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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s rare that English children who learn Spanish as the first foreign language that they’re exposed to. If their parents are immigrants, then it’ll likely be their parents’ mother tongue(s), and if they’re not, they’ll likely be taught some French before any Spanish. That can then lead to a habit of saying any foreign word with a French accent.

    Also, England has strong regional variations in accent, so you might be hearing people say exactly the same vowel sounds as they’d use when speaking English, but those vowel sounds might be totally different to how you’re expecting that they’d speak English.



  • I think you might have misjudged when LCDs became common as by the end of 2004, when Halo 2 released, LCD TVs were already a reasonable fraction of new TV sales, and in parts of the world, it was only a few months later that LCD TVs became the majority. For PC monitors, the switch came earlier, so it was clear CRTs were on the way out while the game was being developed. If they hadn’t expected a significant number of players to use an LCD and tweaked the game as much as necessary to ensure that was fine, it would have been foolish



  • In a lot of the world they’re regulated as novelty items, so free from the regulation that stops harmful chemicals being in things like kitchen utensils and childrens’ toys, despite many of the same potential risks being present. You don’t need to use a corner-cutting regulation-ignoring retailer like Wish to get your fix of toxic plasticisers etc…






  • Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don’t think they’re bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn’t necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They’re just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn’t stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn’t expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they’ll use it.



  • The discussion on the talk page was basically nuh uh, loads of reputable sources like the Israeli and German governments say there’s no evidence of genocide, and even if they’re biased, anti-genocide NGOs are more biased because they have to accuse nations of genocide to justify their existence, with people responding to point out that’s not how Wikipedia’s rules work, and if it were, they’d have to rename the pages on various other genocides because there are very few that no nations deny.



  • If you trust Adam Smith, an efficient market would quickly make new goods and services available for the lowest possible price. People are supposed to be incentivised to sell things, and competition is supposed to stop an excessive amount of money being diverted to profits instead of reinvestment and price cuts. There are supposed to be systems in place that ensure that there are always opportunities for competition, but the wealthiest have the most power to erode those mechanisms and the most interest in eroding them, and neoliberals think an Ayn Rand novel is the definitive text on how capitalism works rather than Adam Smith’s work, so even if you land in the capitalism makes everyone better off mode, it doesn’t last for long before it falls back into fuedalism with extra steps mode.


  • I don’t think anyone who ever texted like that is still under 25 anymore. It rapidly dropped off around 2010 as smartphones with full keyboards became widespread, and not using full words was a signal that you hadn’t got one yet. That was fifteen years ago, so to still be under 25, you’d have had to be texting people while aged under ten, and people didn’t give preteens phones back then.


  • There are a fair few troubleshooting things I’ve seen where I could have smugly pointed out a clever way Windows avoids the same problem or an easy way it provides to solve it, so it doesn’t even always need the lol at the end. It’s just an annoying thing to see when you’re already annoyed at a disobedient computer, unless learning the technical details would be an interesting distraction, so should be saved for when you know your audience and know it’s interesting.