The Defense Ministry had previously assured conscripts they would not be sent to the front in Ukraine as they cannot legally be deployed to fight outside Russia.

Easy: simply declare that the sovereign nation you seek to eliminate has always been part of your empire. Now it’s no longer ‘outside Russia’. Conscripts hate this one trick.

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Search results being polluted by llm content is so annoying. As if all the SEO didn’t do enough already to bring down overall web quality.

Recently I was searching for some technical guidance on how to do a particular thingy with the IPython coding framework and found just the right page. Except when I tried to run the examples, nothing worked because it was all made up! The entire site/domain was a collection of machine generated answers made to look like blog posts to common programming questions (which they probably scraped from some site with real human collaboration).

I can’t even.

Aww, too bad. I really rely on autocorrection suggestions a lot as it speeds up my typing.

different dictionaries but merged into one.

many keyboards handle it like this: if you switch to English keyboard layout, you get English autocomplete, if you switch to chzech layout you get suggestions for chzech words, etc

what I want is to be able to pick any layout and get suggested words from English, Czech and whatever other languages I select.

In my recent experience Google still delivers better results for tech troubleshooting queries. “linux drivers for acer e15 card reader” at least points me to some semi-relevant pages on Google that could lead to a solution or more ideas where to look while ddg throws a lot of generic stuff that is only faintly related.

Librera Reader is a PDF // ebook reader for Android. It has a very smooth user experience and useful options. I used to have 5 or so different PDF readers installed and would pick and choose according to the task at hand but now I’m down to just 1.

¿Does florisboard support multiple input languages at once? I might switch within a conversation or even mix words within a single sentence. So far I haven’t found a good open source alternative to SwiftKey in that regard.

Russia’s recruitment process is mind bogglingly disgusting. They have even begun to kidnap thousands of Ukrainian children which they attempt to “reeducate” and russify.

As Russia is facing huge demographic problems (less and less young people that can serve in the military) yet has long term imperial ambitions and a history of preferring to sacrifice ethnic minorities on the front line it’s likely that at least some of these children are to be part of the next generation of soldiers.

Shout out to Banjo Kazooie, an older platformer from the Nintendo 64 game era, where the antagonist always speaks in silly rhymes. So the translators needed to translate and also make it rhyme while also keeping the context and humor intact. They took creative freedom of course because there simply isn’t a good match but it actually enhances the game in a way. So if you played the game in French before and now switch to English you’ll get a fresh set of jokes and rhymes.

but the proposal does not yet spell out what constitutes a violation.

and this is not a coincidence. Authoritarian states love vaguely operationalized definitions like this because it’s basically a blanko check to arrest anyone at any time. And it puts the populace into a fearful, fatalist mindset of “I could be arrested at any time for bogus charges, even if I did nothing wrong.”

Man am I glad that I picked KeypassXC as my password manager some years ago. Super safe, easy to use, costs nothing, not dependant on internet/cloud, can export data to another app at any time, transparent because open source.

I’m using Syncthing to synchronize across devices which arguably took some fiddling to set up but I only had to fiddle once and haven’t touched the configuration since; it just works automagically in the background.

Weird, maybe it’s because it has ‘fucking’ in the title? That would happen if they applied a filter with keywords.

One of the mechanisms that is thought to affect long term weight gain is the following:

Your body offets heat loss by burning calories from food intake. In healthy people this is well regulated so that the body radiates off about as much heat as you gain through food. Some medications or conditions however can mess with hormones involved in regulating your body’s temperature. Even just being slightly colder (it’s imperceptible, you won’t be shivering or anything) kickstarts a different homeostasis mechanism which essentially tries to make up for the heat difference by upping the other side of the equation: more food intake. That means you feel more hungry than usual and eat a little more than you need. Over time this adds up and you gain weight.

Of course in the real world many more factors are involved, for example how much you move or how much sleep you get. But it’s still an interesting piece of the puzzle.

I’ve resolved my issue by updating Jerboa to the newest version but that’s a really useful app to have nevertheless. It let’s you do a whole bunch more like removing tracking parameters or see what’s behind a shortened url. Thanks for sharing.

Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:

die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house

So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷‍♂️

Wikipedia confirms, in particular on this page on the expression ye olde.

Also bonus content:

singular: “das Mädchen” (neutral) - the girl

plural: “die Mädchen” (female) - the girls

So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷‍♂️ 🇩🇪.

No idea why lol.

This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it’s because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one’s grammar defaulted to a neutral case.

As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix “s” to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there’s plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.

What exactly does the bar code encode? I suppose it must be the unique identifier of the receipt. Can you look it up on the web? Or is it only useful to the employees of the store?