Excellent release by the Qwen team as always. Pretty much the best open-weights model line so far.

In my early tests however, several of the advertised languages are not really well supported and the model is outputting something that only barely resembles them.

Probably a dataset quality issue for low-resource languages that they cannot personally check for, despite the “119 languages and dialects” claim.

I can't track down the name of this knot, but for ropes that will be under tension the knot I learned when working line service in high school for tying down aircraft has been tremendously useful. [0] is an excellent example of how to tie this knot, it holds tremendous tension while being easy to release. I've found this very useful for camping and general securing of loads.

If anyone knows the 'proper' name for this knot I would greatly appreciate it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMITtV80xpY

Teach your kids Tarock, not Bridge.

Ok, that phrasing is mostly just to keep the pattern going. But I do want to bring to light the fact that there are actually a larger class of games of the same sort as Bridge - imperfect information, high skill, with a body of strategy and discussion - than most Americans are aware of.

I think it’s worth mentioning these for two reasons:

1. They’re really wonderful games! And they have deep cultural roots, which can be added delight for those of us who enjoy engaging with other cultures.

2. Bridge players can be kind of… dicks? That is, it’s unfortunate but true that the culture of Bridge can often be quite rigid and unfriendly. Especially to newcomers. As mentioned elsewhere, a surprising amount of Bridge has to do with the conventions encoded in the bidding, and if you don’t know those conventions you might feel rather lost, and your partner might get very annoyed at you.

Luckily, there are other games in the world that are the ‘Bridge’ of their own countries of origin - deep, strategic, rewarding years of play and study - that the average English speaker has never heard of.

I won’t go into too much detail but some highlights are:

- Preferans, a straight-trick-taking game for three from Russia;

- Skat, a point-trick-taking game from Germany;

- Tarocchino, a point trick taking game played with a 62 card tarot deck from Bologna;

- Koenigrufen, a point trick game played with a 54 card tarot deck from Austria;

- Danish tarok, a point trick game played with a 78 card deck;

- Vira, a straight trick taking game from Sweden;

- a half dozen incredibly deep and challenging games from Hungary alone. Something in the water over there.

In point of fact, Bridge is quite interesting, especially if you’re interested in the meta game of communicating through bidding conventions. I am not; there are other games out there that have really interesting features, lots of strategy, and a history dating back hundreds of years. Check them out!

Because I’m an annoying evangelist for this sort of thing, I’ll make sure my email is in my profile in case you’d like to know more.

This reminded me of a cool technology that I've forgotten the name of and can't find again online. It was some sort of wood-burning stove that loaded sticks from the top and would recirculate the smoke until the fuel burned off, then the cooled gasses would naturally flow out of the system. Instead of a chimney that went up, there was a small port on the outside of the building, where smokeless, room-temperature gasses would exit.

The design was dead simple with no fans or anything, just using convection. But because the idea is so new, there are very few of them and no regulation yet. Does anyone remember what these things are called?

Im surprised Seat61[1] has not been shared yet. All you need to know about Train travel in the world including night trains

[1] https://www.seat61.com/

I played Diablo2 for almost 19 years. Then the Blitzchung controversy happened. Now Diablo2, and all Blizzard products are dead to me, and imo they should be dead to you all as well.

Come on Mozilla, hurry up! I want to give you money for goods and services (I also donate monthly [1]), but I'm not that interested in a VPN (I can and do also pay Mullvad).

Give me that real internet stuff - email, calendar, file sync, chat(?) - give me Firefox Premium. Bundle in the Lockwise password manager. I'd pay good money to see a company fill the void of paid, privacy first essential internet services and I think Mozilla is one of the foremost existing players to pull it off. They've started talking about Firefox Premium a while ago now [2] and it's obviously not easy to build all of this in a lean way, but I'll happily pitch in. If only to help make Firefox development less dependant on Google or Yahoo.

[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org/

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/18660344/firefox-subscrip...