Lots of inner monologues that have a sort of stream of consciousness feel to them. Plot is secondary or non-existent. But I do feel like his movies usually have a coherent theme and he gets it across successfully. I don’t know anything about films so am unable to appreciate any technical feats like lighting - but I really like his movies. I feel like a lot of “good” movies are also fairly formulaic; I enjoyed f1 and predator badlands, but it feels like they followed the Hollywood formula and were good movies because the executed it well.
Interesting - I got something completely different out of The Thin Red Line. To me it was fascinating to see how different people processed the war and their different struggles, whether philosophical (Private Witt), with relationships back home (Cpt Staros), or PTSD. It was a little scattered as it bounced between so many soldiers but the central theme seemed to centre around Pvt Witt and Sgt Welsh - the actual battle was almost secondary. IMO there’s no snobbery - though Malick is maybe a little self indulgent - and I enjoyed movies like Saving Private Ryan or even Fury just as much.
Agree. To me the general reaction seems to be mourning or indifference. I don’t see why the latter is a problem - there are so many gun deaths in the US; I believe there was yet another school shooting the other day too.
I haven’t seen any of this, anecdotally. Don’t confuse indifference with celebration. You all had a school shooting the other day too and I’ve hardly heart about it because it is overshadowed by this news.
Respectfully, this argument reads like it is completely ignorant of the e-commerce landscape over the past 30 years and how much Amazon has shaped and innovated in the space. Not to mention that today they have several verticals beyond e-commerce that make up their valuation.
Okay go on and count only half for the sake of argument. That's still a trillion. Any business can do what Amazon does for their products and their customers. But they don't and they won't. Those who do experience great advantages.
Yer trollin', but yeah, I'll reply, normally when things are successful, people follow suit, so doing something is evidence that it is possible to do. Like, take nuclear weapons for an example...
"Any business can do what Amazon does for their products and their customers."
What I meant is that any business can do for their products and their customers what Amazon does. Not that any business can do everything Amazon does.
There would be little reason for online marketplaces like Amazon to grow so huge, if businesses had cared enough to provide a reasonable online experience. 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or 5 years ago. Now we are in 2025 and most businesses offer worse online customer experience than what good businesses were offering 20 years ago. You can't be 20 years behind the times and say that it's impossible to compete. It's very possible to make a great customer experience and make money online, even for small businesses with limited means. As evidence by many companies doing that.
It's the same with any marketplace like Booking.com or restaurant delivery apps. They wouldn't be half as big if the businesses they serve wouldn't be too lazy and worthless to make a decent online experience for their customers. But here we are.
I think today it is a lot easier for businesses to do what Amazon does - but a lot of that is true because of Amazon. Shopify, stripe, and logistics & last mile providers fill some gaps but they were not as widely known or as easy to integrate with long ago - most didn’t even exist until well into Amazon’s existence.
Can you make your point without resorting to insults?
Businesses don't need to be as good as Amazon or deliver as fast. Amazon is just an example. But business need to take their online experience seriously if they don't want to be pushed aside by Amazon and the likes. And few businesses seem to do that even though it's not hard.
Having worked there in the past, Ubisoft is awful. When I was there previously there was an aggressive push for UPlay (now Ubisoft Connect) integration into all products. Then there were the bullshots for promos/E3/etc. There were often clashes with leadership who would fight against creativity / novel ideas in favour of cookie-cutter mechanics that would not add anything to the experience - certainly there was a mentality of, let's just copy what was recently successful.
I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.
I'll never buy an Ubisoft game again. Instant dealbreaker to see that studio on the Steam store page; I've deleted a $3 sale game from my cart when I realized that it was Ubisoft. No game is worth giving money to a company that hates its customers so much.
> I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.
They are like junk food. Everyone has the junk food that they enjoy. FarCry is certainly the McDonald's of games. I enjoy some junk food once in a while, problems arise if I make it my staple diet.
For Steam users, a reminder that you can go to a publisher's page and "Ignore" that publisher. The option is a little bit hidden, it's in the settings cog on the right-hand side of the page. It'll stop steam from recommending their games to you, and when one does show up, like in the Top Sellers list, it'll have a message on it saying that it's by a publisher that you ignored.
I have Ubisoft, EA, and Sony marked as such, personally.
Not an American, so maybe I don’t have the same depth or insight into the candidates, but as bad as Kamala might have been, I think she would have been better than Trump. But then again I think a potato would make a better president than Trump.
It doesn't matter. A black woman is entirely unelectable in the United States.
Moderate and conservatives in the US are deeply sexist and racist. I know plenty of women who wouldn't vote for a female president and are very open about it.
Policies are irrelevant. Americans are still deeply sexist and racist.
I grew up conservative and know very well the quiet things they don't say to most people.
A woman, let alone a black woman, is not electable in the US right now.
It blows my mind how people seem to think Americans aren't still sexist/racist when there is so much evidence saying otherwise. It's important to get outside our social circles and talk to people with differing views.
> Is there data for this question which would back restricting populations from having tools of self defense against tyrannic government(could happen in Canada too one day) and make it high priority for society compared to other problems?
The US has these tools and a dictator upending the country and yet these tools are not being utilized.
It’s a third, but also that’s not a criteria for “dictator” – the term refers to unchecked power, and while over time that tends to build resentment it’s not a given. This is especially true when they favor certain religious or ethnic groups where the beneficiaries like the dictator and everyone else does not.
Poll is an actual check, that his actions are aligned with what population wants from him. Laws and institutions are always not perfect, and all governments violated some rules.
Some very obvious and easily avoidable problems (of the binary format):
* Messages are designed in such a way that only the size of the constituents is given. The size of the container message isn't known. Therefore the top-level message doesn't record its size. This requires one to invent an extra bit of the binary format, when they decide how to delimit top-level messages. Different Protobuf implementations do it differently. So, if you have two clients independently implementing the same spec, it's possible that both will never be able to communicate with the same service. (This doesn't happen a lot in practice, because most developers use tools to generate clients that are developed by the same team, and so, coincidentally they all get the same solution to the same problem, but alternative tools exist, and they actually differ in this respect).
* Messages were designed in such a way as to implement "+" operator in C++. A completely worthless property. Never used in practice... but this design choice made the authors require that repeating keys in messages be allowed and that the last key wins. This precludes SAX-like parsing of the payload, since no processing can take place before the entire payload is received.
* Protobuf is rife with other useless properties, added exclusively to support Google's use-cases. Various containers for primitive types to make them nullable. JSON conversion support (that doesn't work all the time because it relies on undocumented naming convention).
* Protobuf payload doesn't have a concept of version / identity. It's possible, and, in fact, happens quite a bit, that incorrect schema is applied to payload, and the operation "succeeds", but, the resulting interpretation of the message is different from intended.
* The concept of default values, that is supposed to allow for not sending some values is another design flaw: it makes it easy to misinterpret the payload. Depending on how the reader language deals with absence of values, the results of the parse will vary, sometimes leading to unintended consequences.
* It's not possible to write a memory-efficient encoder because it's hard / impractical sometimes to calculate the length of the message constituents, and so, the typical implementation is to encode the constituents in a "scratch" buffer, measure the outcome, and then copy from "scratch" to the "actual" buffer, which, on top of this, might require resizing / wasting memory for "padding". If, on the other hand, the implementation does try to calculate all the lengths necessary to calculate the final length of the top-level message, it will prevent it from encoding the message in a single pass (all components of the message will have to be examined at least twice).
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Had the author of this creation tried to use it for a while, he'd known about these problems and would try to fix them, I'm sure. What I think happened is that it was the first ever attempt for the author in doing this, and he never looked back, switching to other tasks, while whoever picked up the task after him was too scared to fix the problems (I hear the author was a huge deal in Google, and so nobody would tell him how awful his creation was).
Anecdotally I've found that almost all alcohol-free cocktails on the menu are priced the same as regular version cocktails; like $15-$20! In Canada, at least, I believe there are licensing and taxes that contribute to the price of alcoholic beverages, so I don't understand why an alcohol-free cocktail should cost anywhere close to the regular drink.
