Ys. Fr n nglsh spkr t’ll b hrd. Nt mpssbl t prnnc bt hrd.

I don’t think that’s either/or. You’ll inevitably get the folks determined to defend their houses, those who underestimate the danger, those who were surprised by fires, those who were incapable of moving to safety faster. All of the above. Once a fire started, they can kind of forecast where it will be going. But you don’t know where it will start exactly.

I think the only sensible thing is to encourage the elderly and those who might need help evacuating to do this up front. That is before the season starts or better still permanently. Move care facilities out of forested areas. Inform the public about the dangers. And hope for the best.

Edit: I just read that the victims are probably mostly foreign tourists. So I add as a recommendation: make information available in other languages.

47, like his erstwhile buddy Epstein, deals in favor/counterfavor. The sheiks who paid for the jet scratched his back in exchange for a US favor, possibly pushing the repeat Nobel peace laureate runner up into war on Iran. And if he and his own can get rich in the process, no, wait, that’s plan A. All the rest is just theater and headline generation. I suspect the ballroom is just helping direct tax funds into construction companies that are owned by his former fixer’s neighbor’s third cousin’s dog’s groomer’s husband. The NYT will enlighten us in time.

I think the US military will be able to inspect the plane and discover any hidden bugs. You don’t really need to track the plane; it’ll be on the news. As for the White House, even if a republican wins the next election, I’d fire the entire staff and send the military counterintelligence outfit through there with a fine toothed comb. A Democrat incumbent will probably sleep somewhere else for a while, pointing to “necessary” renovation work. I don’t think that that would be paranoid.

There is a lot of talk about bringing back the wooly mammoth that way but they are collecting funds and not delivering so far. I think some celebrity cloned their dog but IIRC they took samples while the OG puppy was still around. To be fair, I am not sure about that story.

Technically, it’s probably possible with a human but the science isn’t quite there yet. They like to test this first on other creatures before they graduate to bringing back Napoleon or whoever. And that is saying nothing about ethical and legal restrictions on top of that.

Why are we doing this again? CPS can’t do anything useful outside the US.

They’re fighting in Japanese courts ostensibly because their lives were centered in Japan. So Japanese rules apply, which probably favor the mother. Shared custody is unfortunately a new concept. For that, it depends on many things. None of them fall within the purview of US CPS.

I think it’s the same everywhere in the developed world. There are things that will just keep virtually forever, like honey or tea bags, but they come with an expiry date of some sort. Because at some point, allegedly, ol’ moneybags himself lobbied for legislation like that to make people buy more stuff.

I’m in Japan and if I didn’t blatantly disregard the dates and guidance they print on bread I’d never finish a pack.

Did you hear about that curved building in London that reflected light so well you could cook an egg in the street a block away? I think you could make an argument for white surfaces to reflect light into buildings but full blown mirrors are probably a fire hazard.

I’m going to exercise my free speech here: what a good job ChatGPT did at summarizing this video. Is this really a thought provoking post or just a way to boost the views over at YT?

If the US model is so great, why is the country so royally fucked right now? The first amendment only tells governments not to limit what people can say. If you have enough money you can buy CBS or the Washington Post and silence critical voices or just scuttle the whole ship respectively. And that’s not the government censoring, it’s just a good buddy of the big guy or some brownnoser doing it looking for favors at the court of the king. Freedom of speech becomes something you need to be able to afford. When even the big guy files frivolous lawsuits against media outlets that didn’t want to get up his ass for a gazillion dollars. Just to tie them down in courts hoping they will settle and in the meantime be extra careful not to incur more wrath. What happens when hate speech and libel laws don’t work, you get Alex Joneses who make a business model out of being a despicable excuse for a human being. Your freedom of speech situation is very much like your healthcare system, in that it is very different from lots of other developed nations and the consequences are tragic.

Don’t call me Shirley.

It’s like with planting trees. The best time was to plant some 50 years ago, the second best time is now. But it is too late in many ways.

Log this: you violated rule #1

No. And not likely at all.

No.

Why “even?” Even after struggling with privacy concerns you don’t think they’re the future of wearables. Shouldn’t that be “because of?” Normally, privacy concerns aren’t a big plus point. I didn’t want to buy this hypothetical device but after learning all the data goes directly to an unencrypted database on an open server in the cloud, I was all in?

TL;Dr because of this dumb premise that is the first sentence:

As someone who is largely (if not always) inseparable from my iPhone’s camera, the desire to test out Meta’s elusive AI glasses was a natural next step.

If that’s your natural next step, your opinion doesn’t matter to me.

Why do you post the same stuff under different titles in different communities? What’s the weirdest thing in english?

I vote spelling. English spelling makes less sense than French or Danish and they take mothereffing liberties as well. No naturally occurring, alphabet using language will probably score perfect on that but I suspect English will be in the relegation zone of that table.

Nothing fills my heart with such joy as negative Meta headlines.

Stop fooling around with “he used his private money”, it’s money he earned with this company, by donations, VPN and services, paid by the users.

What you call fooling around I call a factual distinction. It’s also been pointed out that Mullvad money wasn’t possibly a big bulk of the donation. Because they’re not raking in the dough.

I’m not telling you not to be outraged. If I were a customer of theirs I’d be mad too. You draw your own line and that’s just fine with me. Let me draw mine.

I believe facts matter. Facts like Mullvad didn’t directly fund a Nazi party, but one of their owners did. And it wasn’t per se a Nazi party becausre they are more of the horseshoe persuasion where they try to marry ideas from the extreme right with those from the extreme left, which is an unfortunate trend in European politics right now. And I’ve pointed this out before: the real threat is already in the Swedish parliament as the 2nd largest fraction. They are the Sweden Democrats and they are probably more deserving of the Nazi label.

Machine translation is not good at tone. So if a friendly fuck you is a different expression from one uttered in anger, I’d be very careful. Puns and slang only if it’s established enough. By which I mean is been around for a while and the model could train on it. Hyperbole will also be tough because if it’s devoid of tone how would the computer know? And even if you run instant spoken translation I wouldn’t trust any assistant to get it right.

There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Granted, languages that are more closely related and in places that are culturally similar make it easier. But translation is also making choices. Different translators will make different choices. It would be madness to assume that any book would not contain parts that are at least questionable. That’s regardless of source and target languages. You’re operating under the false assumption that stuff in English is just better, maybe because it’s the most understood language on the planet if you count nonnatives as well. Free yourself of these biases.

I would also point out that neither 死亡 nor 戦死 strictly mean “died.” Without very specific context or a version of an accompanying する they would be translated as death/mortality and death in battle respectively. There you can see how little mistakes can creep in.

Also, since we are sliding into the movie Idiocracy by outsourcing more and more stuff to LLMs, expect more shitty translations. Who knows, your book may have been translated by a bot.