For those with a passing interest in this topic and quite some patience, "le ton beau de Marót" by Douglas Hofstadter is a whole book of musings about translation, particularly of poetry.

It's a fun book full of interesting linguistic trivia.

The patience would be needed to get through the 50 or so translations of the same poem, all different and "wrong" in some way.

also recommended: After Babel by George Steiner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Babel

there was a very interesting blog post on this a few weeks ago

https://matduggan.com/the-year-of-the-3d-printed-miniature-a...

apparently some do, most don't.

Anecdotal but the last time I actively still played at local games half of the players for that ruleset had at least 30-40% of their armies 3D printed. Half of that had 100% of their armies 3D printed and weren't buying GW at all.

I think a big part of it comes down to scale- like that author mentioned, going through the effort of setting up a printer, printing, curing etc. for a handful of models is a pain in the ass. But if you're printing then curing half an army in one go (which the nature of resin printers easily allows you to do by stacking/arranging minis) it comes out as worth it over spending a few hundred USD on official plastic.

Thanks, that post answered the question perfectly

> In practice, the effort to get the STL files, add supports, wash off the models with isopropyl alcohol, remove supports without snapping off tiny arms, and finally cure the mini in UV lights was exponentially more effort than I'm willing to invest. And I say this as someone who has painted individual eyeballs on figures smaller than my thumb. I have a high tolerance for tedious bullshit. This exceeded it.

The following paragraph is also significant — if you're going to spend 5, 10+ hours painting the thing, which might be free evening time for several weeks, the £35 cost isn't a problem.

I spend more money per hour if I go to a bar.

It definitely is. He also mentions that he has several unpainted sets acquired during the Obama Administration. He's constrained by time he can spend painting, not money to acquire more sets. There's no point adding to his backlog.

> near monopoly position in their niche

how do you identify their niche? Miniature wargaming has a bunch of competitors[0], and so does genre publishing.

I suppose they have more physical shops and places to play[1], and it's easier to find people to play with, so that may be what you're think of.

I myself never played the TT game, but I love the world of 40k, and have spent a lot of time consuming related content. I'd pay for WarhammerTV, if they just let me!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miniature_wargames

[1] I recall looking slack jawed at the awesome miniatures in a GW shop in.. Maidenhead, I think? 60k people. Around ~1993, I was a kid in a "english studying" holiday.

The near-monopoly comes from network effect. There are plenty of other games, I'm more of a painter and have models from a load of them, but I've only ever played GW games as that's what my friends play.

I can't think of anything that comes close on tabletop in terms of number of active players. I've just moved to a new town (pop ~5K), there's a club and that wasn't surprising. I wouldn't expect that with any other wargame.

Yeah, it's much like D&D in TTRPGs and MtG in CCGs. Anyone you meet who is into those kinds of games will almost certainly play those specific games, and potentially exclusively them, and finding players for any of the many other games in the genre is much more difficult.

makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

> Lutnick told his audience that the world should focus on coal as an energy source rather than renewables,

> according to one person present, and made dismissive comments about Europe.

yeah I can see how that would get you booed while talking to a mostly european crowd

Namespaces are a cool idea that didn't really seem to pan out in practice.

I know nothing about this, but bubbletea-ruby was in the news recently

https://github.com/marcoroth/bubbletea-ruby

same experience for me, I translated a few chapter to Italian while in university, I learned a lot and the translation project was super well run.

this proposal exists under the umbrella of the 28th regime[0] idea, as per their FAQ.

Which.. would be a good idea, but I am not holding my breath for it to happen in the next 10 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28th_regime

At a glance this looks like an obviously nicer format that a zip of jpegs, but I struggle to think of a time I thought "wow CBZ is a problem here".

I didn't even realize random access is not possible, presumably because readers just support it by linear scanning or putting everything in memory at once, and comic size is peanuts compared to modern memory size.

I suppose this becomes more useful if you have multiple issues/volumes in a single archive.

Random access is completely possible within a zip, to the degree that it's needed for cbz; you might not be able to randomly access within a file, if for some reason the cbz was stored with deflate on a jpeg, but you can always access individual files independently of each other, so seeking to a random page is O(1).

ZIP literally has a central directory.

I don’t understand what’s the point of any of this over a minimal subset of PDF (one image per page).

I feel that came out wrong but the "maybe" was intended to be a way of saying "no guarantees", to avoid giving people the idea "solve this, get hired".

Should have asked Claude how to write it better.

In that case, removing „perhaps“ would have helped a lot. It is not about maybe being hired, but about maybe being interviewed.

They don't want to guarantee an interview to everyone who sends them an improved solution, either.

If three people send them improvements, they'll probably get interviews. If three thousand do, the problem is easier than they thought or amenable to an LLM or one bright person figured out a trick and shared it with all his classmates or colleagues or all of GitHub.