Luc

Alright I see — and happy to hear it!

“space” to save anyone a click

Why not one of the northerly neighbors? Seems more attractive to me as someone from the Netherlands

There ought to be nonfictional countries that fit that bill lol

I tested it and there’ll be months where I do 400 queries and months where there’s maybe 200. Since it doesn’t carry over, I’ll simply have to use alternatives on a regular basis. Especially across all devices (all my work is on a computer, most of the time with unfamiliar technologies as the customer has a new project for us to pentest), I’ll be out of queries most months. My employer is too scrooge to pay for our primary internal communication tool (we pay for various crap where it’s mandatory, even if we barely need it, but not for a donation-run hosted service that we heavily use). They’re never going to subsidise the searches I do during work time so long as competitors are “free”. So I’ll be stuck with other engines regardless, or have to pay as much as for a streaming service. It just seems like a lot, especially when part of it goes to Russia and burn-the-world AI bros

Before even being allowed to queue, security cared a lot that I present some email of the company I’m flying with. I had just sent the QR code to my phone, but the person doesn’t have a scanner (so what is this going to prove?) and so she requires seeing the email for the privilege of confiscating toiletries. Of course the airline later scanned it just fine but I’d not have gotten on the airplane that day if I had given my laptop away as checked luggage (didn’t have email on phone back then)

Of course she didn’t more than glance at it, no identity card check to compare the name or anything. An invoice from my mom’s dentist would probably have done the trick. Balancing a laptop on a knee, trying to two-handed type a password that you only know as muscle memory, is the sort of reason they require you to plan two hours “just in case we come up with more bullshit than expected for you or a passenger ahead of you”

And yes, my backpack with electronics needed to be flagged, bomb tested, and the last sip of water needed to be finished because the bottle was theoretically capable of holding an amount over the limit. Makes sense.

Yes

Yes? Who hasn’t?

Changing (not just translating) the title is sometimes clearly necessary to preserve a joke or reference for people who don’t speak the original language (otherwise they’d be reading that version already), but in most cases I find it unnecessary and just makes it hard to talk to others about it or find more info because you know it under completely unrelated names. The Wikipedia article translations about the author will sometimes mention them in a recognisable way, but sometimes not even that helps…

Buying a Pixel to install GrapheneOS is not the only reasonable alternative to mainstream Android.

Each person has their own threat model. My priorities will be very different from a journalist in China, a whistleblower, or even my own mom. Some are more at risk of ransomware and a device with root is risky. For myself, I’d incur that risk as a power user and would rather my phone can be backed up so I don’t have to worry about it breaking. GrapheneOS devs/followers believe that security is the only thing you must ever want, nothing else matters, and everything else is irrelevant, as though Google or street thugs will come to your house and exploit your bootloader if you don’t give them data voluntarily. They just don’t realistically question the statements the project makes, like what threats are worth mitigating (ubiquitous tracking? Who cares, I’ve got security patches and a locked bootloader!) and what options they’re giving up by using GrapheneOS that’s about as locked-down as the average Samsung phone. The marketing game is super strong because it’s hard to argue against at scale: everyone’s situation is different and “don’t you want to be safe?”

The person I was talking about in the first paragraph was in a school that’s internationally considered a university! People in “we all went to university” bubbles may not all be that type of smart, although - yes - many of them will be. Degrees primarily show whether someone thrives in a structured school setting, and most people not acting very dumb is not surprising when they’re near (but below) the average

I’ve completed the highest and the lowest mainstream education levels in my country. Long story how that came to be, but what that taught me is that while university students frequently have an easier time memorising facts on paper than those who “work with their hands” (not sure if that’s how you say it in English), it’s not a given. There were kids smarter than me at the lowest level: they just couldn’t be bothered to do homework and wanted to skip class to buy or sell drugs. Some others in that school sounded really dumb whenever they asked a question, but when this came up with a teacher once, the teacher asked if I knew what grades the student in question ended up scoring (I didn’t) and that this is just their way of learning the subject matter effectively. Okay, at least for some of them :P. Meanwhile, not everyone whom I know with a university degree can hold a job

Btw, what I also found interesting is that people score differently on IQ tests through the ages, way too short timescales for brains to evolve at a population level so our actual smartness as a species isn’t what changed. I wrote some stuff here but then checked my facts and actually this is a better article so I’ll just link the Wikipedia instead :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect. But that’s not what you’re talking about since you don’t mean IQ scores literally but just how people act around you, if I understand correctly now. Just thought it interesting as an aside

I’d say that attitude, mental health, learning styles, social skills… lots of things play a role in how we perceive people’s wits besides their actual wits. People are hard to capture by one metric. Which is also why I’d call many of the examples in this thread into question btw: service workers often interact with someone only on a single topic, often even only during a single session (support call for example). It could sometimes also just be some neurons not making the right connection in that moment, rather than the person’s intellect. Or regarding the attitude they gain towards the general public: who needs support most frequently? Surely not the people that are particularly resourceful and make smart decisions. There’s a massive selection bias there

Okay, last anecdote. Two people with a university degree (one of them has even two university degrees in IT) are put in front of an Apple device which is of course super intuitive and needs no manual. It’s so easy that neither of us can figure out how to complete the unskippable device setup wizard. We call Apple support. The solution? Scrolling down. I tried that, but the part of the screen that I touched wasn’t a scrollable element and so I concluded there was nothing to scroll to, which of course the support person couldn’t know. The person receiving that call would fit right in in this thread with a story about someone not realising in 2026 that there is such a thing as scrolling down to find the ‘continue’ button below the form. Nobody (afaik) considers either of us dumb and yet there’s plenty of ways to end up as one of the service job examples in a thread like this xD

I’ve been enjoying Age of Empires 1 lately. Or Slay if you like puzzle games. Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection is also great for that. I dunno, there’s so many options. Wanna be anymore specific about the type of game you’re looking for? It seems a bit silly to mention nearly every game ever made

A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he’d score under 100 but I’d love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.

It’s hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It’s half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there’s still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn’t have to work hard to get anywhere

It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that’s a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)

Is all email still delayed by 30 seconds or more?

Support first denied it’s a problem, saying email was never meant to be realtime (doesn’t change I’m receiving OTPs on it and sitting there waiting for their server to get off its ass while it’s expiring) and to come back if it’s ever more than 5 minutes delayed. So I do some shell scripting to find those emails and supply a list of emails that were delayed more than 5 minutes (visible by the Received headers that the problem is between Runbox internal servers). Then they ghosted me. And ignored an inquiry about the ticket status iirc about a year later. Another year later, we moved away iirc for some calendaring reason, so I don’t know what things are like since about 2022. I self-host personal email and it often pops the “you’ve got mail” before the sign-up page finished loading. Feels like it’s coming from the future so fast compared to the experience I had at work 😅

I loved Runbox in every way except for this email delay. If this got fixed, I’d recommend it to people again as the #1 thing to use since this question comes up with some regularity on various platforms but this really bugged me and sometimes seriously got in the way

Edit: CC @ExtremeDullard@piefed.social — do @ mentions work when edited in?

Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person

Or it was simply the best attempt at the time! Idk if you’ve ever tried to transcribe even your own words phonetically (where you know what sounds you’re enunciating) or tried to guess the spelling (much simpler than phonetics) for a new-to-you word in a foreign language even if you understand the language nearly as well (just don’t have the vocab yet) as a native speaker. It’s really super hard to find letters for sounds!

There’s people whose job is nothing but finding and arguing over the most accurate transcription, e.g. for dictionaries or research, of languages that long have a dictionary, pronunciation guides, learning materials, etc., but are wrong a decent fraction of the time.
Or when they’re not wrong, they’re getting outdated with evolving speech, e.g. “train” has shifted to something like “tchrain” but Merriam Webster claims the transcription is trān while their example pronunciation sounds out [tʒreˑjnə] (loosely: tchraaine) if you listen closely and compare to IPA charts (compare with their entry for “chart”, where they show the ch in the transcription but not the initial t! That looks to me like shart! lol)

We might need to give the olden times phoneticians more credit than this 😄. Of course I wasn’t there for it either but I was triggered by what sounds like a dismissive default assumption about people not doing their job properly while in reality we usually all try our best 🙂

You could always type it over and say you’ve recreated it, but that also didn’t fly. Why would overfitting a machine learning algorithm on the data and then having it predict next tokens be any different?

All this doesn’t qualify you for disability benefits?

This penny dropped for me when I heard someone from GB/IR use something like “that’s grand!” rather than great. That painted quite a literal picture in my head at the time!

In Dutch we call the city Peking also. Never knew why it was Bejing in English, figured maybe that’s what the Chinese say for it

I don’t find that weird. I find myself relatively negligent for not having this sort of thing prepared in some way, if not by go bag then by having the copies at a friend’s or such

From the few artists I know in this thread and any self-descriptive titles, this is going to be rather out there but…

Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace are what a friend and I agreed is the perfect breakup music. I think it came up because it made me feel better during a breakup but I didn’t want to continue listening to it to avoid getting sick of it and it losing the effect next time. Or something, idk I was a teenager :p

BB: I will not bow • Crawl • Blow me away
3DG: Break • Scared • Riot

Didn’t know them at the time but Amity Affliction probably fits here as well. Soak me in bleach or Pittsburgh, for example