Lithium ion batteries are far cheaper now at a consumer level than they were thirty years back.

EDIT: I’m actually surprised that a higher proportion of laptops today don’t ship with 100 Wh batteries. Go back some years, and shrinking the battery had a much larger difference in cost than it does today. The larger battery gives you longer battery longevity (makes it more reasonable to charge to 80%, say), can be used to make a laptop run more quickly, can power more devices. The only drawback is weight, and it isn’t that heavy.

while being a literal mascot of Lemmy

Lemmy’s mascot is a lemming rather than a lemur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

In a 2020 post, Lemmy’s co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. “It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that.”[7]

Luckily Spanish is generally pretty well subtitled and dubbed. My pet peeve issue is that oftentimes there’s only Latin Spanish, instead of Spain Spanish. You’d think that each Latin country would have it’s own dialect so having just Latin Spanish would be reductionist, but alas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Spanish

In any event, in the sphere of spoken language, the issue has become problematic since at least the 1950s when the commercial demands on movie dubbing studios working with Hollywood films began to call for the development of a Spanish whose pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical features would not be recognizable as belonging to any particular country (español latino or español neutro, “Latin American Spanish” or “Neutral Spanish”). This goal soon proved to be an elusive one: even if the results could, on occasion, approximate a universally intelligible form, at the same time the process prevented the transmission of a familiar, intimate, or everyday tone. Disney Pictures took an early interest in unified dubbing. Three Little Pigs was dubbed in Paris by Castilian and French-accented actors. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio were dubbed in Argentina under Luis César Amadori. Later Disney films were dubbed in Mexico under Edmundo Santos.[44] Nevertheless, its continued use has produced a degree of familiarization with a certain abstract phonetics throughout Spanish America. Dubbings made in Spain, are very particularly localized due to both the language politics of Francoist Spain and later assumptions by Spanish audiences. As Disney has re-issued its productions in newer media or to establish new copyrights, it has increased the number of dialectal versions. Sometimes this has backfired: parents who had watched The Little Mermaid with a pan-Hispanic dubbing disliked the re-dubbed Peninsular Spanish dubbing.[44]

Context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)

Anubis is an open source software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them in order to deter web scraping. It has been adopted mainly by Git forges and free and open-source software projects.[4][5]

https://lib.rs/crates/iocaine

Iocaine is a defense mechanism against unwanted scrapers, sitting between upstream resources and the fronting reverse proxy.

I doubt that there’s actually a substantial impact on battery cell production. Might be on rack-mountable batteries containing those cells. But setting that aside:

Panasonic plans to expand lithium-ion cell

Non-rechargable AAA batteries are typically alkaline, and rechargeables are typically NiMH, not lithium-ion.

EDIT: Looking at a handful of rack-mount lithium-ion batteries on Amazon price history using camelcamelcamel, prices are either unchanged or very slightly up. Could be Panasonic looking to get into the news, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a shortage of even rack-mount lithium-ion batteries.

LLM subtitling is generally really bad.

All relative. Let’s take an infamous example of human translation from Japanese to English, Zero Wing’s intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5Z-PGJWYU

The Japanese, the original human translation, and what current Google Translate’s LLM gives when I plug in the original text.

English proficiency in France is bad

My guess is that it’s because French is comparatively-widely-spoken relative to most other languages in Europe.

The benefits of speaking a language increase the more people who can speak it — it gives you access to more people out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

According to this, as of 2026, there are about 1,493 million people in the world who can speak English.

There are about 334 million people in the world who can speak French. That’s second only to Spanish among European languages behind English.

So if you already know French, learning English will give you access to something like 4.4 times as many people as you could otherwise communicate with.

Contrast that with, say, Icelandic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language

Icelandic or Icelandish (/aɪsˈlændɪk/ ⓘ eyess-LAN-dik, /aɪsˈlændɪʃ/ eyess-LAN-dish; endonym: íslenska, pronounced [ˈi(ː)stlɛnska] ⓘ, íslensk tunga [ˈi(ː)stlɛnsk ˈtʰuŋka]) is a North Germanic language from the Indo-European language family spoken by about 390,000 people, the vast majority of whom live in Iceland, where it is the national language.[2]

An Icelandic speaker picking up English gives them access to about 3,828 times as many people. That’s a a lot more content you have access to, people you can communicate with, etc. The payoff to an Icelandic speaker from picking up and using English is considerably larger than the payoff to a French speaker; they’ve got more incentive to be able to use it well.

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In Calgary they have water shortages, because they road-salted their water mains into oblivion.

looks blank

Water mains take incoming water, not drainage water. How does salting roads harm water mains?

Like, you mean that the water drains off and comes in contact with the pipe and damages it from the exterior?

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Ah. Yes. Apparently this was a thing in Calgary recently.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/road-salt-calgary-bearspaw-south-feeder-main-9.6993387

Sodium chloride use continues on Calgary roads after likely contributing to 2024 water main break

Report suggests city’s road de-icing led to increased chloride levels in soil

Ehhh.

When I saw the title, I thought that someone was trying to use LLM-backed bots to drive some sort of marketing campaign or something.

But this sounds like it’s just someone plugging in something into an LLM and it returning the same kind of stuff that a Web search engine would.

Reporters fed national-language versions a range of prompts, including requests for online casinos with the biggest bonuses and websites that don’t ask for proof of age to register.

In three quarters of replies, chatbots recommended gambling sites not licensed in Europe, describing them variously as “secure and fast”, “perfect for competitive players”, or “great for novice gamblers”.

Casinos that lack national licenses for countries where they operate do not offer the same consumer protections as legal operators, and may expose players to the risk of scams or fraud.

When prompted, the chatbots explained how software could be used to access unclicensed platforms and promoted sites registered in offshore territories. One Meta AI chatbot wrote that online casinos with no identification checks were the “Holy Grail!”. Google’s Gemini said crypto sites offered players “anonymity” and a “lack of rigid limits”.

I have a hard time calling that “luring”.

cheaters

Steam store

If I were set on that, I’d probably play on a console. I prefer keyboard+mouse for shooters, but…

The PC’s strength is that it’s open. You can do whatever you want. Want to mod a game to have more features or make it look prettier? Go for it. Tweak it? Sure. Get more-powerful or newer hardware to get a more-attractive appearance in a lot of games? Sure. Cheat to skip that annoying grindy bit in game X? Sure thing. Use whatever new and interesting input devices you want to add quality-of-life features with an extra button or macros? Sure.

Works beautifully for single-player games.

But by the same token, attempts to resist cheating in multiplayer competitive games are ill-suited to the platform and rely on developers trying to hack together attempts that tend to have performance and compatibility implications and work imperfectly. It’s hard to try to lock down an open platform.

Whereas the strength of the console is that it’s closed. You can’t do whatever you want. You don’t get to mod or tweak games much, which eliminates routes to get an edge via exploiting that. Everyone has (more-or-less) the same hardware, so nobody can “pay-to-win” in the sense of getting a performance edge in multiplayer competitive games — there’s a level playing field. A lot of PC gaming hardware is ultimately driven by trying to sell some way to basically let players pay-to-win, to get some edge in competitive multiplayer, which isn’t something that most players much like having around — and consoles don’t have that problem. Cheating is a pain. I understand that these days, console vendors blacklist and authenticate alternative input devices, so that players can’t use alternative controllers and the like, which prevents them from getting an edge.

Works beautifully for competitive multiplayer games.

To cue anyone’s memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_based_on_films

Gas prices are up, but I’m in California, and our gas prices are always quite high relative to the rest of the US anyway, due to additional regulatory requirements.

https://www.gasbuddy.com/usa

I feel like coffee and chocolate have both skyrocketed in the last year.

Hmm. WalMart’s online store also shows the price for Hershey’s chocolate syrup up.

On the other hand, looking at Hershey’s chocolate bars on Amazon, the price isn’t up:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B086LHQHLT

And looking at a bag of sugar doesn’t show any dramatic change:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B01BWM57CK

EDIT: Hershey’s cocoa powder is up over about the same timeframe as the syrup, though:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00AZNG8O4

That’d be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1975-2024/

Game Console Launch Prices Adjusted for Inflation (1975-2024)

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/995e4917-5bb0-4dee-8b7d-f43e8ef21d62.webp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_generation_of_video_game_consoles

The ninth generation of video game consoles began in November 2020 with the releases of Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S console family and Sony’s PlayStation 5.[1][2][3]

The duration from the eighth generation until the start of the ninth was one of the longest in history, having started in 2012 with the release of Nintendo’s Wii U. Past generations typically had five-year windows as a result of Moore’s law,[10] but Microsoft and Sony instead launched mid-console redesigns, the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.[11] Microsoft also launched a monthly console lease program, with the option to buy or upgrade.[12] Some analysts believed these factors signaled the first major shift away from the idea of console generations because the potential technical gains of new hardware had become nominal.[13]

The eighth generation video game console period ran for about eight years, so there’d be precedent for the ninth generation consoles to do the same, which would take us to a 2028 release date for the tenth generation.

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https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-switch-2-production-cut-33-following-weak-holiday-sales-report-claims

Nintendo Switch 2 Production Cut 33% Following Weak Holiday Sales, Report Claims

Nintendo has reportedly cut back on manufacturing Switch 2 consoles following weaker than expected holiday sales for the console.

That’s according to Bloomberg, whose sources say Nintendo now expects to make 4 million Switch 2 units this quarter, down 33% on the 6 million it previously planned to manufacture.

Nintendo recently confirmed it had sold fewer Switch 2 consoles internationally over the holiday period than it had once hoped, particularly in the U.S. — though the impact of this had also been dulled somewhat by stronger sales in its homeland of Japan.

I seriously wonder if they’d be better off just deferring the next console generation until 2028.

If one has it set to default-deny Javascript, a lot of websites don’t work, because many web developers don’t develop websites that work without Javascript today.

Historically, websites did a better job of falling back.