I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.

There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.

You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.

A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."

In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.

To be fair, it requires a little bit of thinking to see. The general audience might see it as success because the outcome was "good" even if it had nothing to do with anything Jones did.

Indy led Belloq to the Ark. Belloq was looking in the wrong place because he only had the side of the headpiece of the Staff of Ra that was seared into Toht's palm, thus without Jones in the movie, the Nazis might never have acquired the Ark, failing to "take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God, whose Ark this is".

Moreover, if Indy had not gone to Nepal, then Toht (having obtained the headpiece) and Belloq might have used a staff of the right length to find the Ark. Had they also captured Marion and taken her along to their secret island base, Jones would not have been there to tell her not to look, and thus her face would have melted off too.

Of course, Toht and his henchmen might also just have killed her in Nepal.

Alternatively, as Toht and company followed Jones to Marion, and might not have found her otherwise, they might never have had even half the headpiece of the staff of Ra, and the Ark thus would have remained undisturbed in its resting place, leaving the baddies to deal merely with the wrinkles and creases associated with aging appearing on their faces in the fullness of time.

So: Jones keeps Ravenwood alive, and puts the Belloq and his Nazi colleagues in a position to have their faces melted off. Jones also offed a couple of Nazis and other baddies along the way.

After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.

>In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.

I think that's just bad script writing.

I really miss gallo pinto. I went to Costa Rica in 2009, and since then, nothing has been the same (in NYC).

It's mind-boggling that such a simple recipe can be so good in CR but so bad over here! I hear there are some Costa Rican restaurants in Paterson, NJ, but I haven't had the chance to check yet.

I also have fond memories of gallo pinto in Costa Rica from 1997 but when I describe it to family they just look at me blankly in mild disgust. Would love to know what the secret sauce is.

Good luck on your quest. Part of the issue might be lack of good ingredients. I watched a depressing YouTube video the other day about why US restaurant prices are so high but the food is uniform and uniformly bleh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RsJ5a_QVVA). The TL;DR is (1) Sysco and US Foods control most of the supply chain to restaurants, (2) they've raised prices aggressively since the pandemic, and (3) listeria and salmonella outbreaks have caused chains like Chipotle to stop sourcing ingredients locally, preferring factory-prepped food from Sysco et al, further increasing their dominance. This means it's increasingly difficult for even your neighborhood hole-in-the-wall restaurant to find local, fresh, authentic ingredients.

Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

EDIT: And HN at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697

One number is not going to work for everyone. The only way to be sure is to get a blood test for Vitamin D levels. I get tested with my yearly physical, but if someone really cares they can get more frequent blood tests.

Privy just got purchased by Stripe: https://privy.io/blog/announcing-our-acquisition-by-stripe

By the way, if you liked this post, this taking-silly-things-way-to-seriously is the comedic wheelhouse of Nathan Fielder.

But the point still stands: if it's so straightforward, why give this person this treatment, instead of millions of other people?

For the sake of null hypothesis, how far and wide has the second most translated article reached? Is it also an (apparently) random stub?

That's what the OP link is about. Woodard is #2, below Turkey and above Japan.

I wonder how hard it is to change a game engine to render images like this, and if the effect would be preserved while panning.

I think the difficulty comes from it being context dependent, it's not a consistent distortion of the true image the way most projections are, it identifies synthetic structures in the foreground and warps everything else (including similar structures in the background) around them. It should be possible for an AI filter though.

I don't know why you've been downvoted so much. I'd expect a company to issue replacements, not refunds, when they're not the end retailer.

I was under the impression that Community Notes were designed to be resistant to sybil attacks, but I could be wrong. Community Notes have been used at Twitter for a long time. Are there examples of state-influenced notes getting through the process?

Twitter's Community Notes were designed to be resistant to sybil attacks. Meta is calling their new product Community Notes, but it would be a mistake to assume the algorithms are the same under the hood. Hopefully Meta will be as transparent as Twitter has been, with a regular data dump and so on.