IMO, the first statement is half-stupid, the second one is half-overcomplicated :)

Welcome to English, my friend. No one ever claimed that it wasn’t a pain in the arse to learn :)

Lol well teaching this professionally surely makes me some form of authority (albeit of course not the authority!) on this subject.

To clarify, your original point sounded like you were making a distinction between metaphorical mirrors and actual mirrors:

“in the mirror” tends to more often refer to a metaphorical “mirror”, typically when discussing self-reflection

• “I took a look in the mirror and decided to change my ways.”

“in a mirror” tends to refer most often to actual mirrors that exist in reality, not metaphorically

• “I looked into a mirror to fix my eyeliner.”

This incorrect distinction is what I was objecting to, because of course we can use both the indefinite and definite articles to refer to either literal or figurative mirrors.

Nope, as I explained in my other comment, it’s standard usage.

In English, we often use the definite article when speaking in general about a specific activity or action that involves a non-specific object. E.g. “go to the bathroom” or “catch the bus”, or “read the newspaper”. It’s not poor form at all.

A fair guess, but this isn’t one of those times when a grammatical error becomes normalized through common usage.

There is no grammar rule that separates speaking literally versus metaphorically in this case.

“You have something on your face; go take a look in the mirror” is just as grammatically correct in English as “You need to take a good look in the mirror and change your ways.”

I’ve explained why this is standard usage in English in my comment here.

English teacher here. Articles in English can be really confusing but essentially we use the definite article in this situation because:

• Uniqueness: In most situations, there’s only one mirror in a room or a home that’s readily available for someone to look into.
• Generality: Similar to “going to the bathroom,” “look in the mirror” refers to the general act of using a mirror to see oneself, not interacting with any specific mirror.

True, but I would argue that American Chinese food is a distinct cuisine in its own right, just as Anglo-Indian is.

If the argument is that the British Empire didn’t incorporate seasonings and spices into its own traditional cuisine, then I’d argue that none of the European powers did. French cuisine is still undeniably French and spice-less, despite their colonialist history in Africa and the Caribbean.

Ha! Don’t make me spit out my tea. Your cheddar is cheese-flavored plastic in comparison.

Bold talk from the nation that eats cheese from a spray can.

Anglo-Indian cuisine is a product of the British colonization of India and the fusion of British and Indian culinary traditions. This unique blending of flavors and techniques creates a cuisine that is both savory and flavorful, while remaining distinct from traditional Indian or British dishes.

https://medium.com/@wethechefs.in/a-food-lovers-guide-to-anglo-indian-cuisine-exploring-the-flavors-and-techniques-39bbb806a82d

“We have investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.”

That’s why I did a double take when I saw the above headline. Biden finally putting his foot down and strong-arming Israel into a ceasefire would be huge.

But alas…

Thanks, I couldn’t find that part anywhere.

I’m personally not sure that saying “We’re trying to work out … an immediate ceasefire” has nearly the same urgency as as calling for one, but hey at least it’s something.

Sadly, this headline seems to be misleading. Checking for additional sources, I can find none that confirm that he actually called for a ceasefire.

According to the Associated Press, he did decry the loss of life in Gaza and announce that the US are about to commence airdrops of humanitarian aid, but at no point did he seem to do what this headline implies.

A Reuters article covering the same conference mentions the possibility of a ceasefire, but this apparently referred to a previous conversation a few days ago.

Unless anyone can find evidence to the contrary, I have to assume that this Newshub article is clickbait.

FYI that’s not a spectrogram, that’s a waveform analyzer. It might help you in your search to know that.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any FOSS apps for Android that offer this feature.

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I think so, but I’m no expert on the details of legal ownership.

@Dark_Arc@lemmy.world added a good comment here that explains the royalty free licensing.

The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.

The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.

Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.

The Thai government never asked for Elon’s help - he volunteered following a tweet by a twitter user who suggested that he help.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44779998

Also, his solution was never viable to begin with - the rescue organizers said straight away that the submersible would be useless in the cave environment.

The main reason for the Linux operating system not seeing widespread adoption is because of its multitude of distros.

No it isn’t - it’s because the vast majority of computer/laptop users just stick with the OS that comes installed on their device and probably aren’t even aware than installing a new one is even an option. Your grandma isn’t sitting there thinking “should I install Ubuntu or Fedora on my MacBook?”

Lemmy/Kbin do have something in common with Linux in that the Fediverse concept requires a certain amount of technical knowledge to understand, but it’s far easier to grasp that than it is to install Linux on your home computer.

The term “Asian” is almost never used in the geographical rather than socio-cultural sense, though.

Cypriots are certainly European, culturally, and a good number of these nationalities are considered “Middle Eastern” rather than “West Asian”.