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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • The most recent one I saw was “Neige cause ralentissement de REM”. It works translated in English, giving something like “Snow causes slowing down of REM”, but in French it’s missing enough articles to sound wrong. The cromulent sentence would have been “La neige cause le/un ralentissement du REM”. Back into English this would add “The snow causes the/a slowing down of the REM”. A missing “le/la”, or using “de” instead of “du” doesn’t change the meaning of a sentence, but it makes it obvious that it wasn’t from a native speaker.

    Maybe it depends on the model and the source but so far, in French, for news, most of what I’ve read becomes uncanny after a few sentences. They often read like something passed through a translation program but just a tad better. You can understand it fine but it’s missing an article there, reversing the word order in another sentence, uses vocabulary that is just slightly off, and often ends up like something written by someone that learned French as a second language for most of their life. A very good learner, nearly native level, but not quite there yet and still a bit off.


  • As someone that doesn’t have a car and uses coaches, public transit, or bicycles to get around, I’ve always found it ironic that people are willing to be stacked and piled into planes for hours but refuse to take a public bus ride for an hour. Planes are the only place where people can’t just take their car to go somewhere and really have to put up with all the BS of traveling with other people.

    When I go visit my family and friends using public transit and it takes multiple hours, I sometimes fantasize that I could have gone to the airport and use the same amount of time to fly to a Caribbean island. People complain about planes but I’ve used public transit all my life so to me they’re just a tad worse than a packed public bus. At least planes have power and bathrooms, even if you have to climb over other people to use them.

    I also love bike touring so sometimes instead of taking 2.5 hours to go visit my family using public transit, I use the greenways to cycle there, spend the night camping in a small provincial park, and finish the rest of the ride the next day. It usually takes about 7 hours of continuous cycling, without the pauses for rest/food and the overnight. I could rent a car and drive there in about 1.5 hour but then I wouldn’t spend a night there. It’s not always easy, but it’s usually much more rewarding.

    So yeah, it’s relative.




  • Sometimes there’s also just different interests in the same thing.

    At some point I was waiting in line and wearing a Planet Express t-shirt. Someone passed by and made a math joke that I didn’t understand. I was confused for a few seconds then realized what I was wearing, replied that I wasn’t so much into math, and I just think electric mucus is an excellent choice for the colour of a ship. They seem a bit insulted and we quickly stopped exchanging plaisanteries.














  • The company, which is today back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is launching its open beta to the public

    Huh. I assumed Rose would still be behind stuff like this, but didn’t expect Ohanian.

    I’m a ‘Digg refugee’ that fled to Reddit around 2009, I think? I knew Digg from Rose, because I was watching Tech TV and The Screen Savers, around 2002.

    Anyway I turned my back on Digg when Rose sold out and I’m also going to avoid his new attempt at money making with an AI thingy.

    Digg is dead and is gonna stay dead to me. I don’t want its rotting dug up reanimated corpse with a sticker saying “now powered by AI!”

    EDIT: Coming to think about it, Tech TV turning into G4 might have been an early form of enshittificarion.



  • You should tell Gemini about it!

    Seriously I don’t know what version started what but Android is slowly getting more and more annoying for me to use. It’s like Windows where you have to spend multiple minutes, if not hours, in personalizing and removing bloatware. But then an update brings or restore more shit.

    I know it’s not all Android’s fault, but it adds up.

    For example, I know they are forced by the EU to lower the volume after a while, but sometimes I use weak bone conducting headphones and I NEED the volume to be at max.

    Or another are the mandatory presidential/amber alerts, where the government decides to make your phone scream an end of the world alarm because a child is missing 200 km away. I’d like to have normal notifications for that but no, only end of the world alarms.

    This one is on Android though and I’ll need to find how to disable that annoying “you haven’t used those apps in a while so permissions were removed” thigny. I don’t open some apps often, like my backup app, but it’s still used, unless Android decides to revoke permissions automatically. Like, I don’t use Wahoo in winter but when I want to use it back in summer, it cant find my sensors because permissions have been revoked.

    I’ve been annoyed and tired of using Android for a few years now. And I obviously won’t go to Apple. Maybe next time I’ll get a dumb phone and just carry a small computer with me for the rest.