In the context of reviews my experience has only been code review quality brought up as a negative thing for folks and the bar to not be a negative is low enough that folks slowly take less and less time to review code well because it isn't valued come review time.
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).
It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).
Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.
You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries
Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.
I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
Mainland China is coming the other side through anime.
Productions like "The Legend of Hei" are of truly high quality and it's getting a decent reception in Japan for instance (not breaking the box office, but the fact it's there and talked about so no positively is already something)
> Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped.
You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.
The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.
The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.
It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.
Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
> Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I live in Australia, and when I was growing up I thought the same, even though Indonesia are a very close neighbour of ours. Indonesia is featured quite a bit in our local news these days, and that together with lots of Aussie tourists in Indonesia, plus lots of Indonesian students studying here, has made us a little more knowledgeable about our neighbours.
The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.
That's so weird. What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography? The fact that Indonesia was Muslim is something I learned very early on - certainly before high school.
> What do they teach in American schools? Apparently not even basic geography?
This doesn’t fall under the category of basic geography. I can guarantee you that the majority of people you attended school with would not be able to locate Indonesia on a map, much less tell you about the religions practiced there.
TBH, without going into overmuch detail, I wouldn't generalize from my educational experience to the American educational system as a whole. I think it was better in a lot of ways, and worse in a few ways, than what most people would have received, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some particular holes in my knowledge due to taking part in multiple curricula from different institutions.
I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.
It is a little bit wild that 3/5 all came from the same country. Without the partition of ‘47 - India would have by far the largest group of about 600M a full a third of the global Muslims and also at the same time be only a minority in that hypothetical country with 1.1B Hindus
Correct, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.
How much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.
Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
Yeah, Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and had a US passport, but he grew up in Hong Kong. Point is, Chinese diaspora exists and can be seen for those who want to look. Projecting a viewpoint that no one knows about China or Chinese people because you don't want to think they do, so you feel slighted, and can then rage against that; it just seems kind of hollow to me.
I was hoping to talk more about (Mainland) China being uniquely bad at exporting pop culture, especially when compared to the success of Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, Taiwanese pop culture.
The fact that nearly all celebs you mentioned were famous from HK film seems to at least confirm that.
Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
It's largely about pattern detection in our brains. If the pixels always look the same, it's easier to spot them. For many people graphics in a video game are a secondary addition but the decision making is uncontested priority; modern 3D graphics get in the way by making everything less readable.
I completely agree. To me, it's the same with adventure, and platformer games and 2D. I think the key is symbolism. In 2D, graphics are more about communicating intent, 3D is more for realism - or maybe this is just the trap they fall into, because there are highly stylized 3D games as well, as well as technically-3D-but-actually-2D games.
but on a tangent, just wanted to add how impressed in was at super Mario 3D world on the Nintendo switch. Perfect balance between good looking and pragmatic 3D graphics adding up to real platformer feel.
Happy to hear that! Have you also played Fall Guys? How do they compare? I haven't played platformers for two decades now, but looking at the Mario screenshots, I got an immediate Fall Guys feeling.
Couldn't agree more. To me 3D environment in games is frustrating to control / move around while 2D is straightforward. And I truly don't care about camera movement. Games are meant to be fun, not a chore with adjusting camera all the time.
All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.
ChatGPT has literally no brand moat. Nobody recognizes, or even cares about, the brand. They care about the interface - chat.
If you just take those chinese models and slap them on some decent looking website, nobody will know the difference. People take brand recognition far too seriously.
If Linux was actually indistinguishable from Windows, you bet your ass nobody in their right mind would install Windows. But they're actually different things.
> LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.
This is still an unknown.
> Linux is free and yet people use Windows.
The moat isn't even 1% of the one that Windows has - and even Windows has been losing ground on the consumer side. While slow, the rate acceleration is definitely there. Compare Oct 2020-Oct 2025 vs the preceding 5-year period.
I don’t buy this argument about brand, in tech history has showed customers will switch overnight if a better option appears and there is no network effects or ecosystem lockin. BlackBerry had a brand too.
They are going all in, promising so many deals to so many companies that if OpenAI fails, the entire US economy will explode. Expecting the government will bail them out to prevent such a disaster.
That's not really true. It may be legit strategy. If they realize they overhyped the whole industry, and everyone is tied to them, and they have strong political allies… if you also realize it's going to crumble. You might just see bailout as only viable option so you make yourself even bigger to fail.
If it turns like this it's extremely cynical and one would wonder how could Altman stay ou of prison (i am sure he will not go to prison).
Absolutely nothing. They don't, they didn't, it's a poorly stitched together attack job.
The 1.4 T amounts to a broad nearly decade long capex plan, not liabilities.
The loans and backstops etc were a request, not for OpenAI, but on behalf of manufacturers of grid equipment, manufacturers that OpenAI wouldike the government to consider as eligible for money already carved out by the AMIC national investment in chips and AI, and also probably more money as well-- it's a separate group of tangential industries that weren't initially considered, so why not ask? Sure it would help keep the wheels moving in OpenAI and the broad AI and US semiconductor industry, but it's far away from and ask by Altman for a bailout of his company.
What is it that happened roughly 2 months ago? It seems like a disproportionate number of all the low-effort comments on the anti-ai side of things are coming from accounts that age.
When I was younger I used to hate on popular things and be that guy who is like "how can anyone like this, this is objectively bad" (for example pop music)
But I started a habit of re-framing it instead like "well if you don't understand why people like something, that is your own failure to understand human behaviour and culture, if you were smarter you would understand why its popular"
That habit of re-framing stuff like that made me look at things a lot more like a neutral observer/anthropologist and not be such a hater
To tack on to this, a thing my partner taught me: a shortcut to calling someone stupid is calling something they love stupid.
Trying to understand why they like that thing is a more connective and productive path. Maybe at the end of it you end up more informed and still don’t like the thing, but for me often times it turned a knee jerk “that thing is dumb” into a thing I love with people who also love that thing. What a great life hack.
> Whereas now its all about RT scores, review megathreads, unboxing, reaction videos
Is that them or is that content and algorithms seeping into every possible nook and cranny of the human experience? Creators seeking to tap value off of popular brands and fans trying to find more content and falling into a long tail?
We're making more content, taking up more time, resulting in people who are stimulated all the time. Busy all the time.
And not going to a meeting may be perceived that you aren't interested in that project