Calorie counting through MyFitnessPal. I am unable to accurately gauge how many calories I’m consuming just by eyeballing it, and this is especially difficult given my TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is about 1350 calories. (I’m short.) The only way I’ve been able to manage my weight is by turning it into concrete understandable numbers.

I have a 3,312 day streak of calorie counting now. It’s the one habit I’ve managed to keep up, and while my weight has gone up and down I’ve kept track of it all. At my starting point, I weighed 150lb (obese by BMI), and I’m currently down to 118 (high end of normal by BMI).

Y’all kids and your speedrun strats. Some of us have poor reaction time and need to perform safety setups.

I’ve never understood why people have such a hard time with the trolley problem. Obviously, if you pre-emptively move that lone guy over to the rail with the five, you can hit all six at once to maximize your score. Just requires a bit of setup.

Self-reply: looks like Clozemaster Pro now has a ChatGPT-enabled “Explain” feature which is extremely helpful and breaks down the sentences. You can do this on your own with ChatGPT of course, copying sentences in and asking (I have done this), but it’s nice to have the option embedded in.

Which language are you trying to learn? There are different answers depending on that.

As someone learning Hindi, I’ve found that Duolingo is wholly insufficient in grammar and vocabulary (the entire course is far too short) and did not concentrate on listening comprehension. I’ve started using a combination of the following:

• Clozemaster for vocabulary in context of (sometimes pretty wild) sentences. (I’ve got a lifetime subscription to Clozemaster, it goes on sale during holidays.) Clozemaster has grouped “common words” and a combination of reading/listening skill and multiple choice / vocab word transcription / entire sentence transcription. It feels very overwhelming at first as you’re just thrown in but keep at it - start with reading and multiple choice and once you know the words and sentences in your grouped section start typing them out via listening.
• A combination of textbooks and websites to explain certain grammatical concepts.
• A listening-based podcast, example Innovative Language, for listening comprehension. (This also goes on sale regularly.)

Important context autotldr missed:

The incident happened when the engineer was programming the software that controls the robots, which cut car parts from aluminium, The Information reported.

Two of the robots were disabled, but a third was inadvertently left on. As it went through its normal motions, it caught the worker in its claws.

Yikes, that should be checked multiple times before someone gets close to the clawed aluminum cutting robot. Failure of process, I suspect.

Somewhat unrelated, but I do find it funny that farts aren’t considered acceptable, but sneezes and coughs are. Like, farts have an extra barrier in the form of your clothing (assuming you’re not at a nudist colony or bathhouse) and won’t make other people sick. I guess it’s just because they’re stinky.

I vote to normalize farting with an “excuse me”, and saying “bless you” to people when they fart.

While I get what you’re saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, “what people say” is only half the story, and “how they say it” (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.

When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. “… he said, cheerfully”; “… he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice”; “she said, while averting her eyes”.

In first person communications like social media, we don’t really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷‍♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit’s usage of “/s” to indicate sarcasm.

We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like “while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above.” (This might be an example of “overly eloquent” and there is probably a happy medium.)

I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can’t tell!

Is it actually a Mandela Effect if you’ve just forgotten what a guy’s name is? I always thought it was more about mass confabulations.

A fascinating take on it. I’m still wary about Threads interoperating with the rest of the Fediverse, and how that may change the culture as well as the system over time (Meta would have the power and money to throw around regarding changes to ActivityPub implementation), but I also see it similar to email. And I’ve spoken about this before to the point I sound like a broken record …

But people understand the basics of email. They understand they can sign up for a Gmail account and send an email to anyone else. Maybe Threads will be our Gmail here, and introduce people into the idea of a wider open social media concept in a more familiar way to them, and they can branch out as needed or just choose to stay on Threads.

In any case, any given instance can choose to block Threads if they so choose.

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On the other side, as someone younger it’s hard to date people much older, as they start casually talking about what they did during various wars, or comparing the COVID pandemic to the black plague, and I’ve just got zero frame of reference to connect.

Everyone much older I’ve met has been just delightful (I assume the rude ones eventually get murdered by their local townsfolk) but it’s just so hard to make that genuine connection when your life experiences are so different, you know?

Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn’t seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

Under Text Correction I have enabled:

• Show suggestion strip
• Auto correction
• Auto capitalization
• Double space period
• Proofread

Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I’m unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.

This is Windows-based and mutes your microphone globally, but if you’re concerned about leaking video/audio accidentally I’ve found it very helpful:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/video-conference-mute

This is part of PowerToys. It says “legacy mode” because they were gonna deprecate it now that they’re trying to build the functionality into W11, but relented and are keeping it based on the outcry from W10 users.

Now that I have a Kindle, digital all the way. It’s so nice to just throw that tiny thing in a bag and read somewhere, and if you finish your book there are a bunch more on your device. I like that the Kindles allow you to email ebooks to your address to be downloaded so you’re not locked into the Amazon store.

Mbin is a very recent fork of kbin so there are very few differences at the moment. My instance does not have a lot of communities as it’s a private instance with very few members, so mostly we follow others’. Mine is https://the.coolest.zone

Fantastic news, Ernest! I’m sure a lot of people will be happy now that that visible domain blocking / posts disappearing fix should be in. :) That was the most visible issue I noticed coming from your kbin.social folks, anyway. Instance level moderation is also a great and welcome addition and I hope you are able to get some volunteers to assist with active moderation, since it’s such a large instance.

It’s also good to see commits and changes happening on the kbin code in general. While I’ve moved my instance over to Mbin, I am still rooting for kbin as well - more hands and more ideas in the “community-focused posting” section of the Fediverse can only lead to further improvements as well as more choices for people looking to spin up their own instances, be it Lemmy, kbin, or Mbin.

This is almost certainly totally out of date.

Today, the confusing, intimidating pile of Google Messaging services is bigger than it has ever been, with Google Chat, Google Messages/RCS, Google Voice/Project Fi, and separate messaging services in Photos, Messages, Pay, Assistant, Stadia, Maps, and Phone.

• first three - still around
• Photos - yep
• Messages - duh
• Pay - I couldn’t tell you as moved out of Pay when Wallet rebranded to Pay and then Google inexplicably released a second app called Wallet
• Assistant - I think this technically doesn’t count since you can’t message people
• Stadia - RIP, thoughts and prayers to the five people who used it
• Maps - Took a bit of clicking around to find a business near me that used it, but, yeah. Still there.
• Phone - The most baffling thing on this list. Even ArsTechnica in the article doesn’t know if this is the same service as the above Maps chat or not. I’ve never seen this, so hopefully it was a short lived experiment that never took off… but maybe someone else here has seen it recently?

Welp, never mind, not that out of date.

These clowns want to push a messaging standard. Jump to RCS, Google says. Hey, Google. How about you standardize your shit first. Nearly all of these could be collapsed into a single messaging platform with little integrations into your other services via the Messages app (aka sent as links and displayed as integrations in compatible devices).

Bob, short for Bobert. So that every time he has to say his full name to anyone on the phone or fill out forms somewhere, he has to repeatedly explain that, no, it’s not Robert, it’s Bobert.

Wow damn I only wish I had those urban planning skills. My cities all turn into sprawling traffic-congested nightmares.