Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@tymwol @hynek No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm not saying, "Hey, this privacy violating machine is a dystopian nightmare, but man is it efficient!"

I'm saying that Chrome is on balance an excellent example of a genuinely useful technology, and has almost certainly made most of our lives much better, even if we don't use it directly. The chrome team has had some missteps and the monoculture is not great, but they obviously have a genuine commitment to excellence and security.

@hynek I work at Google but I had nothing to do with chrome, but I still think it's appropriate to be proud of having played any significant part of building Chrome. For all its flaws, it is a major accomplishment and a consistently high quality product that has done a lot for the web in its time.

Not that I want to do anything to stop people from adopting Firefox, I use it and really dislike the chrome monoculture out there, but I think Chrome engineers deserve to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment despite the latest changes that I may disagree with.

Learning a new language: "Why are there two words that both seem to mean 'very' in this language? How am I supposed to know which one to use?"
Speaking English: "There really should be a word between 'amble' and 'stroll', 'meander' isn't quite right."

@timorl Awesome, thanks! I hadn't heard of minetest, so finding out about that has made it way easier to make more of these if I need them in the future. Thanks!

@kevin Man I love engaging with brands. Just the other day I actually decided *not* to fly somewhere because I knew I would have to take a break from brand engagement. Glad there's finally an option to do it "on the wing".

Anyone out there with #minecraft installed willing to take a screenshot for me?

I'm trying to get an image to illustrate the sentence "you put it there, but I want it here" for an Anki deck to teach my son to read.

I was thinking something like a house in minecraft with a door attached in the wrong spot (like above a door-shaped hole in the wall), or maybe a railroad with a few rails shifted over by a few voxels.

Prefer if you'd release the image CC-0, since that will minimize complications when I eventually make the deck public.

I dunno if you can tell from my open tabs, but I miss my #pebble... 😿

(And my #PineTime is really not cutting it...)

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@glyph As for *why* you can't do this with the standard library, it's half "haven't gotten around to trying yet" and half "it's really complicated and there is neither a consistent API for retrieving this across different platforms *nor* a guarantee that your system is even set to a specific IANA zone", with a dash of, "There are a lot of versions of this kind of API that are very close to an attractive nuisance, so it is necessary to take care in its design."

@glyph There's no standard library way to do it, but IIRC `tzlocal` migrated to use `zoneinfo` a while back, so if you trust their heuristics you can use that to get the name.

@adamchainz I think if I weren't concerned with licenses I could just google image something up pretty easily, but I'm trying to keep all the images CC-0 or CC-BY so that when the deck is done I can open source it. I am considering trying to go on fiverr or something to outsource the illustrations, because they're really quite time consuming even using generative AI, but unless I can find someone who will churn out a ton of quick illustrations or AI-generated images for pretty cheap, I think getting a hundred example sentences illustrated might be outside my budget for the project.

@adamchainz I kinda wonder if the early "hands with too many fingers" and bizarre extra limbs and stuff made people try to put huge penalties in for bizarre stuff like that, and it gets penalized when you actually *try* to generate something weird.

@adamchainz I am putting together an Anki deck to teach my son common sight words (to supplement our phonics-based reading). I have a sight word for him to read, then a simple example sentence, and when we finish the sentence it reveals an illustration.

I had the sentence "I have three eyes" as an illustration for "have", and I wanted to have a three-eyed lemur or something (kids love funny stuff like that), but no matter what I tried I couldn't get any image generator to give me something suitable.

I ended up going with a different example sentence, but I found it curious that image generators *really* don't like extra eyes.

@adamchainz Yeah, tried mind's eye, lots of terms like that. Just tried Ajna chakra and I got a bunch of lemurs with glowing balls at all their *other* chakras...

Tried to go extremely stereotypical, specifying the "three eyes" multiple ways. The closest I got was a lemur with a little yellow light on its forehead.

“a three-eyed lemur; the lemur is sitting in a lotus position and all three of its eyes are open. The third eye is centered on its forehead. highly detailed digital art trending on artstation”