I typically fold a single tortilla into half and put the filling in. Taco style, but with flour tortillas.

They’re typically homemade, and I’m not skilled enough to make them thin enough to wrap.

And they got a bit too used to it. To the point they struggled a bit with other seas; Caesar’s first attempt to conquer Britannia, in 55 BCE, highlights it.

When the Romans were close to the coast of what’s today Kent, from Pas-de-Calais, the Britons were waiting for them on the hills. Full of love, hugs, and arrows. No problem: boats are fast, right? Just look for another open beach, it’s shorter to go through the sea, the Britons won’t catch you! What could go wrong?

…except it is not shorter. This is not the Mediterranean, sea surrounded by land; it’s an island, land surrounded by sea. It was really easy for the Britons to protect any potential landing spot, while the Romans took the long way.

Eventually the Romans said “Per Hercle… let’s land anyway in this muddy island”. With boats built by the Veneti. Who lived in Brittany (the continental peninsula). Great shipmakers, they often did the Gallia-Britannia route to trade tin, their boats were little wonders of engineering: built of sturdy oak, with thick nails holding planks together, leather sails… what could go wrong?

The Veneti shipped between Brittany and Cornwall. It’s mostly open sea, and deeper than between Pas-de-Calais and Kent. The Romans had a hard time landing, because their ships couldn’t go too close to the shore without getting stuck. The Romans knew a lot about the geography of the Mediterranean, but those lands? Hic sunt bibitores loti dracones.

But hey, eventually the Romans did land. They fought there, encamped there. The ships were beached… without taking into account high tides. Because unlike in the Mediterranean tides are a big deal down north. Caesar got storms, high tides, some ships were full of water, some hit each other and became useless, then the Britons saw all of that and said “They can’t go back! The suckers can’t go back! They got almost no supplies and they can’t get more! Attack!”

For the want of a nail that fucker wouldn’t go back to cross the Rubicon. Sadly he did. And he got praised for landing.

I’m sharing this mostly as history trivia.

Donkey Kong Country (1994). I still play it all the time.

That’s basically the premise of Shinju no Nectar.

a ‘product of its time’.

Something like this, indeed. Or more like a product of the situation, plus a few laws - like network effect (the value a user derives from the OS depends on the number of users using it).

Note that not even the devs are to blame for this; it makes sense someone releasing commercial software would focus on the 70% (Windows), sometimes on the 15% (Mac OS), but almost never on the 4% (Linux).

This article is such a slop, that AI could write it.

“Wealth” is the result of the produce of land and labour*. As such, just like stocks going up doesn’t generate wealth on itself, stocks going down doesn’t destroy it either. As such, the crash won’t “destroy” wealth.

What is happening, however, is that the stocks those people bought will be worth as much as Monopoly money. Ultimately the wealth moved hands - from them to whoever issued the shares.

Why this matters: if the wealth was actually destroyed it wouldn’t make sense to look at who got it. If the wealth moved hands, it does. You can and should blame the ones who got it.

*and before someone starts whining “wah, you commies only see errything through Marx”: that’s Adam Smith dammit.

It does, but this is a vicious cycle: small market share → devs don’t release Linux versions for their software → the software ecosystem is fragile → users who’d rather use Linux still need to use Windows → small market share. Anything countering any of those “links” weakens the vicious cycle, including Microsoft pissing off some Windows users; that’s why the penguin gets smug, because they know “Winrows is now an Agenric OS lol lmao” means slightly higher Linux market share.

It’s like one of my cats. When she’s doing something silly, and I grab the phone to take her pic, all I get is a picture of her butt. Because to observe something you need to interact with it, and when I interact with her she collapses into the “I wants buttslaps!” state.

And before I watch it, she’s in a superposition of states. Much like Schrödinger’s cat. However her states aren’t dead vs. alive; they’re “sleeping”, “licking her own buttocks”, and “ruining my Christmas decoration”.

Your typical Linux user gets really smug when learning about dumb shit Microsoft is doing with Windows. Just like that penguin in the OP. Because that dumb shit is making plenty Windows users consider ditching Windows for Linux.

One of those things is to force-feed AI into the users. Exemplified by Microsoft seeking to transform Windows into an “agentic OS”. People who don’t know how those systems work don’t want it; and people who do, even less.

“Windows is now an agentic OS”.

In the specific case of clanker vocab leaking into the general population, that’s no big deal. Bots are “trained” towards bland, unoffensive, neutral words and expressions; stuff like “indeed”, “push the boundaries of”, “delve”, “navigate the complexities of $topic”. Mostly overly verbose discourse markers.

However when speaking in general grounds you’re of course correct, since the choice of words does change the meaning. For example, a “please” within a request might not change the core meaning, but it still adds meaning - because it conveys “I believe to be necessary to show you respect”.

Leftover polenta from yesterday lunch with two eggs, some yerba, and a cig.

And AI sucks at that. If you interpret its output as a human-made summary, it shows everything you shouldn’t do — such as conflating what’s written with its assumptions over what’s written, or missing the core of the text for the sake of random excerpts (that might imply the opposite of what the author wrote).

But, more importantly: people are getting used to babble, that what others say has no meaning. They will not throw it into an AI to summarise it, and when they do it, they won’t understand the AI output.

I don’t see a big deal given

1. What matters the most is not the words within an utterance, but the discourse conveyed by that utterance. [Translation: how you say it matters less than what you say.]
2. Word usage is prone to trends. Not just slang. Easy come, easy go.

What I am concerned however is that those chatbots babble a bloody lot. And people might be willing to accept babble a bit more, due to exposure lowering their standards. And they kind of give up looking for meaning on what others say.

It isn’t that bad. At least now. But if there’s at least one stray in your neighbourhood, you can be pretty sure he’ll smell it from afar, and he’ll sit just like that cat, watching the oven.

Yes. Typically only Sunday, and the owner of the “dog TV” being a small market: grocery store, bakery, etc.

Bit of language trivia: you know, commercial rotisserie ovens? Like this one?

Here in Brazil they’re known as “TV de cachorro”. Literally “dog TV”. Guess why: because you always get a bunch of stray dogs staring it, just like the cat in the OP.

Point still stands; the same “customers” of Vanguard and Fidelity own a huge chunk of both Google and Microsoft.

The one from my childhood is almost identical to this one, plus the three weights from the video pelespirit linked. Even the “IIII” instead of “IV” for the four*. I have no idea on its geographical origin, but it still exists — I saw it last week, now it haunts my brother-in-law and nephew my sister inherited it.

*something I’d only understand years later - “IV” is for Jupiter (IVPITER). Just a bit of respect for the old gods that survived.

Unlike “cuckold”, “chupim” isn’t really sexual. It’s mostly that sort of person who wants everything, but never gives back.

For example. You and your brother got each their own toys. If you play with his toys, he throws a tantrum: “THEY’RE MINE!”. If you don’t let him play with your toys, he also throws a tantrum: “WAAAAH YOU’RE SELFISH!”. That’s a chupim.