Well, as a right-wing loony, it would insist that its wrong answer is right and anything you use to show it that it's wrong it would discount as fake news and a conspiracy by the Bilderberg cabal of reptiloids.

So, essentially, it's like a marriage. Easy to get it, but getting out costs you an arm and a leg and you can be almost certain that a lot of your stuff will go missing.

Just say you want a golden shower, no need to tapdance around it, we're all adults here.

Like explaining WTF Salesforce is, and why the hell it should be relevant that their shares lose value.

Yeah, mommy is proud of you. Now go play and let the adults have their chat.

Probably the one with the fewer deaths?

But how very American of you to not consider that a bigger problem than losing money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Social credit is a distributive philosophy of political economy developed by C. H. Douglas. Douglas attributed economic downturns to discrepancies between the cost of goods and the compensation of the workers who made them. To combat what he saw as a chronic deficiency of purchasing power in the economy, Douglas prescribed government intervention in the form of the issuance of debt-free money directly to consumers or producers (if they sold their product below cost to consumers) in order to combat such discrepancy.
        In defence of his ideas, Douglas wrote that "Systems were made for men, and not men for systems, and the interest of man which is self-development, is above all systems, whether theological, political or economic. ...
        Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
        Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value. While Douglas did not deny that all costs ultimately relate to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth. Douglas carefully distinguished between value, costs and prices. He claimed that one of the factors resulting in a misdirection of thought in terms of the nature and function of money was economists' near-obsession about values and their relation to prices and incomes. While Douglas recognized "value in use" as a legitimate theory of values, he also considered values as subjective and not capable of being measured in an objective manner. Thus he rejected the idea of the role of money as a standard, or measure, of value. Douglas believed that money should act as a medium of communication by which consumers direct the distribution of production."

If the data is processed locally, great -- but I'm guessing it goes to Google?

I am writing this on a Chromebook Plus (Acer 516 GE). For contrast, I recently installed the VS Code Speech speech-to-text plugin by Microsoft into VSCode (running under the Linux subsystem) but it runs locally. From the plugin blurb: "The Speech extension for Visual Studio Code adds speech-to-text capabilities to Visual Studio Code. No internet connection is required, the voice audio data is processed locally on your computer." The plugin works amazing well, even usually adding appropriate punctuation automatically in sentences. Odd to think Microsoft in some ways might be more committed at the moment to both FOSS and privacy than Google?

I was using spelling-assistive and grammar-assistive tools under Unix (VMUTS) circa 1984 -- and the tools helped me become a better writer. Hard to believe such tools can't run locally given so many computing advances since then. Frankly, I'd still like a grammar tool for VSCode or Thunderbird as good as what I had forty years ago.

I think this was probably the tool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Writer's Workbench (wwb) is a grammar checker created by Lorinda Cherry and Nina Macdonald of Bell Labs. It is perhaps the earliest grammar checker to receive wide usage on Unix systems. ... The Writer's Workbench was meant to help students learn to edit their work... As of 1983, the wwb package contained 29 utilities. As of 1986, this had increased to around 35-40 utilities."

On an Android phone, I have been repeatedly prompted to "backup" all the pictures on the phone to Google. The prompt happens at odd times and it would be easy to accidentally click the wrong button and have all the pictures go to Google. Worse, when I click no, then it seems at least some (maybe all?) pictures are selected and another prompt appears to backup the selected pictures. Again I have to click "no" and also deselect pictures. Seems like a "dark pattern" to me. I haven't seen that prompt in the last week or two so many enough people complained for them to revise that?

Anyway, I am wondering if I will eventually have to stop using the Chromebook (or at least reimage it with a non-chromeos Linux distribution like GalliumOS as I did with a previous Chromebook) if Google has now integrated stuff that could send the content of any text area to its servers with a mis-click?
https://www.makeuseof.com/best...

I'm starting to think that the only reason Google does better than the rest right now is because their index is much larger than everybody else's. Wasn't always that way, used to be their algorithm was much better. Now it's just anywhere between mediocre to shit. Feels like Excite and AltaVista did in the late 90s. The market feels ripe for disruption at this point. The cycle repeats.

I've never been able to entertain the idea of writing anything in perl, only fixing somebody else's broken script. Its syntax honestly bugs the crap out of me. Though in addition to bash, the problem I'm describing is definitely there in python, PowerShell, and beanshell. If you haven't heard of beanshell, then don't google it unless you want PTSD.

But isn't that what every C++ developer says? Basically everybody but themselves are incompent. That everybody but themselves doesn't use smart pointers correctly.

Why weren't they just designed so that they can't be used incorrectly in the first place? That's the approach rust took, and it's already proven to work. Sure, you can misuse them in ways that are suboptimal, unergonomic, or unidiomatic, but you can't inadvertently use them in a way that will cause your program to crash, or worse, create a silent security vulnerability that somebody discovers days or even decades after you've released it.

Japanese (non-kanji) isn't an alphabet, the word you're looking for here is syllabary.

I admit, I'm old, but when I have friends over, we usually got better things to do than play video games.

First you pay a premium for the software, then you pay to play it online. And all that to use an inferior input device for FPS games.

Why would you do that?

People have stayed in more abusive relationships...