No, sounded southern, maybe Devon or thereabouts.

Are you also upset that “December” doesn’t refer to the tenth month anymore?

I’m not entirely against it, but I’m amused by how common it is to put “whole” inside of “another”, making it “a whole nother”. Can anyone give any other use of the word “nother”?

The thing is that, at least in the UK, many people also say “of”. You might say that in quick speech it’s not possible to tell between “would’ve” and “would of” which is probably where this misspelling came from, but I once was talking to my English friend and after he said something quickly, I asked if he just said that “she would see it?”, to which he replied “she would OF seen it” putting a lot of emphasis on that “of”, making it clear that he wasn’t aware that it should be “have”.

Yeah, must of.

I remember once being on a call with some customer support guy who didn’t seem to even be aware that words “you” and “me” exist. My favourite part of the conversation was when he said “let myself put yourself on hold while I ask a senior colleague to clarify this for myself”.

It’s not so much on strict grammar, but it’s a wonderful guide on clear writing and in general, clear expression of yourself. It does have a chapter on use and misuse of English, usually backed by data and only rarely being the expression of the author’s personal preferences: The sense of style by Steven Pinker.

Is that mildly infuriating or just mildly amusing?

I don’t know, the MW defines unstop as “free from obstruction” or “remove a stopper”. You could say that the “stop” text functions as an obstruction or stopper, which you can remove in order to receive texts again.

Remember that there are biases at play here. There’s the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”. (…) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

What is your 6 year old laptop’s make?

Well, you do also have what you could call atheist extrimists. Richard Dawkins is pretty well known for his lack of tolerance towards religion that in my opinion isn’t much different in its intensity from religious extrimists’ opposition to non-their religion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an atheist myself, I’m just saying that I don’t think that the complete lack of tolerance to the opposing world view is a problem confined to the religious right.

Could someone ELI5 (if possible) what passkeys actually are?

Lol made me imagine firemen standing next to a burning house and drenching the one next to it with their hoses.

I’m a molecular biologist, but I’m into so many branches of science! I love maths (arguably not science) - the elegance, the consistency, and pi that pops up everywhere. Physics - the laws that actually govern the universe and it’s most basic level. Chemistry - the science of change where so much emergence happens. Biology - the science trying to solve the actual mysteries of life. Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology - understanding what makes us tick and how it came about. And linguistics - the science of the original sharing app.

Edit: typo.

Yes!

I do the same things. Half of my conversations with people is me first rephrasing everything they said to me to make sure I understood them correctly before I answer their question or address what they said. And I also always want to give relevant answers but find myself circling around them more than I’d like. I didn’t study philosophy tho.

Wait… Did The Onion buy out CNN?

Oh. Ok then, we don’t have them in the UK in the city where I live.

Was it really AI powered? I’ve never used one (we’ve not had them in the UK) so I’m genuinely curious. I heard it just had chips in every product, so when you leave the shop through a gate, everything you bought got scanned, and you were charged automatically. But in my description there is no AI in the modern sense of pattern recognition based on vast training data.