I know a couple who speak French and Spanish, and English is the majority language here. They speak and reply to each other in their own language. It’s amazing and I love it.

You may be interested to read about the scheme of intellectual and ethical development by William Perry. This website has it discussed only in terms of cognitive development, but I think you’ll see how it directly correlates to ethical development: https://neurolaunch.com/perrys-theory-of-cognitive-development/

I loved opening flip phones with a flick of the wrist, and the physical action of ending a call by closing it.

Wow, I’m so sorry to hear that. As a non-American, I didn’t realize the food safety situation was this dire. What an unnecessary, pointless death. How many more until the people finally turn on the government? Food is about as non-partisan or bi-partisan as you can get.

Speech-to-text (a type of AI) has been around for a fair good years, but now they’re being paired with generative AI. This is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be paired with a generative LLM. A language model to identify words? Yes. Generative? No.

As cheers_queer has experienced, “flood” means something specific in insurance. It’s wise for everyone to check your specific policies (even if you’re not currently experiencing water in your home). Water that comes up from your pipes/sewer, fresh water that enters your home over land, and salt water can be referred to and covered (or not covered) separately, depending on your specific policy.

The other day I went out for lunch with a friend and some acquaintances. One guy ordered a burger, and then he went on for a little time about how is it possible there are enough cows for everyone to have a burger? How many burgers can you get from a cow? Where are all these cows coming from??

So I said it’s factory farming, these cows are produced for the sake of their meat. A cow is huge, a quarter cow is enough meat to feed a family for a whole year. I don’t think this guy was being purposefully obtuse, because I don’t know him to have that kind of personality, so the only remaining explanation is he really is that ignorant/stupid. In this age, we have lots of people who don’t care, or wilfully turn their eye from it. But to not know?

May I suggest an iPod shuffle; there isn’t even a screen to interface with.

Personally, I’m in favour of “mamsir”, which is the obvious compounding of “ma’am” and “sir”. The Internet tells me it’s used in the Philippines, but I could have sworn I first heard of it being used in India 🤷‍♀️

If I know someone is a terrible person, I can’t enjoy their work. Besides not wanting to financially support them, I like to put myself in an author’s, actor’s, writer’s shoes when I watch/read stuff.

That said, I don’t purposefully look into people’s lives; I’m not into celebrity gossip. But sometimes a person is such an outlier or just so vocal about it that it’s unavoidable.

Thanks for articulating it this way for me. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me, at least in my situation. I reported my boss to the directors. He was (still is) planning to cut a guy from our team, claiming he costs too much. But when I did the math, I found that my boss’ personal expenses on food, gas, phone, vehicle, etc. (with increasingly unaccounted-for amounts) are more than that guy’s pay.

My boss isn’t worried about the financial health of the organization, he’s worried he won’t be able to keep spending it on himself if he has to pay the workers.

It’s happened to me several times that other shoppers have come up to me in a store to ask where such-and-such is, which I didn’t know the answers to 🤷‍♀️. I have never even worked retail before. (Food service, yes, retail, no.) I think maybe just walking with purpose gives off a vibe? I walk with purpose because I want to just buy what I need and get out 😂

I, for one, am a fan of bringing back the ascot. (but perhaps not during the height of the summer months.)

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.

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.

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.

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.