u/Shyam_Lama

I'm wondering where to start with old-school Gibson. The choice seems to be between Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, and Johnny Mnemonic, after which the remainder of the Sprawl trilogy would presumably follow naturally. Still, I like to be efficient with my time, so if anyone here could recommend the "optimal" path of entry, I'd appreciate that.

Since today I'm getting HTTP 403 "Forbidden" for almost all vids I try to download with format option -f18, and also for many I try with an even more compact format:

ERROR: unable to download video data: 
HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

When I invoke yt-dlp without a format option, all vids download successfully.

Strangely though, a few videos can still be downloaded in format 18, so apparently there's no general problem with the extractor. Something else is wrong.

Anyone else experiencing this?

In the Encyclopedia of Mythology (by Arthur Cotterell), the primordial ice-giant Ymir, from whose corpse the world was made, is described as "utterly evil". This characterization can be found in both the entry on Ymir himself and also in the entry on Vé, who together with Odin and Villi killed Ymir. The latter entry also points out that the idea of the world being made of the posthumous remains of an evil creature is not unique to Nordic mythology but appears also in the Babylonian story of Marduk slaying the chaos-dragon Tiamat.

Moreover, the entry on Loki points out that Loki was likely evil because his parents were giants, and all giants (which would include Ymir) are evil.

Wikipedia also seems to concur that Ymir was evil, describing him as having been born from (or made of) some sort of nasty venom or bile ("atter", pus), which likely symbolizes a rather unpleasant disposition.

I wonder, is there any basis for this in the original Nordic texts like the Eddas, or some other lore? I've scanned the poetic Edda but couldn't immediately find any passage that obviously confirms this idea.

As we all know, there are two "original" Shadowrun games, one for the SNES and another for the SEGA Genesis—and they aren't the same game at all. Apart from being set in the same universe, the plots seem (to me) to be completely different, with the prevailing consensus being that the SNES game had the better story while the Genesis game is to be lauded for being much more faithful to the tabletop original.

As for the different plots, Wikipedia claims that the SNES game is an adaptation of the novel Never deal with a Dragon by one Robert N. Charrette. But what about the SEGA-Genesis plot? Beyond how it starts (investigating the death of your brother) I have no idea what the plot is—I never played the Genesis version, because I didn't own a Genesis—and I can't find a plot summary on the web either.

Can anyone summarize, or link something useful? Thanks all.

See title. I watched seasons 1&2 two years ago, and for some reason I don't remember now (bad reviews maybe?) I didn't continue on with the 3rd season. Is it worth my time?

Same question for the 2026 movie, which some say is effectively season 4.

Bonus question: have any new SW spin-offs come out in the past couple years? I'm getting too old to keep track, but a web search gives me the impression that apart from Mandalorian season 3 + the movie there hasn't been anything. Apparently Ashoka, Andor, and Boba Fett were discontinued? How about "canonical" or near-canonical (e.g. Solo) movies? Are we all done with the those?

Relevant

• reddit thread

ใครสักคนอธิบาย​ได้ไหมครับว่าทำไมเวลาเราใช้คำว่า"สตรอว์เบอร์รี่"เป็นสับสแลง​ ทำไมมันถึงมีความหมาย​ว่า"คนโกหก"(อะไรประมาณ​นัน)​? ในภาษา​อังกฤษ​มันไม่เห็น​มีความหมายแบบนี้เลย มันเป็นแค่ชื่อ​ของ​ผลไม้

Some title huh, this post? And I wasn't even aiming to click-bait.

Anyway, this post is in earnest, blasphemous though it may seem to mainstream Christians. You see, when I read the gospel I can't help but get the feeling that while Jesus was certainly a great guy, and likely a divinely inspired guy (and in that sense certainly a god), he wasn't exactly free from vanity. It seems to me that he was intensely conscious of his own extreme self-worth, and of his exceptional role in the escatological drama. And I don't like him any less for it.

Still, vanity *is* a sin, and a major one at that. It is typically included in any list of "capital sins", of which there are usually seven.

But I've been thinking, maybe it is inevitable that someone who is on the Path toward Self-Perfection ends up with this particular sin, namely vanity, as the last remaining one? And maybe it's because it's the last sin (and originally quite likely the first) that it becomes very intense? It's as if energy is removed from all the lesser sins and all becomes concentrated in this one thing we call vanity, which may also be called "perception of one's own value", or even—to put it in Buddhist terms—"clinging to Self-Consciousness"?

I suspect that is this is how it works: on the path toward self-perfection, Pure Vanity (unadulterated with other sins) is the inevitable final stage. Would y'all agree?

And of course the final question then becomes, how does one overcome it? Is Crucifixion necessary? It seems a logical impossibility for the ultimate vain man—who is a man by and large free of other sins—to "choose" to relinquish his perception of himself as being of extreme value. How can you relinquish yourself if you're aware in the extreme of your own value? It seems that an outside event or intervention would have to take place. Is Crucifixion that intervention?

Do let me know what y'all think.

PS. No dogmatic Christian comments please. I'm well familiar with standard Christian ideas, and therefore well aware that the above is completely unacceptable for mainstream Christians. I'm looking for meaningful feedback from freethinking theologians, not dogmatic Christians. Thanks.

Hello all, I'm considering coming to China for a few months, perhaps longer. It will be my first visit.

I currently don't have a laptop, but would prefer to have one with me while traveling. I'm wondering whether I should buy one where I am now (Portugal), or obtain one in China.

Some obvious questions I have:

- Are laptops typically cheaper, more expensive, or same price as compared to Europe?

- Does China have any brands that aren't available in Europe? If so, which brands are reputable?

- Will a laptop bought in China have a normal (aka "US International") keyboard as concerns the physical shapes of the keys? Additional characters on the keys don't bother me (in fact would help), but a tall (two rows) and narrow Enter key (like on many MacBooks and certain European keyboards) is something I can't get used to. I must have a fairly wide Enter key, as on a US International keyboard.

- Is there a good market for quality second-hand machines, aka refurbished? If yes, are there physical stores for that, or is it purely through second-hand websites?

Thanks all.

Cross-posting from r/androiddev.

Hello all. Is there any tool, IDE, or something else out there that would allow me to do a bit of Android development on my Android phone? Obviously I can't expect a full Android studio environment to run on my phone, but perhaps there's something more lightweight out there that will allow me to at least code, compile, and run? Even if it's just a bunch of command-line tools, I'd be interested to hear about it. (I'm an experienced developer, but not on Android, and I'm someone who likes to experiment quickly as ideas occur to me, which may well be when I have only my phone with me.)

Thanks all.

Let's say I have a string someNumber that I know for sure contains a number, so I can be sure that a call to strconv.Atoi(certainNumber) will not return an error as the second return value.

Since I don't need to check the error value, and since strconv.Atoi is a trivial function, I'd like to inline this into another call, e.g.

fmt.Printf("result: %d\n", strconv.Atoi(someNumber))

It seems to me this isn't possible in Go. Unless there is a way to select the first value from the (int,error) tuple? I tried strconv.Atoi(someNumber)[0] but that's not allowed.

I was wondering today, why would the Golang designers have chosen to support closures, but not function-local static variables as in C?

Effectively, closed-over variables are function-local statics that arise when the surrounding scope disappears, and remain for as long as the function instance isn't GC'ed. At least that's my mental model of them.

But because they arise implicitly, and multiple copies can exist of what lexically appears to be a single variable (analogous to multithreaded execution), closed-over variables are, in my opinion, quite a bit harder to grok than explicit function-local statics, which are conceptually very simple.

This seems strange to me: to support the subtler, harder-to-understand concept but disallow the simpler, explicit equivalent. Only thing I can think of is that function-local statics invite multi-threading problems if the static is a "true" static instead of a thread-local static, but that's a choice the designers would have had if they'd wanted to support them.

Of course various other languages (e.g. Java) have made the same choice to support closures but not function-local statics, so perhaps I should post this in r/Programming. Still, I thought I'd try here first.

This here page on initializing slices has a section 3 on "Creating a nil slice", e.g.

var nilslice []int

The claim is made that

>A nil slice is different from an empty slice (created with []int{}).

I don't see the difference. Is there one? Both have initial length and capacity of zero, and both can be appended to.

This is about season 3 episode 4, "There's a Last Time for Everything".The central idea of this episode is that an original could take the place of her/his own clone, without the person who made the clone being aware of the switch: Trevor clones Aeon for the purpose of having a lifelike copy of her by his side, but what Trev doesn't know is that the real Aeon and her replica collude to switch places.

Interestingly (imo) this idea was very closely copied in a 2001 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, namely season 5 episode 18 titled "Intervention". In this episode, vampire Spike gets romantically and sexually involved with a "Buffybot" that he built for himself to gratify his desire for the real Buffy. Just like in the Aeon Flux episode, the original Buffy ultimately switches places with the replica without Spike being aware of it, and then confronts him about the perverseness of building a Buffybot.

Don't know about y'all, but imo this can hardly be a coincidence. Either the makers of Buffy watched Flux and ran with the idea, or alternatively the same makers were involved behind the scenes. (Or should I call them the e-makers?)

Anyway, that's just my two cents worth for today. Just thought some here might be interested in a little harmless trivia.

Does a BH have internal pressure? And if yes, is it possible for the pressure and gravity to arrive at a static equilibrium for some time? Perhaps even for a long time?

Black hole theory tends to employ examples involving individual particles or hypothetical observers' spaceships, and if we limit ourselves to such scenarios the idea of pressure inside the black hole is strange. But what if we imagine a black hole in the middle of an extremely large and homogenous gas cloud? Then we would have gas flowing into the black hole very evenly from all sides and evenly over time. Wouldn't that support the idea of the black hole possibly having internal pressure? I see no reason why the gas, after passing the event horizon, would suddenly be "without pressure". In fact the opposite seems more intuitive to me: as the gas gets compressed inside the BH, it's pressure would presumably rise. Can it rise to the point where it offsets the gravitational pull? Not near the singularity, it would seem, but how about a couple million miles away from it, but still inside the event horizon?

Would like to hear y'aller thoughts.