I took some French classes and picked up some Italian by spending some time in Italy. I wouldn’t say either language is easier, but I’d say Italians are (at least back in my day) incredibly patient with non-Itlalian speakers flipping through a dictionary in order to talk to them. Anyway, French and Italian are related (both Romance languages) and speaking either one will make the other easier.

I find spoken Quebec French almost unintelligible even though I can somewhat understand French from France. Even French people have some trouble with Quebec French, especially as you go further east and the dialect gets stronger. It’s a bigger difference than the difference between regional accents in the US. But, written French is mostly the same between France and Quebec, so at least you’ll be able to read the signs.

I also once had the idea of improving my French by spending some time in Quebec, but then realized I’d end up speaking the Quebec dialect, which apparently is comparable to hillbilly English in how it sounds to French people.

Added: You don’t mention what part of the US you are in. I’m in California and the most useful language here other than English is probably Spanish, then maybe Chinese. If you want a Romance language, maybe consider Spanish? It is pretty close to Italian, enough that I once managed to confuse the two.

Is that good or bad? What cpu? How big is the screen? What encoding?

I don’t know why clothes that have sat around for a long time get funky but I don’t think it’s dust per se. Keeping clothes in a drawer generally keeps dust off of them but they still get funky.

This sounded too crazy even for Elon, and it seems to be fake. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859807

It’s difficult for software to identify slop, since if there was a technical way to do so, the same methods would be used to generate more convincing slop.

You could give kagi.com a try (fake email address gets you 100 free trial queries) but idk if the output format will work with your browsers. Paid plans start at $5/month. It gives you more filtering options than DDG and so on give you, but I don’t think it’s better at detecting slop. Some people think it’s great and that it’s well worth the cost. I tried the 100 queries and thought it was a bit nicer than DDG but not that big a deal. YMMV.

Bah we did much better testing in the pre CI era than the corpos do now. Main difference was we couldn’t push new releases whenever a bad bug turned up. So there was more willingness to debug first and ship after, instead of the other way around.

No there was usually a two-way PA system that the teacher could call the school office with (an assistant principal would usually answer), but I don’t remember ever seeing an actual phone in a classroom.

Never heard of him but he looks like a younger Charles Bronson? Quick glance at web search results didn’t inspire any muppet thoughts.

Jeez, and here I thought Alban Berg was still contemporary. He died in 1935.

Copyright schmopyright, why aren’t they being prosecuted for all that invasive scraping, like Aaron Swartz was? They caused a heck of a lot more disruption. See for example the captchas and turnstiles nearly everywhere now, and the hassle of logging into anything without guessing pictures of traffic lights.

Phoronix is a drama mongering site so of course the comments will be dumb, just like the articles.

Is there any music on spotify that isn’t also on youtube? Youtube has practically everything, it has always seemed to me. I’ve never been tempted by spotify.

Which direction were the volte faces in? I have stopped paying attention to this stuff.

sensorwatch.net is the only one I’d want. Note it doesn’t have any data communications to speak of. It’s an old fashioned digital watch with some cool features including software thermocompensation for accuracy within a few seconds per year. And it runs on a regular coin cell for a year or so, not a stupid nightly recharge like it thinks it’s a phone.

I mean that happens with humans too. You have to stay in contact with the real world to not get caught up in delusions. This explains a lot of news stories, more or less.

Doggone clickbait. Here. “They found those who drank full-fat milk had a higher mortality risk in than those who drank low-fat milk.” The headline could have said that.

GNU Jami, when I can get it to work and not jank up the sound too much. https://jami.net/

I’m glad I’m doing one trendy thing even if it’s just an accident of being a luddite.

Dunno about the other stuff but I have wired headphones. Am I in trouble?

This looks like an ad. What’s wrong with F-droid?