Ekky

Yup, our everybody’s dear Ursula. I realize that Europe has many institutes and multiple unions, but I feel that the EU best represents Europe as a whole. And, of the multiple bodies the EU is made of, the European Commission often lays face to news and is said to hold the most “power”.

Yes, the USA is a master of making itself seem much more powerful and important than it really is, and what do news outlets love more than painting the devil onto the walls? Denmark living in the USA’s pocket doesn’t help much either.

At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if more Europeans know the presidents of China, Russia, and the USA than know the name of our own European prime minister, which would be pretty sad if actually true.

Of course it’s important to know what other countries are up to, and the EU is currently reliant on the USA for conflict handling (please make a joint European army), but unless you plan to intervene then I see no reason to fanatically follow their politics. Just tell me whether we’ll have to deal with some ancient inept dude, or another ancient inept dude who has managed to weaponize incompetence.

Welcome to my rock, i guess.

I’m vaguely aware that the USA is gearing up for another political tragedy, but who, living outside of the USA, actually follows that stuff? Can’t influence the outcome much either way if you can’t vote, except perhaps by spreading propaganda.

Could be worse, could be XBox. shudders

Couch co-op, split-screen, hotseat; Kingdom Two Crowns is nice. So is Darksiders Genesis, For The King, Moon Hunters, Trine, etc.

Always on the lookout for other good co-op couch games, especially with a good story, but I feel that they are few and far between. :(

Hmm, well, I have heard women being compared to singing birds (or more degrading as vultures or pen of hens if in group), but I’ve more often heard women being romantically compared to bees or flowers. Though, I don’t think I’ve ever heard men being compared to bees, but often to birds (eagles, vultures, seagulls, etc.).

Might also be local culture, as I usually think of harmony, nature, and perhaps matriarchy when pondering bees, while birds seem much more gender neutral, like, standoff-ish, elegant, brutal, impulsive, egoistic, even presented as predatory and evil in children movies and some media.

So, using common stereotyping, you can see where I’m coming from.

Thank you for the explanation.

As someone not too familiar with American cultures, I’d probably make an assumption and go for the (to me) more masculine bird over the docile and flower loving bee, since bees have stingers that they normally would never use and birds have beaks/peckers.

Now LLMs are even taking the jobs of professional trolls! What’s gonna be next? The scambots loosing their jobs to LLMs?!

Hope the preview works right.

Yeah, I’ve been bamboozled by this before. Found out that both “dike” and “dyke” mean “water barrier” but also can be slurs.

I guess it depends on context and audience, though, I hope the context is clear in this case. :P

Edit: Also, “dam” doesn’t fit since it’s an island and not a river or lake. The island does have dams, but those are not nearly as important as the dikes.

The Baltic sea just had a once-in-a-century storm surge this fall. There was little danger since the baltic sea is rather well protected, but many local dikes weren’t up for the job, resulting in quite some damage (in general, the houses on my island were mostly unscathered).

Took us the better of two months to drain the water from the island, and in the meantime we had to hike along the more robust dikes to get to the harbor.

We also had to empty our lakes of saltwater to attempt and save our fire-bellied toads, as the Copenhagen Zoo is trying to preserve the species on the island.

And then links to a similar sounding but ultimately totally unrelated site.

Luckily that was only the abbreviation and not the actual word. I know that language changes all the time, constantly, but I still find it annoying when a properly established and widely (within reason) used term gets appropriated and hijacked.

I mean, I guess it happens all the time in with fiction, and in sciences you sometimes run into a situation where an old term just does not fit new observations, but please keep your slimy, grubby, way-too-adhesive, klepto-grappers away from my perfectly fine professional umbrella terms. :(

Please excuse my rant.

LLMs (or really ChatGPT and MS Copilot) having hijacked the term “AI” is really annoying.

In more than one questionnaire or discussion:

Q: “Do you use AI at work?”

A: “Yes, I make and train CNN (find and label items in images) models etc.”

Q: “How has AI influenced your productivity at work?”

A: ???

Can’t mention AI or machine learning in public without people instantly thinking about LLM.

I guess that’s one way to announce End Of Service.

Well, it was sadly not the original Tetris by Alexey Pajitnov for the IBM PC, but the NES version was indeed beat recently.

This is the way! The razorblades last for about 4 uses (7 if stretched) so a pack easily lasts a year, and I haven’t cut myself with one yet (in contrast to those pesky plastic razors which can’t keep sharpness throughout a single session).

Never gonna give my safety razor up, one would have to wrestle it out if my cold, dead hands!

While accessibility always is nice, games are a kind of art, and art is not always for everyone.

Some games are made to be hard and even impossible to beat (Tetris till recently), so asking them for an easy mode is not unlike asking Rolex for a 10$ series, which would ultimately tarnish the brand’s name.

To expand a little:

While it indeed is annoying, it did mostly go as expected, as in, law makers must always be ready for companies responding to new and more restrictive laws with malicious compliance.

The vast majority of websites don’t actually follow the rules for cookie banners or implement them in as roundabout a way as possible, making them needlessly annoying as it should always be easier and at least as fast to decline than to accept.

While this all sounds like cookie banners ultimately are a failure because of the misimplementations that companies provided in response, it does function as an eye opener for the common man and stepping stone for the EU for further laws and fines in regard to citizens’ rights to privacy.

I think its a bit of both.

Personally, I apparently focus (that’s what it’s called, right? Non native speaker here) slightly behind infinity, so I’ll have to put a slight amount of effort into seeing clouds clearly. I can also focus on close objects, but if I read a book for about 5-60 minutes without my glasses I’ll suffer a splitting headache, depending on how much time I’ve used inside recently.

I’ve found that I can do office work just fine using glasses, but after a few months I’ll need to get stronger glasses as my eyes become worse. This resets if I spend a few days outside avoiding computers, books, and my glasses entirely.

I can usually watch TV just fine without glasses, but if I’ve been doing office work or just been mostly inside for about 2-3 months I’ll need my computer glasses (tuned to focus at around 50-100cm) to watch the TV (located about 3 meters away). At this point, I usually also have to use my reading glasses for the computer, and I’ve got a special pair of glasses that I can use for reading in that specific case. I even start having problems driving longer routes.

In other words, I have really rather (I can still most tasks, just with a headache) bad eyesight during winter and spring, but usually have much better eyesight and barely need glasses during summer and fall.