The last name of the president of Russia is Пу́тин. Since people can’t read that without knowing Cyrillic, we need a way to map Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. However, neither Cyrillic nor Latin script have universal pronunciations: the phonetic value of letters change depending on the language. This leads to the romanization of a name being different depending what the source and target language is. Пу́тин is Putin for Russian-to-English, but Poutine for Russian-to-French. They’re both equally correct, and neither is a change from the other.

You need an Apple developer account to even make software for iOS. Alternate app stores are distributed on the web, not Apple’s App Store. Since an alternative app store is an iOS app, Apple banning Epic’s developer account means they’re banned from making one.

My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one

The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.

Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:

• Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
• Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)

Third party browser & JavaScript engine + ability to install web apps on the Home screen = third party app store that doesn’t have to pay Apple’s fees.

When Apple could force everyone to use Apple’s WebKit, web apps didn’t matter as much as Apple could limit WebKit features to push people to the App Store. E.g. it took ages to get push notifications on WebKit. If Google and Mozilla are free to make whatever improvements to their browser engines, the need to have native apps on the phone decreases considerably.

Most of the time the pope is no different from any other Catholic. He has a lot of respect by virtue of his post, but what he says is not the word of God.

This changes if he speaks “ex cathedra” (Latin for “from the chair”, the throne the previous poster is alluding to). Ex cathedra means the pope is defining dogma for all the faithful as the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church. Think of it as the difference of the US president saying something in a private conversation vs. him issuing an executive order. When the pope speaks ex cathedra, he is considered infallible in the Catholic faith.

Popes rarely speak ex cathedra. Most of Catholic theology is settled, so there is rarely need to clarify anything. The last time it happened was in 1950 about the Assumption of Mary.

Papal (and church council) infallibility does mean that the Catholic Church can never change its mind about things like homosexual marriage and abortion. The Catholic Church says it is Christ’s church on earth, and is protected by the Holy Spirit from error that could lead Christians astray. Saying that they got something as vital as “what is and is not sin” wrong would undermine the church’s entire foundation.

It’s not fewer people that’s the problem, but fewer people too fast. A society needs labor to provide the goods and services people need. If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable. (The Boomers had the opposite: they had a smaller older generation and didn’t have many children, so during their prime years the working age population was much larger than dependants on both ends of the age pyramid. That’s part of the reason why they were so prosperous.)

Going by total fertility rate (children per woman):

• 2.1 is enough for replacement. No problems.
• 1.8 means every generation is 10 % smaller than the previous. We can deal with that.
• 1.5 means every generation is 25 % smaller than the previous. This starts to cause problems.
• 1.0 means generation size halves every generation. This is not sustainable.
• 0.8 RIP South Korea

Finland has a housing first policy. The homeless often have multiple problems that prevent them from getting a home the normal way (e.g. drug problems that cause them to get evicted). Instead of insisting people get better while homeless, they’re given homes first and treatment for their other problems after. This coupled with welfare transfers that ensure you never end up homeless just because of lack of money leads to low homeless numbers.

I wonder if Ukraine is willing to lease Snake Island for that.

Next step: there’s a good argument to be made that the United States is not a nation. tldr: a nation is a group of people sharing ethnicity, language, culture. The United States is a country united by an idea, not an ethnicity.

In Finnish, the numbers 11–19 are (the number for 1–9) + “toista”, lit. “of the second (ten)”. So 11 is yksitoista, “one of the second (ten)”. That system is only used for 11–19. Bigger than that is tens + number, e.g. 21 kaksikymmentä yksi (two tens and one).

The Finnish word for “teen” is “teini”, which is a loanword from English. The native word for a person that’s not a child nor an adult is “nuori” lit. “a young”.

Here in Finland a lot of new apartment blocks have very small apartments. Three rooms and a kitchen crammed into 60 m² (650 sq ft) are not uncommon. That means bedrooms that can fit a double bed and nothing else, and kitchens built into the side of the living room. Older blocks by contrast have much more spacious apartments. The condo I bought in a building built in the 1970s is three rooms and kitchen in 80 m² (860 sq ft). The condo goes through the building, so windows on two sides. The kitchen is its own separate space. Bathroom and toilet are two separate rooms. (The building is not a proper commie block, though. Or “Soviet cube” as they’re called in Finnish. We were never Soviet, but we took some inspiration from their cheap building styles.)

Twitter, Reddit, and Unity have not been profitable. This was fine when money was cheap (near zero interest rates). The market was awash with capital trying to find something that could turn a profit. A business plan that was basically underpants gnomes (1. Gather underpants 2. ???? 3. Profit!) was acceptable. Twitter’s and Reddit’s 1. was “gather users”, Unity’s “gather projects”. Now money isn’t free anymore, and capital is demanding that these businesses fill in 2. with something. Twitter is doing whatever Musk thinks is good, Reddit is trying to monetize its API to make AIs pay and to serve real users ads through its first party app, and Unity is trying to monetize the projects it has gathered. All of them have been offering a product below cost, and users are understandably angry that the cost is going up. (And in many cases, finding that the product isn’t really worth anything.)

Blizzard is different. It operates in a creative field and has been very profitable. Games are art as much as they are products that are sold. As such, they’re fickle: you can’t assembly line manufacture games and make a hit after hit. Artists in music that turn out bangers decade after decade are rare, as are authors, directors, etc. Blizzard’s streak of awesome games was bound to end eventually. AAA games are also extremely expensive to make: if you make an AAA game, it must be a hit or you’ll lose money. Alternatively, you can use dark patterns to monetize it, then it doesn’t have to be as good to make loads of money. Banking on your creatives to keep beating the odds is risky; infesting a good enough game with scummy monetization is a safer bet.

Cooking is art, baking is science.

Just 60 Hz. Is there a technical limitation that prevents 5K@120 Hz?

Shipping? Shipping is about 2 % of global CO₂ emissions.

Large ships emit a lot of sulphur oxides (SO_x). E.g. cruise ships emit more than all cars of Europe. SO_x is not a greenhouse gas, but it’s a nasty pollutant nonetheless.

It’s cheaper. In Japan manga volumes are about 700 yen, which is about $5 currently. No budget for color printing there. Manga is often drawn by one person who is already massively overworked just to hit serialization deadlines, so no time (nor budget for assistants) for coloring.