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rags2riches

894 karma · joined January 17, 2018

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rags2riches··on Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
> In accordance with Nobel's will, the prize is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a five-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway unlike all the other awards chosen by the Swedish Nobel Committee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize

There's been accusations of leaks in connection to bets with the Nobel Price in Literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature_cont...

rags2riches··on Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days
Who's selling a home router that isolates devices by default?
rags2riches··on English: A vs. An
See also "he's in hospital" and "he's in the hospital" in British and American English.
rags2riches··on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
That's due to shutting down reactors in the south. Turns out "transmission capacity" is more complicated than having fat wires...
rags2riches··on The "I don't know, Claude wrote this" pandemic
My favorite reviewers are those that say "I'm not sure I see the whole picture, can you walk me through this?"
rags2riches··on Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)
I recognize this to some extent, but not to the same degree as some others in this thread. School and all other forms of obligations were just annoyances to avoid with minimal effort. Took me many years before I could find my own motivation to pretty much anything that wasn't immediately fun or engaging. And I was really picky with what I found fun to do.
rags2riches··on The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates
I played some of the Patrician games. Loved the start of every game, then became bogged down in managing my growing fleet. I wanted to do so much more but I found the UI lacking.
rags2riches··on Magnolias are so old that they're pollinated by beetles, not bees (2025)
This is what the shape of the flower and its placement of the stamen and pistils are all about.
rags2riches··on The Free Market Lie: Why Switzerland Has 25 Gbit Internet and America Doesn't
Just above your comment is one lamenting the situation in New York City. That's roughly the same population as Switzerland in a not quite as massive area.
rags2riches··on Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back
If there were reliable statistics, I'd much rather have the methods used to produce those statistics than the numbers.
rags2riches··on Sauna effect on heart rate
Is the stove radiating too much heat? You want it to heat the air, not fry your skin! I once got a stove glowing hot because I had failed to get a high enough temperature going on the day before. It was the first time I tried a wood fired sauna myself. As long as the stove was glowing hot, I just couldn't enjoy the sauna.
rags2riches··on Musketeer d'Artagnan's remains believed found under Dutch church
Some Swedes will be delighted to learn that not only was there a historical d'Artagnan, but also a real life cardinal named Mazarin. But I have yet to find a historical person named Loranga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loranga,_Masarin_och_Dartanjan...

rags2riches··on Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person game
Interesting. I was really impressed by the art at first, taking joy in exploring that as much as the scenes themselves. But it soon faded out of focus as I was engrossed in the story and gameplay.
rags2riches··on Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place
If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.
rags2riches··on Many people have no mental imagery. What's going on in their brains?
> “When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.

I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.

rags2riches··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
> "Schultz" is German for "brown".

Beleg fehlt.

rags2riches··on A4 Paper Stories
The 5 grams per sheet of common printer paper has certainly proven handy once or twice in some of my interactions in the informal economy.
rags2riches··on Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)
The bottle wouldn't be empty though.
rags2riches··on The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice
Try making it through a few northern European winters as a pre-modern farmer. I'm sure you will develop a keener interest in measuring these things.
rags2riches··on EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages
Sweden didn't have an "official" language before the Language Law of 2009. Five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sámi, Yiddish) were officially recognized as such since 1999.
rags2riches··on EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages
Malta has Maltese and English as official languages. I don't know what they bring to the EU list of official languages.
rags2riches··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
> I've first hand seen lockers destroyed to remove the lock.

A neighbor secured his expensive bike with a hefty lock and chain around a tree in our courtyard. Bad guys brought a saw. I still miss that tree.

rags2riches··on Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout
> LOT

Just capitalised for emphasis, right?

> COE

Center of Excellence? Council of Europe? Still wondering even after Googling.

> SLA

Service Level Agreement. This I knew beforehand.

> SDM

Service Delivery Manager?

rags2riches··on DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia
This makes me think of the Barbary Wars where piracy out of the Barbary states was a huge issue. There's also the connection with the slave trade then and the human trafficking for the scam centers now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

rags2riches··on A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler
Hold on, are those pebbles Imperial or Troy?
rags2riches··on When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
Still it skips over weirdness like the same person being both a sovereign king and vassal of another king. See for example King Henry II of England and Duke of Normandy etc.
rags2riches··on Search all text in New York City
There's even "West Indian Grog" to be found! Surely, that must be the rum based drink? https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/63DKJbMdVQY8ah6jgobU9g?o=85...
rags2riches··on Search all text in New York City
At first glance, there's plenty of grog to be had in NYC. But sailors will be disappointed. It all seems to be OCR errors of "Groceries" or the "Google" watermarks.
rags2riches··on Every part on a bicycle is safety critical
Turn your handlebar all the way to the right side (assuming the stand is on the left) and it will be much more stable.
rags2riches··on The hamburger-menu icon today: Is it recognizable?
I hit a link labeled "reply" to write this comment. A good translation requires context to tell if that is a verb or a noun. Providing that context is the hard and expensive part. Skip it and you get a terrible result.
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