"Demsoc" is just a shorthand for "democratic socialist". Similar to how "ancap" is "anarcho-capitalist" and "nazbol" is "national-bolshevik".

No, the current president is also called Ferdinand Marcos.

I mean it's a valid concern. He's also nowhere near the first to voice it. I attended a presentation from a Microsoft exec who explained that Microsoft had already developed very powerful voice mimicking technology, well ahead of anything public at the time. It required only a few seconds of speech before it could fully replicate your voice. But their ethics board or whatever stopped them, due to the massive fraud risks. Nowadays I think they've adapted the tech to voice recognition used in Teams instead.

Of course, MS wasn't the only one working on this and other people have since published these solutions, so the cat's out of the bag now.

It's not AI. The oldest version of this image is from May 11th 2020, and the first widespread text-to-image model DALL-E came out in January 2021. That makes this image too old to be AI-generated.

It also doesn't show any strange AI defects the early models had, in case you may think it's from a very early proprietary unreleased model or something.

Yeh his origins are all over the place and combine in a pretty terrible way. Changing it is for the better.

Sinterklaas supposedly lives in Spain, and some origins suggest Piet is modelled off of Moorish slaves there. But the outfit doesn't match; it's based on traditional Moorish outfits as they wore in Venice, and those Moors were free. The bright colours are also reminiscent of the southern Dutch as well as the Venetian carnival.

Decades ago, Piet would announce himself with the clanking of chains. That makes people think of slavery, but they're not chains as used to bind slaves. Rather, it appears to be coming from the German Krampus, which is more of a boogeyman that scares kids. Piet then changed to make him a friendly and non-scary alternative to Krampus.

Piet has always been described as a "knecht", which some people interpret as "slave" but that's a bad translation of the world. A knecht is just someone who helps with some task, and who does just get paid for it like with any other job. A farmhand for example could be a type of knecht, and they aren't slaves either.

Combined together, it's the perfect cocktail of "it looks terrible, but does seem coincidental". Refusing to change it because of "tradition" when people who are uncomfortable kindly ask to do so, that does appear to be the most racist thing about him.

Android has a garbage collector, meaning it requires an additional 2GB of RAM of overhead to keep things smooth. iPhones run significantly hotter than Androids, and consume more energy to achieve their performance gains.

It's not true to simply state "one is better than the other". There's various metrics in which either one may be better.

Because the Kremlin would protect him and help him broadcast his message. It harms the US government, so the Kremlin sees providing Snowden with protection and a platform as an absolute win.

Most other countries that are remotely aligned with the US might be pressured to keep Snowden quiet.

Polls gave Trump a 30% chance. He barely won a couple states, and lost the popular vote. There was also some very late political interference by the FBI director announcing new investigations into Clinton, only to retract that later.

I would. I certainly wouldn't inspect the order of the email recipients to see if I was given the right amount of "respect". I don't mind at all if someone wants to order the recipients, go ahead. But if someone gets angry at me for not ordering them, they can go get bent. I have better things to do with my time.

How incredibly petulant and childish of Sunak to chicken out of this meeting. There were incredibly important subjects on the agenda, like the crisis in Gaza.

Absolutely disgraceful for the British.

Japan did have a bit of an earthquake and a tsunami to contend with.

Generally the programmers that visit these kinds of websites, let alone participate in a survey, are the enthusiast programmers who are much more likely to be interested in exploring a new language in the first place.

There's a considerable potential for a selection bias here. Not that this disproves the survey, but generally these kinds of surveys tend to be a little bit ahead of the curve, so to speak.