Normille

There's a blast from the past. Remember on the old Nokia dumbphones with T9 [0] predictive text. Belatedly realising you'd insulted somebody by calling them a 'duck' or an 'aunt'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

Swipe-to-type on Yandex keyboard on Android had a similarly infuriating habit of "correcting" my English spelling to American. So I'd swipe c-o-l-o-u-r and it would insert 'color', c-e-n-t-r-e and it would insert 'center', etc. etc.

Oh.And this was with my phone set to 'UK English' and Yandex keyboard set to use 'System Language'. If I caught it in time, I could drag the suggested word off the suggestion bar, so it would be removed from future suggestions. But the yanks have mangled the English language so much, it was a Sisyphean task.

  >i just turned auto correct off completely a few versions ago...

I don;t use autocorrect at all. Never have. But I do use 'swipe-to-type' [or whatever it's called] on Android and run into the same annoyances, as it will also chooses the wrong word, for a swiped pattern, every time --no matter how often I correct it.

For me [on Android, which is just as excerable] it's changing "has" to "had", which it does every fucking time. No matter how many times I change it back. I'll re-read what I've written and find I've been jumping between past and present tense like a grammatical kangaroo.

One thing that could vastly improve the suggestions would be to only insert a proper noun if I've first tapped the shift key. Here again, Android has the infuriating habit of suddenly inserting a person, city or country name into the most prosaic of sentences.

My other major annoyance with this kind of typing on mobile is that; once the fuckwitted algorithm has made a ridiculously wrong choice, when you spot it a word or two later and go back to correct it, all the corrections offered are variations on the wrong word it chose, rather than alternatives for what could have been chosen initially.

And the very nature of typing on mobile means you're looking at the keyboard, not what's appearing on-screen [as people can do, to various degrees, on 'real' keyboards]. So, unless you're looking up at the screen between every single word, to make sure it's correct, a lot of the correcting has to be done belatedly. So the errors tend to pile up.

  >I would prefer it to ask for confirmation instead of doing it automatically... 

Not on Windows, so it doesn't affect me. But I agree with you. One of my major annoyances is having to go preference diving becasue some application which I've just updated has added a new 'feature' [which I don't want] and has enabled it by default --instead of asking me "XXX can now do YYY. Do you want to enable this?"

Strangely enough, browsers seem particularly prone to doing this.

  >Rust is arguably future-proof in its syntax.

I'm not so sure about that. Given how many people dip a tentative toe in the Rusty waters and give up, baffled by the arcane syntax, I really wouldn't be surprised if Rust-2032 bore little resemblance to Rust-2022

I like the look of Crystal but lack of decent tooling and slow compile times put me off.

The plant app I use [0] gives a percentage confidence rather than saying "this is definitely X or Y". I've found it pretty accurate on the various plants and trees I've used it to ID. But I limit my foraging to nuts and berries I already know and generally only use the app to increase my recognition factor of what else grows around me.

I do like mushrooms but I think it's just a step too far into 'Russian Roulette' territory to risk trying to forage for those. Eating something which might make you sick for a day or two is one thing. But risking eating something which might kill you or require a liver transplant, if you get it wrong, is a bit too scary for me. The only mushroom I'm confident in my ability to ID is psilocybin.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.floraincog...

It's almost like the whole thing was a big publicity stunt all along. But, of course, that can't be true. We all know how Elon hates publicity.

Being white and not self-loathing is practically a hate-crime these days. If you happen to be male and heterosexual too, you're worse than Hitler and should begin self-flagellation immediately.

Personally I find it offensive to be continually lectured on what a rich, over-priveleged piece of shit I am, just because I was born white. By people with more wealth and privilege than anyone in my working class family has ever enjoyed.

Political correctness, and its never-ending hammering on an already open door, has actually made me more racist of late, where I wasn't at all before.

  >what's next?

They learn to write clickbait headlines?

Looks interesting. Any plans to make it available through MacPorts?

TLDR; It's all everybody else's fault.

I just tried this:

  >echo bollox
  >history | grep bollox

and got a long line of results, dating back to 2019 [Who knew I swore so often in my terminal!]

I don't have any of the fixes suggested in the article in my .zshrc so either it's duff info or not all OSX zsh installs are setup the same. Mind you, I'm still running OSX Mavericks so my zsh may not even have come bundled as the default shell. I may have enabled or installed it myself at a later date.

I ditched Thunderbird for Mailmate last year, after getting frustrated with just how slow and clunky Thunderbird was, so much of the time.

I really wanted to like Mailmate. It does tick a lot of boxes. But it's expensive and I found it to be too glitchy to justify that kind of price. It would often error out on all my accounts, throwing up endless dialogues, telling me that there was no password stored in the keychain for each account [not true!] an issue that's been reported several times over the years and never been fixed. Similarly, when sending messages, I'd often see similar errors and the message would end up in both my Sent and Drafts folders. So I was never quite sure whether it had actually gone or not. And having to re-send lots of emails with a "Sorry if you get this twice, but..." disclaimer at the top soon got boring.

I'm now back on Thunderbird and, while it still looks like something from the 1990s, it does seem a bit less sluggish than I remember. Maybe Mozilla are finally getting their act together?

   >>Spark - By far the best I've tried so far. But, and it hurts... I choose not to use them now that Ukraine is being invaded both geographically and digitally. In this case I'm rather safe than sorry.

EDIT: I don't get the connection between stopping using Spark and Ukraine being invaded?

I looked at Spark a while back too. It was the fact it's 'rent-a-software' which put me off going there.

If ever there was a case for 'killer satellites', this is it! I can't believe the origin of this story is actually one of the companies proposing to do this. And leading the article with a bragging "Ad-block this: Space advertisers ready to display commercials in the sky"

Total and utter cunts!

Eric Clapton's hand

  >Germany and the Soviet Union also had pretty close economic ties right up until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941

And a lot of the British upper classes [including quite a few people directly and indirectly related to the royal family] were fiercly anti-semitic and thought Hitler was giving the Jews a bit of what they deserved, from 1933 right up until he started annexing parts of his neighbours' territories.

Point being: no-one comes out of WWII with an unblemished record.

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous!

[Sorry. Someone had to]

  >Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected.

So you hate Russia for saving you from Hitler but you suck America's arse even though they were quite prepared to completley annihilate your country and all your people [including all your friends and family and everyone you knew] because you were a 'vassal state to Russia'?

Wow! --the Stockholm Syndrome really is strong in Eastern Europe these days.

  > Glad I live in the very south of Australia.

Don't get too complacent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)

  >It really doesn't make much sense to lookup Putin's speeches...

It does if you're arguing not about whether what he said was true or not, but whether he eactually said what you're accusing him of saying.

  >as soon as he's opening his mouth, a lie comes out.

So, just a regular politician, then.

But wait! --It's like one of those logic puzzles then. So, if everything he says is a lie and he says he's goiung to use nuclear weapons... then that means he's NOT going to use nuclear weapons.

Hurrah! --we're saved!

  >The only country that is threating 1st strike is Russia. 

  >All of Putin's speeches are available in english on the kremlin website.

Shh! --you're spoiling the doublethink. It's the same as how the energy crisis has now become "Russia turned off the taps" when, in fact, Europe decided to shoot itself in the foot by refusing to buy Russian gas, beforehand.

Now "Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons" when, in fact They never said any such thing. There were just some vague threats to use whatever means necessary [or similar] to defend 'their people' in Ukraine.

Even after BBC News [Nation Shall Speak Propaganda Unto Nation] played Putin's speech [with overdubbed translation] where he pointedly DIDN'T mention nuclear weapons at all, the newsreader summarised the speech by saying Putin had "threatened to use nuclear weapons"

It really is like living in Orwell's 1984 these days. Consequences are quoted as initiating actions and even when we're [rarely] allowed to hear what Goldstein actually said, we're officiaslly informed that he said something else.

Logically then, you should approve of Iran and North Korea having nuclear weapons. Because, otherwise, they might leave themselves open to invasion by some 'bully' [mentioning no names].

In fact, let's give every country in the world nuclear weapons. Then no-one will dare to attack anyone else and peace will reign everywhere.

Tsk! Tsk! USA! --94 nukes targetted on brave little Ukraine. And yet you love them so much!

Will there come a point where a large 'conventional' weapon can cause as much devastation as a small tactical nuke? If that happens how will the 'red lines' that no nation dare cross, for fear of massive global retaliation, be defined?

Is it part of their emegency plan to generate heat this winter, when the gas runs out?

Agreed.

It's also quite concerning to me how, even amongst HN's supposedly enlightned readership, a lot of this discrimination against people just for the 'crime' of being Russian is either approved of or tacitly accepted with a hand-wavey "Well this is an inevitable consequence. Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine..." As if the average Russian has any more say in what their government decides to do, than the rest of us do.

Swap "black", "gay", "trans" or, in another era "Jewish" for "Russian" in all of these stories and see if you still feel OK with shrugging it off.

  >It's is a contraction and should be used where a sentence would normally read "it is." The apostrophe indicates that part of a word has been removed. Its with no apostrophe, on the other hand, is the possessive word, like "his" and "her," FOR NOUNS WITHOUT GENDER  [my emphasis]

As someone who prides myself on being pretty literate [which is a nailed-on guarantee this post is going to contain typos galore!], I think this article slightly misses the point.

The reason otherwise literate people make this mistake [and I'll admit to having done so myself, in the past] is because the dual-purpose of the apostrophe in English leads to both options appearing correct.

* On the one hand we have the apostrophe as 'missing letter/s signifier'. So: it's = it [i]s

* But, on the other hand, we have the apostrophe as 'possssion signifier'. So it's also logical [if not grammatically correct] to assume it's = belonging to it

The 'nouns without gender' is the significant and oft-overlooked sub-clause here. And the reason I consider this particular grammatical faux pas to be more forgiveable than the dreaded Greengrocer's Apostrophe [0]

[0]https://www.startpage.com/sp/search?lui=english&language=eng...

Do some people seriously care about what colour the fecking bubbles are on their messaging app? Jeebus! --talk about 'first world problems'!