englishrookie

I agree with the spirit of your comment. 20261209 Is a much better way to express the date than the 9/12 Americanism.

The fear is that the US will use control of critical infrastructure as leverage. Given the Greenland debacle, I'm inclined to agree.

Well, there are also noises about the SaaS company preferably not being American. Apparently there's a US law that compels US companies to divulge data on their users even if the data is hosted outside of the US. (I'm not sure this wouldn't happen anyway, without such a law.)

Almost everything about societies except cities is just pretty words. Countries and most borders are just an abstraction. We fight for them because someone convinces us with words to do so. We could do the same for the UN and it would be a much nobler cause in most cases.

I don't have a voice in my head when I read. Knowledge of West-Fries helps though.

Well, for a native speaker of Dutch who doesn't speak English at all (not many left since my grandmother died in 2014), I'd say old English is actually easier to read than modern - starting around 1400.

Around 1000, English and Dutch must have been mutually understandable.

I'm in the Netherlands and I DO find it bad. Probably also has to do with my age (early fifties) - your eyes adjust with more difficulty the older you get, it seems.

Do you really believe Europe would devolve into actual internal warfare, without the US? What about the EU? I believe it has successfully kept the peace ever since its predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was created - specifically to avoid another war.

Your example is very on point: the member states are talking - not fighting - to protect their own interests.

Right now, Russia's hands are conveniently tied by their incompetently fought war in Ukraine.

In the mean time, most major EU countries have increased their defense budgets. Some of the larger ones, most notably Germany, are considering to reintroduce conscription. Within about five years, the EU will be able to withstand Russia without any aid from the USA.

In fact, right now, Poland would be able to withstand the Russians on their own. Mind you, they would not be able to defeat the Russians, but they would give them a beating and repel any invasion of Poland.

I would certainly call it a Germanic dialect.

By your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.

Cool! I may have used some of your applications on my Atari 1040 ST back in 1988. Which ones did you work on?

Would you mind sharing your setup (LLM model, IDE, best practices)? Personally, I'm struggling to get value out of Continue.dev in VSCode (using Gemini 2.0 Flash by default, with the option to switch to more advanced models). I still revert to pasting code into ChatGPT chat window (using the website), frequently.

Are you using agentic features, given that you have not just one but two PMs?

You do that by voting people into power who pass laws which provide a framework for these agencies to operate in. Putting these agencies under direct control of a central government (the federal government in this case) will inevitably erode civic society. See Hungary, Poland (until recently) and Turkey.

Don't Look Up...

Introduced into English most likely through Nieuw Amsterdam / New York.

I would give all US passport holders the advice to think more carefully about who they vote for...

You might consider hiring yourself out as a contractor. This is especially interesting if you're specialized in some vertical where you can bring consultancy skills to the table. Be the guy who's brought in when there's a problem, replace some proverbial screw, and then charge a week's salary for it. Because nobody else knew exactly which screw to replace.

Also, this path allows you to delegate work to other contractors that you have vetted. After all, your clients care about the results, not who does the actual job.

> Rich person toy.

The Mac, yes. But my father was a construction worker earning a below median wage (definitely not middle class) in 1988 when we bought our Atari 1040 ST. This was in the Netherlands, Europe.

(Although admittedly we were rich by world standards.)

Then the language area in your brain is activated separately for the comment parts.

Amusingly, there are languages where the word for bank and couch are the same: bank (Dutch).

There's a Holborn 6110 terminal on display in the Home Computer Museum in Helmond, Netherlands, apparently: https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/collectie/holborn/holborn-...

Could you explain why not? Technically speaking it's nothing special as Moodle is completely built on the LAMP stack (although WAMP is also supported, as well as PostGreSQL, Oracle, MariaDB and MS-SQL).

Except that Chemours, the company behind the pollution, already knew about the toxicity of PFAS in the 1990's. Source (in Dutch): https://www.bnnvara.nl/joop/artikelen/chemours-wist-dertig-j...

I assume you compile the source code because you want to be sure you don't use any compromised binaries? But how can you be sure the source code wasn't compromised with some obfuscated C code? (Honest question, I'm just a humble application developer.)

The European Commission is not funded by lobbyists. Unless of course you believe the EC members are corrupt.

What part of Germany are you from? Isn't there a clear distinction between Wolke (cloud) and Volk (people). I ask this as Dutch speaker (so, speaker of 'West Germanic') where there is a very clear distinction between volk and wolk (which presumably have the exact same meaning and origin as their German counterparts).

Anecdotally, I once spoke with Russian students (this was long ago) who insisted that there was a Russian 'v/w' sound in the word Berenburg (the name of a distilled spirit). I couldn't hear it...

Spanish in Amsterdam? That sounds refreshing. Whenever I eat at a restaurant in Amsterdam, I get served in English about 80% of the time.

Well, you can say "het is fris buiten", meaning "it's chilly outside".

No transliteration: Dutch uses the Latin alphabet.