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> There is nothing in the word “theft” that implies depriving someone of physical property.

Of course there is. It's origin is the crime of taking of tangible property owned by someone else without consent. It did not apply to intangible property because it predates any concept of legally protected intellectual property that can be duplicated without loss.

Now, there was also the metaphorical use of theft for non-criminal / non-tangible things but poetic use of language shouldn't be confused with primary meanings. For example, "plagiarism" comes from the Latin for "kidnapping" coined playfully by a comic. It was never a crime or ever resembled actual kidnapping. If you call your poem "my baby" because of how precious it is to you, it doesn't become one. Badly editing your poem is not murder either yet you might complain in such dramatic terms.

You might want to argue something about metaphors and secondary meanings but we shouldn't consider the crime of kidnapping to mean reciting other's verses any more than a summer's day should mean temperate people. If we start taking metaphorical uses literally then you also have to start claiming silly things like most kidnapping being legal.

Only in later industrial society did the metaphor become less metaphorical in written law for criminal acts that emerged post-printing-press that were being called fraud, deception, infringement and piracy.

> deprives the owner of privacy

It's pretty metaphorical to describe such things as property that can be stolen.

With this latitude you can frame every injury as theft e.g. stabbing is the theft of good health, murder is theft of life, perjury is theft of a fair trial etc. You might choose to use such language because it's how we roll, but we also know that, as offences, they are not theft.

When an item cannot be traded or restored to the owner, is it property that can be owned and stolen or are concepts of injury, damage and destruction more legitimate?

When it comes to intellectual property, it's closer to contract law where citizens are compelled to abide by contracts the state issues and enforces. The movement of intangible theft from metaphor into law for breaching such a contract was popularised by the beneficiaries to rhetorically inflate an illusion of loss and justify severe sanctions for acts not considered unlawful for most of human history.


> It's pretty metaphorical to describe such things as property that can be stolen.

Stealing is a pretty wide term meaning deprivation of a good, asset, property, service, etc. If it means deprivation only of physical goods at some point in time, sure; this is 2025 outside now. Theft of physical goods is so first millenium.


It makes me curious about how human subtitlers or even scriptwriters choose to transcribe intentionally ambiguous speech, puns and narratively important mishearings. It's like you need to subtitle what is heard not what is said.

Do those born profoundly deaf specifically study word sounds in order to understand/create puns, rhymes and such so they don't need assistance understanding narrative mishearings?

It must feel like a form of abstract mathematics without the experiential component... but then I suspect mathematicians manufacture an experiential phenomena with their abstractions with their claims of a beauty like music... hmm!


The quality of subtitles implies that almost no effort is being put into their creation. Watch even a high budget movie/TV show and be aghast at how frequently they diverge.

A good subtitle isn't a perfect copy of what was said.

Hard disagree. When I'm reading a transcript, I want word-for-word what the people said, not a creative edit. I want the speakers' voice, not the transcriptionist's.

And when I'm watching subtitles in my own language (say because I want the volume low so I'm not disturbing others), I hate when the words I see don't match the words I hear. It's the quickest way I can imagine to get sucked out of the content and into awareness of the delivery of the content.


I mean, subtitles are mostly the same.

Sometimes they're edited down simply for space, because there wouldn't be time to easily read all the dialog otherwise. And sometimes repetition of words or phrases is removed, because it's clearer, and the emphasis is obvious from watching the moving image. And filler words like "uh" or "um" generally aren't included unless they were in the original script.

Most interestingly, swearing is sometimes toned down, just by skipping it -- removing an f-word in a sentence or similar. Not out of any kind of puritanism, but because swear words genuinely come across as more powerful in print than they do in speech. What sounds right when spoken can sometimes look like too much in print.

Subtitles are an art. Determining when to best time them, how to split up long sentences, how to handle different speakers, how to handle repetition, how to handle limited space. I used to want subtitles that were perfectly faithful to what was spoken. Then I actually got involved in making subtitles at one point, and was very surprised to discover that perfectly faithful subtitles didn't actually do the best job of communicating meaning.

Fictional subtitles aren't court transcripts. They serve the purpose of storytelling, which is the combination of a visible moving image full of emotion and action, and the subtitles. Their interplay is complex.


Hard and vehemently disagree. Subtitles are not commentary tracks.

The artists are the writers, voice actors, and everyone else involved in creating the original media. Never, ever, a random stranger should contaminate it with his/her opinions or point of views.

Subtitles should be perfect transcriptions or the most accurate translations, never reinterpretations


Nobody said subtitles are commentary tracks.

And official subtitles aren't made by random strangers. They're made by people who do it professionally.

It's not "contamination" or "opinions", like somebody is injecting political views! And certainly not "reinterpretation". Goodness. It's about clarity, that's all.

Also there's no such thing as the "most accurate" translations. Translations themselves are an art, hugely.


> When I'm reading a transcript

That's the thing though, subtitles aren't intended as full transcripts. They are intended to allow a wide variety of people to follow the content.

A lot of people read slower than they would hear speech. So subtitles often need to condense or rephrase speech to keep pace with the video. The goal is usually to convey meaning clearly within the time available on screen. Not to capture every single word.

If they tried to be fully verbatim, you'd either have subtitles disappearing before most viewers could finish reading them or large blocks of text covering the screen. Subtitlers also have to account for things like overlapping dialogue, filler words, and false starts, which can make exact transcriptions harder to read and more distracting in a visual medium.

I mean, yeah in your own native language I agree it sort of sucks if you can still hear the spoken words as well. But, to be frank, you are also the minority group here as far as subtitle target audiences go.

And to be honest, if they were fully verbatim, I'd wager you quickly would be annoyed as well. Simply because you will notice how much attention they then draw, making you less able to actually view the content.


I regularly enable YouTube subtitles. Almost always, they are a 100% verbatim transcription, excluding errors from auto-transcription. I am not annoyed in the slightest, and in fact I very much prefer that they are verbatim.

If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.


> If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.

And what are deaf people supposed to do in a cinema, or with broadcast TV?

(And I'm ignoring other uses, e.g. learning a foreign language; for that, sometimes you want the exact words, sometimes the gist, but it's highly situational; but even once you've learned the language itself, regional accents even without vocabulary changes can be tough).


> If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.

That's just plain tone deaf, plain and simple. I was not talking about myself, or just youtube. You are not everyone else, your use case is not everyone else their use case. It really isn't that difficult.


You made a bet and lost. Things are difficult.

What even is this random ass reply? Are you a bot, or just confused?

But then what about deliberate mishearings and ambiguous speech, like the GP said?

Aren't same-language subtitles supposed to be perfect literal transcripts, while cross-language subtitling is supposed to be compressed creative interpretations?

Tom Scott would agree with you. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c

I had similar thoughts when reading Huck Finn. It's not just phonetically spelled, it's much different. Almost like Twain came up with a list of words, and then had a bunch of 2nd graders tell him the spelling of words they had seen. I guess at some point, you just get good at bad spelling?

Writing in the vernacular, I believe it's called. I do something like that if I'm texting.

The book "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks uses something like this for one of its characters to quite good effect.


Except it forces me to slow down to "decypher" the text and makes the reading labored. I understand the point as it is part of the character, but it is easier to understand someone speaking in that vernacular vs reading the forced misspellings. I definitely don't want to get to the point of being good at reading it though. I wonder if this is how second grade teachers feel reading the class' schoolwork?

That's true. I'm sure Twain and Banks were aware of this, though. Apparently they considered the immersion to be worth a little extra work on the part of the reader. Whether the reader agrees is a different story.

I try to limit my use of it to just enough for my accent and way of talking to bleed through. I don't go for full-on phonetics, but I'm often "droppin' my g's and usin' lotsa regional sayin's." It probably helps that the people I text have the same accent I do, though.


For what specifically?

My top-of-funnel is not searching github but recommendations or searching technology/platform specific repositories e.g. for software it's flathub/f-droid and for rust its crates.io/libs.rs.

Where the code is hosted is in theory irrelevant... but I'm ashamed to say that when code turns out to be on gitlab my heart sinks. It's a bit of a red flag for e.g. no bug-tracking, no contributions, no maintenance, absent maintainer and unexpected licenses.

It's gross personal hypocrisy because I hate the absurdity of commercially owned FOSS collaboration and centralised git and happily self-host myself... but those not publishing code on github are awkward bastards :)


> treatment for binge eating disorder

There is a mixed picture on this. I see a lot reports of reports of it causing binging in the evenings despite no prior issues.

The issue is that therapeutic doses are not the multi-day bender of a speed-freak that forgoes sleep to keep their blood-concentration permanently high. Instead it's a medicated window of 6-12 hours with a third or more of their waking hours remaining for rebound effects to unleash stimulation-seeking demons that run wilder than ever.


> to retain body heat

Heat retention would benefit an ambush hunter in a cold climate whereas heat exhaustion is one of the ways endurance hunters catch their prey in hot climes.

> Humans are also hairless endurance hunters

It's something we can do but the diversity of habitats, prey and techniques humans feed themselves with is far greater than what feels like an over-indexing on specific extant savannah tribes as if they are proto-human relics. Do you need to out run a fish or an oyster? Why would you run after a rabbit instead of waiting for it near it's burrow? etc.

Personally I bear little resemblance to an endurance runner so one might assume no shortage of forest/mountain dwellers in my genes given short thick legs. Built for sprinting, climbing and carrying but, to my despair, incurably injury prone at endurance running.


I tried it a few months ago to narrate an epub in Apple Books and it was very broken in a weird way. It starts out decent but after a few pages, it starts slurring, skipping words, trailing off not finishing sentences and then goes silent.

(I've just tried it again without seeing that issue within a few pages)

> Siri voice or some older voices

You can choose "Enhanced" and "Premium" versions of voices which are larger and sound nice and modern to me. The "Serena Premium" voice I was using is over 200Mb and far better that this Show HN. It's very natural but kind of ruined by diabolical pronunciation of anything slightly non-standard which sadly seems to cover everything I read e.g. people/place names, technical/scientific terms or any neologisms in scifi/fantasy.

It's so wildly incomprehensible for e.g. Tibetan names in a mountaineering book, that you have to check the text. If the word being butchered is frequently repeated e.g. main character’s name, then it's just too painful to use.


I hate that they deliberately obscure the keyboard in all their product pictures. I couldn't see what was wrong until looking at a review. Sounds great otherwise but that's disappointingly deceptive.

I wish such devices had hot-swappable plates and key caps to let us choose our own compromises. Key layout seems like such a trivial, almost cosmetic, aspect that can make a device a misery overshadowing much higher complexity/cost tech like the screen and internals.


Home advantage wasn't an accident for Jeff Beck, the Cambridge United manager in the '90s because he used groundsmanship as a weapon:

- plough the pitch to kneecap expensive teams with running/passing games

- narrow the pitch dimensions to minimise fancy wide plays

- grow the grass long and pour sand in the corners so long balls less likely to go out

He then recruited the tallest forwards he could and the strategy was simple, hoof it to the big fellas up front. None of this running/passing nonsense that requires money/talent.

I expect regulations might have improved since then...


The Goodison Park (built 1892) away dressing rooms are really Spartan and uncomfortable. They are poorly heated, are right under the stand (noisy), there's only one toilet etc.

I don't think Everton's home record can really get that much worse when they move into their new stadium next season though.


Some of the All or Nothing documentaries that cover Premier League teams include a lot of footage in the away dressing rooms, and they are almost all bad (though Goodison was weirdly cavernous and looks more annoying than normal).

Exactly how they are bad changes, though - when you take the Emirates Stadium (Arsenal's home ground in London) tour, for instance, they actually include some details about how the table in the middle of the away dressing room is designed to be uncomfortably high in a way that keeps team members from making eye contact, which is something that the stadium designers thought would be annoying. At one point, at least, the self-guided tour narration actually included a comment that Pep Guardiola hated the layout.


I toured Stanford Bridge in the middle 2010s, they actually found uncomfortable away dressing rooms weren't the most effective as it either got the other team to go out and start warming up or riled them up.

When Mourinho started he brought in a sports psychologist who made the dressing rooms slightly heated with light pink walls and a comforting atmosphere. They ended up going 2+ years without a loss at home after that.


Norwich painted their away dressing room an effeminate shade of pastel pink because it supposedly lowers testosterone


Another classic result of British Scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_scientists_(meme)


Same with University of Iowa (American College Football)

https://www.ncaa.com/video/football/2014-09-12/traditions-io...


This hurts my eyes and throws off my sense of white balance.


Reminder that the association of pink with femininity is a recent phenomenon. Before WW2, it used to be associated with masculinity.

'In 1918, an article in Ladies Home Journal advised: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”'


That may be true that a century ago baby girls and baby boys in the US were associated with different colors than today, but the reasoning of "pink, being a more decided and stronger color" seems suspect to me. How come dozens of flags of countries around the world feature the color blue and approximately none feature pink (Spain and Mexico have a small amount of pink in their coats of arms). When it came down to it, the designers of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes and all of the Tribands, etc ... none of them thought, "yeah, lets add some pink to project strength".


Baby clothes use more faded colors because of the frequent washing, so it's pink or light blue. Many countries use red in their flags.


This would also presume that the strength and colorfastness of pink and blue pigments was different 100 years ago than it was today.


Which is a very safe assumption given advancements in chemistry, textiles, and industrial processes.


Most flags that have blue don't have sky blue, they have a darker blue. If pink was as dark it would be red.


I don't know if this is the explanation, but I remember reading about how men's shirts would often be pink from blood stains after hunting and skinning animals.


Interesting. Any source on why/when the switch happened?


There’s a claim that it was a marketing scheme in the 1940s to reduce the usefulness of hand-me-downs in families. My grandmother would have lived through that and I may see if she remembers anything about it. She was definitely babysitting or watching children by 1940.


That doesn't make sense to me US textiles were in high demand, though perhaps not in pink and blue starting around 1940 and by the end of the decade US consumers were getting quite wealthy. I'm not saying it didn't happen but I'd like to see a better reason than "companies love money" since if you loved money in the 1940s there were better ways to get it than trying to do some sort of marketing campaign to reverse a social standard (using a marketing industry that was much less advanced and pervasive no less.)


It seems your argument applies to fashion in general. But fashion is a well known phenomenon. How then can your argument be valid?


I don't think test cricket is quite as bad, but pretty sure wickets are prepared to suit certain bowling styles.


I do think that smooth grass fields (I mean billiard-like smooth) greatly help teams with the best players that can pass ball with no mistakes so those points #1 and #3 were probably very effective at closing the gap to the top teams. Every stadium in every major league around Europe has a smooth field of grass now, that's one of the reasons for having less and less surprises at the end of the year.


Stoke city too - had the narrowest field and used tall forwards combined with ex-Javelin thrower Rory Delap


Broadcasters rule football. Even if there was no regulation, the broadcasters would be absolutely livid if their audience wanted to see the best players & top clubs play tiki-taka but were served smash & grab.

The Premier League & the Champions League are money spinning ventures for a reason.

What you say still happens in International Cricket, but not usually for club tournaments like The 100 or the Indian Premier League.


The broadcasters have absolutely no say whatsoever in how a groundsman prepares their pitch for an upcoming fixtures. In fact the kind of gamesmanship we are talking about happened as recently as the last few games of the most recent English season. Sunderland played Coventry in a two-legged playoff semi-final, having won the first leg 2-1 in Coventry they had a one-goal advantage going into the home fixture. Coventry had a player Milan van Ewijk who was able to deliver a very long and precise throw-in, so any throw in Sunderland conceded within 20-ish yards of their own goal would basically be like conceding a corner (a set-piece seen as a good goal-scoring opportunity). Sunderland mitigated against this by shrinking the distance between the touchline and the advertising boards at the side of the pitch, shortening the distance van Ewijk could run prior to taking his throw-in, and stunting his ability to turn it into a goal-scoring opportunity.


> Sunderland played Coventry in a two-legged playoff semi-final, having won the first leg 2-1 in Coventry

Feel for Frank, but this wasn't the top clubs & best players playing in the Premier League.


It was a very high-profile example of exactly this type of shenanigans during a live game picked up by the biggest broadcaster in the country, which will have been watched by millions across the world. The claim was that this simply isn't allowed happen, and it literally happened. I don't even particularly like the English leagues, but this is a daft thing to brush off


> millions across the world

Debatable playoffs have the same reach as PL & CL matches between top clubs.

> daft

I don't doubt that the home team may make changes to their advantage, but I don't think the broadcasters would particularly like it if the pitch absolutely destroyed any chance at good entertainment. In International Cricket, the equivalent would be preparing the pitch to the home team's strengths (which went horribly wrong for India, the home team, in the 2023 World Cup Final, which was as drab as they come).


Consider the recent Club World Cup final and semi-finals, hosted on an American football field with shitty SIS pitch. I saw more slips from players in the semi-final than I've ever seen in a single game.


None of those field issues were due to home field gamesmanship though. That was shitty US planning and conversion of NFL stadiums with turf into temporary real grass fields. Comparing the two shows a total stretching of the storyline. Yes, the CWC fields were embarrassingly bad. Has nothing to do with TFA though


Are the world cup pitches going to be better?


doubtful, but maybe they can learn from this experience. it's managed by USSocer, so I don't have a lot of faith.


> someone high up

Has to be. It has that Musky smell of banning yellow safety paint i.e. too stupid to be a team effort.

Legibility issues with translucency is such a basic thing and I expect Apple designers have gone deep on the topic e.g. mathematical models using human colour perception to determine hard limits for different type weights. I don't think the heavy frosting in past versions was an accident.


> UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design

Is it?

I like a UI without a minimum screen size. I am livid when I can't use a fixed-size-settings dialogue because a driver/monitor is misbehaving so I'm at min resolution. The sort of issue where you have to find another machine so you can "count tabs" for keyboard navigation to get at things off-screen.

Many other cases: e.g. I like to use VMs or RDP in small windows. I also like to resize a settings window into something tiny or tiling it when doing something I need to do toggle something back and forth.

I agree it's bad if it's a long list of barely related things you have to scan each time to find what you want. The "categorised scroller" type dialogue vscode uses for settings in in theory the best of both worlds... but I keep finding myself accidentally scrolling beyond my intended category causing myself much confusion.


The right way is to design your dialogs such that they fit into the minimum screen resolution that the OS runs at. Some of the Windows ones are optimized for 640x480 because that's what the basic VGA driver runs at. If I remember correctly, macOS requires either 800x600 or 1024x768.


640x480 was the minimum resolution in Win95 days. It was upped to 800x600 in WinXP, I think? And more recently, to 720p in Win11.


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