I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

Saul (Sha’ul) is a Jewish/Hebrew name. Paulos is a Greek name. Even until now, bilingual people who are of a minority culture (compared to where they’re living) often have two names, one in their their native (family) language and one in the local majority language, one official, the other unofficial.

This was not limited to Paul, even in that immediate timeline. Levi (Jewish name) was also called Levi (Greek name). There’s no reason to believe Paul “changed” his name sheet his conversion. He continued to go by Saul after he became a Christian. He went by his Jewish name among Jewish people, then his Greek name when he travelled across Rome and interacted with Greek-speakers.

The person complaining thinks the proprietor is scamming people, and (apparently) ChatGPT, by falsely advertising what products are available.

Idiot: You lied about your product! MapGuy: Where did you see that (on my website)? Idiot: ChatGPT screenshot

We barely rejected the right wing nuts, and they could easily take the next election. While relief is warranted, we should not be smug or complacent about it, either. Lies more faster than the truth, it’s still an uphill battle for morality and decency.

Everyone reacts differently to different things. I know someone who’s side effects were worse each Covid shot he got. He still got them, because he was taking care of an elderly family member, but he had to started planning to be bedridden himself. He’s not antivax, but stopped getting boosters when the family member died because he didn’t want to be laid up for a week at a time.

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 had one interviewer specially say she was committed to getting back to each candidate, no matter the outcome. I expressed genuine appreciation for that, saying that most places just ghost people.

She ghosted me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I’ve been waiting five years for Ruthie!