← Feed

Posts

• Post #3969836

  RE: https://mastodon.world/@Oxymetheus/116944206513552370 A medina not just for fixing things but for experimenting with new businesses ... that's one of the things that make Tokyo great ... a person can open a hole -in-the-wall bar or café or antique jeans shop or obsessively complicated model airplane shop; and it doesn't take a fortune in rent and renovations and 3 years and public hearings to get a licence. And such areas are fun to walk around. (Akihabara and Ameyoko and Golden Gai...

• Post #3782693

  RE: https://social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/116902385348829369 Human-caused global warming / climate change has been known since the 1970s (I remember conversations about this at university). But even though most people in most countries(*) believe in climate change, only half believe it's human-caused. 🤯 (*) The US is an outlier in how few people believe in climate change.

• Post #3759240

  orbisai0security did a drive-by check of some sample code, and raised a "critical" security issue with a fix. It flagged a strpy() -- I agree, that is a security issue -- but replaced it with a call to snprintf(), plus a fair amount of boilerplate commentary. Where did this ridiculous replacement code come from? Sure, strlcpy() is BSD, but strncpy() is part of the C standard and is made trivially safe by: strncpy(dst, src, size of dst); dst[sizeof dst - 1] = '\0&amp...

• Post #3759239

  TIL that "privilege" comes from Latin privilegium "a law in favor of an individual" (typically the exemption of one individual from the operation of a law) and "white privilege" or "male privilege" take on an extra dimension.

• Post #3739195

  RE: https://thecanadian.social/@MostlyHarmless/116896198307162148 Also true of NextDoor

• Post #3464673

  @Teri_Kanefield I find it useful to at least have a year (and season or month) on an article (it's not always the published date), to give a bit of context. (Knowing the author's political preferences also helps, but I can usually figure that out ... it's interesting to read opinions that differ from mine, as long as the facts aren't mis-represented.)

• Post #3189039

  RE: https://pdx.social/@courtney/116710372072561409 Me too

• Post #3152297

  @rk It's French grammar that makes no sense (also English grammar of course). Japanese is just agglutinative RPN (SVO) with all the individual pieces being optional. Both Mandarin and Japanese use topics more than subjects. .(In French, I'm constantly surprised when what I think of as an English idiom means the same thing when translated word for word to French)

• Post #3152296

  @rk My daughter got hooked on manga and anime in middle school and taught herself Japanese from them because the existing English translations were so bad (she was exposed to quite a bit of Japanese until about 8 years old but had resisted Saturday Japanese school so much that we gave up)

• Post #3152295

  @tokyobybike The Empire State Building was erected in a little over a year, and it's taking Trump's favourite contractor 3 months to do "repairs" that don't fix the underlying problems with the pool, but they do stop it from reflecting and they cost over 10x what Trump initially said.

• Post #2747398

  Tired: Avocado toast Wired: Avocado croissant Inspired: Avocado and Comté cheese croissant

• Post #1117803

  "... fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them." https://acoup.blog/2024/02/23/fireside-friday-february-23-2024-on-the-military-failures-of-fascism/ "Fascist governments, as Eco notes, “are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”...

• Post #858192

  "... it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result." An analysis by a military historian: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/

• Post #298595

  @tokyobybike This thread might interest you: https://federate.social/@mattblaze/116051975648548470

• Post #1274

  @mattblaze@federate.social Does the acquittal of the Sandwich Guy mean that anyone may throw a wrapped sandwich at a federal agent wearing a bullet proof vest, or that Sandwich Guy was charged with the wrong "crime", or that the prosecution was incompetent, or something else? I am not a lawyer, so I'm wondering what prevents a national outbreak of sandwich throwing (besides people not wanting to waste of edible food).