Entries tagged 'cat:#100DaysToOffload' (Page 6)

Deutsche Untertitel für A Brony Tale

Entry created on 2024-07-18 author:steeph (374) cat:#100DaysToOffload (41) cat:Bronies (2) cat:Documentary (1) cat:Fandom (1) cat:Films (22) cat:My Little Pony (10) cat:Subtitles (1) lang:de (41)

Es gibt da eine weniger bekannte Dokumentation über Bronies, als die Bronies-Doku. Auch über die bekannte von John de Lancie gäbe es etwas zu schreiben. Aber egal. Einfach vergessen. Die muss nicht gekauft werden. Interessanter (auch weil weniger bekannt) ist die Doku mit dem Titel A Brony Tale.

A Brony Tale von Brent Hodge gibt einen Einblick in das Fandom von My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic indem die Frage "Was sind Bronys" langsam und aus der Sicht von Ashleigh Ball beantwortert, während sie entscheidet, ihre erste Brony-Convention zu besuchen und Fans ihrer Voice-Arbeit trifft. Ashleigh Ball kennt ein Publikum von Fans bisher nur von Konzerten ihrer Band. Als Sprecherin zweier Hauptcharaktere in der Animationsserie (im englischsprachigen Original) wurde sie aber auch unter Bronys ein Name und häufig zu Panel auf Fan-Conventions eingeladen. Es gibt auch Einschätzungen anderer zu dem Fandom, aber keine wirklich kritische Beurteilung oder negative Betrachtungsweise. Ein guter Film für jemanden, den die Frage oder das Thema interessiert. Aber keiner, der weit ins Detail geht oder viel Wissen über die Subkultur vermitteln will. Die Bewertungen haben recht viele Ausreißer nach oben und untern, liegen aber größtenteils im unteren Mittelfeld. Also, nichts besonders Tolles, aber als Teil des Fandoms fand ich ihn sehr gut.

Nachdem der Film veröffentlicht wurde gab es wohl auch mal Pläne, ihn im deutschen TV zu zeigen. Jedenfalls hatte mir Brend Hodge derzeit glaubhaft gemacht, dass es Interesse eines Senders gegeben hätte und quasi nur noch ein Termin gefunden werden musste. Ich hatte damals meistens Zeit und Kopfkapazitäten frei und habe gerne und viel an Gemeinschaftsprojekten mitgearbeitet oder bei Crowd-Sourcing-Aktionen mitgemacht. Mein Angebot, dass ich die deutschen Untertitel für den Film schreibe, um eine Entscheidung für die Ausstrahlung im deutschen Fernsehen wahrscheinlich zu machen, nahm er dankend an. So habe ich gelernt, Untertitel zu schreiben. Praktischerweise gibt es gute freie Software, die die Arbeit erleichtert. Als professionell ist das Ergebnis sicherlich nicht anzusehen. Die Zeilen sind viel zu verbos und bestimmt hier und da zu direkt übersetzt. Aber ich halte das Ergebnis für benutzbar und frei von Fehlern. Aus der Ausstrahlung ist wohl nichts geworden. Vielleicht war es auch ein Missverständnis, weshalb ich danach nie wieder von ihm gehört/gelesen habe.

Aber die Untertiteldatei wollte ich dann doch mal irgendwo veröffentlichen, weil sich das mit brauchbarer Software so gehört. SRT und XML (SubtitleEdit-Datei, nicht TTML) sind im Anhang verlinkt. Der eigentliche Film nicht, weil ich das bestimmt nicht darf. Schade. Naja. Keine Ahnung wie brauchbar die Untertitel heute noch sind, bei den ganzen Tools, die die Untertitel-Arbeit mehr als nur vereinfachen.

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Alternative Web Browser Engines

Entry created on 2024-07-17 author:steeph (374) cat:#100DaysToOffload (41) cat:Computers (22) cat:World Wide Web (10) lang:en (253)

I don't think I have to spell out the problem with the current shape of the web browser landscape in detail. Almost every HTTP client uses one of the now three big engines, WebKit, Blink and Gecko. Blink, as the big bad Google one is definitely one that nobody should consciously choose to use. Not everybody trusts WebKit much more because it is developed by another powerful global player that inadvertently collects more data in one hand than can be considered healthy, Apply. And Gecko, the one developed by Mozilla has been criticises for being pushed into a direction that is less free and user-friendly than it is expected from Mozilla. Since Mozilla has received large sums in funding from Google for a while it can be argued that any recent fork of the engine has a history of being influenced by Google. All the other large engines are no longer developed and thus not seen as a possible choice for the future. But there are some options to be discussed for users who want to avoid using a browser that relies on one of the big engines. And there are signs that the lack of competitive differences in browser engines will be reduced in the coming decade.

I like that the recent financial development in the SerenityOS/Ladybird project has prompted discussions about alternative browser engines and has shone some light on upcoming new browser engines written from the ground up. The interest in a new kid on the block has been growing over the last couple of years. So it should not surprise that several projects are undergoing and aim to create alternatives to the current big three browser engines. But in my eyes most of them are still not well-known enough. Not all are equaly useful. So I've decided to mention some options that could replace a mainstream browser at least in some use case.

Using Old Browsers

Yes, I'm covering the less practicle options, too. Using an old browser with security issues that won't be fixed not only might add security holes in the system it is used on, it also doesn't do anything to tackle the problem. The development of browser engines that are used in newer releases will not be affected by some people using them less. Choosing an older browser merely sends a signal and possibly changes statistics to look like you now also forget updating for a long time. But there is range of different lightweight browsers with engines that have no trouble with HTML4 and CSS2 and also offer good JavaScript support. KHTML (Konqueror) becomes an option again, Internet Explorer with Trident or EdgeHTML could get another chance and an old Opera with Presto could continue to shine. But you might need to maintain an envirement of outdated libraries to make your choice over a long time.

Flow

The Flow browser with its own HTML engine is developed by ekioh, a company with experience in developing browser for various embedded devices. As a free product, the preview of a Raspberry Pi version is available. But browsers for all major operating systems are planned. It uses an existing JavaScript engine the JS support is better than with other newly written browser engines. But it also doesn't add as much competition in the market in this regard. I have not tested Flow. As a product from a commercial business it didn't look interesting enough, yet, even though it is reportedly relatively mature.

Haphaestus

The Haphaestus TV Browser is a project by Adrian Cochrane that forms a web browser specifically aimed to be easily navigated with with few buttons (like on a TV remote control). It is a very interesting project because it is made up from several individual parts (CSS engine, font rendering, box layout engine, …) that all are written from the ground up in Haskell. A JavaScript engine is not part of the project. The web is nowadays more pleasant to browse without JS anyway. Adrian also recently started a free year-long course that encourages others to write their own HTML rendering engine (surely with the intention to collect experience for future paid programming courses).

Goanna

Of the browsers that use the Goanna engine, I see Pale Moon recommended most often. Goanna is a fork of Gecko that, by now, differes in features from the current gecko engine. It looks like Goanna may be the way to keep using a relatively old engine that supports all majer web standards very well with an actively developed browser that runs reliably in the OS of your choice. It may not be performing as well as current Gecko browsers like LibreWolf, but there's supposedly a smaller chance that their developers have been influenced by payments from Google.

Dillo

Small, realy light-weight, very simple and currently with no intention to pay any attention to scripts. Older versions of Dillo had been ported to many other systems. The current version 3 is only developed for the now big OSs (Linux, BSD, OS X). But it is very light-weight and snappy compared to mainstream browsers. CSS support is still lacking in the eyes of users who are used to every positional property to work. (Float support is also still missing.)

LibWeb, LibJS

The Ladybird web browser is becoming more known now that a company has been formed around it that has been promised major funding for the next few years. The project started as "the web browser of SerenityOS" but has since gained indipendent support and in turn supported hope that a novel web browser with a new engine will be established on the market of web browsers in the near future. The libweb and libjs libraries were started to build an intependent engine behind Ladybird. An application that will be seen as a usable alternative to Firefox in daily use with no need to fall back on another browser is still far away though.

NetSurf

Another small web browser that good HTML, CSS and JS support is NewSurf. LibDOM, LibCSS and Duktape (JavaScript) are combined to create a simple and portable browser. NetSurf can be found on Atari, Haiku, Linux, RISC OS and other systems. I've also found it a few times on my journay through alternative operating systems (about which I still have to write in this blog). It's the portable, small browser.

Servo

This is one that I like a lot personally. A noval web engine written in Rust. There is currently no full-fledged browser application that uses it. But there is a GUI demo that allows to test the engine with any URL. In my experience, web sites with elaborate design that make use of different layout rules and a lot of JavaScript tend to render better with Servo than with a current Ladybird (LibWeb, LibJS). Support for CSS3 rules is also better than with the small browsers NetSurf and Dillo. The potential is more readibly visible with this one compared to other new projects. Maybe the fact that browsers based on Servo only exist for specific devices is responsible for it being less known than Ladybird. No wonder Mozilla sucks up Serve during their project to replace parts of Gecko with re-implementations in Rust. I guess eventually there will be no big difference between the two engines.

Text-based web browsers are probably not an option for most users. Most web sites are designed for a graphic layout only and even when a page is structured well and can be read with a screen reader, sighted people usually prefer a GUI to a text-based interface. But if you want or a use case requires it, text browsers like links2 or lynx are also worth checking out, of course. Another thing that I'd like to mention here because it could be considered an alternative web browser are auditory browsers. But this entry is meant to be about browser engines, not browsers. Otherwise there would be many more projects that I should mention (browsers with a small user base, forks of Firefox, browsers for quick keyboard use).

Edit: Here's an interesting chart about the live of web browser engines since the first one in 1990.

Consciousness

Entry created on 2024-07-15 author:steeph (374) cat:#100DaysToOffload (41) cat:Consciousness (1) cat:Philosophy (5) cat:Science (6) lang:en (253)

Consciousness is such a heavy topic that, even if I keep clear of actually trying to address the so-called hard problem, writing anything on it feels like I'm over-stretching my copetence in both science and philosophy. But I've decided to be confident enough to type out some of my thoughts an how the subject is discussed.

The topic interests me on an academic hobby level. Consciousness in dreams especially is something that I've read and thought a lot about and experimented with over years. Really explaining the nature of the brain-tingling that a good philosophical chain of thoughts gives me would take a lot longer than I'm prepared to spend writing this entry and would probably produce enough related sentences to write a book about it. Suffice it to say I'm interested - among other things - in how experiences and thereby people's realities change when input is filtered differently by the brain that processes the input (more of less or differently consciously).

One reason why I find it hard to structure thoughts around the topic is because of the definition of consciousness. There is none that encopasses all the cases where it is regularly used with the assumption that the meaning of the word in the context it is used in is clear, or obvious. That is OK in principle. And I've decided to do thew same here and not define it in any way, for simplicity. But when discussing the topic academically, when writing a paper on a related subject or when writing a book on it (with an academic target audience or not), a definition that prefaces the presentation of any concept or theory is necessary to allow for a productive discussion. Without a definition on such a varied subject interesting things may be said on it. But it's complicated to impossible to discuss them in a structured way or to do epirical reasearch on them. In other words, they lose some very important possibilities of being useful above entertainment. That is probably why a definition usually is brought forth in such publications. But not always. Introducing a concept on most other topics doesn't require the author to first define what they think the field of research actually is about. But such a requirement inheres - in my opinion - in discussing the subject of consciousness; something that can be experienced by somebody who agrees to the fact that they are experiencing it (according to some definitions) but who at the same time argues that it (according to some definitions) may not exist as a distinguishable state. I've seen a panel discussion once where two of the participants discovered their diverging definitions of consciousness in regards of what they wanted to talk about that day halfway through the discussion, which lead them to agree to every seemingly contradicting statements based on the assumption that they each other were the expert on what they were talking about. That was a funny and useful one compared to other panel discussions that muddle ideas and thoughts on the topic by mixing concepts that are not reconcilable with each other.

I'll leave it at that for now because I don't want to actually say anything about consciousness before producing a formal definition, which, in confusion over different views on what consciousness is, I'm not prepared to do.

The Best Movies Ever

Entry created on 2024-07-10 author:steeph (374) cat:#100DaysToOffload (41) cat:Films (22) lang:en (253)

I like to recommend movies. Because I like to discover movies that serve me as a source of a good mystery, an emotional journey, or fun. But it's not easy to recommend some film to somebody with a different taste than me, which is everybody that I know. But I think it is pretty likely that you will like this recommendation - if you take the time to follow it.

Something like three years ago I've started to watch the titles on the then current IMDb Top 250 Movies list. The way I do it is to keep the next 8 to 16 titles with me, ready to watch when I like to. When I'm not in the mood for a movie, find it booring or for other reasons not worth following through, I skip to the next one but keep the skipped movie to give it at least another two chances. That way I always have at least some very good movies with me, ready to be watched, even when I'm travelling or have no access to the internet. I started this because there are some very well known and very popular movies that I had never watched and I didn't know if that's because of a preconception or not. I'm slowly going through the classics of all genres. Even the horror movies I at least watch for a while. Although I say that horror is not for me, there are some very good ones that I enjoyed in a way. I've watched Casablanca and North By Northwest and get those references now and I know that I don't need to watch them again. I get to see some Chinese and Indian movies that I would have never had the idea to check out. I've seen 12 Years a Slave and To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and now their relevance now. So many other great movies that I had missed out on for a long time for various reasons. I've eaven discovered some movies that really are for me but I've never heard of before, like Paris, Texas and Jagten. Again, all the classics people from different generations expect others to know, like The Shawshank Redemption" and Psycho, are in the reportoir of comparisons I can make now. From some I learned pieces of history, like from Hotel Rwanda and Gandhi . Some Anime like Hotaru no haka and Kimi no na wa., I would probably have never watched if they weren't rated that highly. ANd in between all of that, I get to watch many of my favourite movies as well as very good movies that I haven't seen since I was much younger.

I don't watch all of them, by far. And that is where I'll stop naming titles in pairs, or at all. I just don't like some movie styles and others are too boring or too far outside of my reality (without any element that keeps my interest up otherwise) and so I abandon them after a couple of attempts to make me interested. I'm not through yet. There are still many classics coming up. And even now there are new titles on the current list, like Oppenheimer and Joker, that I know I'd like to watch. So either when I will be through my list, I'll look at the then current one and see if I want to catch up or start anew. Because many of these movies are worth wathing again after five years.

In my experience, watching one after one of these movies has been a great way to discover new movies of very high quality, rediscover old gems, get to know classics and re-watch favourites because it is a relatively broad list. Not one that is confined to genres, a time period or a culture that I'm familiar with and that I already know has movies that I like.

It's possible to convince somebody of something with the right (form of) argument.

Entry created on 2024-07-09 author:steeph (374) cat:#100DaysToOffload (41) cat:Beliefs (2) cat:Communication (3) cat:Conspiracy Narratives (1) cat:Conversation (2) cat:Corona (9) cat:Opinion (9) cat:Science (6) cat:Thinking (3) lang:en (253)

There is this thing that I've noticed happen when I'm speaking about something I've heard or read about but don't feel like an expert on. I believe that one should not spread information unless one truely understands it as well as how the information was gathered, what knowledge it builds on, what relevance and meaning it has in the context it likely will be applied in by the person who receives the information, and a few other principles that are hardly possible to honour every time. Those principles cannot be applied to everday conversations like smalltalk, without eliminating the interaction. (That's another topic, though.) So I don't apply them in general conversations with colleagues and customers and often overlook them in conversations with friends and other peers. So it is almost inevitable that I at some point say something I'm not 99.99% sure is correct the way I present it. It happens a lot with "interesting facts" and "what most people don't know". What happens then is that I feel in the wrong to some degree - because I have not made absolutely sure that I'm neither wrong nor going to be misunderstood - while the person I'm speaking to (if they see me as a peer, take me serious and are listening to me) takes what I say as new information and fits in into what they already know and believe. They don't know about the tiny feeling of guilt that I have. So I am regularly surprised when I speak to someone and seem to influence their set of beliefs inadvertently.

How to convince somebody of something is quite a complicated question psychologically. I've read enough about it to know that and to know that I'm not interested in learning how to do it in any professional way (or with style). But there are some interesting aspects to know about how easily people can change their mind in some situations and how tough it is to make somebody change their mind in others.

There was an experiment done that is often referred to in social media sometimes as an interesting bit of knowledgle and sometimes as an argument of an almost political nature, hinting at the stubbernness or irrationality of people with different beliefs (usually beliefs that deverge from the widely accepted set of scientific knowdlege). The simplified conclusion of this study is often presented as this: Presenting a person with a firm belief evidence that their belief is factually wrong makes it even stronger (see Backfire Effect). The conclusion that people draw from this sometimes is: Arguing rationally with somebody with an irrational belief will have the opposite from the intended effect. That is not usually true, though. Not only are cases where that happened rare even in the study that is referred to, the effect could also not be replicated when several researchers tried.

Sometimes I come across a person and learn of a belief of theirs that I find problematic for some reason or another. An extremist attitude to societies basic questions, fascist ideas formulated into political demands, a conspiracy narrative that results in hostile behaviour, things like that. These are usually beliefs with a large foundation that was built over years if not decades and they are often embedded in a world view that justifies and explains anything that might appear to others to oppose ethical code or the reasoning behind the belief. But "often" is not "always". And even if those things are the case is the assumption that simple, rational arguments won't have a positive effect is an erroneous one that is made too quickly. Yes, it seems like a hard undertaking to craft responses that take the opposite of your own beliefs into account properly, not as the hallucination of the enemy camp but as an equal to your own opinion. It also feels like the work necessary to formulate a response that foresees all the expectable counter-arguments and to answer all the antagonistical follow-up questions. That's the things I expect to be confronted with after objecting to something somebody said in a conversation. Correctly so. But if forging a plan to optimally convince the opponent to abandon a belief of theirs is not what I want to do, then it's not necessary to put that much work into it. You can just respond honestly with a simple thought and even end the conversation if it becomes too cumbersome. When a topic has an emotional component, it's easy to forget that keeping this on the level of a regular conversation with no expectation that it will have any meaning to anybody other than passing time.

The insight that I keep having and intend to remember in applicable situations more often is that it is not necessary but possible to convince somebody to take on a different view on something. My mind is not short of explanations and explanation attempts from opposite viewpoints and I'm ready to share them with others to encourage a broadening of their thinking. If it's my own view, a belief based on my own experience, I'm often more reluctant to share it if it opposes somebody else's belief. But it is worth it. Provided both conversing parties bring forth the necessary trust to take other's assertions seriously, a calm, rational objection is far better than cutting the topic short. The latter can easily have the same effect as saying something like "Oh, you're one of those." Derogatory remarks should be avoided just like dismissing a concern, be it ever so irrational. Ignoring an argument for being too absurd or discrediting a source without a reason, talking down or being in any way not as respectful as you would like to be treated yourself in an emotional discussion will not get you closer to invoking insight nor to learning something useful yourself. Those aren't new ideas. The realisation that is, as a conscious insight, new to me, is that I'm far more likely to influence somebody's thinking than I assumed. If a respectful discussion can't be maintained for after small talk got out of the area of the mundane, I don't need to maintain it any longer. One sincere offer of a different view on something is better than none, and better than one with a snarky remark about anti-science belief systems appended, which will likely not make your conversational partner want to think about any of what you said. Say something positive and let it sink it. The hours and even night after you talked can do a lot for making a new idea a familiar one that can or needs to be integrated with ones world view.

I will not continue to give tips on how to convince people of anything. That's not what this entry was supposed to be about. And I'm not experienced enough to give good tips. But I want to leave a book referral here. I can't recommend it, because I haven't read it. But it appears to me that Lee McIntyre knows what he's talking about in his book "How to Talk to a Science Denier". I conclude that from what he says in book introduction (YT, IV.