NGram

I’ve mirrored it to my own git server too https://git.ngram.ca/mirrors/cdrm-project I will ignore DCMAs because I (and the server) don’t live in the USA.

This is the first and only post by the account, so it’s not worth interacting with

I was hoping it was an April Fools joke but now I’m just disappointed for two reasons.

We are discussing what someone would use when writing about a hypothetical person.

And that changes it how? It’s insulting to misgender someone, though I can understand how you’d think that there’s no harm in insulting someone hypothetical.

I suggest you do some research on the history of language

Per your suggestion, “they” has been used to refer to a singular person since the 14th century. “He” is currently masculine-only. I apologize if you misunderstood my use of “never” to refer to things around the 18th and 19th century (when it apparently was considered bad to use “they” in the singular) when I presumed that there was an implicit limit to modern usage of English.

Someone with undetermined/unknowable gender would use the pronouns they/them, never he/him.

This sounds like open weights but not actually open source (which requires an open training set), but we can only hope they are true to their promises when they actually release it. Bonus points if they also release how much energy they wasted to train it and how much energy it wastes to run it.

Ticketmaster is doing their very best to make paper tickets unusable with refreshing barcodes. Funny thing is that “anti-theft” feature is needed because of their own systemic failures. I do like tickets that are just sent to my email or similar (e.g. as an attachment that I can save to my phone) though, it’s better than wasting paper when I know my phone won’t fail me.

Regular smart watches are such a luxury good that I’m surprised they’ve been growing up until last year. Realistically most people don’t need a smart phone that’s more than like $300 and I can’t imagine spending more than that on a smart watch which just duplicates most of the features of a smart phone (and adds a few more sensors if you’re lucky).

The rise in kids smart watches is a bit alarming to me, though. If the reason for it is truly that parents want to track their kids more, that’s really bad for the kids for two big reasons. First being that kids need to learn how to behave without their parents always watching, and second is that if the parent can see where the kid is then probably so can the company who made the smart watch. Maybe they’ll make a smartwatch which sends location data over something like the Signal protocol to mitigate 3rd party tracking, but I doubt there’s a big enough demand for that for any of the major companies to do that on their own.

Just don’t host it with a USA company.

(Self-promo: https://git.ngni.us/mirrors/Ryujinx is still up, hosted in Canada)

I do almost the same thing as a(n unpaid) hobby that I do as my (paid) job. I’m a software developer who writes open-source software on the side.

I’ve also seen a few of my other hobbies grow into serious industries with real employees. The (hobby) drone industry and the 3D printing industry are quite large and growing (I assume).

If you thought about the planet you wouldn’t be using smart devices at all, especially not completely unnecessary ones.

Twitch Plays Pokemon is still better

Interestingly the article about steganography does not mention the term even once.

Relativity would prevent this. If the train moves at the speed of light, then nothing inside it will move because time will stop. The amount of trains inside trains doesn’t really change much except the effect of time dilation (slowdown) on each train. You can’t actually accelerate to the speed of light.

They may have mixed up the British commonwealth. Canada has a similar population to California

If they go into influential people’s houses or into important businesses, I can think of a few reasons to bribe them to do things for you.

If the US government didn’t work with the US military that would be crazy

I just sat down to do my annual donations, so I’ve got the list ready to go:

• local food bank
• local safe injection site
• Signal
• KDE
• OpenMedia (closest thing to EFF in Canada)

A few places I couldn’t afford to donate to this year, in case anyone needs more ideas:

• archive.org
• EFF
• miscellaneous software projects I’m using (mostly Steam Deck plugins because I’m in that community a lot)
• Gnome

I also give a bit to Tor and The Beaverton monthly.

Victims are all SOL, in more ways than one

I like to divide my spending into two broad categories: needs and wants. For example, I need food and shelter to survive, but I only want that really cute blahaj (even though it feels like I need it). Things that I want I can skip, things that I need I cannot. You have to be very honest with yourself for that to work well though.

Of course life is not fun if you’re only surviving, so it’s OK to treat yourself occasionally with things you want. Just make sure you’re saving enough before spending on “wants”.

It’s also often possible to break down “needs” further, since you may need some functionality (e.g. something to eat, something to hit nails with, etc.) but the specific item is not a need. I will prefer the cheapest option if I don’t have any other requirements. I tend to like things that’ll last though (they’re usually cheaper in the long run), so I’m willing to not cheap out if that’s a factor.

I am a very pragmatic and minimalist person though, so I don’t think this advice will work for everyone.