tal

https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/factory-worker/china

The average pay for a Factory Worker is CNY 58,959 a year and CNY 28 an hour in China.

That'd be 26 hours at average factory wage, according to this site. I don't think that it's likely more than a week, if that.

Says beta 1.0 in the upper right of the screenshot.

For a brief shining moment, it seemed like adroit use of state-level legislation in Kansas might manage to blue-ball much of America by leveraging access to its market of 3 million to raise the bar of entry to pornography websites; most users were hesitant to provide legal identification to adult websites.

https://pepperdine-graphic.com/addiction-risk-thrive-in-southern-california-porn-industry-currents-magazine-spring-2016/

In 2011, Piccirillo began traveling from Chicago, Illinois to Orange County, California to act in a number of pornographic films. Pornography production is illegal in Illinois, as it is in 48 of the 50 United States.

The pornography industry “by and large lives here in Southern California,” said Ged Kenslea, the senior director of communication for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. This is for a number of reasons, but legality and location are important factors.

“There are only two states in the union where adult film production is legal,” Kenslea said. “Everywhere else it would be considered participating in an illegal act of prostitution. California and the state of New Hampshire both have state supreme court rulings that codify adult film production as a legitimate business.”

That was until the degenerate California legislature, intertwined in obscene embrace with its filthy industry, and having a market of 40 million, passed its own legislation disallowing a pornography site conducting business in its jurisdiction from having an age gate. Now the outcome was written by economic imperatives: for each pornography website, there was to be a Kansas-conformant site and a California-conformant version. Anyone purchasing a commercial subscription was directed to the Kansas-conformant site if they wished to purchase service in Kansas. The age-gate-free California-conformant site did not advertise in or accept advertising specifically targeting Kansas residents. By virtue of this and of not making sales to Kansas residents, it kept itself from being subject to Kansas jurisdiction. Naturally, everyone in Kansas not purchasing a subscription accessed the California-conformant site.

I don't know about that, but if you use three hyphens, the Lemmy Web UI will render it as an em-dash, and you can remain human!

EDIT: Unfortunately, nobody appears to have made a Threadiverse community analogous to Reddit's /r/totallynotrobots.

I'd think that tariffs driving up, among other things, battery prices probably won't help much either.

kagis

This says that BEVs are more disadvantaged than ICEs by tariffs.

https://www.mitchell.com/insights/news-release/auto-physical-damage/strong-sales-new-battery-electric-vehicles-face-tariff

This edition of the quarterly publication examines how new U.S. tariffs are threatening consumer adoption and sales of battery electric vehicles (BEVs). It also explains why these automobiles are at a disadvantage compared to their internal combustion engine (ICE) counterparts when it comes to import taxes.

“Rapid shifts in trade policy are reshaping the automotive landscape, with tariffs affecting not only the cost of components but also the dynamics of assembly, supply chain transparency and even pricing strategies,” said Ryan Mandell, Mitchell’s director of claims performance. “While these challenges impact all automakers doing business in the U.S., they are more pronounced for manufacturers of BEVs. Insurers will need to collaborate closely with suppliers and collision repair partners to navigate tariff complexities and prepare for future uncertainty.”

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

The brothers were shot and then left to the mob. Their naked, mutilated bodies were strung up on the nearby public gibbet, while the Orangist mob ate their roasted livers in a cannibalistic frenzy.

considers

I guess it's because of the fact that a lot of their stuff is retold fairy tales from societies with monarchies, but Disney does have quite a lot of royal characters.

"Disney princess" is a thing, but I can't really think of other examples of royalty in American pop culture.

TortoiseTTS can, given a handful of WAV files of someone speaking, try and clone them on local hardware.

https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

I don't know how well it would work on Trump, who has a lot of unique mannerisms, not just some sort of general accent.

Can't use AMD hardware due to a dependency on transformers, though it sounds like you can run it on the CPU alone.

I also want to see a shapeshifter character as one of the good guys! Why are they always the bad guys?

Morph, from X-Men.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morph_(X-Men:_The_Animated_Series)

I think that it's more that the viewer normally gets to see things from the view of the good guys, and suddenly revealing that someone is actually someone else shape-shifted

which doesn't work if the viewer has been following along with the good guys

doesn't work as well.

If you're talking about what sort of content (rather than what type of media):

I haven't really been into traditional superhero stuff for a while, but I did really very much enjoy the Parahumans novels (which some may know as Worm and Ward).

Those are dark, don't shy away from taboo content, and tend to focus on using powers together in complex ways to pull off larger goals. The main character is an antiheroine.

I enjoyed the series more early-on, when it was "lower power". I think that there's a strong tendency with magic or superpowers or...honestly, many genres of fiction to always want to top the previous book or story in scope. This usually tends towards trying to save the world or universe or something like that. I feel like that gets to be a bit clichéd. It also limits the story and forms of antagonist that can come up, and makes it hard to continue the story effectively after a "save the universe" one. I'd like more authors who have discipline to hold the "power level" in their worlds down down. If Sherlock Holmes had been fighting cosmic brings by the end of story 10, I think it would have been hard to have a good story 11.

So I'd rather have characters with strongly-constrained, limited abilities that they have to use in creative ways, rather than doing the constant uncovering of new powers.

A few characters in the superhero genre have some form of ability that changes without their power, which helps to let the author explore other possibilities and then dial down the power later. Resurrection Man, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Man_%28character%29

Due to sub-atomic technology in his bloodstream, Shelley cannot be permanently killed. No matter how he is killed or how much damage is done, he always resurrects fully healed. With each resurrection he has a new super-power (while whatever super-power he had previously disappears). In some cases, there is a physical transformation element to his resurrection (in one case, he resurrected as a living shadow, while another time his body altered into a woman's form).

I'm not sure that that's actually a fantastic solution

maybe too random

but as a mechanic, it helps keep characters with superpowers from becoming stale or written into a corner after being extra-powerful in one story. Maybe it'd be nice to have a world where characters have some character-defining fixed powers, but there's also some mechanic that can cause others to shift from time to time.

It can't really be strictly-called "superhero", but probably my favorite graphic novel series was Sandman. That is the dead opposite of "low power", but the protagonist also typically faces a lot of serious restrictions on what he can do, for one reason or another. It's conflict, challenges for the protagonist that make for an interesting story, and having a constrained and limited set of powers, I think, helps permit for a wider range of interesting conflicts.

If you're talking about the type of media, superheroes evolved around for comic books and graphic novels, and I think that that's still the best place for them.

As I mentioned above, I do like the Parahumans series, and that's an illustration-free novel series, so that can definitely work, and the lower cost of production maybe opens the doors to some interesting niches. I've read very few superhero books, though, so I don't knownif I have a feel for it.

For movies...they're okay, but certainly not my favorite type of media for superhero stuff. There was a long run of bad superhero movies. After 2000, some better ones have come out, but while I enjoyed some, I don't watch many movies in general. I also tend to feel that movies are shorter than I'd like for a good plot. and that a lot of the fantastic stuff that superpowers involve requires expensive computer graphics, where movies tend to do better if a lot of what's going to be done can be acted out by ordinary humans on more-or-less real sets. Also, actors and actresses age, which I don't think works well with very long-running characters...and a lot of superheroes are pretty long-running.

Video games...I've played some video games with superheroes. Generally not that enthusiastic about them. Some superpowers of existing characters were designed around being fun to look at and read about rather than being fun to play with. Many superhero games are action games, which I've been decreasingly interested in. For RPG games, I tend to prefer more CRPG-style conventions, which don't work as well with already-fleshed-out protagonists. I suppose that there's nothing really prohibiting making a video game in any genre with superheroes, but the track record for me just hasn't been that great. I do enjoy roguelike games, where the main character may get superhero-like abilities, but I don't think that one would really call such things thematically "superhero".

The Freedom Force series was fun, but not amazing.

The "Heroes Rise" multiple-choice adventure series from Choice of Games isn't bad, is one of their better games, but it also never left me really super amazed. I don't like the tendency of many Choice of Games games to try to make a winning strategy just consistently playing a particular type of character. Don't remember if those did that.

Ehhh.

So, the initial, and real reason that NKRO was introduced was to deal with inexpensive keyboards that used grid encoders. This requires that each key be assigned a place on a grid, with each row and column having a wire associated with it. When you push a key, it sends the associated pair of wires high voltage. The keyboard encoder chip has those wires running to its pins.

Such a scheme can permit detecting any one key going down, which will always set two wires to high voltage. It can permit detecting any two keys going down, since that will always set at least one more line to high voltage, which will uniquely identify the key. But beyond that, additional keys may not be possible to uniquely identify (and, in fact, pushing one may send only lines that are already high to high, which is totally invisible to the encoder), and so it may ignore additional keys.

This prevents a grid-based encoder from doing NKRO.

If you want to do NKRO, you have to have a unique line coming from every keyswitch, which costs money.

There is a second issue with NKRO.

You can have a keyboard that can have NKRO to the encoder, rather than a grid. And can have a USB interface to talk to the computer.

But last I looked, USB has a protocol limitation that cannot support NKRO, and this was a major reason that you could still get some dual-interface keyboards with PS/2 support and USB recently.

PS/2 is edge-triggered by a key. A key goes down, the computer gets a message. A key goes up, the computer gets a message. All that message says is "this key went down" or "this key went up". The computer maintains a list of keys and its idea of the up or down state of them.

This is also why PS/2 keyboards can sometimes have keys that appear to be "stuck" that get unstuck when you tap them

if the computer misses the "up" message for some reason, then it only gets notified about it next time the key changes state and the computer gets a message about it.

USB doesn't work like that. When a USB keyboard sends an event, it contains a dump of the keyboard state. Every keypress, new dump. However, there's a restriction on the size of the message. It can only contain....I think it's seven keys that are down, plus modifier keys.

kagis

Six keys.

In practice, six is probably enough for pretty much anyone. The real problem was grid encoders, as a video game player might legitimately hit three or four keys at once. But...it still isn't, strictly-speaking, NKRO unless it can do all.

It looks like there are basically two approaches that keyboards have used to try to provide a similar effect. One is to just invent a proprietary protocol, and rely on that and a driver rather than the standard USB keyboard behavior.

The other is to tell the computer that the keyboard is a whole array of keyboards. Since most OS environments can use multiple keyboards and just use their input, such a keyboard can pretend to have multiple keyboards pressing buttons.

Unless this is some sort of...I don't know, metaphorical commentary on Brexit or something, I'm not sure that this community is the right place for this post.