pedz
@pedz@lemmy.ca
- Comment on "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym 1 week ago:
If you want to be serious, the word state and état are both coming from an older version of French when it was written estat. French replaced ES with É because it wasn’t pronouncing the S, while English dropped the E and kept pronouncing the S. It happened to multiple words, although some also come from Latin.
Étrange - Strange. Époux - Spouse. École - School. Épice - Spice. Éponge - Sponge.
It also happened with circumflex.
Hôpital - Hospital. Forêt - Forest. Pâte - Paste.
Here’s a whole video about exactly this.
- Comment on "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym 1 week ago:
The Netherlands, but in English the language is called Dutch.
But I prefer when it happens to cities. Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen. Liège or Luik or Lüttich. Ghent or Gand or Gent.
- Comment on It's interesting that we have multiple appliances in the kitchen who's sole job is to turn electricity into heat. 2 weeks ago:
Sure. It’s always “better” to burn stuff to generate more pollution in the air that you breathe, and also continue to depend on fossil fuel.
www.cbc.ca/…/gas-stoves-air-pollution-1.6394514
And “better” depends on your sources of energy and what your goals are. Like most people here, I grew up with an electric stove and we are just used to cook this way. It’s just an adaptation. I use gas stoves in camping and in my cabin, and I’m so used to an electric one, that I hate using gas.
Electricity here is cheap and clean so if you want to eat hot and warm food and minimize the impact on the environment, and your bank account, you should probably get used to cooking with electricity. There’s also different technologies. My mother prefers a glass-ceramic stove but induction stoves are also getting pretty popular. Or you can pay more, pollute more, continue to breathe the results of combustion and keep buying fossil fuel to cook “better”. I consider less pollution for millions of people, and less reliance on the oil & gas industry to be “better”.
- Comment on It's interesting that we have multiple appliances in the kitchen who's sole job is to turn electricity into heat. 2 weeks ago:
Where I live everything is electric for the vast majority of people. The norm here is to have electric stoves and electric water heaters. Even heating houses is mainly done through electricity.
I was so surprised to learn as a teen that this is not the norm everywhere, and that some people are actually still lighting fires in their houses to cook food.
- Comment on PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG 5 weeks ago:
In two parts.
- The before map would be of the only high speed train the US currently has, and it’s the Acela Express. So, something like this.
- If lots of people are consuming Tylenol in day to day life, and it causes autism, and some autistic people love trains, then the US should have a system like the map posted.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Broken clock theory. He’s right, obviously. It’s also interesting that he doesn’t say anything about Trump doing the same thing.
- Comment on New Arizona law to restrict online porn access; Pornhub will block state 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on But also, the correct answer is Devil's Due 5 weeks ago:
Lost, confused, disturbed, unsettled, baffled and eve a bit turned on.
This could describe every decon scene in ENT.
- Comment on What is the current state of Matrix? 1 month ago:
I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and gave I up because I already had a simple IRC setup that’s working for me and my friends.
Some IRC clients are now web based and it’s been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There’s also push notifications and it’s mobile friendly.
Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do voice and video chat but I’ve never got it to work.
I’ve recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I’m pretty sure my friends are going to stay on “modern” IRC anyway.
- Comment on LPT: Go get a shot, now. 1 month ago:
And yet you are saying this in a thread about the US restricting access to some vaccines. It was all nonsense a few months ago.
- Comment on LPT: Go get a shot, now. 1 month ago:
Why not? I’m not willing to provide links for everything I’ll list, so do what you want with it.
Democracy has failed in the US. They have a king with a dictatorship. They ignore their own laws. They kidnap law abiding citizens, on the streets, at work, in the schools, and send them into concentration camps. They kidnap people from other countries at the border. They invade their own cities with the military. They are sending a flotilla to Venezuela. They are renaming the Department of Defence to the Department of War. They have openly discussed invading Mexico. They have mentioned in the past that Canada should be part of the US. Maine’s Senator sent an open letter to Western Canada and invited them to join the US, like, a week ago.
All this shit is normalized in the US. They just do it little by little and so far people don’t react. They always say “Trump is joking” and “this will not happen” but it ends up happening every time.
- Comment on LPT: Go get a shot, now. 1 month ago:
At the rate that things are devolving, if you have the means, you may consider emigrating somewhere else. And maybe not Canada because we’ll probably be invaded by your country in the following years, or months.
- Comment on kansas can get fcked 2 months ago:
- Comment on Almost half of adults say they are ordering kids' meals. Here's what's behind the trend. 2 months ago:
Yes, but…
I sometimes order a kids meal because portions are too big for me and I don’t want to waste. I hate going to restaurants because plates are too big.
If it were not for capitalism trying squeeze every cent out of working people and charging the same for less, I would kind of appreciate the shrinkflation. Like, just shrinking portions without keeping the price of the regular one, that would have been nice.
And I’m sure it will sound mean but, people cutting back on the amount of McDonald’s they eat may end up being not so negative.
Again, it’s bad because people are doing it to cut back on expenses, but they are still going to eat out at McDonald’s, so it can’t be that bad for them.
It’s not like they are being shot at by the IDF while waiting for their happy meal. Maybe by the national guard soon, but not yet.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
The English speaking world should be isolated. Rupert Murdoch made it sick.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Why is it a bad thing?
- Comment on Prince Andrew must be seething that Donald Trump gets to chug along like nothing happened. 2 months ago:
Pretty sure he’s not sweating it.
- Comment on What are your favorite apps for public transit and bike navigation? 3 months ago:
Can I ask how you edit bike paths on Google maps? All I’ve ever been able to do is fill reports (the feedback system) that seems to be ignored. Everything I find about this says to use the feedback system. But I’ve done it a few times and it worked for something about a road, many years ago, but I tried it a few times again for bike paths and nothing was corrected.
- Comment on What are your favorite apps for public transit and bike navigation? 3 months ago:
You’re in luck I guess. Google maps here in Montreal is pretty bad with knowing protected bike lanes and safe routes. It will often send you in a car sewer when there is a perfectly safe route two streets over.
To me, Google maps has outdated data for cycling. It’s confused by contraflow lanes. It also often shows pedestrian paths as cycling paths. And it doesn’t have all the paths and even if you write to them to correct a path, they will not.
I still use Google maps because of how easy it is for turn by turn amd I didn’t find anything to replace it yet. But I have to inspect the route and make changes on the fly because Google doesn’t know about modal filters and contraflow lanes.
- Comment on What are your favorite apps for public transit and bike navigation? 3 months ago:
I use OSM a lot for planning routes, decide where to pass, and then I set Google Maps and fight with it. But I didn’t find anything satisfying yet for turn by turn. I’m on the the verge of making my itineraries in GPX form.
Googke Maps in my city and region sucks so much for bikes. But I look at its suggestions, ignore them when I know a safer route, and follow them if I didn’t plan a route and need to get from A to B.
- Comment on xkcd #3109: Dehumidifier 3 months ago:
Do they have a model with AI?
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 4 months ago:
That must be why Google’s greenhouse emissions went up 50% in five years. ChatGPT’s legendary efficiency.
Keep defending those power wasting glorified autocomplete. In no way are we doomed as a species.
We can just continue tu pump more and more into the air. “AI” will surely find a solution for that anyway.
- Comment on ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic 4 months ago:
It probably consumes as much energy as a family house for a day just to come up with that program. That’s what happens.
In fact, I did a Google search and didn’t have any choice but to have an “AI” answer, even if I don’t want it. Here’s what it says:
Each ChatGPT query is estimated to use around 10 times more electricity than a traditional Google search, with a single query consuming approximately 3 watt-hours, compared to 0.3 watt-hours for a Google search. This translates to a daily energy consumption of over half a million kilowatts, equivalent to the power used by 180,000 US households.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
AFAIK it’s acceptable if the parent is walking or sitting with the child. It’s only abusive if you tie the leash outside while you go run some errands in a store, or if left attached in the backyard.
- Comment on People have private conversations on speaker phone but if I participate then I'm the crazy one 5 months ago:
Bah, sound quality is just okay. It’s fine for podcasts and electronic without bass, but it’s kind of annoying for some types of music.
It works but… meh.
- Comment on People have private conversations on speaker phone but if I participate then I'm the crazy one 5 months ago:
Headphones on a bike are illegal in my province. So I once bought a bluetooth speaker for my bike. I don’t really like imposing my music to anyone and tried to keep it at a minimum level but stills didn’t like it. So now I use bone conduction headphones. Unfortunately they are also in a grey area where they could also be illegal.
In short, if you want to listen to music on a bike here, your only legal option is a speaker. Anything else is unsafe and could traumatize a poor car driver that hits a cyclist that didn’t hear them coming (according to the police here).
Otherwise get a car and blast the music with the windows open like a normal safe person. or close the windows and don’t hear anything around, but this is much safer than having headphones while cycling, obviously.
Same with walking or jogging with headphones. Are you out of your mind? Some poor car driver could hit reckless runners jumping in front of their car because they couldn’t hear it coming.
No, society wants everyone not in a car to keep quiet and don’t ruin their silence, with all the soothing car noises, so it’s safer this way. No headphones on a bike, it’s not safe! You need to hear that car blasting music that’s coming at you.
- Comment on Trump: The EU is ‘nastier than China’ 5 months ago:
As someone that had to learn English as a second language, that man has a strikingly limited vocabulary for someone that’s supposed to have it as his native language.
Someone should make a list of his greatest hits, like nasty, and disgraceful.
- Comment on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup 5 months ago:
A bit ironic given the fact that they want to push everyone on the cloud and run Office apps in a browser. Or is this just corporate?
I’ve been doing tech support for a few corporations and they were literally removing the local applications like Word, Excel and Outlook to force users to use the web versions because it was costing them less money for licensing.
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 5 months ago:
It was the same on the municipal level for me. I can call 311 or write to them, but it was kind of nice to be able to tweet at my neighbourhood and have people interacting with me and them on local issues.
- Comment on Future apocalypse movies won't have survivors scavaging abandoned cars. 5 months ago:
Even right now. Look at how people have to wait in huge lines to get some gas every time there is a natural disaster, or extreme weather. After a few days, or even hours, it’s mostly gone.
