@KitFox in, with, whatever.

Hello

I just added a hat to my gravatar.

Do I look like a dev? I noticed they all got hats.

Actually, only some of them got hats.

Hi.

How do you add a hat?

hat++

Oh never mind, that’s hau not how.

Tsk.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You don it.

It's not hard.

@Cerberus Only if it's my gay hat.

What do you do with your other hats, then?

Eat them, because you have lost another bet?

No, I just store them. If I have a gay hat, why would I want to wear any other hats?

Um.

What does it do?

It frolics.

Cuts capers in the steets.

That sounds exhausting.

It’s gay, you see.

It does whatever hats do, only, gayer than my straight hats.

When you just want to buy a pack of fags.

You have to caper around town.

I’d start with a brace and work my way down.

Or up, as you like it.

I have this cross-talking image of Tigger and the Cat in the Hat dancing in the streets.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 In that case, I can find no reason to wear any other hats, nor any reason to wear this hat, nor any reason to not wear the former or the latter.

@Cerberus Ah.

In short, none of it makes sense.

TBH I'm not sure if my hat is gay.

Have you tried having sex with it?

@Cerberus What doesn't make sense?

suppresses salty-duck test

What does?

@Cerberus what would that prove?

Is it bigger than a breadbox?

I don't know, but why not try?

the hat? no. It's a Tilley Hat.

Tilley sounds gay.

@Cerberus I'm not into sex with hats.

Oh.

Then why would you buy a gay hat if you aren’t at least going to give each other pleasure?

I smell a pig in a poke.

By the way, when people say they are annoyed by puns, do they really mean it? How can one be annoyed by such a thing?

Is it at all comparable to the effect of algae is on sensitive ears?

@tchrist Well, I didn't ask the hat if it was gay or not when I bought it. And actually this hat was a warranty replacement for the original hat which I also don't konw if it's gay or not.

This is my hat: tilley.com/LT5B-Breathable-Nylon-Hat.aspx

They don’t like the way it warps their thinking patterns.

A fisherman's hat?

Not many people wear hats here, these days.

It can be used for fishing.

It is good for keeping the sun off your head. And the rain.

It has a pleasant face.

wearing this hat is like being indoors.

Do random strangers tell it to smile all the time?

So annoying.

Usually people don't talk to my hat.

Oh.

To your hand, rather?

I think people hate puns because they weren’t clever enough to have thought of them first.

I don't mean puns that are necessarily good.

A pun always feels like you’ve been jumped.

Like somebody set you up.

Took advantage of you.

To me, it is just like any other little joke.

Boring at worst.

Funny at best.

An agile and creative wit is often resented by those endowed with neither.

What I can’t abide is people explaining their puns.

Which is not the same thing as resenting their existence.

Think of all the puns in the Economist’s headlines.

Or word plays, or bons mots, or whatever you care to call them.

It shows cleverness in an amusing way. A faint drollery.

People hate puns because they’re the second-lowest form of humor.

@tchrist I don't know, they usually attack puns of fairly low quality.

Hardly worth nothing, those.

This is funny.

The Android clock is supposed to show you local time and your "home" time, when you are abroad.

What is it?

So the above clocks should be local time (big clock), then left "home time" and right some location you chose, in this case London.

This is the Dutch version of Android, as you can see.

Guess what "startpagina" means?

I doubt it is a star chart.

Start page.

Of course.

So your home time is called start page.

Why?

Well, what do you think?

The start page of a website or phone is often called...

The home page.

You click "home".

Why do you have a clock so labelled?

Apparently, Android translates "home" as "start page" everywhere, irrespective of context.

Oh!

How silly is that?

What do you expect from a cybernetic organism?

Yeah.

And yet we get people on Linguistics.SE who think computers can actually understand and translate text.

It's probably a case of a programmer using the wrong string from a bundle. He wanted the word "home" which is in the resource bundle more than once, and he grabbed the wrong one.

It’s like magazine articles that tell you to turn it up by 10° F (–23 °C).

Right.

That's probably what happened.

@tchrist Yes, I have such a Greasemonkey script.

Nothing to do with machine translation.

Anyway there are machines that can translate text, and machines that can understand text.

Are not.

There are?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Perhaps not.

Sure. There was that AI that won at Jeapordy.

against humans.

That is nothing like understanding text.

Interesting notion of "understanding".

well, it understood questions enough to be able to formulate answers to them.

Okay, in a very, very, very basic way, perhaps.

Doesn't come close at all to human understanding.

You need a full-fledged human-like AI for understanding language nearly as well as we do.

@Cerberus not yet

I have trouble with that one myself.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Not yet indeed.

@Cerberus But progress is being made.

Yes.

But it's slow.

It's a hard problem. Even programming a human to understand stuff takes years.

And I sometimes hear people working in machine translation espousing surprisingly naïve theories.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Absolutely.

But you have to admit that Android clock is funny.

@Cerberus yes

Good.

Serious lack of QA in their translations

Yes.

User-testing.

But I suppose an error like this is really hard to find, unless you go through a looooong list of all possible screen elements in all contexts.

@Cerberus Well, you can start by testing the new screens.

Or else log a bug with the Dutch Language Authority: They should call "start pages" "homes" from now on.

But the home clock probably only shows up when you're away from home.

Then you can just use the same translation everywhere.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 No, the problem is the other way around.

I live at start page.

Honey, are you start page?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 By the way, is your wife on 4.2?

I hear people complain about it a lot.

@Cerberus she is on 4.2.1

And since the update came down after she absconded with my phone, I haven't had a chance to play with 4.2 yet

Haha.

What have you done?

A great sacrifice to make for the Nexus 4.

heheh

So she loves it, basically?

I think it's a done deal at this point

As predicted?

well, "loved"... not exactly.

But she hates change.

So the longer it stays this way, the more likely it will stay this way.

I meant "loves".

I appreciate the hatred of having to change one's habits.

I wouldn't say she loves her phone.

No?

She likes that it can hold more than 200 text messages in its storage.

She has started using Google Calendar a lot. that's an improvement.

Don't let her complaints fool you: of course she couldn't flat-out admit that she really likes it.

Don't underestimate my wife's complete apathy, or antipathy towards gadgets and technology.

What she loves is paper.

paper, paper, paper.

Paper is good.

But she must like the practical features of her phone.

If she could make money at it, she's work in a store that sells cute little notepads and post-it notes. and fancy envelopes.

Or maybe in a library.

She grudgingly admits that the practical features are, indeed, practical.

Oh, preferably blank paper?

Yes. Blank paper.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Grudgingly is the right word.

That's what people do when they didn't choose to switch themselves.

Once someone bought her a box of fancy little letter-writing paper. She liked it a lot and never once used it. She preferred to have the pristine paper than to bother writing a letter to someone who wouldn't appreciate it as much as she did.

When they were pressured in any way at all.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Haha.

She was pressured by the dismal failure of her old phone to satisfy her desire to send text messages.

No, I mean, once you start telling her that the new thing is better, that's what I mean by pressure.

Texting is literally the driver here. Her new role at work had her communicating by sms with way more people than she ever did.

At that point, one is obliged to...grudge.

@Cerberus I tried encouraging her to upgrade years ago.

That failed miserably so I let it go.

Even so.

She came around to it herself, because her old technology was totally failing her.

Just knowing that you liked her switch was enough.

Like, her phone literally could not send or receive texts.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Ohhh that is even worse!

Forced>pressured.

@Cerberus But when an old tool fails, and you get a better tool, usually that makes you happy. Or something.

Anyway, it is what it is.

She has mentioned the "maybe I should take the Nexus S and you can have this one back" thing once or twice, and the last time I said "well, I think I'll just get the N4", and she didn't say no, or try to talk me out of it, or anything. So non-disagreement is tantamount to agreement, and as soon as it's in stock I'm ordering it.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Nah-uh!

Because you will always find something that you liked better in the old tool.

Or just having to learn something new, that can be annoying.

@Cerberus Usually I get mad at the old tool for failing and maybe resent the expense which was unplanned but usually like the new tool better.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Haha, the plan has worked!

@Cerberus No, not always. Sometimes, yes.

She has been defeated!

@Cerberus Now if only I could convince her to start using the tablet more.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, but if someone told you several times in the past that you should get a new tool...

Then I could maybe convince her that we need two.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Always!

Simplicity, for one thing.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You want a Nexus 7/10, huh?

@Cerberus Nah. There was nothing that I really missed about my old cell phones until I stopped using the Nexus S. That's the first one that I really missed.

Frankly I still don't seen what I would do with a tablet, but OK.

@Cerberus yeah.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It only counts if someone told you the new thing was better.

Otherwise it depends more on your character.

@Cerberus Well, I use my tablet a lot. But I'm the only one, really. I'd like to replace it with a newer model because they're faster and have nicer screens, but I can't justify that expense. I'd like to get a N7 because it'd be better for reading book-length stuff, but I can't justify it. However, if there was lots of competition for tablet-time, then it'd be an easy sale.

Yes.

@Cerberus So, someone sees me using something, and says "why don't you get X, it's better", and then my something fails, and I buy an X, out of some kind of pressure to satisfy that person, or because X really is the best replacement for my thing?

I don't know if that happens to me often.

I don't think I feel much explicit pressure to buy things or switch things.

Nobody ever tells me to buy a better computer or a better phone. Or a better car or a better house or anything.

You probably just never do what you didn't think of yourself first.

Nothing that involved significant nagging by someone else first.

> U heeft aangegeven dat u een Samsung Galaxy S III heeft. Als u dit toestel over een jaar gaat verkopen en u koopt bijvoorbeeld de nieuwe Samsung Galaxy Note II, kunt u de applicatie niet meenemen. De LifeTime update is alleen geldig voor 1 toestel en wordt daarmee gekoppeld.

Hello.

If you switch from an S3 to a Note 2, you cannot take your Tomtom maps with you. That's € 75 down the drain if you switch devices. Ridiculous. I advise everyone not to buy Tomtom.

Hi!

How are y'all doing?

Good, and you?

I'm doing well, thanks.

Tomorrow my class gets to spend the day at an amusement park.

Oh...

Do you like that?

@Cerberus weird. But who buys TomTom anymore, when there's Gmaps?

@Cerberus Sure, it's a pretty good one. Indoors.

It's a Physics field trip.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 For offline navigation. And Tomtom automatically adjusts for traffic, I believe, which Google does not.

@Mahnax Huh? Physics in an amusement park?

@Cerberus gmaps has offline support. Not sure if it's as good as tomtoms. I don't really use navigation.

Isn't that like a theme park?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It does not.

Navigation and directions do not.

@Cerberus You can save maps for offline.

Nor does searching for a location.

@Cerberus Er, perhaps I called it the wrong thing? It has roller coasters and such.

Ah, I see

Suppose you are in Vienna and you want to look up where the Stefansdom was on the map?

@Cerberus The idea is that you calculate how much force you're feeling while on a roller coaster

You have to drag and zoom until you happen to see the words on the map.

@Cerberus I buy a 10 euro sim card

and then use google maps

@Mahnax Ahh I see!

That is sort of a good idea.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 So not offline.

@Cerberus right.

@Cerberus Yes, we're off to the city.

Anyway, I'm going to head off. It's late and I need to sleep, long drive tomorrow.

And you will still be lost if you want to calculate transit times on the train with poor reception, or when driving through the wilderness, which means all the time, even in my densely populated country.

Bye!

Where are you going?

Belleville.

Why?

my parents are there.

Belleville can't be bad.

Ahh.

Okay, have fun.

They're going to babysit while my wife and I go to see The Hobbit

How far is far?

A long drive means several hours?

the next day my mom is doing Tea, which is a party with a million baked goods

I am bringing this:

Ohh haha.

It's a 2 hour drive

Nice.

OK.

Give them a roar from me.

heheh okay. My son will do that. He roars at everyone.

Yay!

literally

Little Tigger.

He'll see some stranger at a mall, and he'll go "RAAAAAAAAAAAH! I scared that person!"

I remember when my cousin insisted that she was not a human, but a tiger.

It's his solution to everything now.

Hmm.

Are the strangers scared?

No. They usually laugh.

Good.

He's only 2 1/2. If he were, say, 21 1/2, they might be scared.

Slightly.

Especially if he were a hobo.

But then I'd've been 13 when he was born.

In a dark alley.

One can never start too early.

My brother had that once, at 2 AM near the train station, where this madman jumped towards him and yelled.

oh, one can. one can indeed.

He didn't do anything, it was just a mental spasm.

But my brother was obviously scared to death.

The madman had been standing still until my brother passed him at 2 metres or so.

One time I was waiting for a bus at 4am. It was like -15°. Some guy came up to me and asked me if I was Portuguese or Italian.

Huh.

I was like, "uh, neither?"

So he's like "well, what are you then?"

Odd.

I said "Canadian". He said "Do you want to go get some coffee?" and I was like "Taxi!"