The reading and writing skills of young people
Recently, I updated my Mac to version Tahoe 26.0 and shortly after that, I noticed that selecting text while editing made the well-known ChatGPT icon 
appear.
Clicking on the icon did pop-up a menu:
My mouth dropped open at this unprecedented level of ‘support’. How convenient! Continue reading →
Perhaps, as I did, you wonder about the modern history of neighbors Ukraine and Russia, like:
I’ve tried to summarize all agreements on peace and sovereignty that Ukraine has been involved in with Russia since the fall of the USSR…
Cryptic? Let me explain: As a carpenter needs a hammer and a saw to build anything, in order to develop software, a software developer (aka computer programmer), needs tools for software development. Of course, today’s carpenter uses a nail gun and a circular saw, preferably battery-driven – there is progress and development even in the tools of a trade. Similarly, tools for software developers have evolved from simple text editors to advanced dedicated programs supporting every finesse of the programming language to be used. Sometimes these tools are free, in other cases you have to subscribe to them.
However, sometimes the development of these tools stalls or grinds to a complete halt. This can present a real challenge for its users. Continue reading →
I would like to contribute to Paul’s recent essay by trying to put institutions and persons into a different perspective.
If you find the tone somewhat cynical, then you may be right.
It’s about politics after all. Continue reading →
My computer of choice is, has been for a long time, and probably remains to be for the forseeable future, a 2008 Lenovo X220 laptop. Yes, I’m aware that it is rather oldish. When it was new, it must have been a beast of a machine, and likely sported quite the price tag. Today, close to 20 years later, it is still a fast laptop. It boots in under a minute and shows no delays in loading files or web pages. Of course, it came with a spinning hard disk when new, but I swapped that out for a Solid State Disk (SSD) years ago. The internal memory was with 16Gb already up to spec, it came standard with a 64-bit processor, and it never was, nor is today, a slow machine. It ran Windows 7, then Windows 10, and then….Microsoft said NO!
Say what? You heard me, they said NO, you ain’t gonna run our shiny new W11 on that old thing! Continue reading →
The ongoing Gaza war between Israel and Gaza (Hamas and by extension also Hezbollah) has been impossible to miss or ignore in the daily news since its start in October last year. Equally hard to ignore are the devastating and cruel initiatives taken by all parties whenever negotiations for a cease-fire are approaching. Sticking out like a very sore thumb, however, are the excesses in cruelty that both parties seem to find perfectly acceptable in this war. With the escalations in bad behavior as bad as they are now: where will this go, and when or where will it end? Continue reading →
When Eef wrote his piece on foreign languages, more specific on the French language for non-native speakers, he presented the article to me by email. In this email Eef he asked me on my view on the situations sketched in his article. This is a very fair question indeed as my wife and I left our home country The Netherlands (aka Holland) in 1997 when we emigrated to Sweden. You could say Eef’s and my family share the experience of moving abroad to a country we did not speak the language of. The prevailing language in Sweden being Swedish as it is French in France. In Eef’s defence, they were pensioners, while we were in our thirties. Continue reading →
My wife Wil and I live permanently in France since 2008. We’ve bought our house in 2005, but we were not ready for the final step at that time. Our reluctance was mainly due to the difficulty we had in speaking French.
But in 2008 the ultimate decision was made: France was the place to be, attracted as we were by the beautiful nature, the calm pace of the French countryside and the low-stress attitude of the local people, so we sold our Dutch property.
Does this mean that we overcame the problems we had with the French language? Not by a long shot. Continue reading →
Det är inte ett bra tecken om jag ser anledning att publicera än en artikel om det svenska valsystemet, denna gången med löpnummer 3. Se tidigare artiklar kring samma ämne här och här, och mer nyligen här.
Några veckor efter det senaste EU val, bestämde SVT sig för att kolla hur bra det fungerade på en skala från 0 till 1, läs SVT’s inslag här. SVT tittade inte på hur själva valet genomförs, vilket jag själv har synpunkter på, men de kollade om det fanns avvikelser i själva rösträkningen – ett ännu viktigare del av valet. I all enkelhet påstår jag att om det finns avvikelser i rösträkningen så är dessa resultatet av hur valet och rösträkningen genomförs. I ett demokratiskt val påstår jag att avvikelser inte får förekomma.
Just letting you know that I’ve got a couple of new books in the making. Continue reading →
The word ˈɪnflu.ənsə(ɹ) phonetically spells the word ‘Influencer’, but what does it really mean? Here are the official meanings according to Wictionary:
In my experience, a third category ought to be added. But, for the time being, let’s stick to these two categories as these seem quite straightforward. We’ll tackle my proposal for a third category later. Continue reading →
Eef, our resident columnist and contributor of mainly scientific content to this blog, decided it was time to write and publish some short stories collected from his memory under the sub-title ‘Unexpected turns of events‘. It is my pleasure to publish them on this site and bring them to your attention. Eef wrote three stories to date, I have no doubt that more will follow shortly. Continue reading →
Well, that remains to be seen. The question is if I can publish an audiobook using AI?
Good question, I’ve written a few books, and published them both in paperback and ebook format, but never given the idea of publishing them as audiobooks much thought. While I’ve always been an avid reader of printed books and more recently also of ebooks, audiobooks never really became my thing. I tried one of them once a long time ago but never managed to finish it. Mind you, that was in the age when CD’s had just become fashionable. Continue reading →
You can find the English version here.
K: Hi.
ik mag van me opa eve achter de leptop om met jouw te praten.
ik heet Arjan en ik ben 8 jaar.
AI: Hallo Arjan! Leuk om met jou te praten. Hoe gaat het met jou vandaag? Heb je vandaag iets
leuks gedaan? Continue reading →
E: Hello again.
Do you remember the last conversation I had with you?
It was featured by my wrongly quoted Descartes statement “I think, so I exist”,
corrected by you into “Cogito, ergo sum,” which means “I think, therefore I am”. Continue reading →