Learning a language is easiest when you have opportunities to speak it. Which one are you more likely to use? A book might not be as effective as an app, like Duolingo or similar. Duolingo is free for a single language.

French phonetics is a bit more different from English, but both Italian and French are romance languages (based on Latin). Many English root words are Latin (also German, Greek, Dutch, and Indigenous languages). English also borrows loanwords from French and Italian, but pronunciations vary. I’d say both are relatively easy to learn as an English speaker (as is Spanish or Portuguese).

Grammatically, sentence structure is close to English. French introduces an extra word for negation which takes a little getting used to. “I cannot” becomes “Je ne peux pas” while Italian conjugates the verb to remove the subject “Non posso”.

One big difference with French is that there is a governing body that determines official French spelling and pronunciation. L’Académie Française was founded in the 17th century by the bad guy from the Three Musketeers, and is committed to maintaining linguistic purity. They tried for years to get French people to say “le courriel” instead of “email” but I don’t think anyone actually says that. Italy also has Accademia della Crusca, aka la Crusca, which had a similar function until the early 20th century when they were made more of an philology organization.

The benefit to both is that, once you understand spelling and diacritics, reading a word tells you precisely how to pronounce the word. The downside is that the languages have been basically stagnant for 350 years, so there are many strict, archaic phrases and sentence structures. English is notorious for homophones, homographs, and homonyms, which aren’t nearly as common in either French or Italian.

That said, reading from a book will never be the same as speaking with and listening to a native speaker. If you don’t have someone to practice with, there are online resources and probably local community options to find people who will help.

Right? Like even if tourists are visiting the countryside, they’re going to be spread out across all the available space.

This is a valid question, but it’s hard to answer because it depends on the security of your own network. Tailscale creates a secure tunnel directly into your home network, but if your home network is compromised then it’s not secure.

Could Tailscale be compromised? I think it would be difficult but not impossible. It’s safe enough for personal use, certainly, but I wouldn’t use it to protect state secrets.

And if you have it on your phone, and someone gets access to your phone, then they can access your home network. How secure is your phone? Do you use biometrics or a password keeper? Do you leave your laptop unlocked?

Security is a mixed topic, and it’s impossible to pull one thread from the sweater without unraveling the whole thing. Sometimes the illusion of security is as effective as actually being secure, and sometimes it isn’t at all.

Both fair concerns. Plus then your server must always be on.

Can you stream from your pc? I set up Jellyfin and Tailscale, and all my music (and movies and tv shows) are on my computer, accessible from anywhere.

[glancing around my office at all the people using jira] Yeah, sure. That’s the intention.

Seriously, though, I’m an “educated professional” with a liberal arts degree who uses jira every single day. Being an “educated professional” doesn’t mean you have PM skills, or tech troubleshooting skills, or know how to search documentation for your problems. Educated professionals are a cross section of the larger population, and are more or less a representational sample of the whole of humanity. There are proportionally as many people whodon’t know what a Kanban board is, or can’t figure out why they don’t have permission to delete the 350 epics they accidentally created.

AI assistance is like an interactive FAQ. It can do a little more than a static list of questions and answers, but the answers should also be validated by a human with the knowledge and understanding of the underlying systems. AI agents hallucinate and make up answers all the time. LLMs are essentially pattern recognition, and novel problems often break patterns. A human would go “huh, that’s weird.” An AI will classify a platypus as a duck and tell you with confidence how to pluck it.

So, I agree with you, and I am the same way. But you and me, we represent like a fifth of support callers. AI could deflect an alarming number of daily support cases. Just finding information in the documentation often requires a deep and thorough understanding of the product, and it’s really difficult in documentation to separate “this is a common problem everyone has” from “this weird thing has never happened before and you need to talk to the dev who coded the fucker.” AI is fairly good at that level of pattern recognition.

The problem is that you still need the people to take the hand off, and deflection doesn’t mean they got the right answer, it just means they left.

Or some edgy marketing move, just having it redirect to an artists’ makerspace collective or something. $185 is nothing compared to the notoriety a few viral news articles would bring in.

I’m surprised it’s not already owned.

I play chess with my kids this way.

Criminals should go to jail.

They used to pay someone to do it.

Closed ecosystems are one of the reasons I don’t use an Apple Watch, iPhone, or MacBook. I know I’m not the typical target consumer, but I’m not that special. There are a lot of people who specifically avoid convergence.

I always wanted a novelty 5 inch bay device that was release a small wisp of smoke from the front of the pc case, like mission impossible. It could be a command, or randomized and it would councide with a BSOD or just a power-off command (probably screen off now that I think about it).

You know how you have to pay extra to have insurance to pay to take care of your mouth bones and your face balls? Well, what if we did that but with all the bones and stuff? Like, why are your foot bones included in the same insurance that pays for you to have knee bones or neck giblets? Why not do all the bones and stuff a la cart? And then maybe skin can be a premium add-on. We could charge separate for the red goo that’s all on the inside everywhere, and then it’s like a subscription model for having parts. We can sell it like “don’t pay for the parts you don’t have,” and people will think that they are saving money because each part costs less than the whole, but paying for everything costs more.

-some Health Insurance board member somewhere, probably.

… I should start an AI company.

I feel like I’m going to be responsible for Trump sending ICE to raid the Shady Pines community event planning committee that picks the color schemes for their weekly card games.

I’d rather spend 10 minutes avoiding 4 minutes of advertising on a streaming service I pay for. Luckily, it doesn’t take nearly that long.

The hell is a USian?

Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”