felix318

Sure but why not give me file name matches first instead of random pictures, since I started the search from Finder itself? Why try to outsmart the user?

I have no problem with searching pictures using keywords if it’s limited to the Photos app.

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Taxi, bar, hotel, restaurant, are very common. Maybe because of tourism?

I have no idea what “kaput” means…

I find it interesting that people write Google queries in correct, often polite English as if there is something intelligent on the other side. When I try this query: "where mango grow washington" I seem to get decent results, but the human-sounding query does return garbage.

Perhaps the problem with Google is that it's trying too hard to convince people that it's smarter than it really is. I treat it as a stupid, mindless computer and it works fine most of the time.

I don’t understand how it’s possible to make money in the stock market unless you have inside information. I deeply suspect the whole game is rigged and there are ways to do insider trading without getting caught, and the real secret to be a successful trader is to find out how to join the club.

Somewhat unrelated: shouldn’t it be pronounced “Dvorjak”? That is how the other famous Dvorak (Czech composer) is pronounced.

Merits and criticisms aside, carbon offset has a striking semblance with the sale of indulgences practiced by the Catholic church in the middle ages. Some patterns of thought seem ingrained in us.

I’m not in the least worried about the supposed dangers of AI; I don’t see it causing major unemployment, nuclear armageddon, or anything particularly scary. However, I think the real danger with those chatbots is how people are becoming emotionally involved with them. This is clearly by design and it’s working extremely well with so many people.

Tip for searching acronyms: put the word “acronym” in the query. Works for google and gpt.

Such techno-utopianism... political power belongs to people who control the guns. There is no way around it.

“ Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed. “

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Numbers also only exist in our minds but that doesn't make mathematics a branch of psychology. There is a rational side to economics because money can be measured and the measurements are reliable.

The unpredictable side of economics is of course the behaviour of the various economical agents, and regarding this I think economics is closer to astrology than to psychology.

It’s not that clear-cut, in the richest states in the South the pattern is similar to what you see in the US, urban left, rural right.

Also, this election is not typical. Left or centre-left has won 6 ou of the 7 past presidential elections since the end of military rule. Brazil, like most Latin American countries, is predominantly left-leaning. Bolsonaro has been an anomaly and most likely will not be reelected.

I still have my HP 11C, the engineering equivalent, from my school days. It is still a joy to use, the build quality, the feel of the keys, the RPN system. The thing is almost 40 years old and it looks like new.

Sure, it’s totally anachronistic but the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.

I would say if the words of Christ are not enough to convince someone, who else could possibly say it better?

I’ve read lots of Chesterton and CS Lewis, and they didn’t change my perception of Christianity a single bit. What they did though was expose the enormous inconsistencies of the materialistic worldview. It’s not an argument for Christianity as much as a critique of its critics.

“Santa” means “female saint” in Italian and Spanish. Perhaps the English “santa” came from another language but I always found the name “Santa Claus” just horrible.

The Christian dilemma, almost a paradox really, is that the more you love humanity the harder it is to love humans.

The other day I read something about how society must “prevent the oversexualization of children” and that got me thinking, who will protect the oversexualization of society itself? The answer was obvious to me.

The numbers in bank accounts are not fake, if banks could materialize money out of thin air they would not need clients. The numbers mostly stay in the system but the balance betweeen banks needs to be settled everyday, and that can’t be done with fake money.

(to be fair, all money is fake but only governments have the power to enforce the value of their fake money)

They may eventually find that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by someone else with the same name.

Conversely people looking at current adverts 50 years from now will wonder “where did all the white people go?”

(I’m not white and I don’t care, it’s just an observation)

Technically any sequence of notes within the octave is a scale, including the chromatic scale (111111111111). The French composer Olivier Messiaen did some investigation into how many scales can be built, I think the number is a bit over 800. Of course most scales sound weird to unaccostumed ears.

I didn’t believe in talent until after I spent over ten years trying to learn music, and then seeing 5 year-olds on YouTube doing stuff I can only dream of. True, some, perhaps most of it is hard work, but talent makes the process a lot easier.

I seem to recall Steve Jobs saying the reason the menu is at the top of the screen is that it's easier to hit it with the mouse, you just push it all the way up. I think it's a valid point.

A bit off-topic perhaps but as a non-native speaker I'm always baffled by English smalltalk. People who reach out to me on Teams usually start with "Hi, how are you" and I never know what is the proper reply because I know the question is not sincere. Why not just say "Hi"?

(and this is nothing compared to the seemingly mandatory Monday morning elevator "how was your weekend" question)

I don't think it's a waste of time (I'm not OP by the way) but you would surely be missing data.

There are altered states of consciousness that occur naturally and don't lead to a sense of euphoria. Sleep paralysis for example. It happened to me once and it made me see things differently, nothing religious or mystical, just an enhanced perspective.

To give an example, during my episode I had what is usually described as an out-of-body experience. I felt myself walking around my bedroom as if I were awake, only to find out that my body never left the bed. Now if the sense of being "out of the body" is an illusion, how can we be sure that being "in the body" is not just the same illusion? (I'm tempted to think we are not anywhere and that space itself is the illusion, but that is beside the point)

I think it was always the case that the development of instruments is a major influence on musical styles. Sacred music and the church organ, Baroque music and the harpsichord, Romantics and the piano, Jazz and sax, the list goes on and on.

Today however, synthesizers can create any sound imaginable so we probably reached the end of the cycle. Who knows what will guide the future of music.

That was interesting. I listen mostly to classical and had no trouble whatsoever with the Mozart track, the difference was clear. The other tracks I was forced to guess and, strangely, got all wrong answers!

Compressed classical music annoys me to no end, although for a long time I couldn’t tell why. Then I found out, the problem is the artifacts, which you may not be aware of but they do affect your emotional response.

This page has an amazing description of the issues: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compressio...

All those public health decisions are taken behind closed doors, we are never told the full story. I suspect the point of the vaccine passports is really to protect the unvaccinated.