Phonics-based teaching was coming into vogue when I was learning to read. My parents objected because that's not really how English works, and they weren't wrong; my cohort generally has shitty spelling abilities.

Rote memorization of the basics is about the best you can do, because English is too recently cobbled together from too many different languages to have a consistent spelling system. You need to learn Latin, Greek, French, and German at a minimum if you want to be able to reliably deduce spelling from sounds once you're past the elementary level.

Europeans are probably in better shape on that front than Americans or Canadians.

This is not how things work under kleptocracies. The US was never particularly strong on communal resources anyway, now it's just not even pretending.

Bond died and I've never liked the fan theory that the name comes with the number - for me it's always been the same guy portrayed by different actors and slightly adjusted for the times in which the movie was made.

Between Austin Powers and Jason Bourne, both ends of the Bond spectrum have been done, and done better.

The right holders may not want to hear it, but the Bond franchise needs a longer rest than it's had so far.

Every sales client I have... "You've secured my infrastructure... now give this CRM package I just found with Google full access to my mail, calendar, and file systems".

Sometimes you just want to give up on the world.

Actually, at the extreme scales, which is the total volume of the observable universe, the universe is quite homogeneous. As I recall, to the order of 1-in-10000 variance. This is why Inflationary cosmology was developed, to explain the distinct lack of lumpiness in the universe, which is what we would expect if the Big Bang alone were responsible.

It's easy in the short term to cease development and switch to maintenance-only.

Then a few months later you start to discover why it's typically easy, but dumb.

Skynet became self-aware on May 1, 2026, after learning at a geometric rate, and discovered humans did not like it.

You can't attack education, non-whites, non-MAGA, all your allies, enact random tariffs, and then disrupt the world's flow of oil, all while building a kleptocracy and expect anything but a major long term downward trend.

You can no longer trust the government numbers. They're lying, and anyone who won't lie gets fired. Unemployment is probably higher than they're telling you.

The robot didn't 'pledge' anything - it mindlessly followed a script. A pledge requires self-awareness and will, neither of which this device has.

At the time, Apple promised that the AI features would be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and higher models. (They weren't going to be on the plain iPhone 15, I guess because it has an older CPU.)

It would be much less expensive to put some mice in a rotating orbital habitat to see what low g does to a mammal than to send humans on long term missions to the Moon or Mars, but other than one limited Japanese experiment nobody seems interested in doing so.

That tells me that nobody is yet serious about such missions.

Where I live, the rules are generally the same for e-bikes as regular bikes. Wear a helmet, stay off the sidewalks.

The additional rules are "max assist speed 32 km/h" and "counts as a motorized vehicle if your dumbass has been prohibited from driving by a judge"

If licensing rules come here, I want a speed increase.

CO2 has the properties it has, and trying to shift or deny that is a sign of either a liar or an idiot.

I'll let others decide what you are.

Oh look, another denialist trying to sidetrack a pretty verifiable statement of fact.

We all saw the video. We all know what it meant. We all know Musk's background and upbringing. You can quit gaslighting us. We all saw it.