, literally every humanoid race is by definition an (unwitting) invader.
[1] is a video from a couple decades later (1914) that shows more of the urban middle or lower class folks of Kristiania (it wouldn't be called Oslo until 1925).
well it's still same Oslo, just under different name, definitely not a village, but yeah those market shots seem closer to reality of majority I guess judging by sellers/kids
That's a neat observation, the cities do have a similar history.
The medieval town called Oslo burned down in 1624, and a new city was founded on the other side of the bay. It was named Christiania after the monarch Christian. It kept that name until 1925 when they changed it back to the old historical name Oslo.
Some decades later, the Russian monarch Peter would also found a new city, which happened to have his name in it. So these two cities were being constructed at around the same time and taking design and architectural inspirations from the same places I would imagine.
That street in particular has been closed for all traffic except buses and trams (and necessary service cars I guess, like the parked van on street view). On [1] you can see Stortingsgata labeled in blue as "kolletivgate" (collective street). As the graphic shows most streets at the very core of the city have been closed to general traffic, the bluish streets are mostly only public transportation and the pinkish streets are mostly pedestrian and bike lanes. Outside the core you see more cars on the roads.
One time I was using my laptop to remote desktop into a computer I was hundreds of km away from physically, I discovered that if I hit the power key on the laptop (yes, the laptop had a key on the keyboard for power, not a separate power button) while having the remote session window focused, it sent the signal over the wire and put the remote host to sleep instead. Whoops.
After that I looked up how to enable wake-on-lan and open up a port to be able to do that remotely.
I don't have the best experience with Wake-on-LAN, it stopped working after a BIOS update or something. So now my desktop is set to turn on when power comes back and it's connected to a WiFi switchable power socket. I bought one with the usual app/cloud rubbish and flashed Tasmota on it.
I have some smart plugs I was planning to hack the network protocol of. I looked up Tasmota but I couldn't figure out how I could see if it would work with the random crap I bought on AliExpress and if so how to do it. Any advice?
Well. I went the other way, I bought known compatible devices. In my case the inofficial name is "OBI socket 2", from the (German) OBI home improvement store. It's about 10€ a piece.
That said, if your device is based on some kind of Espressif ESP32 module, you might be able to find the right four pins on the circuit board and find or cobble together a configuration to talk to the I/O ports. Hardware required is a (usually USB) RS232 interface at 3.3 volts, some medium-thin cables, screwdriver, soldering iron, probably multimeter to check things. The firmware flashing and WiFi setup are fairly independent of the I/O port configuration, so you can flash something that can bring up the WiFi connection and web interface and experiment from there.
I rediscovered the joy of working with databases while working on an Elixir application with a Postgres/Timescale DB.
Elixir's Ecto library (doesn't really fit the definition of an ORM) lets me compose queries in a functional syntax that then get compiled to SQL before execution. This both enables me to be more productive and results in more readable code that can be reasoned about and be tested easily. Sometimes I still have to dive into "raw" SQL to write e.g. a procedure or a view definition (like Timescale's continuous aggregates), and I definitely miss the pipeline operator when those expressions get complex. SQL is a powerful tool, but it gets clunky and has strange footguns. A feature like what this post describes is definitely a step in the right direction for Postgres. Looking forward to try it out.
Glad you liked it! Please do give us feedback especially about how it is to use with your library…will be intrigued to see how they interact. Also , cool to hear about the library more generally, any particularly good syntax you think we should try to learn from?
This looks very interesting! I only skimmed the abstract now, but I will look more closely tomorrow. Back in 2016-17 I did a master's thesis on a combination of (much simpler) cellular automata and neuroevolution, and had some thoughts about how other neural "paradigms" like backpropagated deep nets and indeed, adversarial training could be used with CAs. It's great to see that it's an ongoing topic of research.
Something that makes this extra interesting is that two of the major telcos of Myanmar are subsidiaries of companies from other countries: Telenor from Norway and Ooredoo from Qatar. Both of which are majority owned by their respective governments. According to [1] they account for 28 of 54 million subscriptions.
It will be interesting to watch how these two companies continue to comply with such orders. These events are making the news in Norway with a Telenor angle. If things keep escalating and Telenor is shown to be in any way complicit in any human rights abuses, it will be a scandal in Norway, and the Telenor leadership will have to answer to the government. Norway has cultivated an image as a human rights champion of sorts on the international stage, and is expected to take this sort of development very seriously. There is precedent in the VimpelCom case [2] where the financial crime police, parliament and the ministry of commerce got involved. Senior leadership had to testify before parliament committees, the police made corruption charges, and the chairman of the board resigned after the minister of commerce indicated she did not have confidence in him. So Telenor Myanmar and it's Norwegian leadership is now under pressure from the government of Myanmar to comply, while also being answerable to the government of Norway for the possible consequences of doing so.
Meanwhile, Qatar is under international pressure because of human rights issues on their own turf, and the international eye turned on them because of the upcoming FIFA World Cup. In fact, Norway's national team has been calling them out recently [3]. They might also want to tread very carefully around this issue.
As others have alluded, I have major doubts Telenor is able to accomplish anything here. Myanmar's military already faces practically unanimous derision. They will just nationalize Telenor's telco assets and try to figure out how to fill in the gaps. If they don't care about shutting off the telco's for weeks, they won't care again.
How is it an option not to comply when a government disallows use of the airwaves in its country?
That’s not a question of ‘human rights championing’, it’s a question of sovereignty. It’s not realistic to expect a country to challenge that, it’s basically a declaration of war.
I don't see how any consequences inflicted upon the foreign owned telcos by their respective governments is much more than theatre as viewed from the perspective of Myanmar citizen.
How will any of that help to reduce the burden of human rights abuses?
I'll admit though, it is entertaining to watch a political scandal unravel. Predictable though.
> and is expected to take this sort of development very seriously
Yeah, but what does "taking it seriously" really mean? They can either comply or not. If they comply, the world will call Norway hypocrites. If they don't, you think Myanmar's military would give two fucks about forcefully destroying their facilities, killing their employees along the way?
It's no only a matter of optics and it's cynical to reduce it to a mere PR (ergo, money) problem. It's catch 22.
