Antisemitism has be co-opted and applied to any and all criticism of Israel, as opposed to it’s previous meaning, hatred of Jews/Judaism. This isn’t strictly because the meaning of the word is being used differently as much as it is that proponents of Israel like to conflate Israel with all of Judaism, or even more broadly with all Jews (as an ethnic group as opposed to a religious one). Since Israel takes any criticism to be hatred, the inevitable consequence is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. I’m splitting hairs here and probably making things more complicated than they need to be… But hopefully you understand what I’m getting at.

Incidentally, even in its more broadly accepted definition “antisemitism” itself is a bit of an etymological oddity, because “Semites”, or the Semitic people, are both Jews, Arabs and others… Judaeophobia is an alternative that is unquestionably specific to Jews/Judaism.

The tie is the most egregious part, if you zoom in the pattern makes no sense at all.

Unfortunately most English speakers don’t really understand the reasons we use a lot of the weirder cases & tenses. I don’t know if the same is true when learning German as a first language, but certainly in English most people just learn past/present/future and that’s about it… You don’t really get into the nitty gritty around situations like “I had intended to go to the pub later that day”, i.e. speaking about the future from the perspective of the past.

Anyway, in the case of was/were I will do my best with an acknowledgement that I am no expert despite being fluent in the damn language.

Was/were are usually singular/plural words that take you into the past continuous rather than simple past - consider “I worked” vs “I was working”, “we worked” vs “we were working”. The former of each pair implies that the work was a distinct event while the latter implies it was ongoing (I used it again there with “was ongoing”).

The “subjunctive mood”, mentioned in the title is about hypotheticals, e.g. “If I were you, I would go to the park today”, “I wish I were taller”, . In the subjunctive the verb remains in its infinitive form, which in this case is “were”.

To be completely honest though… “I wish I were never born” might be grammatically correct, but to my ear it sounds quite old fashioned, like something a Jane Austen character might say. I don’t think the majority of people would blink an eye if you said “was”.

There’s also “had been” and “would have” to consider… “If I had been taller everyone would have thought I was pretty”, this is also a hypothetical but honestly I don’t know what the case/tense we’re using here is… I’ll just have to leave you with that :D

The company I work for (we make scientific instruments mostly) has been pushing hard to get us to use AI literally anywhere we can. Every time you talk to IT about a project they come back with 10 proposals for how to add AI to it. It’s a nightmare.

I got an email from a supplier today that acknowledged that “76% of CFOs believe AI will be a game-changer, [but] 86% say it still hasn’t delivered mean value. Ths issue isn’t the technology-it’s the foundation it’s built on.”

Like, come on, no it isn’t. The technology is not ready for the kind of applications it’s being used for. It makes a half decent search engine alternative, if you’re OK with taking care not to trust every word it says it can be quite good at identifying things from descriptions and finding obscure stuf… But otherwise until the hallucination problem is solved it’s just not ready for large scale use.

Well hopefully after you use the bidet there won’t be any shit there lol, but no. The last few times I used a bidet there was TP as well, you just dab yourself dry with a little bit and put it in a bin. Less paper, not in the sewer, but you get a dry arse. Best of both worlds.

Alternatively you could dry yourself afterwards.

Steam/Proton on android would be quite something, I would finally be able to play something decent on my phone that wasn’t originally released for the PS2

Drying a dinner plate was how my teacher described turning. Starting with both hands opposite (10/2 or 9/3 would work fine) - push with one hand and slide the other one towards it until they meet at the top, then switch which hand is holding and reverse the motion, so you end up doing both, but you never cross your hands.

I knew there was something I wasn’t doing

Ahhh brings back memories from my YuGiOh days, sitting in the back of the shop opening extortionately expensive packs and playing game after game. I’d miss it if I didn’t now see just how much of a horrible waste of money it was.

It should be, but presently it accumulates in the assets/accounts of the 10 worst people you can imagine instead

I was initially impressed by the ‘reasoning’ features of LLMs, but most recently ChatGPT gave me a response to a question in which it stated five or six possible answers sparated by “oh, but that can’t be right, so it must be…”, and none of them was right lmao. Thought for like 30 seconds to give me a selection of wrong answers!

Wait, there’s something scrawled on the corner down here in crayon…

i’m lazy

The only part I disagree with is stone/pounds for people’s weight. Although we use stone, I’ve never heard someone use pounds… Maybe if you’re in Weight Watchers or something, but otherwise it’d be rounded to the nearest half a stone (e.g. 9 and a half stone)

Sounds utterly weird, but I’m intrigued

Oh man, yes. Dream Scenario. It went so very awry when it became clear what it’s actually about.

Seriously cool piece of kit! I have no use for it whatsoever, but can’t help but wish I did.

Spotify knows you’re not REALLY listening to it

Personally I prefer to call myself “fattened”, like a pig I suppose, as this clarifies that it is something that has happened to me, not simply something that I am. It’s not my fault, it’s the mince pies’ fault!

Actually they misspelled ‘ware’, they’re talking about who the nation’s biggest hero is afraid of.