I thought I understood this as a Canadian until this current World Series. “My team good, your team bad.” Then I saw comments from the fanbases of the teams that the Blue Jays faced, and now I understand that people are absolutely deranged. Calling for violence for opposing players for daring to face their team? Yikes.

And this is literally just a game. It doesn’t actually have a bearing on people’s lives in the long term. (Except the actual teams, I guess.) No wonder American politics is the way it is. Unfortunately, parts of Canada are trying to emulate this here, too.

All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he’s in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he’s doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.

Truly, without sarcasm, I invite you to read the gospels and actually get to now about Jesus. The shortest is Mark and can be read through in one evening.

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

This is basically how we ended up with the burqa. A woman’s body is evil because it makes men unable to control their sexual urges, therefore women must be banned. Now, in Afghanistan, a woman’s voice must not even be heard.

How long until the USA reaches that point?

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.

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.

Yes, we do eventually find out what G stands for.

Firefly and Pushing Daisies are staples in these conversations, so I’ll throw in a less common one: NCIS LA.

I watched that show for over a decade. It was something predictable and comfortable. The show ending was like losing my favourite hoodie I’ve had for 14 years. Does it really impact my life? No. Do I miss it nonetheless? Yes.

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.

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.

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.