“Evidence”? What a quaint concept.

As a Bavarian (South of Germany) I agree with the Ch at the start of the word being pronounced like a K (Chiemsee starts with the sound K), but with it depends on the region. I start “China” and “Chemie” with K, but a lot of people start it with “sch” (which sounds like sh in English). But that’s really weird for my ears.

And the father of my ex wife is from Cologne, his “ch” sound quite like “sh” as well. Kirche (church) sounds like Kirsche (cherry) when he says it. Funnily his last name has two “ch”.

German is my native language , so yes. It sounds a lot different from what you might think if you can’t speak “ch”. But if you’re American…

Please read this German sentence aloud:

Ich suche den Koch.

(I’m looking for the chef.)

Anything else, sir?

Fortunately in English classes (I learned English at school) we read Macbeth. There’s a lot of layers to Shakespeare - for example a lot of allusions which you’ll only understand when you know about the time it was written in. And our English teacher dragged in a native speaker to help out with conversation, who was a student living in my town.

In German (my native language) however, we were presented a poem without not enough context about the author and had to answer “what’s the meaning of this”. Most of the German teachers I had were boring, lazy or both.

Your literature problem - I had that in German, Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig”. Yeah, I as a teenager was so eager to read about the homoerotic thoughts of an older man traveling to Venice and lusting about a young boy. Yes, of course it’s symbolic but - fuuuuck me, really? Do I need to read that.

Mark Twain has written an essay about the “awful German Language” (I don’t agree). Amongst other things he complained about long sentences.

Ha! He know NOTHING! He had not seen the works of Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann must have been hugely intelligent. He managed to write a single sentence that is too long for a single fucking book page. With a random number of subclauses in between. Exploiting all the cleartext encryption mechanisms the German language allows! With the most boring content a teenager in the height of puberty can not relate to.

I still have a visceral hate for Thomas Mann. In my 40s I thought I’d give that book another chance. Nope. Still hate it.

Ah, soon I’m 40 years past school and I still get PTSD about it.

No no no.

In school in higher education we had to interpret poems.

I am definitely sure, that neither the author’s opinion or my opinion are relevant. It is only the teacher’s opinion that is relevant.

(Do I need the /s?)

Eating it cold is even faster and still better than microwaving it into a mush.

MICROWAVE?!?!!! Who puts Pizza in a microwave? That’s probably the worst way possible to heat it up. It’d rather eat it cold.

Put it in an oven (or yes, a pan).

My ex-wife and me divorced amicably, so we still talk.

One day, about two years after separtion she called me whether I still had my credit card.

(Typically we pay by payment cards called ec or giro card - but they don’t habe a credit card number, so not usable for ordering something from overseas)

So I said, yes, why. “Uhm, I want to buy something from the US” she answerf with skirting around the topic.

A certain assumption forms in my mind, as she speaks on I’m getting more sure every moment.

I answer: Look, <ex-wife>, don’t try to order the Hitachi Magic Wand from the US. It can’t be imported due to the no-lead-in-electric-devices law. And even if it arrived you 'd need a transformer for plugging it into our 230V system. Just buy one of the knockoffs available on Amazon in Europe

She : “Um (pause), OK”

Some years later my teenage kids found it when they were at her place. They asked her what it was and she said “a microphone”. I swear by my kids, the “it is a microphone” meme happened once in my family in real life. (And of course these teenagers knew what it was).

You will get a lot of lasagna and only read unfunny boomer memes for a month.

I do think software piracy also was a large success factor. When I was 13 there was one major spot in my city where consoles and computers were sold (within a department store!), and people where “swapping” games even before they bought the hardware. I remember at least one of the store clerks having a small side business providing access to disks and tapes you could copy - right on the machines that were shown in store.

And I learned how to copy the C64’s basic rom to ram and mod small things even before I had the machine myself.

All the kids were gathering round the computers, the consoles were less attractive.

When I got my own C64 in 1983, my first game was Fort Apocalypse. It was not an original. You needed a boom box with dual tape decks to copy these.

Yay, a 25 year old feature with a new UI design.

I’m using FF as my daily driver, but I feel my hatred for Mozilla soon reaches the level of my hatred for Google.

I do wonder (just in my head, there’s no hint to that in the public) if all that money Google pays to Mozilla somewhere has a no-competition clause which says FF must stay more shitty than Chrome.

I’m not consciously of one Innovation out of Mozilla that made FF a better browser, and a lot of interesting stuff has been canceled.

It’s still an OK browser, but it is like it was 15 years ago. While I watch colleagues using chrome reskins which have great tab management (amazing when you use Jira). Only now that we have LLMs people turn browsers into agents - why the fuck is there no cross - request scripting (go to google, search for this, click on 2nd result…). Yeah we have developer tools like puppeteer for that, but having - say python or js to do so would make people use it more frequently.

Browser history. Ah damn, a day ago I saw a page that explained how to do xx with yy while considering zz. How great some decent browse history would be. (And yes, FF, keep it all, but only when I’m at http://weirdkinkyporn.com/, please just store it for a few hours). A single keyword for history search IS NOT ENOUGH. I need to isolate things by adding a number of things, because if I knew the word I’m searching for, I’d just google it anyways.

Yeah, so much more things you could do (and the above ideas are just half - baked thoughts).

But Mozilla needa tha sweeet CEO payments. There’s no money for experimental stuff.

About a month ago, I ranted about that with a few friends, afterwards I rage-contributed to the Servo project.

I just wish Google would cut off that Mozilla money, I really believe that would improve competition.

That no-compete agreement is a product of my imagination, but things really feel like that.

Fuck Mozilla.

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’mangiate.

Something like that, I’m no Italian.

Because 12 and 60 are great numbers to divide. You can take a half of it, a third and a quarter and still get whole numbers.

Iirc the French did try decimal time at one time, it was not convenient.

Heh thanks for explaining it, I never knew if noon was 12am or 12pm. In German we say “11 in the morning”, “12 o Clock (noon*)” , and “1 o Clock (in the afternoon)”

But typically we don’t say whether it’s am or pm, it’s clear from context if “i need to be in the work meeting at 9”

Clocks, TV listings, my work timesheet read 24h times. We read 15:00 as “three” most of the time.

Btw some software tools (my timesheet for work) differnciate between 0:00 and 24:00. I can work (theoretically) from 0:00 to 8:00 (8h in the night to morning) and from 16:00 to 24:00 (8 hours from afternoon to midnight).

So 0:00 and 24:00 are the same moment but thought to belong to the next or previous say, respectively.

Ok yes it’s not bad, for people here it’s just - normal. There’s quite a number of beer fests round the year in Bavaria. Of course it’s the biggest one.

In Munich we have at least Frühlingsfest, Starkbierzeit and Oktoberfest - so something where you can go is always close (time wise). And if not, you’ll just go to a beer garden.

Oktoberfest

For an Esp32 you’d need to take a larger model which has psram. With the Pi, yes a is take a zero (Zero 2w or so). The Pi already has hdmi on board and a graphics chip and accelerator, while for the ESP32 you’d need a custom solution.

The price difference is maybe 10 Dollars per piece or so. On the PI I have 512Mb of RAM and what ever SD they put in for storage. On the Esp32 I have 8 psram or so and a tiny bit of flash.

Ah right, for the ESP i probably need to wire up a sd card, custom board, all that stuff, to just store that 24bit 1024x768bit image.

Naah, while I love my ESPs and am just build a project with one - the PI is just so more competent for this task while still being damn cheap.

A decent Esp 32 board is around Eur 5, a. pi zero 2w around 20. Compute module proably similar - customer prices.

That’s a 15 Euro difference.

Ah and my developer pool who can code for Unix is a LOT bigger than the pool who have commercial experience for the Esp32.

I can’t follow your math, at 100 units the price difference is 100x15 for me, which is 1500.- About a day of developing for a small team, if the office and hardware is free. More if you pay for those, too.

When I calculate, custom development always is more expensive.

This is being produced in relatively low numbers (thousands) , so software development is a factor. Just plopping a scripted browser in kiosk mode on Debian is cheaper than ESP32 UI development.