AFAIK, a lot of Iranian-Americans go by “Persian” because there was already such a stigma associated with the name Iran.
AFAIK, a lot of Iranian-Americans go by “Persian” because there was already such a stigma associated with the name Iran.
He’s failing my secret purity test. I can’t tell you what the purity test is, because it’s secret! If I told you what my purity test was, he might find out and pass it. But, if he passed it because someone told him what it was, that wouldn’t count. So, all I can tell you is that he failed it! Trust me bro!


It has been a while since I saw it, but you’re right. I mostly remember it as drama, not comedy.
Point Break? I think Keanu was a heart throb who could do action, but who had started in comedy. Will Smith was more a comedic actor who could do action, but was mostly doing action-comedy.
Yeah, he was huge. Stallone and Schwarzenegger were bigger names for purely action movies. But, Keanu and Tom Cruise were the action stars who the teenage girls wanted to watch.
I think it’s all the years of Fresh Prince of Bel Air that makes me think of Will Smith as primarily a comedic actor at that point. Because, he and Keanu really had a similar path. They started with comedy and then proved they could do action. I guess Will Smith’s action movies were a bit more action comedy. Men in Black is definitely a sci fi action comedy. Bad Boys was an action comedy. Independence Day wasn’t really a sci fi action comedy, but he did punch out an alien. But, Will Smith did do Enemy of the State, and I don’t remember much comedy in that. For Keanu, Speed isn’t an action comedy, but there’s some light-hearted stuff in it. But, Point Break (from what I remember) was a more serious tone.
But, I think by 1999 if you were hiring Keanu Reeves for a purely serious action role, that wouldn’t be seen as strange. And, if you were hiring Will Smith for a purely serious role, it would probably be seen as wasting his talent.
It would have been a very different movie. So, maybe people couldn’t picture Keanu in that forgettable action comedy called The Matrix. But, Keanu did show he could do comedy. His first big movie was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He’d also done Parenthood. In addition, he’d shown he could do action movies / thrillers with a bit of comedy when he did Speed, and fairly serious action movies with Point Break.
Will Smith has done plenty of action movies, but all of them are at least somewhat comedic. He’s shown he can do serious roles too, like Happyness, 7 Pounds, etc. But, I don’t think you’d hire him for a science fiction action movie without having him do some comedy. I’m sure Will Smith could do a straight dramatic science fiction action movie with no comedy, but AFAIK he’s never done it.
IMO Keanu is a much more limited actor than Will Smith. But, The Matrix played to his strengths.
That’s his argument, but I don’t really buy it.
For example, what would Hollywood do if Canada suddenly stopped respecting copyright? (I know we’re talking about the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA, but the C in DMCA is “Copyright”, so this would definitely be framed as Canada not respecting copyrights.) A lot of movies and TV shows are now made in Canada. I imagine a lot of those companies would pull their productions out of Canada. So, whichever politician passed the law would be labelled as the one who killed Canada’s entertainment industry.
If Canada allowed jailbreaking John Deere tractors, or HP printers, they might stop selling them in Canada. If Canada allowed people to bypass Apple’s App Store, Apple might ban all apps from Canadians and Canadian companies. That might piss off farmers, or CTOs, venture capitalists, etc.
Taking this step might create a lot of new jobs, but that’s a big unknown. How many jobs? How well paying? How long would it take for them to be established. They’d have to weigh that against all the people whose jobs might be disrupted. So, it’s much easier to stick with the status quo, even if that status quo means just bending over for the US.
At least 3.
This Azores erasure will not stand.
Exactly, so this wouldn’t make things any worse.
Except that no country is likely to take him up on that suggestion because they’re afraid of how the US would react. Cuba’s already heavily sanctioned, so they have less to lose. Maybe nothing to lose.


Imagine if they focused on creating tools that could jailbreak iOS devices, John Deere tractors, HP printers, etc. I bet they could sell that as a service. What could the US or American companies do to stop them? They could be Disenshittification Island.
I remember looking at some point, and Gnome had roughly 4x the number of developers that KDE had. If you want the best (most stable, most well tested, most feature full, etc.) programs, you basically have to use some Gnome programs. That was one of the deciding factors that pushed me to go with Gnome. If I was going to have to use Gnome programs anyhow, and they worked best with Gnome, then I thought I should use Gnome. My experience was that Gnome programs don’t really play well with KDE, but that KDE programs generally work OK on Gnome.
I really like the customizability of KDE, but I like many of the defaults of Gnome. Unfortunately, if you don’t like some of Gnome’s defaults, it’s real pain in the ass to change them. Personally, even though I liked a lot of Gnome’s defaults, I absolutely hated some other ones. If it weren’t for extensions there’s no way at all I could use it. Luckily, some of the biggest misfeatures are so widely recognized that there are dozens of extensions to choose from to fix them. OTOH KDE’s customizability led to some issues too. I remember having some weird interactions between things because settings A, B and C don’t necessarily work well together. But, at least those settings are built into the desktop environment, and you’re not relying on some random dude’s hobby project for a critical system setting.
At the moment, I’m pretty happy with Gnome, and most days it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do. That’s something I never ever got with Windows. It was always a pain in my ass. And, it’s something that was only ever 90% true with OSX. Great defaults, but that last 10% is a real pain in the ass. Gnome’s extensions let me get much closer to 100%. I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.


Aaaaaaaand let me tell you, I had a sleepless night last night knowing there were no detectors installed.
This seems really weird. Smoke detectors are important, but the odds of a fire any given night are incredibly low. To me, replacing a detector would be a chore I’d get to within a week, and I definitely wouldn’t lose sleep over it.


I’m pretty sure Google’s AI is fed by the same spider that goes out and finds every new or changed web page (or a variant of that).
As soon as someone writes an article about how AI gets something wrong and provides a solution, that solution is now in the AI’s training data.
OTOH, that means it’s probably also ingesting a lot of AI generated slop, which causes its own set of problems.


It’s not literally guessing, because guessing implies it understands there’s a question and is trying to answer that question. It’s not even doing that. It’s just generating words that you could expect to find nearby.


3 in 10 people get this wrong‽‽
Maybe they’re picturing filling up a bucket and bringing it back to the car? Or dropping off keys to the car at the car wash?


It’s also the case that people are mostly consistent.
Take a question like “how long would it take to drive from here to [nearby city]”. You’d expect that someone’s answer to that question would be pretty consistent day-to-day. If you asked someone else, you might get a different answer, but you’d also expect that answer to be pretty consistent. If you asked someone that same question a week later and got a very different answer, you’d strongly suspect that they were making the answer up on the spot but pretending to know so they didn’t look stupid or something.
Part of what bothers me about LLMs is that they give that same sense of bullshitting answers while trying to cover that they don’t know. You know that if you ask the question again, or phrase it slightly differently, you might get a completely different answer.


In the absence of content destroyers, I’m happy to settle for content selectors, like OP.
I think a lot of people use it instead of Iranian. Technically it might be an ethnicity. But, for example, I can find restaurants that advertise having Afghani food but no restaurants with Pashtun or Tajik food, restaurants with Syrian food but not Arabic or Kurdish restaurants, etc. But, while most restaurants go by the name of the country, not the ethnic group, there are no Iranian restaurants, only Persian ones.