FishFace

I get annoyed just seeing all of these spelled out.

Speed is an absolute requirement for a launcher, and if one of the search providers is taking too long it needs to be removed until its speed makes it usable. There’s no way I want to wait for web results if they take between 1 and 10 seconds. The number of local results should always be such that it can be held in memory without being a burden, and return in an imperceptible amount of time.

I have never heard anyone fully elide the first vowel sound in “the morning” -it’s a schwa. The exception is Yorkshire accents which do so, and indeed, that shows you there is more to elide in “in the” than “at”.

“At m” is easier to say simply because it is fewer syllables - inserting more sounds rarely makes things easier to pronounce, and the fact that we say “at midday”, “at most” and “at many times” shows that there is no pressure to change these combinations of sounds.

But the whole thing is based on the faulty, unsupported premise that “in the” and “at” are in free variation. You can’t just start saying “in the midday” because it is ungrammatical, so if there were pressure to simplify “at most” we’d simplify its pronunciation (maybe to “ab most”) not swap preposition.

This is why I’m not giving more of a detailed argument about ease of pronunciation - because it’s not even relevant. That’s not how language picks prepositions. Like why do we say “I’m in the car” but “I’m on the bus”? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer lies in the history of the (Omni)bus, which used to often be open-topped, whereas the (motor)car was generally enclosed since its invention.

To find the answer in the case of morning and night requires tracing the etymology of the words and understanding the grammar used at the time they arose.

The sounds of “in th” can be said without moving any part of the mouth except the tongue, so I have no idea what you mean. Like, you can see them with your teeth touching and holding your lips completely still.

Your argument is completely post hoc to the extent that you’re forgetting whatever you were taught about phonology.

And you’ve skipped the vowel of “the” why, exactly? That’s a whole extra syllable in “in the” compared to “at”, which is definitely not easier. Your analysis is completely based on the difference between “the m”, “the n”, “at m” and “at n” but “at the” is grammatical so what about “at the morning”?

Yet another example of why fascists try to take over the education system and curriculum.

You assume that the things that informed you of trump’s lies were heard and found convincing by all the magas. Here’s living proof that people are capable of understanding, eventually.

How on earth is “in the morning” less effort than “at morning”? Doubly so for “afternoon”?

Prepositions in general don’t follow regular patterns in English. I would bet on there being, if any explanation, an etymological one: the origin of morning, afternoon, evening and night are all different, so the constructions which have since been contracted away will have been different.

I always thought carol of the bells was something mainly used in American movies to make choirs sound fancy. In contrast to ordinary carols which are easy tunes and don’t need multiple parts.

OK, I don’t think that is realistic.

Some people are like that, but some aren’t. Some people are convinced to hate a group because of lies, propaganda and confirmation bias. When the lies start to be exposed, it can also start to unravel the hatred.

It can be difficult to expose lies in a way that is convincing, especially nowadays when media is so polarised, so people from another camp are likely to think you are lying if you challenge their existing beliefs. But this is obviously an example of people starting to realise they’ve been lied to nevertheless.

Are you suggesting people might think you really said what was in the joke quote, and that you edited your comment into something else?

Appropriately enough the phrase “seed of doubt” is often used in religious contexts :)

That right there is a wedge that can be opened. (Not be someone who comes across as being left-wing, who they’ll likely reject out of hand, mind).

The seed of doubt has been sown, and now it remains to be asked just how kidnapping brown people (phrasing it that way won’t work but I’m not currently trying to convince anyone…) benefits them, personally. It’s an opportunity to examine the disconnect between things they feel are connected - “everything is shit and I don’t have enough money” and “there’s too many foreigners and brown people”.

Yes if only there were some way of detecting whether the quote was accurate or not 🙄

Pathfinding is another great example.

it’s not a pain

Here’s the dozen lines of config I had to write and tweak and debug to make it tolerable

Uh huh. You do you.

Yes, neural networks are, usually, AI, but no, thermostats are not AI.

The definition of AI is more or less “a machine that can accomplish something that an intelligent thing like a human can do but which would be unfeasible or impossible to create an explicit algorithm for the machine to follow in order to accomplish it.”

So natural language translation is AI: before it became usable in the 2000s, this was seen as something that only humans could do. Producing meaningful text and recognisable images from scratch or a prompt is AI for the same reason.

On the threadiverse people equate AI with Artificial General Intelligence, i.e. something capable of true reasoning, with something we might call “understanding” (not a concept that I can attempt to define, but if you think about that ability which LLMs lack in spite of being able to produce text as if they had it) but this is ahistorical.

People who like multi window gimp must be a very special kind of nerd. I used it before single window mode was added, but when it was I never looked back. Positioning each subwindow in a way that didn’t suck was such an absolute pain

Do the other effects for switching desktops, like the default slide, not accomplish the same thing? I also find that having no animation makes it harder to keep track of where things are, but just have the sliding one

Weirdly this happens on my work laptop (x11) but not any other Linux machine I’ve used including all the Wayland ones. I assume it’s due to video drivers.

yikes