“Our analysis shows that the two voices are similar but likely not identical,” Berisha said.

They also point out the main differences between the two voices in the paragraphs below this quote. I do believe that they hired a voice actress and that they didn’t train on SJ’s voice, or at least not entirely. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was big push for finding a voice similar to SJ’s voice in Her, no matter how much they deny this.

It is, though. Safari has native support for 3rd party adblockers, it’s just that many people don’t know. AdGuard is one of the good options. Safari is doing the actual blocking for the most part (the extension just hands over the filterlists), but nowadays some of the adblockers include an optional extension that applies some rules for complex ads that are not supported by the Apple API, such as on YouTube. As an end user you just have to install and enable the adblocker.

Then there are also other browsers available with built-in adblockers. Admittedly those are all limited in some ways because they’re forced to use the same browser engine (outside of the EU), but they are very effective at blocking ads.

It’s Markdown syntax. You can actually format it nicely in a code block:

bool isEven( long long x ) {
  if ( x < 0 ) x = -x;
  if ( x == 1 )
    return false;
  if ( x == 2 )
    return true;
  return isEven( x - 2 );
}

You do that by adding ``` above and below it. To force single line breaks, you can terminate your sentences with two spaces, or a backslash.

I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.

Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.

A non-political event, eh? Interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/dec/30/eurovision-chief-russia-ban-stands-for-ultimate-values-democracy.

But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.

Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.

[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.

Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.

Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.

Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.

Not only that, but there are also two arrows on this map going into the UK. It’s up to the UK to take care of how well these arrows connect to important locations within their borders. There really doesn’t appear to be an issue whatsoever.

Average none, though 2.5 Gbps is getting more and more common and WiFi is catching up too. You could max out multiple slower devices at the same time without hitting the limit of your uplink. I don’t have a use case for that, so I’d only upgrade from my current 1 Gbps to higher speeds if the price is comparable. That doesn’t mean that others don’t have a use case for it.

I’m using Kagi, which aggregates search results from several search engines (including their own), but without the ads, with less crap and with features like searching for literal strings and promoting/demoting certain websites. It’s a paid service, though, but I like it enough that I’m ok with that.

Your title too :)