Catoblepas
@Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Why is having a lawyer present during police interviews "opt in" rather than "opt out"? 2 weeks ago:
The fact that in some instances the legal system does work according to the invocation of a magic phrase makes it so much harder to deal with the delusions of sovcits. The right to remain silent should be just that. You don’t have to say “I’m invoking my right to free speech” every time before opening your mouth for it to count.
- Comment on Most American headline 2 weeks ago:
cnn.com/…/pennsylvania-school-lunch-debt-trnd
Unless this is happening again, this story is from 2019. Still bad, just not recent
- Comment on Let my Duolingo streak expire cos I don't want to give them any more AI training for free and this popped up 🙄 2 weeks ago:
This is just for the English speaker learning Spanish Duolingo course, which I’m told is one of the best ones, so it may not apply to other courses. But IMO it was easier to pick up the majority of the beginner vocabulary in Duolingo (they’ve got the drill aspect of language learning down pat) and then spread out to other sources. I especially needed outside help with grammar because (at least when I was doing the early parts) Duolingo didn’t explain grammar very much, so there was a bit of ramming my head against a brick wall.
How long an article takes me to read depends on how many colloquial phrases it has that Duolingo hasn’t introduced me to, if uncommon words or jargon are used, etc. The dictionary app I use is pretty good and includes slang, so when I do run into unknowns it only takes a few seconds to look it up. But overall I’d say I read maybe 1/2 to 2/3 the speed I read English, depending on all the above factors. It does fatigue me a lot faster than reading English, but I think that’s a normal thing for second languages you’re still learning.
- Comment on Let my Duolingo streak expire cos I don't want to give them any more AI training for free and this popped up 🙄 2 weeks ago:
I learned probably 90% of my Spanish through Duolingo. My reading is good enough that I can usually follow along with Spanish news articles and Spanish spoken at a moderate pace. (So almost none of it, haha) I have hearing comprehension problems with English as well though, so that’s not Duolingo’s fault.
I’m definitely not fluent, but it’s not like I wouldn’t know what to do if someone handed me a form in Spanish, either.
Overall it’s just the repetition that matters. I don’t think I would know any less Spanish if I’d spent 20-30 minutes every day for the past 2+ years using a different app to learn.
- Comment on Let my Duolingo streak expire cos I don't want to give them any more AI training for free and this popped up 🙄 2 weeks ago:
Mango Languages is available for free through many libraries and has an app.
- Comment on Owned (stocks) 3 weeks ago:
Do NOT leave that amount of cash on your PayPal if you draw porn, they might shut down your account and you can lose it with zero recourse.
- Comment on It’s Time To Go Back to Web 1.0 3 weeks ago:
I imagine a solution could be the same one from Web 1.0: webrings. Find one site on one and you’ve found a lot more interesting, curated ones as well.
- Comment on Wanna Ride This Bussy? 3 weeks ago:
I do love a bussy that’s not hiding anything
- Comment on yalls done seen any bugs round these' parts? 3 weeks ago:
I can smell this image, lol. Hope you didn’t get peed on!
- Comment on Community Notes vanishes from X feeds, raising 'serious questions' amid ongoing EU probe 3 weeks ago:
Someone is very mad all their posts kept getting naughty notes!
- Comment on No looky for you! 3 weeks ago:
It’s because watching a bunch of food water swirl around for half an hour is gross.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 3 weeks ago:
My stupid is 100% organic. Can’t have the AI make you dumber if you don’t use it.
- Comment on Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars 4 weeks ago:
People will say it doesn’t make a difference, but it apparently made enough of a difference that they still can’t find the guy that was putting pipe bombs around the US capitol. I think at least a portion of the “they can still identify you under your mask with computers” claims are based on very niche situations (high quality footage of someone wearing a thin, fabric mask) and exaggeration or allowing people to incorrectly draw their own conclusions.
- Comment on Black Mirror AI 4 weeks ago:
Funny that they’re calling them AI haters when they’re specifically poisoning AI that ignores the do not enter sign. FAFO.
- Comment on Batterypunk 4 weeks ago:
Anyone who understands batteries want to tell me if this will eventually explode or something?
- Comment on Street smarts: how a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully 4 weeks ago:
But what was really interesting, and took me much longer to figure out, was that the hawk always attacked when the car queue was long enough to provide cover all the way to the small tree, and that only happened after someone had pressed the pedestrian crossing button. As soon as the sound signal was activated, the raptor would fly from somewhere into the small tree, wait for the cars to line up, and then strike.
That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length. The bird also had to have a good mental map of the place, because when the car queue reached its tree, the raptor could no longer see the place where its prey was and had to get there by memory.
It was an immature bird. Cooper’s hawks rarely nest in cities in our area but are common winter visitors. So the bird I was watching was almost certainly a migrant, having moved to the city just a few weeks earlier. And it had already figured out how to use traffic signals and patterns. To me it seemed very impressive.
Emphasis mine. That’s wild!
- Comment on Just a reminder... (with thanks to Ice Cube) 4 weeks ago:
That reminds me, I keep forgetting to post this sticker I saw on a lamp post a few weeks ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
It has the number of steps it does so that the pressure from the button holding your pants closed is evenly distributed over the fabric (and thread), so that nothing tears or rips. When sewing through cloth more points of attachment is generally better. You might be able to staple a button on without damaging the fabric over time, but it’s probably a lot less comfortable to wear than one sewn on.
Just attached a button to my pants yesterday, after the factory sewn button gave up.
- Comment on This Printer company served you malware for months, called them false positives 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, I would expect a printer I paid 6k for to not have malware!
- Comment on This Printer company served you malware for months, called them false positives 5 weeks ago:
That’s possible, but they aren’t really typical office printers either, it’s for specialized art printing. Again it’s definitely bad, this just isn’t typical office equipment.
- Comment on This Printer company served you malware for months, called them false positives 5 weeks ago:
Also it’s for a UV printer, not an inkjet or laser printer, with the cheapest option on their website being $1900 and the average being around $6000. So, not a regular printer you would buy off the shelf. It’s still bad of course, but only so many people even could be impacted by it.
- Comment on Yabba-dabba-doo! 5 weeks ago:
When you’re done with that, check out the Snagglepuss comic! The commenter that said if anything it was better was absolutely right.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
the statistic showing that the number of disabled adult middle aged “refugees” is double-digit higher that the same number for Danes
You know refugees aren’t a random sample of the population, right? Why tf wouldn’t there be more refugees from war zones, gang violence, etc with disabilities compared to some random Eestern European country with a population that for the most part deals with none of that? What brain trust managed to convince you that the only way to be a refugee is to like, win an Olympic sprint or something?
- Comment on Yabba-dabba-doo! 5 weeks ago:
You’re right, it is better, and the Flintstones comic was already really good! I went into it knowing a lot of the historical details of the time, but it was a fantastic and emotionally moving representation of it. 10/10.
- Comment on Yabba-dabba-doo! 5 weeks ago:
Just checked out a digital copy from the library 👍
- Comment on Inappropriate Ads on Child-Directed Websites: Weight Loss Pills and Depression Tests for Kids. 5 weeks ago:
It comes across like you feel we can’t protect gay/minority children from being exploited by huge corporations online because it would be homophobic to protect gay kids from psychological manipulation.
This is some weird ass fanfic you are writing about me for asking how the researchers came to their conclusions about LGBT ads, specifically, being judged to be inappropriate.
- Comment on Inappropriate Ads on Child-Directed Websites: Weight Loss Pills and Depression Tests for Kids. 5 weeks ago:
You’re classifying all of these as malicious by virtue of being ads, which the researchers obviously didn’t. Take that up with them.
Knowing that queer people exist and that you could be queer isn’t “sexual advertisement,” by the way. Which is why I wanted to know more about how the researchers came to the conclusion that these particular ads were inappropriate.
- Comment on Inappropriate Ads on Child-Directed Websites: Weight Loss Pills and Depression Tests for Kids. 5 weeks ago:
Absolutely true! If the quiz contents were inappropriate in some way beyond like… acknowledging LGBT people and depression exists, I would like to hear about that part.
- Comment on Yabba-dabba-doo! 5 weeks ago:
It fucking rules, I’m not kidding! It’s so worth a read. I need to see if the Snagglepuss comic they put out in the same style is also good.
- Comment on Inappropriate Ads on Child-Directed Websites: Weight Loss Pills and Depression Tests for Kids. 5 weeks ago:
Adding an “are you gay?” quiz to the list of inappropriate ads shown to children immediately makes me question the researcher biases and methodology. Unless those have gotten WAY spicier since I was a kid, I remember passing so many quizzes like that around with my friends at that age.
How many ads related to heterosexuality were classified as appropriate? How does that compare to their classification of LGBT ads?
