Cool. Does he have some paper on the odds you’re able to outdrink centaurs? Preferably taking into account multiple variables: your body mass, if the centaurs in question are male or female, alcohol content of what you’re drinking, if/what you’re eating…

I’m being cheeky to highlight that those people are assuming that the current NN developments will necessarily lead to AGI. Will they? …I honestly do not think so. I don’t think AGI is impossible, far from that; but I don’t think it’s something we’ll see in our lives, while everyone is busier with “put glue on pizza lol” bots.

This game is so realistic that it makes me irrationally angry. A lot of those dark patterns are shit that makes you think “it’s not a bug, it’s an anti-feature”:

• exploiting the natural (albeit undesired) fact that some elements move, as the page loads up
• spamming pop-up “messages”, and doing so in a way that obstruct other elements, and it “just” happens to be the element you want to click (but the interface designer doesn’t want you to)
• weaponising user confirmation to make what should be the “default” option (no tip) take more effort than the others
• etc.

I bet most of those are banned here in Brazil (that basically follows whatever the EU is doing), but it still fills me with rage.

TL;DR: author was generating a bunch of pics through Stable Diffusion. There are loud beeps, he doesn’t know where they’re from. The beeps annoy his cat, the cat sniffs and then paws the surge protector. The author concludes that the computer was drawing more power than the surge protector was made for, that was draining its battery, and the beeps were the surge protector informing the battery was almost dry.

Interesting cat behaviour. Neither of my cats would do this: one doesn’t give a fuck about noises, another hates them so much she’d simply leave. And they have a good, instinctive grasp on where sounds come from. You as a human can actually train it, and it’s damn useful, but the cat will still be better at it.

I’m not vegan, but this sounds like an extremely arsehole move. It’s bait-and-switch: the business ditches its customer base to chase a wider one, that won’t give too much of a fuck about it.

I saw the carrot tartare video linked in the article. If that’s representative of what they serve in the restaurant, well… I get why they need to bait-and-switch, I bet vegans eat there exactly once and then forget about the place, as they prepare the same dishes at home. Fine dining should offer you a repeatable but memorable experience, that you’d have a really hard (and really laborious) time replicating at home. You get this by investing on the diversity of good flavours, making it taste extremely decadent, with fine plating and all whistles and bells; not through weird party tricks like “you mix it yourself”.

Also, props to the journalist for not butchering Letícia Dias’ name.

Frankly I think the current Canadian policy should be "no direct neighbours"¹. Pre-emptively cutting ties with USA, instead of waiting for it to happen; at least Canada would the one deciding when and how to do so.

So. USA wants to steal half a bridge? Say “fuck off”, insist on it, escalate issues a bit (remember TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out), but stop building further bridges to USA. Why would you build bridges to what you should be treating as a desert¹?

Another example: USA will most likely revoke the USMCA. Before this even happens, Canada and Mexico should be signing bilateral agreements to replace it.

Also: give up rekindling ties after Trump leaves/dies². That brainless muppet is a symptom of USA going downhill, but the actual cause are the people who put him on power. (Spoilers: not the United-Statian population. Follow the money.) Without Trump they’d easily put someone as bad as him in place.

Trump continued: “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”

…what.

1. By “desert” I mean on economic grounds. On military grounds it’s probably better if Canada accurately treats the situation by what it is, it borders a rogue state.
2. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump changed the rules in USA, to allow himself to become president for life, Maduro style. Also, it would be damn hilarious if someone did with Trump what he did with Maduro.

In addition to all of that, since your comment is spot on:

When people claim some variety is more conservative than another variety, they tend to cherry pick a lot. It’s easy, for example, to look at rhoticity and claim “American English” is more conservative, or to look at the cot/caught merge and claim British English is more conservative. But neither claim is accurate or meaningful; and when you try to look at the big picture, you notice changes everywhere.

To complicate it further, neither “British English” nor “American English” refer to any actual variety. Those are only umbrella terms; they boil down to “English, arbitrarily restricted to people who live in the territory controlled by that specific government”. And the actual varieties that they speak might keep or change completely different features.

Backstory of the spelling of that word:

Latin colōrem (accusative of color) gets inherited by Old French as color /ko’lor/.

Somewhere down the line Old French shifted /o/ to /u/. I believe this shift affected at first stressed vowels, or that the distinction between unstressed /o/ and /u/ was already not a big deal; so there was more pressure to respell the last (stressed) vowel than the first (unstressed) one. So the word gets spelled color, colour, colur.

Anglo-Norman inherited this mess, spelling it mostly as colur. Then Middle English borrows the word, as /ku.'lu:r/~/'ku.lur/. It’s oxytone in AN, but English has a tendency to shift the stress to the first vowel, creating the second pronunciation. Spelling as usual for those times is a mess:

• colur - spelled like in Anglo-Norman.
• color - swap the ⟨u⟩ with cosmetic ⟨o⟩. Scribes hated spelling ⟨u⟩ in certain situations, where it would lead to too many vertical lines in a row; that’s why you also got come, love, people instead of cume, luve, peuple.
• colour - mirroring an Old French spelling that was more common up south, around Paris.
• coloure - that ⟨e⟩ was likely never pronounced, I think it was there to force reading the previous vowel as long
• coler - probably from some /'ku.lur/ pronunciation already reducing the vowel to */'ku.lər/
• kolour - ⟨c⟩~⟨k⟩ mixing was somewhat common then. And no, KDE did not exist back then, they did no lobby to spell the word with a K for the sake of a program that would only appear centuries later (Kolourpaint).

Eventually as English spelling gets standardised, the word settles down as colour.

Then around 1800, Noah Webster treats this word as if it was directly borrowed from Latin. Since in Latin it’s color, he clipped the -u. And his dictionary was popular in USA, recreating the mess, even after it was already fixed.

*Caution* the sexy girl in my avatar may have fire.

February 04, 2025

I wonder if they gave up, after seeing how poorly Copilot was received.

I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.

Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be

1. You got some experience with that distro and you’re willing to help the newbie in question, with issues that they might have.
2. The distro offers sane out-of-the-box defaults and pre-installed GUI software.
3. The distro is reliable, and won’t give the newbie headaches later on.

why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?

Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.

You don’t know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don’t know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.

Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma

I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It’s by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.

Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don’t know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that’ll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.

So, why don’t I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.

That’s circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.

Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS

Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.

Years ago, a streamer called John Bull introduced his concept of trust thermocline, to explain why businesses get away with abusive practices for a long time, but then something small makes lots of customers leave.

That makes sense for me: customers might not always act on what they perceive as corporate abuse, but they aren’t blind, nor amnesic. They see it and remember. And all those small instances of abuse pile up, until the customer says “that’s the straw breaking the camel’s back” and gets out.

I think Microsoft might have just reached such thermocline.

Given the current political landscape, I find way more likely that some random American province declares independence than a Canadian one.

This made me think on the potential roles the three outer planets* (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the scheduler.

• Uranus: looking at things from a new angle. Innovation, intuition, ruptures with tradition. Higher octave of Mercury; so if Mercury is ruling network and I/O tasks, perhaps Uranus could rule specifically data creation and writing?
• Neptune: elevating things past the concrete, into the abstract. Inspiration, illusion, refinement. Higher octave of Venus; so if Venus rules desktop and UI processes, Neptune could focus on the windowing system.
• Pluto: changing the nature and “hidden-ness” of the things. Metamorphosis, unearthing, cycles of [con/de]struction. Higher octave of Mars; so if Mars handles CPU hogs, Pluto could handle specifically things that have to do with cryptography.

*before the “ackshyually” crowd points this out, the word “planet” in Astrology is used to convey any moving (from our PoV) celestial object. It includes things Astronomy wouldn’t consider as planets; such as the Sun (a star), the Moon (a satellite), and Pluto (nowadays a dwarf planet). So the situation is a lot like tomatoes being fruits, you know? “Yes” or “no” depends on the definition, and the definition is built around a purpose.

Also I’d like to point out that, although I learned a fair bit of Astrology in my teens and 20s, I don’t take it seriously. It’s mostly babble, like tarot; but just like tarot, it’s fun babble.

Be glad they didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto.

Imagine some system task running like your computer was a potato. Then you look for the reason, and it’s because the task is a CPU hog, and its associated planet is in Cancer/Scorpio/Pisces. Now imagine the associated planet was Pluto, that spends ~20 years per sign. (Note some astrology schools do take those planets into account.)

In fact even system daemons and kernel threads (Saturn) will be a mess, 2.5 years per zodiacal sign.

So yeah, fucking dumb idea. But brilliant at the same time.

Just as a heads up, you accidentally posted the same question four times.

That said yes, it’s piracy.

This would be hilarious, if not so sad. Screw it, it’s damn bloody funny.

I bet they either fired their Windows QA team and “replaced” it with AI, or it’s so overburdened with all the “vibe” coded trash that they simply gave up.

This got to do with bogus AI reports, doesn’t it?

I’ve switched systems some 15? years ago. But my mum did it recently, so I asked her this question. (Disclaimer: she isn’t the one managing her machine. Guess who does it.)

She claims it’s basically the same thing. She was surprised her start menu got different some days ago (when I updated her Mint), but it was the good type of surprise, like, “ah, it shows my profile pic now!”. Then she rambled about things that disappear from her email, but that is not an OS issue, it’s PEBKAC (she’s extremely disorganised). And… that’s it.

The author could downgrade it, and that’s what he did… or alternatively bite the bullet and go for Linux.

Even dual boot is an improvement, since the author mentions “programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me”.

Using Wine is an option… well. Buggy option.

Not really that buggy any more. Once you get a prefix well configured, it tends to run really smooth.

“Guys, there’s someone threatening us with an AK-47. But do not worry! I’m bringing a rubber duck against the bully! It’s an incredibly powerful rubber duck!”