FYI, The Straits Times is basically a step down from a state mouthpiece. If you don’t believe me, just read the article:

The cannabis seized from Omar is sufficient to feed the addiction of about 144 abusers for a week.

Here’s a Human Rights Watch article from five days ago not flagrantly trying to justify the state-sanctioned murder of a man convicted of an entirely harmless crime. Fuck TST for this journalistic swill.

Thanks! I don’t contribute there nearly as often as Wikipedia, but I do think it’s seriously underappreciated in that very few people seem to know about it. It’s so convenient to just have multiple languages in one place, and I usually find that Wiktionary gives me more and better information than standard dictionaries. (I try to help keep that order when I make new entries.)

What I especially love is that we can do a lot of fun things that regular dictionaries can’t; one of them that I made a while back (based off of a table of chess pieces) is a table of all the signs of the zodiac. Most major languages have one now for each of their zodiac signs – for example, ‘Bélier’, the French of ‘Aries’.

This is what the actual page looks like. It’s a reasonably common layout for older publications like this.

Compared to other developed nations, yes, but it still hits Americans very hard because cars are by no means a luxury in the vast majority of places and circumstances in America.

It’s not something you can just forego and be a few minutes late on a crowded tram or not be able to stop for coffee on the way; even in places with relatively good public transit intrastructure that aren’t the largest of the largest cities, it could be the difference between being there in 15 minutes and being there in two hours with no way back except a $30 cab ride because you miscalculated and missed the last (but still pretty early) bus by two minutes.

All snow doesn’t instantly melt above freezing just like all the water in your pot doesn’t instantly evaporate when you turn on the heat. The temperature can rapidly fluctuate up above freezing while there’s still a bunch of snow on the ground, and that takes a while (sometimes days) to melt. Melting is affected by factors like shade, snow depth, etc., so while the picture shows no snow, there might be plenty surrounding it – which could be expected accounting for survivorship bias (namely that the lovebugs are unlikely to be lovin’ on top of a foot of snow).

That’s seriously incredible. Thank you for sharing.

68°F.

If you think of 20°C as super conveniently being room temperature (68°F) and use that as an anchor; you can then, within about +/- 40°F, think of every +/-5°C as about +/-10°F. For example:

• 20 - 10 = 10°C (50°C) is approx. 68 - 20 = 48°F
• 20 - 20 = 0°C (32°F) is approx. 68 - 40 = 28°C
• 20 + 10 = 30°C (86°F) is approx. 68 + 20 = 88°F

That is, if you use 20°C/68°F as an anchor, take the difference in Celsius from 20°C, multiply that by two, and add it to 68°F, you have a decent approximation of what the temperature is in Fahrenheit. That’s assuming 20°C is the only anchor you have and that you never want to learn what other temps are – just a compact, minimal-memorization algorithm that gets you close enough for the rare times you need it.

(The real algorithm is that x°C = (y°F - 32) ÷ (1.8))

Sorry. 😭 19th-century social Darwinist texts, old Cleveland Plain Dealer news stories, beetle insecticide salespeople, and dictionaries seemed like a williwaw of boring.

that looks like it’s misinterpreting two word fragments across the two adjacent pages.

Correct! Because “pur-” is at the right side and “positively” is at the left of the next vertical line, Google Books gave up and said: “Fuck it.”

Does anyone have something to clean the cum stain off the word “fucking”?

I think a little Nuka Cola Quantum splattered on the word “fuck”.

I glossed over this the first time reading the article:

The grand opening also included a food truck, tent sauna, a samba music group, as well as a brass band.

Have the Nordic countries gone too far?

Oh, no, I figured that; that’s why I mentioned local first. I figured American carbrains would be the next-most-likely (albeit distantly) to care as a group, e.g. if Fox News decided that it was time to make it the newest attraction in their carbrain haunted house.

Sorry, I must’ve forgotten that paragraph while I was replying. My understanding having read about this a couple years back is that controversy was pretty frontloaded (“originally controversial”) and that the debate did, like in most any large infrastructure project, continue for years after. That is, I think drivers care and are disappointed about this but aren’t losing their minds over it.

Even beside that, if every carbrain across Helsinki were coping and seething right now, I think my overall point stands that turning every victory for good into a focus on how pissed “the enemy” must surely be right now isn’t at all healthy or productive.

This must make the car brains incredibly mad. I love it.

I don’t really assume so. The article from reasonably neutral Yle mentions nothing about local pushback (edit: see below; they do talk about debate, and I still don’t think it’s that major), and I really doubt American carbrains are reading – let alone caring about – Yle or the Helsinki Times.

I know what community and year we’re in, but can’t we just celebrate one nice thing without warping it into an attack on an imagined adversary, à la “I’ll bet the libs are fucking pissed over this”? Nice things can just be nice things sometimes.

I thought he was talking about

I’m about to blow your fucking mind, then: “purpositive” is a word too as a nonstandard variant of “purposive”, most commonly that I’ve seen used to replace it in “purposive sampling”. “Purpositively” is a word that has some small but real usage and that you could use if you ever stop giving a shit.

Like TikTok [… isn’t] basically the same thing as TV.

Dude, what TV were you watching? Even clip shows like AFV weren’t as WarioWare as TikTok is. TikTok is a nonstop whiplash of extremely short-form shit which you’re incentivized to absorb emotionally but not to think about – way moreso than TV. The content is way shorter, and importantly, it’s bouncing back and forth between completely different subjects every dozens of seconds or so. Even in the era where TV is mostly VoD, this doesn’t hold up.

The parallels are there with YouTube if you watch it in a certain way (I’d argue saying “YouTube is the same” is wrong too because there are a trillion ways to watch it that act nothing like TV, i.e. that this comparison is a subset of YouTube), but to say “video playback with ads, therefore TV” for TikTok is the most ridiculous oversimplification of it I’ve ever seen.

TikTok is like TV in the way that a machine gun was like a musket. Like, kind of? Technically? If you want to strip away all nuance? Shooty thing go pew?

Dude, do you realize how fucking long 5000 words is? That’s approximately 11 pages with 12-point font single-spaced – consisting, to emphasize, of just words. That would represent an overwhelming majority of pages that people are reading and is well beyond a “long page”. If this is your attempt to make fun of the feature’s limitations, you’ve actually instead surprised me that they allow this much.

Mind as well that your cited limitation is more to do with on-board processing power than “the LLM will probably fuck it up”. Which are connected, sure – more sophisticated, resource-intensive models tend to do better. But that’s not really apples-to-apples with what they were talking about.

Diabolical. I’m at least holding out hope that, at some point, children’s TV character Arthur Read and talk show host Conan O’Brien cowrote for the Finnish broadcaster Yle – else why would it be advertised on the covers of those books?