Defintely, it's a waste of an opportunity. But as someone also living in non-English speaking country, it's surprisingly a lot of effort to make sure I actually expose my self to the language. If you're work and social circles are all predominately English speaking, you need to take active steps to have meaningful exposure (and you most certainly should!)
I think it's different now that in the past, because it's so easy to live in a bubble and spend a lot of time communicating online. Even back in the 'old country' I barely spoke with strangers, beside shop interactions. I have my headphones on, listening to music, watching streaming services, and interacting with my friends and family. Now that I'm abroad, I can do pretty much the same thing, I don't need to watch the local TV channels I can just watch YouTube, I don't desperately need to make local friends, because I videochat and game with my buddies back home very easily.
It's taken a couple of years here to realise that without actively pushing myself, I'm not really picking up much of the language. Now I make myself listen to talk radio in the car, and try to overhear conversations on the train, rather than existing in my normal bubble. It's absolutely worth it, but if I'd been motivated I could have made myself consume shows, radios, etc in the target language back I the 'old country'. And while there's certainly more possible language partners to practice with, if they don't emerge naturally in your social circle, then it's not all that much easier than finding someone back home who wanted to improve their English to be my language buddy.
Tldr it's a waste to not learn the local language, but failing to do so isn't so much "doing something wrong" as "not actively pursuing a challenging but reward interest".
Two years certainly could be enough, but it really depends what the environment. If OP, like many English speakers who live in France for a couple of years, was teaching English, or studying in an English speaking postgraduate course, and then socialising with a mix of people from different places, who all use English as their shared language... It can be pretty easy to miss out on a lot of immersion.
And the level of language to comfortably phone up a hospital, explain a slightly odd request and be bounced around different departments with the administration... I know plenty of native French speakers who would avoid doing that.
I thought it was places that had circumcision that used the death grip, because of the loss of sensation? (but definitely not an expert!)
I did think that after I commented. Mais non, teaching English Linguistics in France.
Yeah, I've found since I started doing them slower and less carefully they seem to be more acceptable. Like, start a captcha, switch to another tab and do something, then go back and finish it. No ai's doing that.
Tbh, almost all oven thermostats are not accurate for the actual temperature of the oven. Like, they probably are measuring 170 accuretly, but the thermostat is in the very back top corner and the temperature in the middle shelf is 15 degrees off.
People who are keen on baking, roasting meat etc where temperatures are important often recommend getting an oven thermometer so you can see the real temperature.
I guess it'd be interesting if you could measure the drop in undeclared income by seeing places that increased their turnover as electronic payments became common. Although because covid was a big driver for that in many places, and disrupted all the expectations for business, demand, costs etc it might be hard to pick apart.
I dream a lot, but how vivid they are and how much I remember them varies. Sometimes they're very visual, weird or interesting, but often they're vague and hard to recall. I find that if I'm not getting enough sleep I don't dream as much, but then if I'm on holiday and catching up on sleep I dream pretty hard.
No idea why someone down voted this comment. It's pretty much all there is to it. Where ever you're publishing / monetising can have your real name for financial and legal aspects. But the name you put as the author of the stories / books can be whatever you like (probably not the same as someone else who publishes in your field....)
Works fine for me on Boost
I thinknif you've lived in Britain that long most people would think of you as British, especially if you have a reasonably British accent. Where I live in Scotland, most people are happy to accept anyone who actually wants to live in Scotland as Scottish!
Hut there's always going to be racist idiots. I've been told I'm "not really British" just because I'm from Scotland (by someone who obviously doesn't understand the difference between England and Britain. And I've seem the whitest, pure Anglo-Saxon English people being called "not really British" because they wanted to stay in the EU. So, try to ignore the idiots!
I love 60s and 70s music, heard a lot growing up from my boomer parents. So many classic, timeless hits. Then my mum found some "Fab No. 2s of the 60s" CD, a compilation of songs that didn't quite make it to number 1...
It was truly awful, all clichéd cheesiness and triteness, so many lame songs that sounded like other, better songs. Just sucko-barfo all round. I think there are arguments for why music from the early stages of a genre (like 60s pop and soul) are particaurly good... But there's also a hell of a lot of selection bias going on.
Egg and dairy allergies are among the most common food allergies, so I'd guess that something like that might be the issue?
Yeah, I think challenge can be a bit motivator for adhd folks. Once I've completed the main part of something, I find it really hard to care about the details, to the extent that the unfinished parts sometimes spoil the bit I had completed.
I feel like it's the dopamine of the chase is actually what's motivating, and challenge is a version of that. I'll get sucked into finding some obscure game and getting an emulator working to be able to play it and all the way I'm super engaged. Then I start playing this game I was so excited about and meh, don't care.
Maybe you could think about ways to refocus that drive? A therapist told me once that adhd people don't get satisfaction from completing things, but are excited about new things. So, instead of feeling proud of getting into college try and immediately find the new challenge (now I want to get a prostigious internship!) if you succeed at your fitness goals, maybe you can raise the stakes see if you can beat a friend or a record or something?
Is Android increasingly inconsistent?
I feel like I'm encountering weird little tics and problems with my android devices, and those of family and friends. Just simple things where settings don't seem to be consistently applied, or the os switches something back repeatedly. For example, my apps are set to auto update, to use data as well as WiFi, etc, but every month or so I go into Play and see that some random app hasn't been updated in weeks.
Or my friend only gets Signal notifications when they open the app, despite giving full background data use, turning off adaptive battery, etc. My mother uses an alarm app that needs to display over the screen for a feature, but despite me setting that permission repeatedly Android keeps turning it off.
Is this just anecdotal bad luck? Or is all the work to preserve battery life, control background usage, etc led to an OS where the user can't control things reliably? It starting to feel a lot like MS Windows!
Why do my earbuds sound better paired to watch vs phone?
(I've got a pixel watch 2 and moto edge 40 neo, and some jlab earbuds.)
I usually listen to music on my phone, but recently linked my earbuds to my watch, and the same music played on Spotify sounds massively better on the same earbuds when played via the watch.
I assumed it was because I had installed the jlab app, and it was doing a bad job of meddling with the eq. But after uninstalling it there wasn't a noticeable difference. Is there some other setting I can adjust? Any thoughts on whether it's something my moto is doing wrong or something my pixel watch is doing right?
Its a substantial difference (although I'm not enough of an audiophile to describe it) enough that I'm now mostly playing music via my watch. But it's hitting the battery hard, so I'd rather go back to using my phone!
Site / service that will send a message at a specific date/time?
This is maybe a weird request, but I'm looking for a way to send myself some information at a specific time in the future. Basically, it's because I've got a few sites that are huge distractions for me at the moment, and I can't stop checking my accounts, responding to messages, etc. My willpower is so low, and I've got a lot of important work right now and it's starting to really mess up my life.
So my plan is to change the passwords to my accounts to a long random string, then save that string somewhere that I can't access for X days. I imagined a simple way would be to use a site that would send me an email on a date, and the content of that email would be my random passwords. But my web searches only seem to find pages telling me how to schedule my own emails, which isn't what I need.
Any advice / suggestions?
(also, in case anyone is thinking it, the sites I'm trying to block access to are all linked to the same email account, and I'm also going to change its password, so I won't easily be able to reset them).
Edit: FutureMe is exactly the site I was thinking of, thanks lemmings!
ELI5 How does chatgpt do its shit?
I hear people saying things like "chatgpt is basically just a fancy predictive text". I'm certainly not in the "it's sentient!" camp, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot more is going on than just predicting the most likely next word.
Even if it's predicting word by word within a bunch of constraints & structures inferred from the question / prompt, then that's pretty interesting. Tbh, I'm more impressed by chatgpt's ability to appearing to "understand" my prompts than I am by the quality of the output. Even though it's writing is generally a mix of bland, obvious and inaccurate, it mostly does provide a plausible response to whatever I've asked / said.
Anyone feel like providing an ELI5 explanation of how it works? Or any good links to articles / videos?
Do any languages have words for left & right that start with the same letter?
And if so, how do they label headphones, contact lenses etc?
How many of these have been statted as monsters already?
https://thetoyzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/01_The-Boogeyman-Iteration-Worldwide.jpg
Link for slightly better quality image
And the article has zoomed in maps of some continents https://thetoyzone.com/nightmare-fuel-iterations-of-the-boogeyman
how to find a good USB cable?
I feel like some usb cables are great, allow my devices to charge fast, connect to data reliably, etc. But it seems so difficult to find the ones that are good! I've tried buying expensive ones but it seems pretty hit and miss. Sometimes some cheapass aliexpress cable seems to beat the "good brands".
Are there standards or anything I should look out for? USB drives, sd cards, and the like have read/write speeds or different "classes" but usb cables seem to all claim to be brilliant.
Am I just being dumb?
OSR system with specific 'low level' rulebook? (Holmes/Moldvay/Mentzeresque)
One thing I loved about Holmes and Moldvay /Mentzer red boxes was having a set of rules that didn't overwhelm new players with lots of material that they won't need until later.
I know that most osr games are rules light enough that it isn't too much, but I was wondering if there are any systems out there that seperate out the 'basic' and 'expert / advanced' levels like that?
A particular peeve of mine is that spell descriptions seem so often to be presented alphabetical so that the 10 spells that might matter are lost in a bunch of pages. But even just class descriptions or saving throw tables that cover the whole range make level 1 look like a stepping stone, rather than a satisfying place to play many an adventure!
Any suggestions?
Learning computer/OS for kids, that teaches command line?
My nephews & nieces aren't currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won't have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn't require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.
Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational "games". But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.
Any suggestions?
For those who write...
I've just made this community because Supernote related content was one of the last things I'm still checking reddit for. I'm not a regular content creator, so I'm probably not going to be posting lots of new, useful stuff. But now if any other SN users search on lemmy, there's somewhere to start talking!
Any AMOLED friendly redshift / blue filter apps?
I've use Twilight for years and love the red filter for using my phone at night. But since getting an AMOLED screen it's started to frustrate me. The way Twilight seems to work means that black also gets a red tint. Previously this was great, but on amoled black is completely dark with no back-light that needs masking with red. So by shifting it red, Twilight is actually making the screen much brighter.
Tldr: Any apps that leave black as black, but give a red tint to all the other colors?
Castle Campbell, near Dollar, Scotland
Formerly know as Castle Gloom, the castle is situated in a high vantage point in the Ochil hills. It is protected on either side of the castle by two large gorges, through which thunder streams ('burns' in Scots) the Burn of Sorrow and the Burn of Care.
OSRSS: Anyone got good rss feed suggestions for osr / rpg content ?
I'm trying to get back into blogs and rss feeds after a many year hiatus. But I'm finding it hard to find active rpg blogs, so if anyone's got any good recommendations please share! (tbh, doesn't even need to pure old-school, but I'd rather avoid a "WOTC awesome new dice set!" sites).
What are up votes (uplemmies?) actually for?
Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they're participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.
As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there's some discussion about lemmy tracking 'karma' even if it's not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement "karma thresholds"? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?
And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?
Going to deep fry a bunch of these babies
Mix of squash / zucchini flowers. Somehow, despite the fact it'll mostly be oil, batter and salt, the fact that there's a freshly plucked flower at the centre makes me feel like I'm a healthy elf.