Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

So credit card issuers are bad now?

There’s too much to keep track of these days.

Bloodletting is therapeutic… for some very specific conditions. For example, hemochromatosis, where the body has too much iron, and there has been some preliminary study that blood donations are a way to reduce the amount of PFAS in blood.

But everyone has PFAS in their blood; not every male has (beyond normal) phimosis.

I’d imagine he thinks that other evil rich people and sycophants whose immoral compasses are aligned are his friends, but in reality they’re around because it benefits them (or they think it does), and they’d stab him in the back as soon as it benefits them. (It’s just that so far it hasn’t benefited their morally corrupt causes yet.) So people like the deceased Epstein, and Canadian traitors Kevin O’Leary and Gretzky. AB Premier Danielle Smith wouldn’t even be an afterthought of a “friend” in this context, but she’s trying so desperately hard to be accepted, it’s pathetic.

You might possibly be interested in checking out the YouTube channel MyDeepGuide. Guy does in-depth reviews ofbmostly e-ink writing tablets, which perhaps is more functionality than you’re looking for, but some of those manufacturers also do standalone “just” readers. Or maybe you’ll be convinced to get a writing tablet :p

As bad as American prisons are, they are not on the scale as being deported (is that even the right word in this case?) to what amounts to a concentration camp in a foreign country without any process.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

I don’t believe nothing will change. I do believe Musk will capture communications and use it to monitor people he believes are his biggest enemies, then use it to best-case blackmail them, worst-case have them arrested in trumped-up (no pun intended) charges.

Random unknown people are being kidnapped, tortured, and sold internationally as slaves by the government. These are the cases we know about because they are getting to the media. How many are not getting through the Right-supporting media? Do we really think actual opponents aren’t just waiting targets?

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

I never really got into tea because I always found the flavour disappointing compared to its aroma. But I recently tried yerba maté, which isn’t a tea but definition, but is similar. It’s made from the leaves and stems of Holly and has a strong, bitter flavour that definitely does not disappoint. It’s enjoyed in places like Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil. Now I start my day with a mug of coffee, then sip on maté the rest of the day.

Dogs taking away jobs from humans? What a disgrace! Surely dogs are DEI hires, if I ever saw one. They’re not even people!

There are very many normal human sounds that are not speech, including, but not limited to: laughter, crying, yelling/screaming/yelping (in surprise, pain, fear), groaning, moaning, yawning, sneezing, coughing, vomiting, singing, whistling.

What constitutes human speech? There are languages that have sounds that don’t exist in other languages (said as someone still trying to get a hold on rolling my Rs).

In any case, we should all learn some sign language. Seriously, it’s useful to be able to communicate silently or just visually (e.g. Across a noisy room), plus it makes life way more inclusive for Deaf people.

DEI can still be achieved without using that terminology directly.

I agree that not longer having a policy or metrics around diversity doesn’t mean that the people in a company won’t still value it. I’m a part-time student and the school’s director recently did an AMA. He said an upcoming event was renamed to avoid the threats that are being directed at “DEI”, but the event itself is still about cultural diversity. I forget what the new name was, something about the stories of our people or something like that.

I understand your point generally, and would agree with you under most circumstances. However, you’re talking about the guy who came out swinging from Tariff Town before he was even inaugurated, which has already made for negative economic movement. Under his watch (if you would even be so generous to say he’s “watching” at all), there’s already been all kinds of administrative chaos for the USA by wanton firings and other cuts and more EOs than you’ve ever seen in your lifetime.

So, yes, absolutely the country can blame Trump, at the very least for putting all his attention to causing chaos and not on the things he campaigned on. (Not that I ever believed he had any intention to ever pay attention to them.)

The best use, for me, is asking ChatGPT to give me five (or however many) scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on a topic. Then I search for said articles by title and author name on my school library database.

It saves me so much time compared to doing a keyword search on said same database and reading a ton of abstracts to find a few articles. I can get to actually reading them and working on my assignment way faster.

AI is a great tool for people who use it properly.

I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.

The problemo see with this construct is that it only benefits current actors. There won’t be space for a new generation of actors.

About cars, and not necessarily designed poorly, but definitely designed by a man for men: cars that, by default, automatically, immediately unlock all doors when the engine is turned off. A man might be car jacked or robbed, a woman might be car jacked, robbed, or raped.

(Of course men can be raped too, but it’s not as likely to happen by a strange woman threatening violence than a woman is to be raped by a strange man threatening the same.)

Yeah, I was 22 years old when my mother sat me down for “the talk”, and even then, it only consisted of “don’t go to bed with someone”. LITERALLY nothing more than that. I just looked at her cockeyed and told her she was pretty late for this talk. And of course the talk itself was just so sub par.