rvense

I obviously meant sewn by hand, using a sewing machine. Not by a robot. The fabric is cut and passed through a machine by a human.

I just don't see how it holds water at all to say that Christianity was what caused the abolition of slavery, when just as many Christians were in favour of it.

Yes, socks, but nothing else is: underwear, t-shirts, jeans... all sewn by hand.

But if these things are because of Christianity, and it is often implied that western modernity is present in it from its beginning, almost an unavoidable consequent of it... then why are they not universal in Christendom? Why can I point to just as many Christian movements who are anti-science, pro-slavery, anti-individual?

The interesting question is whether the West is succesful because of or inspite of our Christian base. There's no denying the place of Christianity in European history, but that doesn't mean that the good things about our societies are due to Christianity. Christianity has changed a lot since Roman times, and its place and expression in various societies have been affected by other ideological currents and reinterpretations.

I'm Danish, which while nominally Christian has been a fairly irreligious country for a few generations now, and it certainly seems to me that the less influence and visibility Christianity has had, the better off we've been. Most of the things that make this country a good place to live come from socialism/social democracy and feminism, whereas many strands of Christianity has mostly been a reactionary force (with some exceptions).

I wonder what this will cost to build and how often they break. I doubt it's going to be able to compete with the price of human labour anytime soon. So it's either for going places people can't go (rescue bot?), or doing things people really don't want to do, like walk towards gunfire.

Sounds low. None of the companies I've worked for would have existed without open source.

People like you are ruining the internet.

Brain drain means you have great politics, gotcher.

And that has happened again. Changing the colours is "improving UX".

It's not more complicated if you know the language.

Language is a tool. People will use their language for what they need it for. If there isn't a word they'll make one up or steal it. This is absolutely universal. I know you can dig up any number of texts that say English is special, but they're all wrong.

"Languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must express" as Roman Jakobson phrased it. (The "must express" refers to grammar - in some languages you need a subject, or to know the time something happened, or in which direction[0] it happened. Other languages don't care, but you can add that information if you need it.)

[0] E.g. Mam, spoken in Guatemala, marks all verbs for direction, even if they're abstract, then you add one based on convention or metaphor or maybe taste.

We know alot about how English has evolved. Word forms develop along certain paths, sound changes follow laws that linguists have described, and the "fuuuug" in refugee does not become "fugg".

Etymology is probably the subfield of the humanities that provides the closest thing we get to testable hypotheses and laws. This is just mashing shit together.

It also seems to have a tendency to just mash semantics together. As though having something resembling "pig" and something resembling "full" means "full AND piggish". But that's not how plain juxtaposition works in Germanic: it's specification, not conjunction. So "pigful" would mean a type of full, full of pigs. (This is language specific, by the way; as I recall in Vietnamese "mother-father" is the normal word for parents - but in Danish it means grandfather, your mother's father.)

I'm sure I could get WhateverGPT to hallucinate something that looks like those drawings chemists make of molecules to most laypeople. That would be about as interesting as this is.

Etymology is a science. This is random guesswork, and it's not even very precise (deriving refuggle from refugee is definitely objectively wrong).

Maybe I'm coloured by having spent half a decade of my life on a linguistics degree, though.

Fyllipig is derived from "fyllan" and "pigge" and means "descriptive of something that is both full/abundant and pig-like."

Terryjambled means "mixed up in a confused or disorderly state, and covered with or resembling terry cloth."

Refugglemander means to "to manipulate electoral district boundaries in a way that impacts refugees."

I'm sorry, OP. This just isn't very good.

Thinking about that picture from a (UK?) hospital breakroom with the sign that said "Please turn off the Echo before discussing sensitive patient information."

Can you give me some concrete examples of where Euro uber-government is negatively impacting my life?

The world would be much better without much of what American venture capital has created over the past twenty years. Ad tech mass surveillance, Uber eating labour protections, "Unicorn" worshpping monopolization of basic utilities.

No, but the French and German governments just gave you an excellent code base to start from!

Are they undercutting businesses or creating new ones? Running and supporting an instance of a suite of open source tools can be a business.

When your health sector is being shaken down by foreign monopoly for software licenses whose prices increase for no reason, making your own word processor suddenly doesn't seem very different to training your own doctors.

Software licenses are certainly a major expense for all levels of the Danish government. (Cloud infrastructure, too, increasingly.)

They've started complaining, especially since prices have been going up, but while there's rumbling underground, we've yet to see any real movement away from Microsoft.

Is it just me or has this been a year or two off for at least a year or two now?

If you keep doing it she's sure to get it eventually.

Isn't this exactly what you'd expect from an Uber for (somethign)?

Garbage company, garbage culture, garbage business model.

I'm actually part of a site like this, just a thing a friend of a friend made:

- You can write and edit one post at a time.

- This post, in whatever form it has then, gets published at 8 in the morning.

- You can only see posts for today. All old content gets deleted.

- No comments or feedback is possible.

- Only symmetric relationships are possible: you can add someone, but they won't see your posts and you won't see their posts until they add you back.

- All "friend" discovery is out of band. There are no recommendations, no boosting/retweeting, nothing.

This is obviously not a mass medium, but its reductionism gives it some interesting properties that have made me consider what a good social network would be. One post a day is a fantastic idea.

(I don't know if they intend for it to be named in public, so I'll refrain.)

though IIRC you had to patch BeOS for SMP support

The board might have require a driver or patch, but SMP was BeOS's entire reason for being! The drawing of each window on the screen ran in a separate thread. It was their main selling point.

You can get a ZIP of OGGs if you want. Those will last as least as long as a 2005 DVD rip from Pirate Bay. Feels good.

(You can also stream through their site and app, and I think they have all sorts of social features... but you can ignore the hell out of it and just get tunes for money. Really one of my top 5 sites, Bandcamp, though I wish they were still independent.)

Especially if we're more concrete: If your job is, say, in administration and what the machine answers is correct enough that in in 8 out of 10 cases you can basically copy-paste it, I'd say it's extremely likely that it's going to increase the amount of errors made.

A basic education should include a lot of stuff you never use. If you're not exposed to things that don't interest you, how are you going to find the ones that do?

I probably will, actually. It was good to have an ally with their stature and history.