I like to follow some adventures people take. Like cycling across continents for years. Especially since I have a small child so it is totally impossible for me to do. Even basic travelling for holidays is a challenge. Sad to see someone abandon their family to do that, seems like some kind of mental health issue.
I think the main problem is getting a market leading position and then enshittification. It takes time for the competition to eat the lunch, and while that is happening users are getting screwed over. And the competition is going to do the exact same since they are burning VC money to grow with undercutting, so any legitimate business with no intention to rugpull cannot compete since they have neither the users nor the cheapest prices.
Once heard of a user putting in a helpdesk ticket asking why they had to pay for the TOTP app. Then I realize their TOTP seed is probably out in the open now.
I’m sure we can imagine how else this could go badly…
There should be some bit about the locale being default or not. If its not a default, then respecting it would be fine. If its the default, you could try guessing.
It's amazingly fractured actually. In my home country every store pretty much has the same exact model of a card reader that takes all contacless payments and credit cards with chips. In Japan it's a coinflip wether a credit card reader can take contactless credit cards. And if you do it with the chip, it's always a fun process of the clerk not understanding you need to insert a pin or select a currency, so they sometimes abort the process in confusion.
Hard to believe anyone is getting contacted more now than in 2020. But I agree with the general sentiment. I'll do nothing and if I get replaced then I get replaced and switch to woodworking or something. But if LLMs do not pan out then I'll be ahead of all the people who wasted their time with that.
New parents did sometimes take a couple of months, but typically no. Some people would do 4-5 weeks in the summer. If could get your work done and set things up to run without you, it wasn't a problem.
You had unlimited vacation, but you still had to get your job done.
“Unlimited” means there is no limit, so logically it means a few months should be fine. If a few months not fine, I think a reasonable request would be to define the limit and claim that instead of “unlimited”.
I work at place with about 5 work weeks off, which is a lot for the US, and there’s never any question about whether you can use your time or not because the number of days is exactly specified. I like that better than a vague “unlimited” (but not actually) policy.
Like most policies at Netflix, or for that matter most workplaces anywhere, judgement is required.
The policy is unlimited. You are welcome to take a year of vacation a week after you start. However, there are other factors, such as remaining employed. You most likely won't be meeting your job duties if you're on vacation for a year.
Not really sure how you got that from what I wrote.
You're expected to do your job to remain employed. You are welcome to take as much paid time off as you want, in which you would ignore your job.
Assuming you did your job well, this won't be a problem. You either set things up to run on their own in the short term, or you've sufficiently cross trained someone else who isn't on vacation to cover for you.
What I'm saying is that if you try to take a year of paid vacation a week after you start the job, it's unlikely that you've set up either of those things before you go.
We have an actual unlimited unpaid time off policy. I have several colleagues who have taken 6+ months off (even repeatedly). Obviously I suspect that wouldn't be well-received within the "unlimited" paid leave at Netflix (but perhaps I'm wrong, I just can't imagine it).
I quite like the unlimited unpaid policy, is there a reason it's rare? I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?
>I'm guessing the implication that if you can take 6months off you weren't really necessary?
No one is strictly necessary. You can bring value to the company and it still doesn't mean that the company would go bankrupt if you left for half a year.
It sounds stupid but the killer feature for me is possibility to have multiple subtitles visible, all easily configurable with a few keybinds (track, offset, position, size etc). No streaming service provides this, and they actively omit subtitle languages that aren't "relevant" to your geolocation. I cannot respect a service like that.
+1. This is a fantastic feature. I haven't even bothered learning the keybindings (perhaps I should), I just start with --sid1= and --sid2= and it works well enough.
Neither me nor my significant other are native English speakers, but we have different native languages. I'm comfortable enough with English, but like having English subtitles since I have a hard time with some dialects and occasionally just miss a word or two due to noisy audio. My SO likes having subtitles in their native language.
Being able to have multiple subtitles makes it possible for both of us to get the experience we like, at the cost of a little screen real estate. Well worth it.
They are not default keybinds, but like any configuration can be cycled or set at runtime. Actually I don't use the keybindings much directly since my default config usually is fine, but have a remote GUI to configure it when needed.
Depending on the aspect ratio of the video and playback viewport, you could move the subtitles into the potential black bar underneath.
If there is no black bar, you could get one of those long narrow LCDs off AliExpress, set up the driver, add it as an X display with the right positioning... and then drag the mpv window across that and the TV. Should work. Those little LCDs are just silly expensive though...
Mpv is great with subtitles. Not just being able to switch through subtitle tracks and configure positioning, but also being able to automatically find and play external subtitle files when playing a video. I wrote an article about this: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mpv-subtitles-automatic. Only issue I found is the documentation for what subtitle formats are supported is lacking. You have to look through ffmpeg code to actually find what formats are actuallly supported.
Especially for things like language learning they are amazing, but services like Amazon show like two (English and the local language) out of the 30 something they have available. And I won't even go into the difference of subtitles and dubbing...
For language learning there are some scripts that allow you to hover words and show translations for them. I haven't used them myself with mpv, but I found that kind of tools to be invaluable on a browser when learning a language with a foreign script.
They probably don't want to license them globally, because the expected usage is low. But surely this could be taken into account in the contract / negotiation. Anyway I guess I'm just not in the target audience. But that's what MPV is great for, it allows you to tweak it for that 0.1% use-case.
I think it's also partially an issue with video + audio being paired by region.
AFAIK, the video you are being served is always based by the geolocation and what video was licensed for that. E.g. in a French version of a movie, text in the movie may have been localized into french inside the video. Additionaly there might be additional/missing scenes in the localized version to get the desired age ratings in that market.
The audio is then synced to that version of the video. That means that e.g. the French audio produced for the US video is not 1:1 the same audio as the French audio for the German video.
So that takes it beyond a licensing issue, and would mean additional effort to produce compatible audio tracks for content that they may only have streaming rights for temporarily. For content native to the streaming service they usually put that effort in.
> I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese
Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.
Is your mother tongue Finnish? I always found Japanese to have somewhat similar sounds. And as a bonus hint, you're missing a "the" in your first sentence ;)
Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English speaker doesn't have with either.
The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.
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