gotodengo's comments

I have a particular interest in the languages of Mozambique. Many of these languages are heavily used in their local areas, but endangered by lack of acceptance in schools, lack of media in the language, and lack of resources (Possibly one of the reasons Moz is blank in the linked map).

I've found most of the best resources for actual text in smaller languages comes from religious translations, which can be a bit outdated but usually offer a fair amount of text. And beyond that I've gotten lucky with a few google drives and other repos mostly containing educational packets put together by various volunteer and missionary groups.

Unfortunately I'm not sure the copyright on many of those. I think that's why most of the language projects[1] I've seen wind up being mainly repos of titles of papers published on various languages. Which can be hit or miss for educational purposes.

[1] From the linked site I mainly poked at a couple African languages and didn't see much beyond the paper titles. There may be others with much more info.

From the post:

"The ad is attempting to use the Audio API as one of literally hundreds of pieces of data it is collecting about your browser in an attempt to "fingerprint" it... Your browser may be blocking this particular API, but it's not blocking most of the data."

Seems like killing the audio is the metaphorical putting a finger in the dyke of serving arbitrary JavaScript to your users.

Your link is in reference to the state of the air reports. Which seem to collect data in 3 year periods. Looking at the most current report vs. the previous one Pittsburgh is (slightly) worse for particulates, going from 12.6 ug/m^3 to 12.8. The city also fell from 17th worst to 10th worst for fine particles[1].

Between the reports, it was the only county in PA to see an increase in unhealthy days for fine particle pollution[1]

25% of days in 2019 have been unsafe for people with asthma in the city[2]. Obviously the coke fire is a large part of that. Which by the accounts I've read at the least took their sweet time warning the public about the scale and type of pollutants that were released.

Obviously the city is not yet at 1970's level. I've spent some time on the rivers, and indicator species once lost have returned and are still there.

Your own link however contains the quote(from before the coke plant fire)

"Of all counties in the state, only Allegheny experienced an increase in the frequency of unhealthy days for particulate pollution, 6 to 8.5 — the highest in any county east of Utah."

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For context with the neighbor, this is while the well ~200 yards from his house was spraying mist. From the last time I was at my parents' house it seemed to do that for about 10 minutes every 4 hours or so. It makes the air smell like old cabbage and is hard to schedule around. The whole street has shared their concerns with one another.

I love the place, and farms certainly add their own pollutants to the air and water, but the status of the air in Pittsburgh is pretty canonically "not good".

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https://www.nextpittsburgh.com/latest-news/american-lung-ass...

https://www.ehn.org/pittsburgh-warned-stay-indoors-pollution...

Western PA in general seems to be slipping back into (as I've been told it was like) the pollution of the 70's.

Even without the recent coke plant fire, Pittsburgh had a record worst year (since they've cleaned up in the past few decades at least) for days of high airborne particulates, warnings for those with asthma, etc.

The gas wells in the south west of the state used to pool their run off/waste water (which contains at least benzene IIRC) and wait for it to evaporate off. Those pools occasionally leaked though, and the pictures of dead fish in nearby ponds/streams looked bad. So now they mist the water and spray it into the air to be dispersed over a larger area. Last time I was home I saw my neighbor mowing his yard with a white surgical mask on.

Tap water has turned cloudy at best and isn't trusted by anyone, so everybody buys bottled water, which just increases pollution again.

Last I read though, Bayer was getting out of Pittsburgh, and BNYM was doing a bunch of layoffs. As much as they should, I can't imagine the local govts bringing down the hammer anytime soon. In leiu of tax breaks, Appalachia has a long history of selling the environment and locals health in exchange for business.

Sorry, but you're making a lot of assumptions as to why this person, or anyone would have a large amount of video or photos.

They could be the guy taking photos of their kid's ball game, that parent's know they can reach out to for pictures of their own kid's goals as well. They might have to record regular meetings at a work or club for posterity/legal sake. Based on what they posted it possible they're a pro photog/videographer who is just looking for a better system than what they're using currently.

Take less video isn't applicable to the question at all.

As for my experience I do agree with the keep them on an HDD part though. Nothing beats raw storage capacity for me, and multi-terabyte drives are only getting cheaper. I've got one set for bulk items, and another for backups of anything worth keeping.

The only annoying part for me is remembering to get data off a group of SD cards and onto the harddrives in a timely manner.

At this point it's a backwards compatibility issue. Like you say for Ohm they now recommend using the omega symbol[1] but there's still code out there using the Ohm symbol.

Solving that wouldn't have helped in the Spotify case though since there's a ton of other edge cases like combining characters 'e' + ' ́' vs precomposed characters 'é' which still cause the need for an idempotent canonicalization of usernames.

Not to get too far from the topic at hand, but I came across the Spotify article earlier this week while looking to support Unicode usernames in an application. After consideration I've decided to just lock things down to ASCII for now. It's just too big a case to consider and there are bigger fish to fry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm#Ohm_symbol

Reminds me of the Spotify unicode username issue[1]. Where a function assumed to be idempotent (think tolower(username)) actually wasn't with certain unicode inputs. Allowing account takeovers.

[1] https://labs.spotify.com/2013/06/18/creative-usernames/

The Portuguese have exported certain other aspects of Asian culture to various parts of the world as well.

"chá" is the word for tea in (all?) the Portuguese speaking world, an early borrowing from Cantonese. Whereas most other European languages use a variation of tea or chai, which have somewhat longer etymological routes.

Cross-pollination from their colonial days has also lead to curries being part of the regular diet of many Mozambicans.

I'm not trying to deny the (until very recently legally enforced) class difference between whites and blacks in South Africa, nor the social issues causing hiring discrepancies in the States.

However, it's not a narrow reading of events. Musk is African. Head a bit out of the way in South Africa and you'll find white kids who spend all day running around with black friends with the whole group speaking fluent Zulu. They've grown up there and their families have been there for generations.

Or from a more paranoid standpoint, they got exactly the public response they wanted.

Dissenters, or at least supposed dissenting federal employees now know they're considered suspect. This attempt died, but in light of this do you, anonymous federal employee considering speaking out against the direction of your department, want to risk being next?

This is what happened during the RadioShack bankruptcy iirc.

Instead of putting customer data up for sale they essentially just split off the portion of the company that held the data and put that up to be acquired.

"Tech companies helped stop SOPA through coordinated messaging to users DIRECTLY through their services.

It's the only industry that has so much leverage for so little cost (free effectively)

Let's put it to use."

I love this idea, especially the follow up about pointing out the contributions of the involved countries and their diaspora.

I distinctly remember a scene from some random show years ago, in which a kid was selling fake school excuses.

The other kids were amazed that the "top quality" excuse even had the same off center 'e' as the typewriter the school nurse used.

In this case the phrase is a more artistic way of describing the beginning of a fight. Think of "John set upon Mike angrily" as John set, or selected, Mike as his target.

It's also a great example of the topic at hand because the same phrase could be used like "The book was set upon the table." Describing a book that was placed on a table.

Each version uses the same common vocabulary, to describe wildly different things.

In my experience, there's some world class tech in the city, but in terms of numbers mid-level more accesible employment is easier found elsewhere.

Also the weather, landscape, and a road system designed to match a 4 year old's hot-wheels track are a real love it or leave it kinda thing.

I agree it's not implausible, and I think they'd be remiss to not consider the possibilities in regards to using new tech in this manner. However I don't necessairly see it opening many new possibilities.

Sure a drone changes the method somewhat. But replace dark web with cash/corrupt state, and drone with small dirty bombs, and people have been talking about similar scenarios for decades.