People believe themselves to be part of the in-circle as “one of the good ones”. My father is a Trump-supporting anti-immigrant immigrant. But when he says “immigrant”, he really means Hispanics and blacks, not Asians like himself.

I even know an Afghan guy who loves Trump. He grew up under the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, so he hates Islam. When Trump says Muslim countries are bad, this guy 100% agrees. He thinks he and Trump are on the same side, because he’s no longer Muslim. Trump, or course, would have him arrested and deported on sight for being brown.

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

We barely rejected the right wing nuts, and they could easily take the next election. While relief is warranted, we should not be smug or complacent about it, either. Lies more faster than the truth, it’s still an uphill battle for morality and decency.

Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

The best use, for me, is asking ChatGPT to give me five (or however many) scholarly, peer-reviewed articles on a topic. Then I search for said articles by title and author name on my school library database.

It saves me so much time compared to doing a keyword search on said same database and reading a ton of abstracts to find a few articles. I can get to actually reading them and working on my assignment way faster.

AI is a great tool for people who use it properly.

I don’t understand what you mean by Firefox’s development is driven by the community? It’s not a community contributed open source software; my friend worka on Firefox and is a Mozilla employee.

The problemo see with this construct is that it only benefits current actors. There won’t be space for a new generation of actors.

About cars, and not necessarily designed poorly, but definitely designed by a man for men: cars that, by default, automatically, immediately unlock all doors when the engine is turned off. A man might be car jacked or robbed, a woman might be car jacked, robbed, or raped.

(Of course men can be raped too, but it’s not as likely to happen by a strange woman threatening violence than a woman is to be raped by a strange man threatening the same.)

Remembering birthdays is a reflection of how much someone cares about birthdays. There’s no need to read anything more into that.

Many people (this thread is an example) are either completely indifferent to birthdays or even dislike them. To us (I’m indifferent) birthdays are totally pointless and basically a fact related to identification, like a student number or social insurance number. I remember my student and social insurance number because I have to, in order to function at school and in society. I don’t ask anyone else’s student numbers because it’s entirely pointless and useless information to me.

From what you’ve described, it sounds like she’s a straight forward and direct person, which is good. Just be straight forward and direct (but tactful) with her. Something like, “I’m sorry, I think I misunderstood the situation. I’d like to hang out as friends, but I’m not looking for anything more.” Optionally, “We can have that drink if it’s just as friends, but I’m not going to lead you on if you want something more.”

I got the Logitech Lift and found it didn’t do it for me. It’s certainly better than a traditional mouse, but it’s at an angle that’s still not neutral. I ended up getting an Evoluent and it was much more comfortable.

I feel this so much. I got into stamp collecting, and I totally enjoy stamps and mail and all, but (old) people are so pretentious about it. The worst are the total hypocrites about it, too.

"I got into stamps when I was young, but I stopped when I went to university/started working/had a family because I didn’t have time for it, and came back to it after I retired.

"Philately is supposed to be academic and scholarly. You’re not a real philatelist if you’re not doing original research.

"Young people just don’t have the patience for stamps!

“The hobby is dying, why don’t young people want to collect stamps anymore??”

Actually, a lot of people do and share lots of stuff online (where the old people are not seeing it and thus is not happening). We’re just not writing 16-page papers about them (which is the standard a expected thing to do in “philately”).

To my understanding, that’s the way ancient Romans viewed it. For lack of more delicate and concise words, it manly to top, unmanly to bottom. Gay sex was acceptable if the sexual roles reflected their social roles.

Let’s be honest, most people who learn Tai chi as an exercise also don’t realize that it’s joint locks and throws.

The thing that I can’t understand about this product is why they didn’t cover the function keys. They are literally functional.

Don’t take it personally, applying for a job is a game of chance as much as a game of merits. It’s simply a numbers game and luck whether your resume even gets looked at in the first place, even if you’re résumé how all their keywords. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of other resumes also hit their keywords.

If you’re lucky enough to get through the first sifting and get an interview with the hiring person (not an HR screener who doesn’t know anything about the job), then you can ask and maybe get a response on how you could have improved. (Don’t ask why you weren’t hired.)

While there must certainly be some devout Muslims who try their best to keep the “rules”, as I’d expect in any group, a lot of Muslims are not so different frombthe rest of us non-Muslims.

My coworker is a former Muslim who had to leave his home country due to persecution when he became a Christian. Here, he’s made Muslim friends who regularly invite him over for dinner and they serve… Pork. They say because he is not a Muslim, they respect that and don’t force him to eat halal. But why does not forcing him to eat halal equate to them eating pork?

They are genuinely his friends, but he is also their “excuse” to break halal.