You think if people who publish their work publicly didn’t research things like this, they would just never be discovered?

At least this way, we all know about the possibility, and further research can be done to see what can mitigate it.

well obviously it won’t, that’s why you need ethical output restrictions

Sharing knowledge. Lots of people are not primarily motivated by greed.

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

While true, why are you linking this comment in almost all the other comments?

I’ve been stuck repeatedly asking myself this question ever since reading your comment 😩 Please be careful about throwing infinite while true loops around! Now I need someone to Ctrl-C me.

That’s interesting. I’ve always thought the name a little weak, so you prompted me to find its origins. According to wiki:

Taler is short for the “Taxable Anonymous Libre Economic Reserves”[7][8] and alludes to the Taler coins in Germany during the Early Modern period.

That definitely looks like a backronym! Anyway, the wiki for the Taler coins says this:

The word is shortened from Joachimsthaler, the original thaler coin minted in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, from 1520.

So the original root appears to be Thal or Tal i.e. valley (just like Neanderthal/Neandertal). The Taler wiki page goes on:

[The Holy Roman Empire’s] longest-lived coin was the Reichsthaler, which contained 1⁄9 Cologne Mark of fine silver (or 25.984 g), and which was issued in various versions from 1566 to 1875.

Was Denmark part of the Holy Roman Empire? Either way, your ancestors would’ve presumably often traded with Germans using these early Thaler/Taler coins.

I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

Yeah I’ve noticed it sometimes seems to get worse. Don’t know what phone you use, but when I use Google’s voice-to-text on Android, I often have to correct mistakes, because it tries to do it word-by-word, but sometimes what I actually intend is not clear until I’ve spoken the whole sentence - and for whatever reason, Google very rarely goes back and changes a word it’s already transcribed. For instance, if I say, “I think your speaking” it’s not yet clear if that should be a “your” or a “you’re”, and it won’t become clear until I complete the sentence/clause.

If I want to dictate a long piece of text, I will use OpenAI’s text-to-speech, which is almost flawless (it doesn’t start transcribing until you’ve finished everything you’re going to say). I appreciate some people don’t like OpenAI, but to be honest, Google isn’t much better, and likewise Apple is not a lot better than Google.

Well spelling was solved even earlier than that, with rote-learning at school in combination with the very environmentally friendly technologies known as the paddle and cane. What was wrong with that way of doing things?? Is it progress? Or were things better in the old days?

In any case, all the words in the sentence in question are spelt correctly - the problem is grammar. Correctly determining if the grammar of a sentence is correct is a much harder problem than simply checking the spelling of words against a dictionary.

I’m using voice to text like right now

AI really has come a very long way hasn’t it. It was not that long ago that you had to train the computer on your own voice and even then accuracy was annoyingly bad. Now it can transcribe speech from just about anyone at much better levels of accuracy.

Yes you got it! The person I replied to was talking about those inline grammar checkers you have in word processors, which are pretty limited in value so I wanted to show what you could do with an LLM, and how it can go beyond just correcting but also helping learning.

I did think about adding a sentence to say to imagine writing in some important official context e.g. a letter to a government agency rather than a comment on Lemmy, but decided in the end it would probably be obvious.

It’s a *lot* better these days. Here’s how you could use it to improve the English in your comment:

Can you point out and characterise the grammar mistakes in the following sentence, with tips on how the writer could avoid similar mistakes in future - “I must admit its been a while, but all these things where horrible last time i played with them.”

Sure — that sentence has a few grammar issues, each pointing to a common kind of slip. Here’s the breakdown:

1. “its been a while” → “it’s been a while”

Mistake: “its” is a possessive pronoun (like his, her, their), while “it’s” is the contraction of “it has”. Fix: Use “it’s” because the writer means “it has been a while”.

Tip: When in doubt, try expanding “it’s” to “it is” or “it has” and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn’t, you probably want “its”.

2. “where horrible” → “were horrible”

Mistake: “where” (a location) is confused with “were” (past tense of are). Fix: Use “were” to correctly form the past tense of “to be”.

Tip: Say it aloud—“they were horrible” sounds natural, while “they where horrible” doesn’t. If it’s a verb (they were), you want “were”.

3. “i played” → “I played”

Mistake: Lowercase “i”. Fix: Always capitalize “I” when it’s a pronoun referring to oneself.

Tip: This is more about habit than logic—just train yourself to always type “I” in uppercase, even in casual writing.

Full corrected version: “I must admit it’s been a while, but all these things were horrible last time I played with them.”

I was puzzled by this too, so I took one for the team and clicked the link. Yes it does appear to mean that there were less users using the Chinese language in this survey than the one for the previous month, which implies fewer Chinese users: “Last month we saw quite a sharp drop for the Linux stats, which coincided with Simplified Chinese once again rising as the language choice on Steam. This is something that happens now and then.”

Why there is a link between Chinese users and Windows is an interesting question. Could be related to a higher number of Internet cafés there - not sure if that’s still true but it used to be - and/or greater acceptability and availability of pirated software in China compared to Europe and USA causing reduced demand for free alternatives.

Here’s a list of well-supported USB WiFi adapters - https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/USB_WiFi_Adapters_that_are_supported_with_Linux_in-kernel_drivers.md

Can you just stream video and audio directly, like a standard IP camera? This list of solutions in the Raspberry Pi documentation could have some ideas - https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/camera_software.html#stream-video-over-a-network-with-rpicam-apps (there are some RPi specific solutions, but also general Linux approaches e.g. ffplay)

In case you don’t already know about it, paccache (part of the pacman-contrib package) will let you easily remove old packages from the pacman cache

fraid I generated a tl;dr for this rather verbose article:

“Home directories are a mess because too many apps ignore XDG spec and dump dotfiles everywhere. The problem isn’t just legacy software—new apps do it too, often out of ignorance or laziness. Windows has similar issues with profile folders. Fixing it requires devs to actually follow standards, but many resist due to inertia or ‘my way is better’ thinking. Users should push back and demand proper XDG compliance to keep $HOME clean.”

Well like it or not, your footer is just a part of your comments, and so people are invited to respond however they wish when you post it on lemmy. If you don’t like people making the same replies, you can simply stop posting the same content in every comment.

artistic licence innit - based being the opposite of cringe.