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[Grim Portent]

-Humans like boiling water
-By boiling water they discovered how to use steam engines to power great machines
-They used these great machines to harvest coal to burn and boil more water
-They discovered they could use this coal to boil water to make electricity people could use to boil water at home without needing to burn coal
-Whilst burning coal to avoid burning coal to boil water they discovered that burning coal was generally shite and also running out of coal so time to burn oil and gas to boil water to make electricity to power the water boilers
-Begin to reach new technological heights. Learn how to harness the power of the atom by using nuclear fission to boil water to make steam to spin turbines to generate electricity to boil water

fast forwards 1,000 years
-Humanity is boiling water using the accretion disc of a singularity generator in order to boil water

What if we boil water to extract hydrogen from water, then burn that hydrogen to boil more water to extract more hydrogen?

Clearly it is the future, we just need to figure out how to make it not a terrible idea.

[Frumple]

... so I've been doing some off and on MTL attempts sorta-lately and, just. I've always respected the amount of effort that goes into translation, y'know? Ever since I had any particular exposure to it, decades ago. Even as disparaged as machine translation often is, I've long been at least somewhat aware that even as relatively easy as it is, it's not easy, and even half-assing it takes a fair amount of effort, nevermind actually making a decent try at it.

But I'd never actually been directly involved in trying it on anything even a little sizeable, and... well, now I have, having a go at translating some steam workshop mods from chinese to english, mostly just 'cause I wanted to play the ruddy things.

This shit is a lot of work, especially without sinking money into anything, bloody hell. The freely available tools are not conducive to translating a few lines per file in several hundred individual files. One mod (for rusted warfare... haven't published it anywhere 'cause I haven't heard back from the original devs, but still, I finished it up enough to be much more comprehensible than the previous attempt at it) I actually managed to get through over the course of a couple days, but the current one (the most subscribed pokemon mod for Legend Creatures) is... I've fixed up-ish nearly 300 files since I started with any seriousness about 13 hours ago. There's still around 200 to go, and then making sure nothing got overtly broken in the process (this is joke, I'm 100% sure I broke the hell out of some shit from testing part way through to see if what I was doing worked at all) and maybe doing an actual editing pass.

It's just. One of those things, where you don't really grok how much of a pain in the ass this stuff is until you've actually done it, or meaningfully been involved in the process as something other than a spectator. Shit is hard, I have a new respect even for the MTL efforts that don't even bother with an editing pass or making sure anything makes sense. At some point during the process you end up wanting to just go, "Fuck it, google-sensei knows best even if it is calling umbreon "evil evee"."

E: Hell, ballparking it at 30 hours total effort between the remaining translation bits and troubleshooting the code I screwed up, at US federal minimum wage you'd be looking at like 218 USD worth of absolutely bottom barrel effort at the least if it was paid for, and this is notably more technical than your average bottom barrel minimum wage work. Just for some fiscal perspective.

[Great Order]

-Humans like boiling water
-By boiling water they discovered how to use steam engines to power great machines
-They used these great machines to harvest coal to burn and boil more water
-They discovered they could use this coal to boil water to make electricity people could use to boil water at home without needing to burn coal
-Whilst burning coal to avoid burning coal to boil water they discovered that burning coal was generally shite and also running out of coal so time to burn oil and gas to boil water to make electricity to power the water boilers
-Begin to reach new technological heights. Learn how to harness the power of the atom by using nuclear fission to boil water to make steam to spin turbines to generate electricity to boil water

fast forwards 1,000 years
-Humanity is boiling water using the accretion disc of a singularity generator in order to boil water

What if we boil water to extract hydrogen from water, then burn that hydrogen to boil more water to extract more hydrogen?

Clearly it is the future, we just need to figure out how to make it not a terrible idea.

Grim Portent solves humanity's energy crisis, 2023 (Colourised)

[King Zultan]

-Humans like boiling water
-By boiling water they discovered how to use steam engines to power great machines
-They used these great machines to harvest coal to burn and boil more water
-They discovered they could use this coal to boil water to make electricity people could use to boil water at home without needing to burn coal
-Whilst burning coal to avoid burning coal to boil water they discovered that burning coal was generally shite and also running out of coal so time to burn oil and gas to boil water to make electricity to power the water boilers
-Begin to reach new technological heights. Learn how to harness the power of the atom by using nuclear fission to boil water to make steam to spin turbines to generate electricity to boil water

fast forwards 1,000 years
-Humanity is boiling water using the accretion disc of a singularity generator in order to boil water

It all boils down to boiling water.

[Akura]

Spent weeks waiting and preparing for a surgical procedure. Had a prerequisite procedure done on Friday. Talked extensively about this procedure with the surgeon and various nurses who asked about it.

Procedure was supposed to be today, except I got no call the night before about what time to come in. Just called the surgeon's office to ask what's up. "You never scheduled it." Yes. Yes I did.


Also, this particular surgeon likes to discuss things the second anesthesia starts wearing off. Not just me, I overheard another patient say that the surgeon told him something as he was still waking up.

[hector13]

Might be wise to find a different surgeon if they treat patients like that.

[Eric Blank]

it sounds pretty bad, yeah, but its entirely possible the surgeon doesn't schedule the appointments and you have to tell the front desk their plan. I had to do that after my counselor appointment today. But thats a bad way to do things for a hospital; the surgeon should be the one making the decisions.

[hector13]

The surgeon should also be aware that folks coming round from anesthesia aren’t compos mentis. Incompetent administration is easy to deal with, incompetent practitioners less so.

[ChairmanPoo]

It's very common for hospitals to work on a personal appointment basis. Ie: the practitioner gives you a slip with a date which you then need to hand to frontdesk, else there is no formal appointment.

[Eric Blank]

I think my cat startled some animal. It sounded like a goose being strangled, running around the side of my trailer. Never heard it before. Cat was sitting innocently by the propane tank, as if she didn't understand it either.

[Loud Whispers]

It all boils down to boiling water.

In an alternate timeline, someone being full of hot air & blowing off steam is a compliment

[Great Order]

Found out about the truerateme subreddit.

Jesus it's sad and confusing. People upload pictures and the mods decide what your rating is. Then people rate you, and if it's not within the mods permitted range your comment is deleted because you're using subjective beauty standards.

You know, as opposed to the objective beauty standards everyone has.

[Loud Whispers]

Reddit in general is just sad and confusing, least of all wherever mods are concerned. Even when not talking about beauty standards they have a tendency to drift towards egotistical narcissism

[Frumple]

One of the hard drives has started failing pretty hard... finally got me annoyed enough to order a new one.

The latest shenanigans? For some reason it's turned most of the drive read only, and is refusing to let me change it off. Plenty of things are still, broadly speaking, working, but updating, say, steam games? Programs installed on the drive in general? Yeah. No, that's currently not a thing. Pain in the bum, but at least storage is pretty cheap these days

[Akura]

The drive switching to read-only might be some kind of fail-safe. It knows its dying, so it switches to read-only to prevent further damage from write operations, giving you a chance to move everything to a new drive.


I've never heard of any hard drive with that as a feature, but that would actually be a pretty decent feature.