> Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos
Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
First off, the amount seized was not necessarily made in a year.
Second, most of the money would not make it to the Cambodian economy. It is likely laundered abroad. The whole operation is likely multinational, with only the workforce located in Cambodia.
Also keep in mind all the bribes, all the money laundering mentioned in the article by the 100s of affiliated subsidiares of the criminal group all in Cambodia
the big casinos which directly and indirectly support additional laundering
My first experience stepping off the plane in Cambodia was being scammed by the official issuing visas. It was $20, I gave him $50, and he didn't want to give any change back. Scams were the defining part of the tourist experience there.
Haha, it reminded me 20+ years back when I was a kid travelling by train in India where the ticket dispenser did not give me 8 Rs back on a 152 Rs ticket when I paid 160, sounds small but is a big deal for poor. Tangential but that is one thing I really thank digital payments and digitization of ticket dispensing for.
I only made a few Bitcoin transactions because I found the whole experience did not feel like the future. That was a while ago now, and as other commentors have pointed out, it not seems obvious that the real value in Bitcoin lies elsewhere.
The UK may not have been enabling this guy in particular, but he's not exactly the only one who has been stashing ill-gotten gains in London real estate. Apparently crooks still think it's a great deal despite some of them getting it seized once in a while.
Cambodia is a small country with no natural resources of any kind. Even to grow rice you need diesel for tractors and fertilizers that are produced from natural gas using energy (which Cambodia lacks).
There's very few opportunities for a small country without resources.
And to grow rice you need to somehow get rid of US bombs that majority of Cambodia soil is very well fertilized with.
Between 1965 and 1973 US dropped 2,756,941 tones of bombs on 113,717 sites in Cambidia. Thats more bombs than all allies together used in all of World War II.
Tens of people still getting killed by them every year.
I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great.
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
That's not a useless project! It's a silly piece of code, but it gave joy to people, so I would say much more useful than most stories in this thread.
Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :)
It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software.
He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :)
Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?
Your dad's thinking wasn't wrong, but you should've used the same PRNG as the machine that generates the official lotto numbers. Of course you still probably won't win though :P
Hey, thanks for making this! And thanks for posting here.
I was wondering if you are willing to share some of the innerworkings of this. You mention in the FAQ that it works for almost any site, so I am guessing you are not developing a per-site scraping script, rather something more generic? Maybe AI? How do you protect from AI mangling results unexpectedly (I don't know if this is a risk, I have no AI experience)
There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
There are many English dialects, and sounds (and meanings) vary, A LOT. It's up to you whether you want to try and assimilate the local dialect of where you live right now, or you want to simply understand and be understood.
There are many non-native speakers who are extremely easy to understand, even though it is clear that English is their second (or third) language. I believe the hardest part is to learn how to make sounds that do not exist in your native language (both consonants and vowels). But the good news is that there are ways to learn that. The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.
The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound. So trying to make the sounds out of the letters will always be a frustrating endeavor, as there will never be a single rule you can follow.
>English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Spanish does have a regulatory agency (RAE) that we choose to follow, but AFAIK, they don't say anything about pronunciation. Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Colombia all have different pronunciations and not one is more official than the other. There's a certain sense of what's "normal" or nearer the center of gravity for most speakers, but I think that's true for English too (new zealand or south african English is less "standard" than a Midwestern accent or BBC English)
You are partially right in that Italian is not perfectly phonetic, but it's in such a different league from English that (100% - Italian) is a rounding error with respect to (sanity -English) ;-)
Still, Italian is still perfectly phonetic in writing: can you imagine never having to ask how to spell a town name, or a family name? Can you imagine a word where spelling bees do not exist because they could make no sense? If you hear it, you can spell it.
By the way, your example of "tʃ, dʒ" is spot on, as in you cannot guess how a Z character is to be read, but in practice very few people ever notice. Concerning "ŋ", I think only Italian linguists know about it as a separate phoneme.
You are wrong, instead, about "ɲ": "gn" is always pronounced as in "gnocchi".
>The human mouth is capable of pronouncing all human sounds, it is only a matter of practice.
This is only partially true: the language a person speaks affects the development of facial muscles used to make those sounds. So trying to speak a different language that uses different muscles can be very difficult. Of course, as you said, it's a matter of practice: with enough practice, you can develop those muscles, just like pumping weights in a gym.
This is 100% correct. Muscles that aren't used in your mouth/articulators (because your native language doesn't require them) atrophy over time. It is possible to strengthen these muscles with isolated practice -- on BoldVoice we have coach videos where they give you "reps" of muscle movements (such as 20 tongue-ups). We call it "a gym for your mouth" :D It's hard work, but it's the best way to get results.
> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Oh come on. The fact that there is no regulatory body doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about "English pronunciation" in a general way. And Spanish and German have different dialects , accents and pronunciations too.
> The English spelling is guided by meaning, not by sound
I had no idea this would exist. I guess it makes sense that people would try to do something like this, but also, to my English addled brain, not much sense to expend the effort.
Oh, it's a huge effort! These bodies meet and discuss what the proper spelling of words should be, or they make up new words, and then they publish those guidelines for journalists, authors, and anyone who wants to speak "properly" to follow.
It gives the language a good balance between spelling and pronouncing - that's why you can pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written (I think there are very very few exceptions, if at all). But this comes at a price of losing ability to track meaning some times.
I don’t think that the existence of those bodies is the reason for being able to pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written.
Afaik there is no such regulatory body for Russian language, and yet as long as you know the alphabet, you should be able to pronounce almost every single word correctly (even if you have never seen or heard it before).
There are a few exceptions, but I cannot even recall them right now, aside from super common ones that make natural sense. Example: “что” aka “chto”, with “ch” being pronounced more like “sh” (which would naturally end up happening if you try pronouncing it as written aka “chto” a few times).
Most of these are just pretending to have any authority.
In particular for French, l'Académie Française is pretty much a joke, with mostly ecclesiastics above 80 years old, no linguists involved, and nothing produced in the last 50 years.
Practice and willingness to fail and clown around is key. As an english teacher I've always liked to bring up cross-lingual interference - you're always going to accidentally bring in sounds from your own language into the one you're learning.
I'm no linguist, but English has also drawn a lot from other neighboring languages. Understanding a bit of French, Dutch or German helps a lot with understanding which English words are pronounced in which way. It's not random is what I mean.
I once knew a EU parlament translator and linguist with 6+ languages under his belt. When he visited us in Poland he would not shut up - he tried reading every sign, every word, kept asking how it's pronounced. Just continuously played with language, like a software developer does with code. When he was leaving after a two day stay he had a lot of Polish quite well figured out, it was really impressive. But he was just really willing to fail over and over and over in all social interactions.
The set of meaningful sounds (phonemes) is pretty conservative though. They can be rendered very differently (and that's what we call "accent" in native speakers), but it's like moving a densely connected graph around in the soundspace — yes the particular sounds might shift, but it's the relation between them that encodes meaning, and that is preserved. In that sense "English pronunciation" does exist.
> There is no such thing as "English pronunciation". English does not have a regulatory body like Spanish or German have.
Well well... as it is called English, scholars from cultural institutions rooted in England are the reference. Everybody else is free to speak their own language, but one is proper English, while the others are at most somewhere-English.
That’s a particularly bad example, as accents vary more within England than in most other English speaking countries. Cockneys and Geordies sound nothing alike and there is no way to have unified and consistent spelling between them.
I still am unable to get resume from deep sleep to be less than 12-15 seconds. I dug the forums, contacted support, did all the things, but nothing works. If I go to s2idle it is instant, but that takes way too much battery.
Even with deep sleep the battery life feels very short. I haven't done formal tests, but I also have a macbook for work, and the difference is quite noticeable. I very often come to open the framework after a few hours of sleep and it just ran itself out of battery. This never happens with the macbook.
Don't get me wrong, I love the framework, and I love that it's "open", and fixable - so I'm willing to live with that. But just comparing it to another laptop, I'm not sure I'd give it 10 out of 10.
