I also have to laugh when someone takes a very rough estimate (around a hundred miles) and converts it to metric with 4 significant figures (160.9 km). Even 160 is too precise when talking about a distance of 80-120 miles. If the original number has 1 sigfig, the conversion should too, even if that feels way off.

This always (and only) happens to me in big company meetings and it’s really hard to get out of those or to find a coping mechanism that would be socially acceptable. So last time I kinda freaked out right before I reached the assembly room, grabbed my stuff and went home. I don’t even think anyone noticed, everyone goes home right after anyway.

I really enjoy the Donki, it’s just cramped enough to make cozy nooks for me to hide between the Pikachu bath towels and the Love Live soap dispensers.

febr//uary skips the second box, so I think they aimed to have an equal number of options in each column.

The hard part is getting the 10 IQ points to follow the specs properly when designing the components.

If there’s a clear pattern, regex is your friend. I use it for complex find-and-replace actions, or to generate code based on a template and a list of values (find a value, replace it with the template including the value). Full control over the output, more reliable even than manual copy-pasting.

And that’s ignoring the Uma Musume manga releasing earlier and My Little Pony: Make Your Mark enjoying modest popularity. And of course the simple fact that people can still be quite fond of cartoon horses who no longer get any new episodes.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Season 9 Episode 26: 2019-10-12

Uma Musume Pretty Derby Season 1 Episode 1: 2018-04-02

There was an 18 month overlap where you could watch two sets of animated cartoon horses.

For the English dub, yes. I even found Italian, French, German, Spanish and Russian. But none of the pirates set their VPN to Netherlands to get the Dutch dub.

And then you have me, who’s so hardcore I was forced to sign up for Netflix so I could watch the Dutch dub of Tonari no Totoro . If I was any more hardcore, I’d figure out how to rip it from there, because it’s the only home release it ever got, as far as I can tell. Can’t even find a second-hand VHS (wouldn’t be acceptable quality anyway).

But that whole situation means I’m a Netflix subscriber who “prefers dubs” for their stats, even though I rarely watch a dub.

Why do you keep Gemini installed? Does it even work offline?

What the hell happened to Edward’s face?

AI upscaling is the newest vector of digital rot. We already had forced compression, watermarks, people making screenshots instead of saving the picture and now there’s AI upscaling guessing at details that never existed.

Here’s the original picture.

Edit: Found a better resolution that wasn’t decAIed

It also looks like that 1973 picture of Nixon’s bedroom is newer than the website design, so I’m not surprised it isn’t using https.

Wow, you’d think it wouldn’t be this hard. There’s White House archives online, but they all seem to be text only. Articles about the rose garden, but never any pictures. And when it’s an article with pictures from 2000-2016, it’s only historical pictures, as if showing a contemporary picture would be the most redundant thing to do in an article about a rose garden.

Is tysto someone’s personal archive of whitehousemuseum.org? I don’t get the domain name, the home page mentions the other domain (which is for sale). Wikipedia lists whitehousemuseum.org under “External links” for a collection of photos.

It’s not racist to say that a theocracy scares a lot of smart people away. I know multiple Iranian families who all fled Iran after 1979 and came to Europe. All highly educated, all very opposed to the Islamic Republic that ruined their country.

Here, the effect is notable enough to have its own Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight_from_Iran

The more obvious choice would be to make everyone go dark, instead of setting up nationwide voice mail to pretend everyone is alive. But maybe this way they can keep everyone’s communications open while also fooling most of these intelligence gathering methods (someone answered, in the right language, mark it as active).

I paid for Lingodeer Lifetime, which was $120 at the time. I thought that was pretty hefty already, but it was like 8 months of monthly subscription, and I figured I would need that much time to get through the course anyway. “Regular” price for lifetime is apparently $300, but they constantly run sales that take it down to more reasonable amounts.

On the other hand, I have to admit that the quality of the course is worth the $300 and I too learned more from a few months of Lingodeer than 2 years of Duolingo. They’re also honest in that they teach you all the grammar fairly quickly with a minimal vocabulary and then just end the course with the advice to start reading books. They’re not trapping you in language purgatory like Duolingo does.

Early Duolingo was curated and corrected by the community. Clearly people were volunteering to do it, so I don’t know why they removed all the community tools and are now using AI to fill the gap.

I think if you look at child development research, you’ll see that kids can learn to do crazy shit with very little input, waaay less than you’d need to train a neural net to do the same. So either kids are the luckiest neural nets and always make the correct adjustment after failing, or they have some innate knowledge that isn’t pattern-based at all.

There’s even some examples in linguistics specifically, where children tend towards certain grammar rules despite all evidence in their language pointing to another rule. Pure pattern-matching would find the real-world rule without first modelling a different (universally common) rule.

How do prescriptions for glasses even work on your side of the pond? I assumed it was just jargon of a sort, because round these parts I just go to a glasses seller and ask him for his strongest glasses. Then he says “no traveller, my strongest glasses are too strong for you, you can’t handle my strongest glasses” and does the eye test with me before making lenses at the proper strength.