Notices by Denny Vrandečić (vrandecic@mas.to)

@GreenSkyOverMe

Meine Mutter lebt in einem kleinen Dorf auf einer kroatischen Insel. Ich schrieb ihr über Jahre Postkarten aus dem Ausland, die waren adressiert mit

Name
Ort, Insel
Croatia

Bis der Postbote sie zur Seite nahm und sie bat, mir zu sagen, das nicht mehr zu tun. Er sagte, die anderen Länder würden sicher über uns lachen, und ich soll doch bitte auch die Postleitzahl und die Straße und die Hausnummer verwenden.

Ten years ago, my daughter was born and I joined Google, who were working on self-driving cars. I was hoping that my daughter would not have to need to learn to drive a car (but that if she wanted, she may). Since, I lost confidence in that hope.

Yesterday, thanks to my wife organizing it, we took our first ride with a self-driving car, driving about ten minutes through San Francisco. And I guess a world-wide roll out will take time, maybe a lot of time, but what can I say: it drove very well.

I don't care about coffee. But this video is just so incredibly well done. The production quality is amazing. A single shot! The light! The artistry involved! I am astonished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkssYHTSpH4

Every morning, I lovingly and carefully scoop out every single morsel of meat from the tin of wet food for our cat. And then he eats a tenth of it.

#cats

Interesting to see an apple URL that takes you right to Wikipedia

Interesting link:

https://apple.com/hypercard

We were wondering what the line "One a penny, two a penny" means, as it sounds paradoxical, and so we asked Google, and it generated the following code (!) as the answer:

def one_a_penny_two_a_penny_meaning():
"""
This function explains the meaning of the phrase "one a penny, two a penny".

Returns:
A string explaining the meaning of the phrase "one a penny, two a penny".
"""
1/4

return """
The phrase "one a penny, two a penny" means something that is very cheap or inexpensive. It is often used to describe items that are sold in bulk or in large quantities. The phrase is thought to have originated in the 17th century, when copper pennies were commonly used. At that time, it was possible to buy a single pennyworth of goods, such as a small candy or a trinket. The phrase "one a penny, two a penny" was used to describe these inexpensive items.

2/4

Today, the phrase "one a penny, two a penny" is still used to describe something that is very cheap or inexpensive. However, it is not as commonly used as it once was. This is because pennies are no longer commonly used currency. Instead, the phrase is often used to describe items that are sold in bulk or in large quantities, such as groceries or clothing.
"""

print(one_a_penny_two_a_penny_meaning())

3/4

Saddened, but not surprised

https://www.gitclear.com/coding_on_copilot_data_shows_ais_downward_pressure_on_code_quality

Which does remind me of student life, where discussions about different political systems and abstract notions of justice are just as prevalent and as consequence-free as they seem to be here, at first.

The book was recommended by the @lingthusiasm podcast, which is how I found it.

I came for the linguistic premise, but I stayed for the characters and their fates in a colonial world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel%2C_or_the_Necessity_of_Violence

4/4

The volume discusses some heavy topics - colonialism, dependency on technology, fairness, what is allowed in a revolution, the "neutrality" of science - and while we are still in the first half of the volume, it feels very on the nose, very theoretical - but that changes dramatically as we swing into the second half of the volume, and suddenly all these theoretical discussions become very immediate.

3/4

But the effect can only be achieved if you have a speaker who's fluent enough in both languages to have a native understanding of the difference.

One example would be the French parcelle and the English parcel, both meaning package, but the French still carries some of the former "to split into parts", with the effect that packages are lighter and easier to transport for the Royal Mail.

2/4

Strong recommendation for "Babel" by R.F. Kuang. It's a speculative fiction story set in 1830s Oxford with an, as far as I can tell, novel premise: one can cast spells (although they don't call it spells but it's just science in this world) by using two words that translate into each other, and the semantic difference between the two words - because no translation is perfect - is the effect of the spell.

1/4

#babel #rfkuang #speculativefiction #books #bookstodon

"The Marvels" was great fun! Filled with surprises. Much lighter than Captain Marvel. Better production quality than Quantumania. I hope that stays..

It wasn't just a setup for other stories. The teasing setups were pretty firmly limited to two closing scenes.

And I just like Kamala Khan. It's great to see her on the big screen! (IMAX, in fact)

Pretty good superhero movie.

#mcu #marvels #KamalaKhan

I am "greynery" #cat #cats #caturday #CatsOfMastodon

@exelotl @obsidianical @ipg the story I got told was that it was a story of standards not evolving fast enough, not of intentionally breaking standards

@evan the funny thing is that I think I would answer the question "Do you belong where you live?" differently

@evan

Only 14½: February 11, 2008 - Added Keiki and Vinismo to default interwiki

https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/commit/5bfc09a26620de2f1866ea3f6033d143320f9e42

I was surprised that only this week I landed my first code contribution to MediaWiki. I would have sworn that I did so before, but I found nothing in git history.

MediaWiki is the 20 years old software running many widely used wikis, eg Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, Fandom, written mostly in PHP. Per GitHub, it saw more than 112,000 patches by almost 600 contributors. It is the core of an ecosystem of hundreds of extensions.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/866814/

#MediaWiki #Wikipedia #opensource