Sometimes movie adaptations actually do things better than the original material

And I'm not here referring to some more obscure works of fiction that some film studio decided to make into a movie, creating a much better end result. I'm actually referring to renowned books that are widely considered masterpieces or, at a minimum, are extremely popular.

Let's take Tolkien's works as an example. Many Tolkien fans would consider it outright heresy that the movies did something better than Tolkien himself. However, I think that at least in a few cases they actually did.

For example, in the original The Fellowship of the Ring book, Gandalf has no qualms about touching and handling the One Ring, and he does so pretty casually at the beginning of the book, when he is at Bilbo's home.

In Peter Jackson's movie, however, he clearly doesn't dare to even touch the ring. He avoids direct contact when throwing the ring into the fireplace and then handing it to Frodo. Earlier, when Bilbo had dropped the ring onto the floor, Gandalf comes close to touching it but then stops himself, when he sees a short vision of The Eye.

I think this version fits the situation better: When talking with Bilbo, who is leaving the Shire, he suspects that there's something dangerous about the ring, and later he confirms that it is, indeed, the One Ring. He knows that the ring could affect him and seduce him if he touches it, making it too tempting to take it and guard it himself, and perhaps use it.

Many people have the misconception that Gandalf is one of the most powerful beings in the Tolkien universe. However, that's just that, a misconception. In reality Tolkien wrote him as being somewhat average as a Maia, maybe even perhaps a bit on the weaker side. Definitely much, much weaker than Sauron. Gandalf fears that Sauron's power could be too much for him to resist, so he doesn't dare to even touch the ring.

I think this is a better depiction of the situation than in Tolkien's book.

There's another example, this time in Jackson's first movie of The Hobbit trilogy, where I think the movie does a better job than the original book.

At the beginning of the book, when the dwarves are visiting Bilbo's home, they sing the famous Misty Mountains Cold song. The book describes it as the dwarves taking out all kinds of musical instruments like violins, flutes and percussion instruments, and overall the ambience is jovial. (I don't remember now if the book actually describes them dancing, but it might have.)

The movie, however, has no instruments and the tone of the singing is very solemn and somber, with the dwarves, who earlier were extremely lively and rowdy, now being very serious, still, quiet and somber, singing the song with thought and seriousness.

I really, really like this depiction more. And that's because of how meaningful the song is. It's not just some random song that they just happened to start singing. It means something to them. It's remembering their long lost home, and their longing to reclaim it and restore it to its former glory. The song represents loss, longing, and sadness, and also hope for the future. It's an extremely meaningful and profound song to them. Thus, the solemn mood fits it perfectly.

A lively singing-and-dancing routine with musical instruments would have completely ruined it. It would have absolutely not conveyed the same deep meaning that the song has.

On a completely different franchise, one of the most famous duels in the Harry Potter series happens in The Order of the Phoenix, when Dumbledore fights with Voldemort in the main hall of the Ministry.

In the movie, they are about equally matched, with Dumbledore having the extra handicap that he needs to constantly protect Harry, especially from the stray lightning bolts emanating from Voldemort's spells. Dumbledore succeeds in keeping Voldemort at bay, defending against his attacks, but barely.

In the original book, however, the scene plays completely differently. In the book Dumbledore is essentially an all-powerful god who has no trouble with Voldemort at all. He deflects all of his spells with ease, and Voldemort is no threat to him or to Harry. It's depicted pretty much as a leisurely walk-in-the-park for Dumbledore.

I really like the movie's depiction more. It does not diminish how powerful Dumbledore is, but it elevates Voldemort to the threat that he is actually supposed to be. In other words, the scene depicts him as, indeed, being one of the most powerful wizards who have ever existed, being able to fight on equal level with the likes of Dumbledore (who, besides he himself also being one of the most powerful wizards who have ever lived, is also wielding the Elder Wand to boot.)

It really shows that Voldemort is a credible threat to the entire world, and a villain of epic proportions, not easily defeated by even the strongest of wizards. Just like he should be. 

I really think the movie did it better. 

I kind of regret buying an OLED gaming monitor

Recently my previous gaming monitor was showing clear signs that it was breaking (after warming up for a minute or two after being turned on, the picture would disappear for a second every 10-or-so seconds, for all input devices, regardless of which input it was connected to, ie. be it DisplayPort or any of the HDMI ports), so I decided to buy a new one.

The previous one was a pretty high-end IPS gaming monitor, 120 Hz, g-sync. Picture quality was very good, and I had nothing to complain about, but alas, it was breaking and unusable.

Researching a bit about possible replacements, I noticed a very noticeable sale on a very high-end Asus OLED gaming monitor, which normally costs 1200€, but was on sale in a local online shop here for just 800€. After considering a few alternatives, I decided to purchase it, as the sale was too good to pass.

On paper this monitor is far superior in every aspect: 240 Hz, 0.03 ms pixel response time (the old one was 4 ms), g-sync, and of course being an OLED panel, pretty much infinite contrast: Blacks are actually black, not a very dark gray.

However, I am a bit disappointed and regretting the purchase a bit.

Yes, the picture has higher contrast, and blacks are really black (which really shows in games like Elite Dangerous), but it's actually not all that mind-blowing and awesome as people make it sound. After a while I don't even notice the difference. Sure, maybe the picture looks a tad bit more vivid and high-contrast, if I pay attention to that, but it's not all that different in practice.

Also, I literally have no use for a 240 Hz refresh rate compared to a 120 Hz. It brings me no benefit whatsoever. Nothing. Likewise for the 0.03 ms pixel response time. I see no practical difference in practical games.

So why am I regretting this? It's not like those things are drawbacks. Is it the high price (even if it was greatly reduced)?

No, it's not that. I was completely ready to pay the same amount for a good high-end IPS monitor.

The problem is the OLED technology. Particularly, the problem with pixel degradation.

Asus provides a 3-year warranty for the monitor, but only if you run the "pixel cleaning" process every 8 hours of use. Which the monitor automatically reminds you of with an OSD popup.

It's a bit annoying to suddenly get that popup in the middle of an intense gaming session. And if you run the pixel cleaning process, the monitor is unusable for 6 minutes.

Yes, you can make the interval longer, but that doesn't really solve the issue. You can even disable the reminder, but you do that at the risk of Asus deciding you didn't run it often enough and thus voiding your warranty.

I used my old IPS monitor also for my work at home, which consists of programming. Which, of course, means completely static elements on screen for hours and hours on end. I'm not sure I dare to use this OLED display for that work anymore, because of the dreaded OLED burn-in problem, even with the "pixel cleaning" process every 8 hours. I'm kind of worried that doing 8-hour days of work, with the static stuff on screen for that long, day after day, week after week, month after month, will degrade the pixels far quicker than they should.

IPS does not suffer from this problem. You can have a static picture being shown 24/7 for literally years, and while in some older IPS panels it might have left a temporary "ghost image", it was always that: Temporary. It would go away in minutes (particularly if you used a completely black screen). In more modern IPS panels you don't get that almost at all.

So it's an actual hassle. I have two choices: Just keep using this OLED display in the same way as I used my old IPS display, and perhaps risk uneven pixel degradation and image burn-in (regardless of the regular "pixel cleaning"), or set up myself a separate working space using a different monitor for that work.

I'm regretting this purchase. I'm not convinced the minor increase in image quality is really worth the hassle. In retrospect I should just have purchased a modern top-of-the-line 800€ IPS monitor. 

North Korea is the weirdest country in the world, part 3

The two previous articles:

• Part 1, where I describe the insane lengths to which North Korea goes to pretend like it's a rich prosperous country to foreign visitors and tourists, even though everybody knows it's all just a huge facade and acted show.
• Part 2, where I describe the North Korean concentration camps, and how insane that system is, outright resembling a dystopian sci-fi story.

Of course North Korea's weirdness does not end there. Let's take, for example, the huge dilapidated factories that are completely broken down and can't produce anything, but where every day thousands of people still pretend to work at, doing absolutely  nothing, because they are forced to.

And no, that's not some people trying to defraud the government to get a salary while actually doing nothing. They are doing it because the government forces them to, and are not doing it willingly.

You see, all the way back during the early years of the first Supreme Leader, Kim Il Sung (ie. some years after the second World War), North Korea adopted a very Soviet-style form of economy, where every single citizen is provided a job by the government, in exchange for the government also providing them a complimentary home, food and a monetary allowance for everyday expenses.

And just like in the Soviet Union, refusing to work was illegal and would easily land you in one of those concentration camps (although North Korea made this even stricter than the Soviet Union ever did.)

This system worked surprisingly well for several decades, and in fact for quite a while North Korea was much richer than South Korea of the time was (before this wealth status made a complete swap some time in the era from about the 70's to the 90's).

However, some time in the mid-90's things changed, and the economy of the country completely collapsed. Deals with the United States and several other countries fell through, and those countries stopped exporting oil and raw materials to North Korea. The economic collapse was so drastic that it ended up causing millions of North Korean citizens to die of starvation because the government couldn't provide for them anymore.

Factory after factory stopped production because of the sheer lack of this oil and raw materials. There was literally nothing to do. Some factories could keep up using locally mined and produced materials, but only some of them. A large number of factories, however, just stopped completely, and started to become more and more decrepit and dilapidated because of lack of maintenance, and after some years they became so broken that they couldn't have restarted production even if the supply of raw materials problem had been fixed. All the machines and infrastructure just broke and rusted. These factories were a complete loss.

However, and this is where the weirdness starts, the law about refusing to work didn't change. People were still mandated a job by the government, and they were still mandated to do that job or face the concentration camps.

The thing is: There were no new jobs to reassign those people to. Thus, they just didn't. In other words, most of those workers were never reassigned, and had to still attend, by law, those same factories that they were originally assigned to, because nobody had changed that mandate. The guards and government officials at the factories were still making a head count, were still looking if anybody was failing to appear for work, were still enforcing the mandated job at that factory assigned to each citizen, because nobody was telling those government officials otherwise either (and if they failed to do their duty as commanded, it would be them facing the concentration camps.)

So for decades, from about the mid-90's forward, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens have been going every day, six days a week, for 12 hours per day, to those crumbling factories, going through the initial rituals of praising Dear Leader, then sitting at their designated place for 12 hours doing absolutely nothing, and then at the end of the work day going through the mandated struggle sessions (yes, those are also a thing there), and going home.

And all that for an absolute pitiable allowance and an abysmal amount of food (that's just a small fraction of what it was in the heyday of the system.)

Indeed, all those tens or even hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens are pretending to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, doing absolutely nothing, because the guards and government officials are forcing them to, they themselves not being able to stop it because else they themselves would be facing the consequences, and because nobody higher-up in the government has bothered to change the system.

Although something has changed in the last few years, actually.

You see, for almost all of its existence, North Korea has had a huge black market consisting of people doing privately business with each other, secretly from the government. For example a fisherman could secretly sell fish to people for money, a housewife could secretly sew clothes and sell them to people, and the black market for illegally imported western goods is huge (yes, somehow some people do manage to smuggle illegal items into the country, past all the security measures. And by "illegal" we are not talking about drugs, tobacco or booze, but about everyday items common in the west that are not officially allowed, such as snacks, books, small electronics and so on. Heck, some even own entire VHS players and have some western movies in VHS format, something highly illegal in the country.)

In the past few years the North Korean government has got a great idea: Rather than try to fight the black market, take advantage of it!

They are doing that by telling those factory workers (both in the factories that don't produce anything and some of those that do) to go to out there and sell stuff to people for profit, and bring a certain amount of money back to the factory. Besides the threat of the concentration camps if they refuse or fail to do so, they have the bonus incentive that the citizen can keep any extra money that he makes from those sales. In other words, the higher the price that the worker can get from the items, the more money he himself  will earn. How generous!

(Unfortunately, and very unsurprisingly, people are not actually making much money this way. They can barely get enough to cover the required amount they need to bring back. Very rarely will people buy the stuff for a significantly higher price. But they need to keep selling or face the concentration camps.)

Lack of game optimization is getting out of control

When Nvidia introduced for the first time their new smart upscaling technology, DLSS (which uses neural networks to upscale a lower-resolution image to a higher resolution with a much better end result than a naive upscaling), the idea was simple: To allow even older hardware to run newer games at a decent framerate.

After all, this has been a bane of PC gaming since the beginning of time: Newer games require faster hardware, and thus PCs that are 10 years old usually have a hard time running those games at an acceptable resolution and framerate.

Smart upscaling gives a good solution to that problem: The 10-year-old PC can now render the game at a much lower resolution (thus increasing framerate to acceptable levels) and DLSS upscales it to a higher resolution, with the end result looking almost as good as if the game had been running at that larger resolution to begin with.

(Of course only the RTX 20 series of cards was the next generation that supports DLSS well, but the idea is, of course, that 10+ years after its publication even newer and more demanding games could still be run on that 10-year-old hardware at an acceptable resolution and framerate.)

Some years later Nvidia developed the next step in this idea: Frame generation. In other words, not only could the PC render at a lower resolution (with the end result still looking high-resolution), but for example it could just render every second frame, with the in-between frames being generated by a neural network, this effectively almost doubling the framerate (at a very small expense in latency).

So, for example, an older PC could render the game at a resolution of, say, 960x540 pixels at 30 frames per second, and DLSS would convert it to 1920x1080 pixels at 60 frames per second. Thus, even older hardware could get a full 1080p experience with newer games.

In other words, you wouldn't necessarily need to upgrade your RTX 2070 system to an RTX 6070 (or whatever) in order to run newer games acceptably.

In other words, Nvidia quite clearly originally envisioned game developers just keeping developing and optimizing their games as normal, and Nvidia's DLSS technology helping those games run even in older hardware.

However, that's not what happened.

What instead happened is that now many game developers are using DLSS as a crutch, as an excuse to not have to optimize their games so well. What's happening is that more and more games are now requiring DLSS to run even on the latest hardware at acceptable resolutions and framerates, while not looking any better, for the simple reason that the game developers are saving time and cost by not optimizing their games.

In other words, more and more developers are taking the lazy route of "why spend months optimizing our game to run at 60 FPS when we can just use DLSS?"

So what's happening is that many new games are requiring DLSS even on the newest hardware and, thus, they will not run well in older hardware (including the RTX 20 series), even though that was supposed to be the entire core idea of DLSS! Even with DLSS the games will run like crap on older hardware.

It doesn't exact help that more and more developer studios are, for some reason, jumping onto the Unreal Engine 5 bandwagon, and said engine is, for some reason, astonishingly inefficient (much more so than Unreal Engine 4, even for content that looks the same.)

More and more people are noticing how utterly inefficient Unreal Engine 5 games are, especially compared to Unreal Engine 4 games. And what's worse, the former do not look particularly better than the latter. (In fact, sometimes it's even the opposite: Many current Unreal Engine 5 games actually look visually worse than many Unreal Engine 4 games from 10 years ago.)

Why are so many game studios jumping to Unreal Engine 5, rather than Unreal Engine 4? I have no idea.

The situation has become so bad that several recently published games are actually listing DLSS and frame generation in their recommended specs. Astonishingly, some are even listing them in their minimum required specs!

And some of those games don't even visually justify that requirement. The most infamous recent example being the latest Lego Batman, which lists DLSS as a minimum requirement even though the game has the visual quality that many games over 15 years ago had.

Can you guess which game engine that Lego Batman uses? (If you guessed "Unreal Engine 5", you would be absolutely correct.)

This entire thing is getting completely out of control. We are already getting games in the Lego series that require DLSS to run properly. 

Do not get fooled by deceptive core counts of Intel CPUs

For quite many years now Intel has been boasting about their high-core CPUs during the latest two or three CPU generations: 14 cores, 20 cores, 28 cores, sometimes even more!

For example, you may be tempted by, say, an Intel i5-14600, which has a relatively affordable price and a whopping 14 cores!

It wasn't even so long ago that having just 8 cores was high-end, now we are getting 14 cores and even more even in mid-tier CPUs at a quite affordable price.

Except that that "14 cores" is deceptive. In actual reality, for practical applications that benefit from CPU cores, like video games and CPU-intensive applications, that processor has 6 cores.

That's right. Not 14, but 6 cores.

Intel divides the cores into "performance-cores" (which there are 6 of them in this model), and "efficient-cores" (which is the remaining 8 cores). While they aren't extremely secretive about the difference between the two core types, they don't advertise it very visibly either.

In reality the difference in performance between these two core types is enormous. The "efficient-cores" are not designed for computation-heavy tasks (such as video games or rendering). They are designed to run very lightweight background tasks (that operating systems typically run dozens of, at all times.)

The "efficient-cores" are significantly slower than the full "performance-cores". According to my casual testing, those 8 "efficient-cores" combined might get you about the performance of 1 "performance-core", give or take.

So for all intents and purposes, from the perspective of computational power, the i5-14600 has about 7 cores, not 14 (and one of those 7 cores is kind of split into 8 "slow cores".) In other words, if you were to run a CPU-intensive task on all 14 cores, you may get the speed of about 7 full cores, give or take.

In summary: From the point of view of video games and CPU-heavy tasks, the i5-14600 has 6 cores, not 14. It should be thought of as a "6-core CPU" not a "14-core CPU".

The same goes for all Intel CPUs with "performance-cores" and "efficient-cores". If you care about the actual number of cores that such a CPU has, just look at the former number, not the total.

(Yes, there are advantages to the efficient-cores, as they consume less energy and ease the burden of running lightweight background tasks from the main cores, but they should not be thought of as main cores themselves, only as kind of small auxiliary cores. They will not make your games run faster.) 

Is the "gaming" label in PC peripherals just a marketing gimmick?

For quite a while now, probably 15 to 20 years, a lot of PC peripherals have been marketed with the label "gaming". Heck, even things like chairs have been marked with that label.

But does that label actually mean anything, does it make any actual difference, or is it just a meaningless marketing gimmick?

With some peripherals it may well be completely meaningless, and the device is just completely normal, no different from any non-"gaming" versions from that same manufacturers. 

With some peripherals, such as mice, SSDs, GPUs and RAM, the "gaming" might just be slapped onto higher-end products, such as high-DPI mice and faster SSDs, GPUs and RAM. So it's essentially a marketing gimmick in that it's replacing some technical term (like "high-DPI") with a term that sells better (ie. "gaming"). So, whether that label, "gaming", is actually meaningful is a bit of a matter of definition. In general, not really.

However, there is one type of peripheral where "gaming" might actually be meaningful and it actually affects how the device has been designed and manufactured, rather than it merely being either meaningless marketing drivel, or just a synonym for "higher end product".

And that's "gaming" keyboards. At least in some cases.

How so?

The vast majority of keyboards do not support every single possible combination of simultaneous key press. For example even a simple 104-key keyboard has 2¹⁰⁴ possible keypress combinations, which is an absolutely humongous amount. Even a 64-bit value wouldn't be able to represent all of them.

Instead, most if not all keyboards have an internal circuitry design that supports only some combinations of simultaneous keys, but not nearly all of them. Typically the keys are, essentially, internally wired in a sort of grid pattern where keys on different rows and columns of the grid can be recognized simultaneously, but ones on the same rows or columns cannot. (In reality it's a bit more complicated than this, but that's the essential idea.) This saves an enormous amount of circuitry and electronic components, and thus it's much more cost-effective.

This "grid" doesn't need to follow the physical layout of the keyboard, though. The designers can route the connections however they want, thus shuffling the grid elements around to cover pretty much whatever keys they want (so, for example, one "row" of keys might consists of completely and seemingly randomly placed keys on the physical keyboard.)

Thus, the designers of the keyboard circuitry have a choice to make when it comes to which key presses are supported simultaneously and which aren't.

And here's where the "gaming" aspect of the design of a keyboard kicks in, quite literally: Usually the upper left of the alphabetical and numerical keys on a "gaming" keyboard will support significantly more simultaneous key presses than the rest of the keyboard, and this is precisely for better support in video games.

For example, I myself own a "gaming" keyboard, and it supports pressing all the ten keys QWERT plus ASDFG simultaneously without problems. However, if I press merely three keys, V, B and N, simultaneously, only two of them will register (the two that I press first).

An "office" keyboard would not need this peculiar choice of where the "densest" concentration of multiple supported key presses are located, but a "gaming" keyboard most definitely benefits from it.

This might be one of the best examples of where the "gaming" label is not a mere marketing gimmick, but actually indicates a hardware design choice for the explicit support of video games.

Explanation for the astonishingly large "minimum livable" wage in the United States

For quite a while now I have been astonished by what is considered a "minimum livable" wage in the United States. In other words, what is generally considered an absolutely minimum yearly income that allows you to survive, barely, on your own without having to rely on charity or governmental welfare.

One of the most common numbers cited for this is 50000 USD a year, ie. about 42000 €. That would be 4170 USD or 3500 € per month.

That number always makes my jaw drop, and that's because 42000 €/year in most European countries, even in the richest and most expensive-to-live ones, is a very good salary. It's a decent salary of an engineer in the tech industry, and way, way higher than most low-level jobs.

Even in the richest and most expensive European countries (eg. the Nordic Countries), a "minimum livable" wage would be about 1500 €/month, ie. 18000 €/year (about 21000 USD/year), although many people are able to live independently with salaries as low as 1000 €/month (about 1200 USD/month). It's not great, but it's livable if you don't need huge expenses.

And that's before taxes. On top of it, taxes are much lower in the US than in Europe (particularly the expensive countries), which means that in the US your net income is even larger in comparison to Europe.

So if we put all of that in USD for our American friends, that would be:

• Generally considered "minimum livable" income:
  • US: 50000 USD/year
  • Europe: 21000 USD/year
• "Barely survivable" extremely low income:
  • US: 30000 USD/year
  • Europe: 14000 USD/year
• Decent income for a senior tech engineer:
  • US: 150000+ USD/year
  • Europe: 70000+ USD/year

And that is, as mentioned, before taxes. After taxes the difference is even bigger (because taxes are so much lower in the United States.)

How is this even possible? Well, I did a bit of research about this, and here are a few reasons for the disparity:

* Firstly, typical rent is significantly higher in the United States. Where the monthly rent of a small apartment in a small-to-medium size city in Europe is typically somewhere around 450 USD to 600 USD, in the United States an equivalent small apartment in an equivalent city has typically a monthly rent of 1200 USD to 1500 USD, and even higher. That's like triple. With larger apartments the difference can be even bigger.

There are many economic reasons for this disparity. Also, from the perspective of a "senior tech engineer", apartment rents skyrocket in the cities that are most populated by tech companies where those engineers work. Even a very small apartment could have a monthly rent well in excess of 2500 USD. That's like five times more than the typical small apartment in Europe (even in such cities). It's all about supply and demand.

* Secondly, health insurance is almost mandatory, unless you plan to never get sick or injured. The costs of health insurance vary a lot, but on average the absolute minimum cost is somewhere in the ballpark of 8000 to 10000 USD per year (unless the employer participates in this expense as a job benefit, which some do, but many of the smallest/cheapest companies don't.)

That's the "barely survivable" European income almost on its own (especially after taxes).

In Europe, of course, there are pretty much no expenses related to health services (or even if there are, they tend to be extremely small in comparison.) 

* Thirdly, unlike in Europe, public transport services in the United States are absolutely abysmal. In the biggest cities it can be decent and in some places you can actually survive without owning a car, but in most places owning a car is pretty much mandatory in practice, else you'll have a really hard time getting anywhere (including work.)

Cars and fuel are significantly cheaper in the United States than in Europe (especially the Nordic Countries), but they nevertheless eat a good chunk of your yearly income, easily as much as the health insurance, if not even more. In most of Europe, however, if you can't afford a car in most places it's perfectly possible to survive on public transport only (public transport services tend to be extraordinary, even in small cities and towns.)