You can never have enough socks. Many a christmas goes by where again nobody gifts me a nice pair of socks. People always seem to think I am in need of more books to read!

(Hope I'm somewhat correctly recounting Dumbledore's answer in relation to the mirror of Erised)

Wait there's profile pictures? I just see usernames in the comment threads in Lemmy and that seems fine to me

Ah yes, a rational response in a democracy

It's called a consumer market authority

A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he'd score under 100 but I'd love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.

It's hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It's half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there's still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn't have to work hard to get anywhere

It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that's a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)

You said most countries but then only mention the USA. May I surmise you're from the USA aka the world? :P

So I got curious, but it's also 7am and I need to sleep. I looked it up for my own country: we don't exactly have this

The Netherlands basically requires you to acknowledge that its laws apply to you (they do when you set foot here anyway) and that you'll fulfill the duties that come with citizenship.
When opening the included FAQ item "what duties?" it says two things: you abide by the laws (duh) and that you should consider that you're part of this society and that "you'll do what is needed to really be part of this society." Handwavey and not about choosing a side in a war or something, just focused on integration and community. Seems okay to me and distinct from blind allegiance. There's some more details but the FAQs all circle back to respecting the other citizens (no discrimination) and the like

Source: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/...

I always have trouble with this perspective. Wouldn't you put your private life before yet another job? It would have to be a very unique dream job before I would put it before a potential life partner

It has to go so badly wrong for this to become an issue

1. Firstly, nothing serious might come of it. Stopping to date isn't an issue then
2. I'd not get serious with someone who's not mentally acting like an adult. Working with an ex partner should be fine on a professional level. I don't need to like every one of my coworkers on a personal level
3. If we did get serious and then break up and my judgement is off about their ability to act rationally at work, I can find another job. After all, there's nothing tying me to this place if I don't live here with a partner

Especially (as it is here) when you don't work with each other daily, I'd take the low odds of losing my job for the chance to find a life partner

Not saying you should as well. I just don't understand it

What game are you changing exactly with this?

So long as you enjoyed playing though :D

Buying a Pixel to install GrapheneOS is not the only reasonable alternative to mainstream Android.

Each person has their own threat model. My priorities will be very different from a journalist in China, a whistleblower, or even my own mom. Some are more at risk of ransomware and a device with root is risky. For myself, I'd incur that risk as a power user and would rather my phone can be backed up so I don't have to worry about it breaking. GrapheneOS devs/followers believe that security is the only thing you must ever want, nothing else matters, and everything else is irrelevant, as though Google or street thugs will come to your house and exploit your bootloader if you don't give them data voluntarily. They just don't realistically question the statements the project makes, like what threats are worth mitigating (ubiquitous tracking? Who cares, I've got security patches and a locked bootloader!) and what options they're giving up by using GrapheneOS that's about as locked-down as the average Samsung phone. The marketing game is super strong because it's hard to argue against at scale: everyone's situation is different and "don't you want to be safe?"

I just hope other EV manufacturers get the lost sales and this isn't pushing people to dino juice sippers

GSam Battery Monitor, I use to check things like until what time I was up or how cold it was in the bedroom overnight. The graphs show when my phone screen was on (when I set my alarm) and log the battery temperature which I've found matches room temperature after a few hours (with WiFi/data off so it's not doing whatever background tasks if people are conversing in a group chat or so)

One time I was absolutely certain my alarms hadn't gone off but you could see a little blip on the screen graph, once every minute, matching precisely the (turned off) alarms. Either Sam is in on it or I just slept really soundly that day :D

Apparently it has ads though. Wouldn't recommend, I always had it firewalled because I didn't think it needed internet access to display some offline data from my phone in the first place and apparently that also works as an ad blocker? Fun side effect. But so I'm very interested in any open source alternatives people know of!

We have a realistic minimum wage, but not everything that needs doing generates enough income to pay it. Taking care of your elderly mother as the simplest example but also firefighting apparently. It regularly blows my mind how much is done by volunteers. We could do so much more if you knew life's basics were going to be covered regardless of how you help society

If you have a lot of intrinsic motivation, Anki will probably make you learn the languages the fastest (or maybe you pick one of the two, idk how Norwegian Bokmål and Nynosk interact)

If not, some gamified thing like Duolingo keeps a lot of people engaged for ages apparently. Keep in mind that even their scientific papers are using engagement as the metric by which they score different spaced repetition parameters, not lesson retention. My grandma has been doing English for a year and I have yet to hear her speak two words, but she loves the characters and enjoys it a lot and that's the important thing for her ^^. If you've already got the book for the in-depth part, this could be a way to supplement by building a habit of daily learning

I'd guess that most other software is somewhere in between, at least on learning efficiency (like listening to audio books as someone else suggested: ok that's great and engaging, once you have a solid foundation at least, but it's only listening comprehension and you already need to know a lot so the further learning is somewhat limited)

Now I'm imagining a shell that looks iteratively through arguments to find where quotes would make total sense

$ ls
my victims.ods
$ wipe -f my victims.ods --thorough

So the shell would go like

1. wipe → command name found, ok
2. -f → no file in the current directory starts with that, skip
3. my → matches a file, keep in memory...
4. my victims.ods → full match, but missing quotes!
5. Prompt user:

Filename "my victims.ods" found without quotes. Choose:
[a]dd quotes this time
[A]lways add quotes (dangerous)
[n]o quotes today please
[N]ever offer adding quotes again
[t]ell me what could possibly go wrong when I choose to always add quotes
[P]unch the person who proposed this feature

Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They've gotten significantly worse

But then, I don't use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?

It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I'm pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they'd have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit

Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there's no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads

(As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I've gotten sidetracked since)

In Dutch we call the city Peking also. Never knew why it was Bejing in English, figured maybe that's what the Chinese say for it

I hear smokers with similar opinions. Some get really old. It's luck, not wisdom

Planet 9 a conspiracy theory? Who's conspiring against whom there :|

Afaik it was a legit theory since we discovered planet 8 that way and then people tried to use the same method for further planets. Also beyond Mercury there was supposed to be Vulcanus and people reported sightings but nothing added up

Discovery of planet 8 (Wikipedia):

unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to hypothesise that its orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. After Bouvard's death, the position of Neptune was mathematically predicted from his observations, independently, by John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier. Neptune was subsequently directly observed with a telescope

And then Mr Einstein had a thing or two to say about those gravitational disturbances being actually relativity and most things clicked into place (but you'll still have a discrepancy between the known spacetime curving and observed orbits because it's hard to know what mass is exactly where in the Kuiper belt etc.). Or something. I'm probably wrong on the details but that's the broad strokes as I remember them

We didn't get planet 9 in school either fwiw but I think it was in magazines or encyclopedia at my grandparents' place that I heard of it

I coincidentally heard something about that today. Sadly in German but according to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGE8jzGZ7To

80% of people said they would continue working

80% of people thought others would not

We seem to expect worse of others than of ourselves. Even if it turns out to be that 40% ends up stopping to do anything remotely useful, it's at least worth trying and finding out what works and what doesn't imo. Having the right to choose how to live your life freely seems like an enormous benefit that a minority needn't ruin