well, never heard that!

And hate it, as "dub" does not contain (let alone start with) the sound it refers to

It's the first part of its name, "double-u".

H doesn't contain its sound either, and G has only one of the two sounds it makes (and it's not the one unique to it).

> from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation

Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit").

Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?).

Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.

multiple people counting would be "comptent" A good example is "fils" which can mean "son" or "strings"

Postgres takes the actual values into account when generating a query plan. The same query with different params can (and should) result in different query plans. It looks at statistics on the actual data stored.

Seamstress is still a thing, and different from a tailor AFAIK (probably a lot of overlap)? I have 2 friends for whom that's their job, and they do refer to themselves as seamstresses

I don't understand the argument? Seems like you're saying that not having to handle a gear change makes roundabouts better, but that applies to both your manual technique and automatic, so I don't see how Europe would be different from NA?

Also, I'm not a particularly frequent/experienced driver but 4th gear at 30kmh on a roundabout doesn't seem very safe, it does not leave you much control to react to something unexpected (some car coming up that you didn't see, a car who changed their mind last minute about exiting, a car changing lane poorly...). Being able to decelerate or accelerate quickly is pretty important on a roundabout. Not such a big deal on a very big roundabout with excellent visibility where there's no-one, but that's pretty rare in europe at least.

Rather, what I don't understand is the original argument that roundabouts are bad because the busy direction of traffic has to slow down and gear down unconditionally, whether or not the rare cross traffic is present, so it is then better to have a traffic light there.

The "you need power to accelerate out of danger" is a motorcycle argument (and a pretty flimsy one); in a car, you are not gas-pedaling your way out of anything. Your emergency control devices are brakes and steering, that's it. There are moves that powerful acceleration lets you get away with, and they are all reckless, and often built on the assumption that only you have that acceleration. People are now using their high-torque EVs like this. You will never be in a collision close call caused by someone or something doing something unexpected, where the reaction of stepping on the accelerator is the action that saved the day. Can't deny that it could help run from a tsunami wave or fire or something.

I'd guess not-suggestive sexuality-related content, such as sex-ed. Possibly political stuff too?

> I'm reminded of a quote: "the best camera is the one you have on you."

Yeah, I think about that often when deciding on what to buy. It's often "what would I actually use" rather than "have on me".

For example, a corded vacuum is better on every metric than a cordless, but my house will be cleaner with a cordless because I'll actually use it.

Or, I really wanted a fully analog hi-fi amp, but realistically I knew I'd use it a lot more if it has bluetooth and airplay built-in and I can control it remotely.

And obviously airpods: I much prefer sound from headphones, but I just wouldn't take them with me most of the time whereas my airpods live on my keyring.

> that isn't a change to the definition of the meter

How is it not? it's not a change to the actual distance (well, it is for a sufficient precision), but a change to the definition of the metre is exactly what it is. It's defined relative to the speed of light rather than a random platinum bar length, with the constant picked so that the actual measurement stay the same (up to a certain level of precision).

Just subjectively making it up, but my feeling is that people are not so much against AI in principle as they are against the american-capitalist approach to it: steamroll its rollout everywhere, risk the entire economy (both jobs and stock market), for dubious net benefits to anyone but the wealthy.

The US earned themselves very little goodwill from the world (and many of their own citizen), to the point that people even in the West are happy seeing China challenging the US on the AI front. Whether China is wielding AI for better or worse outcomes than the US is up for hindsight.

Possibly the only more totalizing steamrolling approach to development than the American-capitalist is the socialist-big-push. This complaint is nonsense.

> Go is an amazing AI language for this reason.

I'd be interested to hear more about why? because my experience with Go has been the opposite, I found it pretty bad for "making illegal states unrepresentable". In fact, its zero-values system often makes illegal states the _default_