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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Zarqa, the funniest thing I’ve ever watched. A spiteful, middle-aged, Pakistani Muslim divorcee in Regina tries to manage/rehab her reputation and ego… With disastrously hilarious results. It’s a short mini-series that can be watched in about two hours.

I just stumbled upon Gangnam Project. It’s about two biracial Korean-Canadian teens who go to S. Korea to connect with their roots and get all caught up in the K-Pop making machine. It’s meant for the tween market, but it’s just so different than anything I’ve seen (maybe I haven’t seen much) that I find it interesting. Plus who doesn’t live an eternally optimistic lead when the real world is crazy times? Obviously it’s dramatized, but I am kind of peripherally aware that idol-culture is a very serious deal in Asia, esp Korea. (Last year some K-Pop star publicly apologized for having a boyfriend?!) I wonder how much of it is based in reality and how much is just made up.

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.

If this doesn’t work for someone, there’s also Red Cross. They have volunteers teams that help people even with small scale disasters like someone’s home burned down. It’s not a big disaster, but for a family that’s perhaps lost everything, having someone to sit with them, give them blankets and maybe some food is a help.

https://www.redcross.ca/volunteer/emergency-management-volunteering

I absolutely agree that Internet should be a nationalized service, with the option of private players. Saskatchewan has (for cellphones) Sasktel by the government, and all prices are lower even from the for profit companies. We should have crown corps + private enterprise for everything that is an essential service. Mail has Canada Post + private couriers.

The nationwide Rogers outage… When was that, a year ago? Put all kinds of businesses, banking, local payment systems, etc. on hold. How is it acceptable to the nation that essential infrastructure is entirely private?

ISPs will provide service so long as it is profitable. It is not profitable to go to northern, remote areas through all the trees and terrain for the relatively few people who would be customers, even at 100% market share. If there was profit to be made by expanding to remote places, they’d be there already.

Although this thread is about Internet, this is also why it’s incredibly stupid for people to whine about Canada Post not being profitable. Of course its not profitable, its a national service that services literally every unprofitable community and person in the country. Even with the recent price increase, it definitely costs a lot more than $1.24 for Canada Post to deliver a letter from Windsor to Iqaluit.

Carney’s win was not a surprise, but I think the margin that he won by was a surprise for many.

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.