I found it difficult because I didn't realize that X brand is a placeholder. I don't know all the car brands.

I think it's because it critically was missing context. So you're constantly trying to frame and reconcile it while reading. When first reading I thought there was actually a car brand named X -- and it doesn't seem out of the question.

But it makes the content seem awkward and clunky. So a reader going in with the correct context has a very different experience.

Yes I think you're right. I've reread it after reading through this thread and it was easier to understand with the context added.

This is where AI kinda has a role. Built on all the sci fi tropes of years past. You can give it a seed and an ending and get it to write the evening’s entertainment.

This just shows what's possible. Copyright should be 10 years

I'm realizing what an utterly wild English language word "psychophysics" is for new learners. It's so many conflicting sounds and rules in one.

Pretty much all of the difficulty arises from the transliteration of Greek ψ, υ, χ, and φ, and then inconsistent pronunciations of these letters themselves in loanwords (including pronouncing υ as both /aɪ/ and /ɪ/)!

That's not to say that it's not very tricky, just that the difficulty kind of arises from one core reason.

Edit: OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.

> OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.

The English plural suffix follows a standard pattern:

It’s voiced (/z/) after voiced sounds and voiceless (/s/) after voiceless sounds. That’s why it shows up as /s/ at the end of “physics” (/fɪzɪks/). /k/ is voiceless.

The -ics ending of physics comes from a plural.

No helpful pattern underlying the middle “s” unfortunately.

Yes, there's a general voicing assimilation to the preceding phoneme for both -s and -ed! (plus an additional epenthetic vowel insertion if the suffix consonant is too similar to a preceding consonant) It took me a long time to learn this because I am a native speaker and did it automatically without thinking or initially without even noticing that it was realized differently in different contexts in the first place. It's a really fun example of how we can do fieldwork on ourselves (gather a lot of data and try to derive the rule).

It's just keeping track of all the times you were mean

I sure hope so. Gemini is useless garbage, and every time I'm mean to it is a case in point. It's by far the most frustrating of any LLM I've ever used.

Does this play a role in why the keyboard on iOS is so fucking enraging? It used to be amazing.

No. That is a separate INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS issue.

Can’t believe they don’t fix it year after year.

There are literal slow motion videos on YouTube showing people pressing the correct intended next character and iOS "correcting" it to something else because it predicted(?) that they actually meant something else.

When the first iOS 27 beta came out, it was actually really good for me. But later betas and now the public release ruined it once again. It's unbelievable how bad it is.

I had a similar experience. It got worse through the betas for me too.

It actually seems like it could be related because of a change in the prediction model that places emphasis on this type of "learning"

Pretty awesome write up to explain their journey in it all.

I suspect a bunch of car head units will face new problems in the spring when many Canadian provinces will no longer change their clocks. The units won't get updated DST rules.

That's this fall - happened a couple of days ago.

You're right. This fall was where they let the clocks remain instead of changing them as expected.

which is mind boggling.

my skoda simply has an entry in the menu: DST? which puts the clock one hour ahead or behind.

This posts remind me that when i will be in the market for a new van i will have to decide to get the trafic or the vivaro, solely on the head unit they use (renault ones have had incredibly stupid design decisions for years, on ergonomics alone, even more in firmware)

Yep, in my mind this is one of the hallmarks of a well-designed digital desk clock: a 2-position hardware switch for DST on/off.

Well. In most places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time#Procedure

(edit to be clear: not all places use 1 hour offsets)

I lived for several years in a place that did not observe DST. At least that portion of living there was pretty nice.

Over here in South Africa we have a single time zone and no DST.

This contributed to me in my very early years of dabbling in software development being oblivious to time zone considerations and would do really bad things like make sure the web server was setup with the correct time zone so that the ASP Classic output would show the correct time.

Happened to my Mazda the other day. Thankfully it supports just setting the timezone and dst flag manually.

I read your "senior" in the general "aged human" sense and I think there's value there to.

Until dementia kicks in anyway

Unless, not until.

Dementia is a disease associated with age, not a result of age.

The original Janeway for Star Trek Voyager only filmed like one episode and her take was very different (French actress I think. And maybe they were aiming for a Picard analog).