There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I once brought my nephew camping on an island with millions of snails. When the evening came I didn’t think much about them and proposed a bike tour around the island. Well, we will remember that. They were impossible to avoid just by their numbers so we were hearing dozens bouncing on the bike trailer, or being shot left and right by the wheels.

My nephew was horrified. He wanted us to stop but we were now in the middle of it so we plowed through. Poor snails. But they should have known better than just fuck in the middle of a trail.

Not just skins. Themes in general. Windows 95, 98 and XP had MS Plus! where people could install themes like this and modify Windows to their taste. And now Microsoft won’t let you switch to dark mode if you don’t have Windows activated.

Customization was one of the biggest reason why I switched to Linux in the early 2000. I could apply a single GTK theme to most of my apps, in one click, while Microsoft was moving away from this. Oh the glorious days of having matching themes for XMMS and Gkrellm, with Compiz and wobbly windows. It’s also why I stuck so much to GNOME 2 style of desktops and switched to MATE. I took my multiple years to give up on my favourite GTK2 theme.

But even on Linux now is either white, or boring dark gray. Still much easier to personalize though. I miss the days of ricing my desktop until it looked lit this.

The most recent one I saw was “Neige cause ralentissement de REM”. It works translated in English, giving something like “Snow causes slowing down of REM”, but in French it’s missing enough articles to sound wrong. The cromulent sentence would have been “La neige cause le/un ralentissement du REM”. Back into English this would add “The snow causes the/a slowing down of the REM”. A missing “le/la”, or using “de” instead of “du” doesn’t change the meaning of a sentence, but it makes it obvious that it wasn’t from a native speaker.

Maybe it depends on the model and the source but so far, in French, for news, most of what I’ve read becomes uncanny after a few sentences. They often read like something passed through a translation program but just a tad better. You can understand it fine but it’s missing an article there, reversing the word order in another sentence, uses vocabulary that is just slightly off, and often ends up like something written by someone that learned French as a second language for most of their life. A very good learner, nearly native level, but not quite there yet and still a bit off.

As someone that doesn’t have a car and uses coaches, public transit, or bicycles to get around, I’ve always found it ironic that people are willing to be stacked and piled into planes for hours but refuse to take a public bus ride for an hour. Planes are the only place where people can’t just take their car to go somewhere and really have to put up with all the BS of traveling with other people.

When I go visit my family and friends using public transit and it takes multiple hours, I sometimes fantasize that I could have gone to the airport and use the same amount of time to fly to a Caribbean island. People complain about planes but I’ve used public transit all my life so to me they’re just a tad worse than a packed public bus. At least planes have power and bathrooms, even if you have to climb over other people to use them.

I also love bike touring so sometimes instead of taking 2.5 hours to go visit my family using public transit, I use the greenways to cycle there, spend the night camping in a small provincial park, and finish the rest of the ride the next day. It usually takes about 7 hours of continuous cycling, without the pauses for rest/food and the overnight. I could rent a car and drive there in about 1.5 hour but then I wouldn’t spend a night there. It’s not always easy, but it’s usually much more rewarding.

So yeah, it’s relative.

Any quality kit should also have pustulant beige.

In French, one of the way to spot AI writing is that sentences will often miss articles or have bad grammar. Can this dude also ask the LLM to include more articles and make complete sentences in the language it’s trying to imitate?

I was using the Discover feed on my phone but Google started to insert rewritten stories & headlines by AI and they were so annoyingly bad at making simple sentences in French that it made me stop using that thing.

Sometimes there’s also just different interests in the same thing.

At some point I was waiting in line and wearing a Planet Express t-shirt. Someone passed by and made a math joke that I didn’t understand. I was confused for a few seconds then realized what I was wearing, replied that I wasn’t so much into math, and I just think electric mucus is an excellent choice for the colour of a ship. They seem a bit insulted and we quickly stopped exchanging plaisanteries.

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If I understand correctly, no fix for easily setting up/connecting to RTP yet. I get that it’s probably not a very requested feature but the downgrade from pulseaudio’s GUI options to having to type long strings is a tad disappointing for me. I just hope it will be possible again some day.

Just use Slackware then.

EDIT: Just pointing out this is distro specific and not Linux specific.

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It’s about the same quantity of plastic that one would naturally ingest over the course of a week anyway. So it’s safe as long as not done too often.

He didn’t forget. He never cared to learn it in the first place. He got what he wanted and it’s all that matters. The name of the woman that gave him the prize is unimportant. Only Trump is important.

Quite possible but if you look on the web, I’m not the only one that can smell cigarettes in coffee. Apparently they share some similar compounds.

I didn’t really check if those links are AI but just look for yourself if they are not satisfactory.

https://brewmelikethat.com/why-does-coffee-smell-like-cigarettes/

https://coffeeplusthree.com/why-does-coffee-taste-like-cigarettes/

He looks enthusiastic and I’m happy for him if he got what he wanted. Clearly he’s a fan of the series and knows his stuff.

Unfortunately the bit they showed didn’t pique my interest. It kind of had the opposite effect.

J’ai tellement hâte que Bernard Drainville soit notre prochain PM. /s

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I can smell my neighbours coffee through the walls in the morning and I hate it. It smells like someone is smoking cigarette.

Here in Québec it’s the gas companies that are doing that.

And they won with just intimidation. The town that was sued tried to ban all fossil fuel, but had to make an exception for natural gas because it’s obviously a renewable clean source of energy and not al all a fossil fuel.

“Our regulation addressed fossil gas and absolutely did not talk about renewable natural gas (RNG), which, according to our definition, is not a fossil gas,” he said.

So the gas company dropped the lawsuit.