(Because this is the Internet, add a /s to the end of the previous message for full comprehension.)

What kind of a maniac comments Makefiles? It was hard to set up, so it should be hard to read and alter, dammit!

Alipay.

Best for what purpose?

There’s no universal “best” because different people want different things from their spaceship combat games. Myself I like quick resolution and simple record-keeping so I always kit-bashed something with the old Starfire wargame to warp it to the RPG setting. If you’re not into kit-bashing, though, that’s not going to be “best” for you.

For spaceship combat that was tense as a suspension bridge truss, the one that was made for Traveller:2300/2300AD was really, really good, but it was very much glued with cyanoacrylate to the setting.

The original Book 5 for Traveller had a ship combat system that was very much about capital ship combat in large fleets (and could barely scale down to smaller conflicts like individual ships). It was “perfect” for that kind of thing, but again was glued to the setting (albeit more with some contact cement rather than superglue).

The Jovian Chronicles (game, not Mekton Zeta supplement) space combat system was rather nifty and came with a nifty spaceship design system (albeit one that had a “dreaded” cube root in the construction rules that made people panic). And while it was made for a setting, it was much easier to kit-bash for other settings.

For more generic games, if you want the scope and glory of space opera, the game, well, Space Opera is hard to beat. It’s an old design, so filled to the brim with odd, crunchy, ornate bits, but it was a whole lot of fun when I played it. Just … be ready to fill out a lot of papers and roll a lot of dice many, many times.

Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it’s not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn’t a waste of effort.

Further, Esperanto is ignored because it’s not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world’s population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.

Learn a few languages from places that aren’t Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases … not even declining by count. Then consider:

1. Esperanto has almost all of these alien-to-many concepts; and,
2. While it is true that it is more regular in these than in natural Indo-European languages, the latter have the benefit of actually having speakers: the purpose of learning a foreign language is met: communication.

On top of this:

1. Esperanto has a consonant-heavy phonetic inventory, making its pronunciation hard for a lot of speakers of other languages. (It is painfully obvious that Zamenhoff was Polish, let’s put it this way.) Too it is very bizarrely irregular (though it’s not so bizarre once you check out Zamenhoff’s native dialect and its consonantal inventory…). Lest you think this isn’t a problem, most native languages in the world rarely present more than “consonant+vowel” structures, so strings of consonants are absolutely horrendously difficult for them. (Even saying “string” is hard, and that’s mild compared to some of the atrocities of PolishEsperanto.
2. Esperanto uses a system of affixes (pre- and suf-) to words to modify word forms and attach meanings. This is a difficult concept for speakers of languages like Mandarin, say, to comprehend (where word forms are notoriously vague and grammatical particles are used in place of affixes to accomplish many of the same things). Further, Esperanto assumes that a) word forms are universal, b) that the categories in those languages that have them are the same, and c) that even when the categories are the same individual words are categorized similarly across languages. Yet in English “angry” is an adjective. In other languages it is a verb. Fancy that!
3. Esperanto has the single most useless feature of any language: gendered declensions. (And, naturally, just to add icing to this cake, the default is masculine.) Zamenhoff had the chance to remove the single most useless feature of a language from his grammar … and didn’t. Flipping FARSI managed to do this, a natural language in the Indo-European family, but a constructed language had to keep this vestigial nonsense?! Again, gendered grammar is not even slightly universal and makes the language difficult to learn for people coming from sane languages.
4. Esperanto’s lexical inventory is gloriously East European for the most part, with random slathering of Romance-language vocabulary generously applied. So, you know, using as a basis words from a small geographical region instead of words from around the world. Where are the Chinese roots? The Arabic ones? The roots from various African languages? There aren’t any. Thus it is pretty much equally difficult for a Chinese(or Arabic(or, say, Swahili))-speaking student to learn the lexicon of an actual language spoken by actual people instead of a toy language spoken by basically nobody.
5. What is a subjunctive? What is an infinitive? What is a participle? These are concepts that are very much Indo-European. Speakers of languages outside that family (which is checks notes most people) have no idea what one or more of these are. So that’s three alien grammatical concepts right off the top of my head in Esperanto’s grammar, and while sure it’s more regular (FSVO “regular”) than in natural languages, it’s the conceptual barrier that is hard to breach, not the rote memory work to learn them once you’ve grokked the idea. So again, slightly more difficult to learn a natural language, but even a natural language with as low a speaker count as Basque will give you about as many people to talk to as does Esperanto while the Big Name™ languages will give you multiple of orders of magnitude more. Each.
6. Esperanto assumes that notions of “subject”, “object”, and “argument” are linguistic universals. They aren’t. This makes Esperanto’s twee case structure with its cute little suffixes actually fiendishly difficult to learn for speakers of languages that mix agents, experiencers, and patients in ways different from the Indo-European majority. (Don’t know what agents, experiencers, and patients are? Maybe you should crack open an inventory of linguistics before talking about how “easy” a language is to learn…)
7. Why are there plurals in Esperanto? Why decline for number at all? Plenty of languages don’t and it works just fine. OK, so for whatever reason you think plurals are necessary: WHY THE HELL DOES ESPERANTO ALSO HAVE COUNT/VERB AGREEMENT!? That’s just bizarre even in many languages that have retained the unnecessary concept of a plural!
8. Personal pronouns. Ugh. There’s first person singular and plural (but no way to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive in the latter case). There’s second person with no ability to distinguish singular and plural (because consistency is for whiners!). There’s gendered (🙄) singular third-person, but non-gendered (let’s be honest: default-masculine) third-person. And then there’s a weird one (oni) that means one. Or people. Because screw making sense! Why are there gendered pronouns at all!? They serve no useful purpose; many languages (including Farsi, the language of Iran(!)) eschew them completely, and others (e.g. Mandarin) only distinguish them in writing (and that itself is a very recent cultural import!).
9. Articles. WHY IS THERE AN ARTICLE IN ESPERANTO!? And why only one!? You’ve eliminated all the other articles, take that final step dammit! Join the majority of world languages which don’t bother with these vestigial adverbs!

And I’m out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They’re “natural” or even “logical”. But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you’re going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it’s best to expend your efforts:

1. On a fantasy football league language that has maybe a million speakers world-wide (and that’s being generous!); or,
2. On a natural language that’s a little bit more difficult but gives you access to ~1 billion native speakers and ~200 million secondary speakers (Mandarin), ~475/75 million (Spanish), ~400 million/~1 billion (English), 350/250 million (Hindi), or even 50/26 million (Hausa)?

If you’re sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)

Esperanto is not a particularly easily learnable language to most of the world. It’s a very parochial language made by someone whose exposure to language was all European and very strongly focused on specifically East European languages both phonetically and grammatically. English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker than Esperanto would be, but it would be a million times more useful given the rather pathetically small number of Esperanto speakers out there.

If you’re going to use a constructed IAL (as opposed to de facto lingua francas like have been historically the case), make one that isn’t filled with idiotic things like declension by case, by gender, by number, by tense, by … Or you’re going to have most people in the world ignoring it. Like you already have for Esperanto.

I started the process and was given the plain message that it was a waste of time to continue.

There are specific things they’re looking for in people they give PRs to. Being ethnically Chinese at least partially helps a great deal. Having specific “high value” skills also helps a lot (though even with those skills it’s a crap shoot if you get it). Having certain political connections helps a lot too.

None of these are definitive, though. The bulk of expats don’t stand a chance. Even long-term expats like me who’ve married in, own real estate, started a business, etc. For all practical purposes the PR is unattainable.

You can apply all you like.

PRs are incredibly difficult to get. I’ve lived and worked in China for over 20 years and I won’t be able to successfully get one.

No. Just bluntly no.

I did try using Dvorak. I got pretty good at it. After about four months I could finally type as quickly and effectively on Dvorak as I could on QWERTY.

On. One. Computer.

I sit down at a friend’s computer or a family member’s? Newp. I use a phone or a tablet? Newp. I use a work computer (where I’m not permitted to install my own software)? Newp.

So that’s four months of reduced capacity to type, plus having to keep QWERTY in my muscle memory anyway (with the attendant confusion and error rate that causes!) all for … not really getting much more speed than I was able to do with QWERTY in the first place.

The troll reek is strong from this one.

The OFFICIAL NAME of the Party in English is “The Communist Party of China”.

Not “the correct translation”. The OFFICIAL NAME.

It follows, incidentally, the same pattern of naming in a whole bunch of other countries. The Communist Party of Canada, not The Canadian Communist Party. The Communist Party of Cuba, not The Cuban Communist Party. The Communist Party of Korea, not the Korean Communist Party. Etc. etc. etc.

But hey, you don’t have to believe me. Just go to their official site: http://cpc.people.com.cn/. Then try http://ccp.people.com.cn/ and see where that gets you.

Getting a name correct is the very most basic element that gets you credibility. If you can’t do that, anything else you say on the subject is highly suspect.

Consider how much credibility I’d have if I babbled about Germany as “The German Federal Republic” (or, more extremely, translated it like you did and came up with “The Dutch’s Land’s Federal Republic”) or about the USA as “The American United States”. Extrapolate.

Or you could use the proper English initialization from their official English name: Communist Party of China. But hey, why not remain an ignoramus and snark instead?

You seem to have overlooked I actually praised the Communist Party of one of the Chinas in my comment.

I didn’t. It’s why I told you instead of rolling my eyes and ignoring you.

Here’s a little tip for you: If you use “CCP” you’re basically identifying yourself as an ignoramus whose opinions on the topic can be safely ignored. After all if you can’t get the name of an institution correct, what are the odds that you got things that require genuine knowledge and nuance right?

In F/OSS circles pre-Github a fork was when there was enough dissatisfaction with a F/OSS project (for many reasons) that people went through the effort of taking the source of a project at a given point and making an entirely new project based on it. Some famous examples of this kind of fork would be the GCC/EGCS fork, the Xemacs/Emacs fork, the DragonflyBSD/FreeBSD fork, the X.org/XFree86/Freedesktop multiway fork, the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork, etc.

In this sense of the term “fork” it’s a major watershed event in F/OSS that sometimes shapes the way future projects run. (And sometimes, like the GCC/EGCS thing, one of the branches becomes the “new normal”.)

Post-Github, a fork is just what Github calls cloning a repository on their platform within their platform. Any time you look at a project on Github, if you have an account on Github you can “fork” it (in their sense of the term) which basically means you have a cloned snapshot of that project in your account. It’s functionally identical to typing "git clone " on your own machine only it’s all kept in Github’s own ecosystem.

What I find funny about the people protesting the second use as some kind of Github conspiracy is that the alternatives they themselves recommend instead … do exactly the same thing (but aren’t subject to the same conspiracy theorist tripe)! Cognitive dissonance is a HELL of a drug…

Phase 1:

Phase 2:

Phase 3:

And that’s where it sticks forever. Longest test run was over an hour.

Indeed whenever I try to upload anything (including the images used in this report that I eventually had to host at imgur) I get this popping up briefly:

That might be a useful data point.

I’ve been unable to make any posts of any kind today. Was there a server update that turned that off?

Show me now a picture of people walking around public spaces reading papers.

Better workout properly. It makes me feel bad and go all instructor mode when I hear about injuries, since I practice MMA and have my own home gym.

It was a new motion and I fucked up. *shrug* It happens. Since it was a new motion we went with light weight so the damage was minimal.

People not getting to hear more perspectives or positive news creates a disconnect between China and rest of the world.

Almost as if where by design, right? ;)

I think you should at least open the link and check the video description and comments. Probably it might surprise you.

I’ll do so when I have some spare time. (Last night was a non-starter. I got injured working out so my night was spent mostly whining quietly in my corner. :D)

Harvard study made that very clear, and to every single person I have mentioned it as a response to “haha but gubmint evil CCP bad no freedom”, each of them has acted like a denialist. I always tell them as an asterisk that CPC does not get to fund Harvard, so they should use better arguments to convince me.

As a general rule of thumb, when I see people use “CCP” I map in “ignorant asshole”. It’s kind of … ballsy … to claim expertise in a subject when you can’t even get the name right, after all.

One more question here. Since Russia and other socialist countries also have “authoritarian” governments yet clearly have had a response failure, why is China so different? Socialist countries generally have people in solidarity, so I want to make sense of that.

Rice culture.

No, really. It’s a thing.

When the main crop of the bulk of your society is rice, and has been for thousands of years, cooperation is in your genes and memes. Rice is not a crop you can farm large-scale individually. Using ancient techniques, for a village to even farm enough rice to feed itself (not to mention an excess for use in trade) it takes a lot of cooperative behaviour that is not needed if you’re, say, farming wheat or potatoes or such. Any person not doing their thing kills the whole. Villages that didn’t learn that lesson starved to death and stopped the spread of their genes and their cultural memes. Farming rice turns out to be a powerful vaccination against maladaptive selfishness.

Russia (which is not particularly socialist right now, and maybe never really was) doesn’t have that need to cooperate hammered into its very genetic and memetic structure. Japan and South Korea (neither of which is even remotely socialist) both do. This is why Russia fared pretty pathetically in facing a threat that was society-wide and J/SK fared relatively well.

I can only speak for things I’ve observed or talked about with people, so my perspective is necessarily limited.

What is the current consensus regarding Indians in China?

I suspect that for most it’s not given much thought. Indian food is well-regarded as exotic, yet palatable. It kind of occupies the same space as Italian food in Canada (right down to being largely inauthentic). For a long time, Indian soap operas were a major hit on television. Nobody in my household watches television any longer (we’ve all switched to streaming to private devices) so I don’t know if that’s the same now. Several of my friends used to go to India once a year and loved it there. One of them wishes he’d stayed in India, in fact, because it seems he’ll never get back given the state of the pandemic.

So largely I suspect the opinions, on average, range from “don’t know, don’t care” leaning toward approval.

What is the consensus regarding topics like privacy, anonymity, Tor, censorship et al, since I advocate privacy stuff (r/privatelife, c/privatelife and also mod c/privacy), and China does not have the kind of privacy/anonymity culture like in Western “freedom” countries? I have never gotten an opinion on it from China’s perspective, and it is just a very odd question.

This is one area where the Chinese are definitely different from westerners. Privacy and anonymity are not huge cultural touchstones. While at the same time they cheerfully use the very kinds of services I’m using to circumvent the Great Firewall because the “Golden Shield” (to give it its proper name) inconveniences them at their work and play.

If you were to go on about anonymity here you’d get people wondering what it is you’re trying to hide, likely causing suspicion, not “HELL YEAH!” responses.