These feel like perfect examples of when banning them makes people MORE likely to read them and revive potentially offensive language (that many people have never ever even seen written or heard spoken). Not saying banning is the wrong answer per se. Just that it can seriously backfire
Raymond Briggs was being fully self aware using Golliwog, knowing that Enid Byton had used it in a thoroughly racist manner in The Famous Five childrens books:
The story follows one day in the life of a working-class Bogeyman whose job it is to scare human beings, who are referred to as Drycleaners, and the narrative hinges on the joke that Bogeymen enjoy all things humans find disgusting.
One illustration shows a puppet reminiscent of the traditional “golliwog” but with pink skin and yellow hair. The annotation reads: “Boggiewogs: The Bogey Golliwog. These are a caricature of pink Drycleaners. They always have huge blue eyes, rosebud mouths and curly blond hair.”
It's mocking the traditional (to that time) British use of Golliwog with a blue eyed racial stereotype doll ... making children question and puzzle over such things in a fun book about farts, slime, dirt, etc.
I wasn't aware of that particular backstory. But I suspected--before seeing the name explicitly mentioned--that Enid Blyton is probably one of the prolific authors that would trigger various alarm bells for some modern audiences.
highlights her use of golliwog .. although to be fair that's a Famous Five parody and her main use of the golliwog stereotype was in her Noddy book series (I got that part wrong in my comment above).
It all sheds some light on the whys and wherefors of the Mau Mau rebellion.
I've been vaguely amused on some recent trips to England that the Five are so prominent on Great Western's advertising posters. I've also seen some funny parodies like the Five on Brexit Island. https://www.amazon.com/Five-Brexit-Island-Bruno-Vincent/dp/1...
Corridor crew (specifically, the VFX artists react)! Tons of videos, most (but not all) get into the weeds about VFX in a way that's really interesting even if you don't work in that space.
Funny. But, also, is he saying that privacy policies are a waste of time because no one reads them? Not sure I love the "we don't need oxygen masks on a plane because we never need them" logic (but maybe I missed his real meaning.
This! I'm from Oregon but live in Thailand, where there are ZERO libraries. My absolute favorite thing about going home is just maxxing out my library card and seeing how much I can get through before heading home (I can do ebooks and audiobooks while abroad with Libby but I'm one of those obnoxious people that always prefers physical)
This is an exaggeration. I also live in Thailand, and I just got a library card at the very stately Neilson Hayes library last week. A bit pricey (3000 THB/year) but amazing ambience since the library was built in 1860.
Yea $100 bucks a year for a small historical library with a very limited selection of English books (that's 45 minutes away from me) doesn't really compare to a free library that's in every city in the US (or many libraries in bigger cities)
it's odd to me that you'd expect a large stock of English books in any regular Thai library
even in Japan, with perhaps the very strongest reading culture in the world, you're going to find a relatively limited selection of books in library outside of their own language
you'll likely have less success finding a varied stock of Thai books in Oregon, to the surprise of nobody
There are hundreds of great ones, but Tale of Genji (classic), The Master of Go (amazing if you like the board game Go), Coin Locker Babies (Ryu Murkami > Haruki Murkami), Out by Natsuo Kirino.
I mean there are actually quite a few public libraries here, but of course the selection is primarily in Thai. I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.
To the above posters credit, it sounds like their claim of exaggeration was spot on (he didn't say it was a lie). You didn't say their libraries don't compare to US ones, you said they don't exist.
I haven't been to Thailand, but I assume there are also libraries at the universities. The parent appears to be referring to a tradition of public libraries, so these are not really counterexamples.
I've used private English libraries in various countries of the Middle East and East Asia. For the expat community, they were really a treasure before the internet.
University libraries are sort of a mixed bag. They're not really advertised but they're fairly open to public browsing in some cases, however pretty locked-down in others.
I finally switched to Kagi last month after reading a bunch of HN comments that boiled down to "trust me, it's worth it." And now I'm here to say "trust me, it's worth it."
To illustrate how good kagi is, here's the things it's not as good at (for me):
1) the weather widget doesn't show precipitation chances in the future, only for today
2) historical queries like "newspaper articles on interest rates from 1/1/2008" are subpar compared to Google. Probably related to the recency of their index.
3) hyperlocal queries that rely on contextual information like location need to have that info explicitly stated, otherwise "best restaurants" returns a list of restaurants in Poland for example. Sort of inherent to the privacy thing though.
Everything else, all the normal queries work as well or better for me than Google.
I am a huge fan of Kagi, been using it for 6+ months now as my “main” search engine. However, I find that queries in my native language (Swedish) results in way less accurate results than if the query was in English.
I would still recommend it to anyone, it’s heaps better than anything else.
In the old days, I could search for something niche on Google and get blogs/enthusiast websites. Does Kagi do that, or will I only get commercial results like modern Google?
Sign up for the Kagi trial (100 free searches) & see for yourself. If garbage floats to the top, you can easily block the domain or lower its ranking in your results by mousing over the shield to the right of the search result. If you find blog/enthusiast sites you like, raise their ranking in your results the same way.
It does. They also have filters you can apply to your query to further restrict the results for things like small web (blogs and niche forums, using the Marginalia index AFAIK) and forums (Reddit and so forth), so that you don’t have to resort to appending “Reddit” to your searches.
Kagi is basically $20/month to time travel back to 2014-era Google with extra features. It’s fantastic and well worth it. I can’t recommend it enough.
Edit: Upon checking my billing it’s $10/mo, not $20. All the better!
They filters out sites with ads or trackers. The results are clean sites. Some blogs/old sites do have ads so it's not exactly like google. Naturally Porn / nsfw types site are missing.
I've had Kagi for several months now and have no desire to go back. Brave is horrible, DDG is bad, and Google is bad AND Google. I decided it was time to trim subscriptions a few months ago and chose to ditch ChatGPT and keep Kagi.
Yep. Last month, I finally hit the $5/mo plan limit of 300 searches per month & upgraded to the $10/mo unlimited plan. Totally worth it not to waste my time sifting through garbage SEO sites on Google or half-assed DuckDuckGo search results.
I love that you can pin, raise or lower results from specific websites. They also set it up so you can see popular raise/lower and pins. It's wonderful. Trust me too, it's worth it. ~850 searches a month here.
It's still around, but their search results are lackluster; I was constantly having to rerun the same query in Google to find what I knew was out there. Kagi's search results are way better -- close enough to how good Google used to be 10-15yrs ago that I'm willing to pay $10/mo for it.
I don't pay them to develop AI. Just like I don't pay Google to develop their ad business. I pay Kagi for search that I use (and Google for limited cloud storage) and what they do with that money is up to them.
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