I vote that all Germans should from now on refer to distances in terms of Saarland - but rather than use kilo- mega- etc, you just add extra "A"s. Actually, better idea, you should change the name of Germany itself to Saaaaaarland.

I dunno man, trying to make grown-up real-world political deals with Trump has got to be like herding cats. My hat’s off to Starmer, he does seem to know how to play him.

if this is part of an effort to get beef recognised as a type of fish by the Catholic church, keep it up, this’ll probably work.

I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

What’s wrong with running your own AI on your own PC? That’s a very luddite reaction for someone who moderates a “tech takes” forum.

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who (if anyone) is profiting off of the high costs of the bricks?

If the these become required, will every brick manufacturer be able to produce them, bringing the price of them down?

They seem to be a generic concept - basically they are like bird houses in the shape of a brick, so anyone can make them. The ones I’ve seen from a quick internet search are all made of different types of plastic stuck together i.e. they are not a really simple thing to make. So I guess that, along with supply and demand (only one or two are needed per new house), is why they are relatively expensive.

Trees do actually improve air quality, by absorbing harmful gases like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide through their leaves. Additionally they can reduce particulate pollution by up to 70% - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200504-which-trees-reduce-air-pollution-best

You live in a fantasy world if you think “Don’t go” is a feasible alternative. If I don’t go, someone else will, and all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Come on mate, you could say this about any kind of protest or boycott.

all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Yes that is exactly how boycotts work. You make a personal sacrifice as a protest against something that’s unfair or immoral.

If you’re not prepared to make a sacrifice, that’s OK, but at least have the honesty to admit you just don’t care enough about this particular issue.

Such a cop-out. Every boycott is a personal sacrifice, and every individual participating in a boycott knows that their one purchase isn’t by itself going to make a difference.

you mean you always plead not guilty, don’t you?

hmm alright, I’ll try it this weekend and see how it works. Thanks

that’s interesting that you mention that - never been there myself or anything, but I did come across reports that the city authorities had relaxed rules on large murals to make up for the lack of advertising, and there’s certainly a lot of pictures of some pretty impressive artworks!

As far as I can tell, they didn’t stop it - outdoor advertising is still banned there. It was hard finding recent online information about it though. The most recent references I found were a two-year-old discussion on Hacker News and a 2022 article from the BBC which mentions São Paulo’s ban and says that Grenoble in France has something similar.

What is it about carparks that attracts the scummiest scammer businesses?? Their whole business model appears to be finding new scams to rip off their customers with eye-watering fees and charges.

The people running these operations need to be made to do community service if not thrown in jail, because losing court cases doesn’t seem to be stopping them.

I wasn’t talking about other customers?

Who were you talking about when you said “I, too, get frustrated by slow-ass people”?

Yeah I’ve noticed it sometimes seems to get worse. Don’t know what phone you use, but when I use Google’s voice-to-text on Android, I often have to correct mistakes, because it tries to do it word-by-word, but sometimes what I actually intend is not clear until I’ve spoken the whole sentence - and for whatever reason, Google very rarely goes back and changes a word it’s already transcribed. For instance, if I say, “I think your speaking” it’s not yet clear if that should be a “your” or a “you’re”, and it won’t become clear until I complete the sentence/clause.

If I want to dictate a long piece of text, I will use OpenAI’s text-to-speech, which is almost flawless (it doesn’t start transcribing until you’ve finished everything you’re going to say). I appreciate some people don’t like OpenAI, but to be honest, Google isn’t much better, and likewise Apple is not a lot better than Google.

Well spelling was solved even earlier than that, with rote-learning at school in combination with the very environmentally friendly technologies known as the paddle and cane. What was wrong with that way of doing things?? Is it progress? Or were things better in the old days?

In any case, all the words in the sentence in question are spelt correctly - the problem is grammar. Correctly determining if the grammar of a sentence is correct is a much harder problem than simply checking the spelling of words against a dictionary.

I’m using voice to text like right now

AI really has come a very long way hasn’t it. It was not that long ago that you had to train the computer on your own voice and even then accuracy was annoyingly bad. Now it can transcribe speech from just about anyone at much better levels of accuracy.