`Tests still passed. Build still passed. But now I have three files to maintain instead of one, and the "extensibility" will never be used.` sounds very LLM-like to me personally, but I wouldn't be willing to bet on it.
Unfortunately the service is very buggy in my experience. When I tried to download all of my photos data multiple times it gave me corrupted .zip files and half of the files were just zero bytes. Maybe I can blame Firefox for that though, I dunno. I should probably try again with Chrome before completely blaming Google
I've never had a problem with Google Takeout the multiple times I've used it. Perhaps try making the compressed files smaller (You can choose to make them 1gb or greater, last time I used it), you might need to download 75 files, but it's better than 1 big file.
Exactly. Remember this is a guy who was "best friends" with Donald Trump. It's just a group of idiots who became rich and powerful through a combination of luck and criminality.
I find it hard to believe that they copied the word for workshop (presumably 工房) convincingly enough that it wasn't obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc. The way that someone would show how a character looks to someone without any knowledge (ie textbook form) and how they would naturally write such a sign is also different. You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.
Actually, signs were also written right-to-left horizontally during that period but it's likely that someone showing them how to write on a piece of paper would have written vertically, so they would probably not even have the knowledge to know the correct order of the text.
If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement?
I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time.
A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
I already agreed that writing kanji without years of practice would be very hard to make look native. But they said they did it and it worked. Maybe it was obviously not native and it didn't matter. I don't know. But I'm not going to say they lied about making the sign.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
It would be much easier for a random Japanese soldier who actually knows the language to just write on the few necessary signs than trying to direct a prisoner to do so, who will probably end up making mistakes and make it almost illegible. This just sounds like a nice explanation but it's unlikely to be the case.
> obviously written by someone without any understanding of how to actually write the language. It's extremely obvious when someone tries to copy Chinese characters without any understanding of stroke order, stroke pressure, etc.
Or someone who is not a professional wooden sign carver, perhaps? I'm natively familiar with English writing, but if I carved 'workshop' I'm not sure it would look any better than someone imitating me, nor obviously like I'd used correct 'stroke' order.
> You would be able to tell instantly that a non-native prisoner wrote it.
"Print characters" aren't hand painted on signs and you will rarely see it written in any context outside of extremely old books. There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway. Presumably you are referring to 明朝体 (although that sign you linked is actually 丸ゴシック, which is much more recent).
Besides, even if it was written down like that it will still be incredibly obvious. It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing. It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
> It would be like if you had your child try to copy Times New Roman and pass it off as the real thing.
Copying a shape exactly is absolutely possible. (Any shape.) Yes most people doesn’t have the skills to pull it off, but then again they are also not making lathes in captivity (or at all).
> It's actually harder than writing normally unless you have a stencil.
Then you make a stencil.
> There's no such thing as "print characters", anyway.
It will be hard to convince me about that when my eyes can see it. You can choose to not understand what I’m saying.
Your knowledge of Japanese orthography gives you an interesting perspective. I'd be fascinated to know, given the obstacles you note, how exactly the prisoners overcame them. Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography? Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure? Were the guards generally illiterate, and therefore not notice the errors? All of those would be spurs to further research, which your reflexive dismissal of the premise would preclude. An open-minded approach to historical texts usually generates more-interesting questions and answers than a closed one.
An alternative possibility is that many other the signs around the camp were made by prisoners over the normal course of their labor and thus this one did not need to hide its authorship. The deception is in acting like it was always there and was supposed to be, not in pretending its was physically written by an official.
Or do the guards just not want to speak out of line or question their superiors. Or do the guards all know but don't care because things are being fixed up around the place. Or are all the signs in the camp created by prisoners?
So much is unknown about the situation to make the claims made above.
Or another (and I think the most likely possibility, given what we know about human nature): one of the guards ran a profitable little side business selling basic machined parts in town made with free labor. In exchange, the prisoners got to make stuff they needed also. Only the high-ranking prisoners were in on the scheme. The rest were told the story about "deception", which is what we see relayed here.
The other explanation is a little too much like a comic book. Real life tends not to resemble Batman storylines.
I mean, it's a great feel-good story and we want to believe it. Americans oh-so-smart, their Japanese captors as dumb as Darth Vader's henchmen, the perfect setting, and the machine shop was used to produce prosthetics. It's so saccharine my teeth hurt.
The camp in this article is located in Changi, in Singapore. Singapore has always had a large Chinese population (it actually was originally in Malaysia upon that country's independence but got kicked out for being too Chinese). It would be surprising if not a single one was familiar with some Chinese writing.
They did, the translator communicates to the prisoners in English, and they pass along in Japanese to the guards. The article says they asked the translator.
Did they have someone in the camp with basic knowledge of Chinese orthography?
This is definitely a possibility, but even then...
> Did someone know enough to note carefully the way in which the characters were written? Did they keep the paper with the characters on it, and then hand-reproduce the precise structure?
This would be unlikely to work, because the characters would be written on paper using a pen or pencil, which produces quite different strokes that a brush, which is what you would have to use for a sign. Even if you know how brush strokes should look like, I can't really say how difficult it would be to produce brushwork that credibly looks like what someone would produce who has been doing it all their adult life, if you lack the experience.
I had the same thought, but as the other responses note, there are many possible explanations.
Yet another one: maybe some of the prisoners actually knew basic Japanese? It would be a very useful skill in their situation, and learning the basics of how to write kanji is not that hard. It wouldn't be calligraphy, but it just needs to look good enough that it might just be sloppy writing.
Many KVM switches do this, just search Amazon for KVM switch + HDMI/Display Port, but they're often not great in my experience. My last one only lasted a couple of years and would sometimes fail to pick up my monitor.
I spent many hours configuring my Macbook for work (including installing 3rd party apps that let you do things the default options don't) and there are many aspects of it I wish I could change but can't (at least without a lot of effort), but I could happily use Windows with very few tweaks. It's mostly personal preference as to what "just works" in both of these systems, but it's certainly nicer to have the option to change things you don't like.
If it makes you feel any better the original is not the same as what is displayed now[0] so it did not take just one flight to achieve elegance, and also included some bugs which were mentioned in the errata later[1].
I have PTSD from extremely bad psychedelic trips and this comment made me cringe (my PTSD must be getting better because I think at one point it would have given me a panic attack). I don't think I could have handled 6 months of that.
It begun for me after smoking weed one night - in a flash I was outside my body with an extreme panic attack and the sudden belief that I was inside essentially a game. This first panic attack lasted around an hour or two. It was horrendous. Your PTSD is something you can manage, I have it too. It gets better and weaker as the years go on. For myself, this all happened 18 years ago but it made me a stronger person.
Marijuana actually triggers panic attacks in a similar way for me. None of the other psychedelics trigger it as bad as marijuana. Even then it’s a different type of management if it’s from shrooms or lsd. The marijuana one feels psychotic with short term memory loss vs just experiencing a different reality.
Any time you feel the onset of a panic attack, tell yourself it’s just a panic attack. Make yourself think of a happy thought and stay with it. Repeat a mantra in your head “Everything will be alright in the end, if it’s not alright, it’s not the end”. Try to go up and down the alphabet, maybe skipping letters - every 2 letters at a time; a, c, e, g… And backwards. Multiply numbers, etc. And do not smoke bongs, smoke only single skin joints which aren’t packed. These are a few of my techniques.
Cannabis is a very strong (and often unpleasant) psychedelic for someone I know — rivaling LSD if not stronger. I’ve heard of this being true for other people too; I wonder how common it is.
This is true for me, mainly because the major effect of psychedelic drugs for me is completely 'internal' to my mind. Actually most of my trips are basically just extensions of the last one because I just revert to the same (psychotic) thought patterns. It's a pretty awful place to be which ultimately led to me getting PTSD after smoking a joint and believing some awful stuff about my existence.
This is why I can only smoke the tiniest bit. And only a couple of times a year - it’s not the same as LSD or mushrooms, but it’s just as intense what it does to my mind.
I always wanted to face my fears instead of run from them. Cannabis definitely gives me super powers, my brain races with a million thoughts and brings out a part of me which needs to escape from time to time - it brings out the best in me (strangely enough).
I can share the sentiment. I got stuck in a few loops on psychedelics and it was tumultuous to say the least. Overall it was a net positive effect but it’s certainly not the only way for “enlightenment.” It’s perhaps the most masochist path to enlightenment. Perhaps Alan Watts said that.
Dang, this did give me a panic attack. The sort of thing OP describes is my greatest fear, and I have a hard time dealing with the fact that it really happens to some people.
To be fair, I suffered anxiety since I was 7 or 8yrs old and had a shitty start at life. That snapping experience was a long time coming for me. Don’t be worrying it will happen to you, cause it’s pointless unless it has happened and it’s not worth the worry.
I wouldn't have been surprised if there was more though. I think the kind of people on here probably think too much/overanalyze stuff to begin with and my impression is that trait doesn't mix super well with psychedelics.
At least I feel like the fundamental cause of my PTSD inducing trips is wanting to explain the inexplicable.
Hope everything's going well for you though. I think it's especially hard to have this kind of PTSD because people don't take it very seriously and it's either socially embarrassing or triggering to try and talk about it to begin with.
Mine was a long time ago now (~7 years), I was pretty horribly messed up and dysfunctional for the first 2-3 years but I'm mostly okay now. I have HPPD too but that's also mostly subsided, and things only flare up for me if I go without sleep or am under a lot of stress.
Hope you're doing alright too!
I also take Buspirone, which I've found helps a ton with general anxiety.
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