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.

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.

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.

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 thing that I can’t understand about this product is why they didn’t cover the function keys. They are literally functional.

While there must certainly be some devout Muslims who try their best to keep the “rules”, as I’d expect in any group, a lot of Muslims are not so different frombthe rest of us non-Muslims.

My coworker is a former Muslim who had to leave his home country due to persecution when he became a Christian. Here, he’s made Muslim friends who regularly invite him over for dinner and they serve… Pork. They say because he is not a Muslim, they respect that and don’t force him to eat halal. But why does not forcing him to eat halal equate to them eating pork?

They are genuinely his friends, but he is also their “excuse” to break halal.

This guy reviews all kinds of e-ink devices. https://www.youtube.com/c/MyDeepGuide/videos

I watched his videos before deciding to get a large format BOOX Max Lumi (13") for PDF reading and note taking. I wanted the large one to split screen a PDF textbook on the left and notebook on the right. That was a few years ago, though, and I suggest reviewing some more recent videos to get an idea of what the current devices are like.

You can download Signal APK directly from their website.

In some different countries, WhatsApp is how people conduct business. I am anti WhatsApp in my regular life, but I used it with a VOIP number when I was traveling abroad.

It’s one thing to tell your friends and family you use Signal, you can’t tell literally every business. Well, you can, they just won’t to do business with you.

I miss flip phones for similar reasons. I loved flicking them open and snapping them shut.

Mostly just Discovery and Picard is kind of halfway there.

SNW is a really fun watch once they’ve dealt with Pike’s future (which they kind of really have to). Personally I like that they go for different genres, but I can see why some people might not like that if.

Lower Decks is a riot and a half and I think it’s my favourite Star Trek, but it might be kind of cheating because it stands on the shoulders of all the other shows.

Prodigy is quite a bit different from the other shows, but it’s full of optimism, hope, and friendship. It doesn’t start out that way, they’re all very suspicious of each other at first. They grow into it as they learn more about themselves and each other, and aspire to be part of the Federation and Starfleet.

Netflix literally will not take my money anymore. I had cancelled my subscription during covid because money was tight, but I was willing to temporarily re-subscribe when the next season of select shows came out. I tried to re-enable my original account, but I couldn’t because they wouldn’t accept my credit card. I tried different cards, then tried to make new accounts with different emails and different credit cards, but still couldn’t. Netflix kept rejecting all my cards. I ran out of credit cards.

Look, I was willing to give Netflix my money, it’s not my fault they were unwilling to take it.

One time I had to use a website where the email 2FA expired in 30 seconds! I usually keep my email client open while my computer is on, but, come on, that was ridiculous.

The messages got from it are:

“the patriarchy” is not a good thing, but even the idealized “the matriarchy” has problems too, and whatever we have going on right now isn’t really working

a man’s value is inherent to himself, it doesn’t come from a job or a relationship. (I suppose this applies to women too, but it was Ken who had to learn this lesson).

Men need to support each other more rather than compete with each other

Societal expectations for women are impossible to attain

I went to a non-uniformed elementary school (which has since adopted a uniform), a uniformed high school, and then university which was obviously non-uniformed. I much preferred the uniformed years because I don’t care one whit about fashion I never had to think about what to wear.

Granted, my high school uniform had a lot of variety, considering. There were two cuts/styles for the long sleeved shirts, a short sleeve shirt, polo shirt, knit sweater, knit vest, knit cardigan, 1/4 zip sweatshirt, and blazer, which could be mixed and matched as you liked.

I don’t remember how the conversation came about, but in a previous office job, some discussion (among us low-level employees) came about regarding an office uniform. Most people were horrified by the idea, but I was totally for it.