merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

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merc,

Bullshit, why even bother then?

Because being creative is enjoyable.

merc,

Libraries are also written and maintained by humans.

It’s fine to optimize if you can truly justify it, but that’s going to be even harder in libraries that are going to be used on multiple different architectures, etc.

merc,

It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.

merc,

Anything talking about the evolution of the “Trash Can Icon” should be starting with the Apple version that Microsoft copied.

merc,

This wasn’t a call center, it was a sysadmin / software development sweatshop workspace.

merc,

That’s just one element of theft.

merc,

I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.

If you are using the term theft colloquially

I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.

By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.

merc,

Not really, theft is theft. Fraud is fraud. Just because something feels like theft doesn’t make it theft.

merc,

Nah, no need to go to laws, just use a dictionary.

merc,

Wage theft isn’t theft, it’s fraud.

merc,

you have stolen my labour

No, that’s not theft. That’s fraud.

merc,

English preserves the pronunciation and spelling of loan words

English doesn’t preserve the pronunciation. It approximates the pronunciation while keeping the spelling, and that pronunciation drifts over time and changes in different places. See: Lieutenant, a word that has two wildly different pronunciations in English, neither of which sound anything like the original French word.

merc,

There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation

But, there are patterns to the language and using a soft “g” sound doesn’t follow those patterns, so it’s objectively a less correct pronunciation.

the guy who created it

Who cares about that guy? He made a mistake, he should have looked up how words are pronounced before trying to get people to mispronounce “gif”. If he’d said it was supposed to be pronounced “dug” people would have just ignored him, but his attempt wasn’t that absurd, it was just slightly wrong, so not everyone ignored him the way they should have.

instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation

It really sounds like you didn’t have friends. The rest of us did.

Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn’t have anything to do with this

Of course it does. How you pronounce things depends on the language you use. How people pronounce the letters “gif” is based on their language. In English, it’s a hard g.

merc,

He’s the only one that can be considered an authority on how the word is pronounced LMAO.

He’s just the guy who invented the software and coined a name for it, he has no authority over how that should be pronounced. If he came up with a ridiculous pronunciation (as he did) he should be laughed at and people should use a sensible pronunciation.

Pronunciation isn’t based on spelling

Of course it is. That’s how spelling works. In English it isn’t nearly 1:1 like other languages, but spelling is very strongly tied to how a word is pronounced.

the English writing system isn’t consistent enough to make estimations for a pronunciation like that

Yes, it is. That’s why people pronounce it with a hard “g”, because they’ve internalized the rules for spelling vs. pronunciation in English and know that those 3 letters in that order has a hard g.

are pronounced wildly phonemically differently

There are slight differences in pronunciation, not wild differences. The differences are so slight that normally you can understand the word someone is using in another dialect without difficulty. And, in every English dialect “gift” has a hard g, as does “gif”.

merc,

What illusion are you alluding to?

merc,

His eye makeup is pretty good, but it can’t disguise how much bigger one of his eyes is.

merc,

I think Windows is hot chocolate from an instant packet where you just add hot water.

It’s objectively pretty bad, it’s definitely not coffee, but it’s easy to make, and you get the same standard thing every time.

merc,

I don’t want to chat with Chlorine Trifluoride, it’s nasty.

But yeah, there are some obscure situations where oxygen isn’t the oxidizing agent, but the name “oxidizer” gives a clue how rare that is. In most normal situations, oxygen is the oxidizer and the thing it reacts with is the fuel. Partially that’s due to Oxygen being a good electron acceptor, but mostly it’s because there’s a lot of oxygen in the planet, and anywhere you can have humans you pretty much need to have oxygen.

merc,

Oxygen isn’t flammable, Oxygen is what reacts with the things that are flammable.

merc,

It’s the “under proton” I don’t like. It means the performance is never going to be 100% of what you get if you run it natively. Maybe in 90% of games the performance is close enough that I’d never notice, but I play enough games that for now it makes sense to have a dedicated game OS, which is all Windows is these days to me.

merc,

I just want to see how happy and relaxed Ensign Picard is. No critical decisions to make. Able to make friends among the crew without his rank getting in the way.

We get to see Captain Picard in Ensign Picard’s body, but we never get to see the slacker who has big dreams but doesn’t bother to push himself.

merc,

Leaving aside the quality of Rock Band vs. Fortnite, there are some other key differences:

  1. Playing with your friends in the same room. With Fortnite I think that’s possible on consoles, but it isn’t how people tend to play. If you’re not playing games with friends in the same room (at least sometimes) you’re missing out.
  2. A variety of games. Almost nobody exclusively played Guitar Hero, or Rock Band. They were just one of many games people played. For some reason, kids these days seem to be hyper-focused on one game. First it was Minecraft, next it was Fortnite. My nephew switched to League of Legends next, and again, it’s all he plays. I can understand getting hyper-focused an MMO, because they try to pile in all kinds of content: quests, raids, dungeons, professions, seasonal events, exploration, PvP, PvE, etc. But, Fortnite and LoL lack a lot of those features.
merc,

There’s a famous Churchill quote about democracy that is almost always misquoted:

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

To me, the key words that are often left out entirely are: that have been tried.

For the Aztecs in this picture, it may actually be true that their system was the best one they’d tried so far. Maybe ritual sacrifice of a tiny minority was a small price to pay compared to what they’d experienced until then. Representative democracy with voting rights for all citizens over the age of majority might be the best system we’ve tried so far. Kings willing to devolve some power to their barons in the Magna Carta was the best system for England so far.

We shouldn’t stop trying to make things better. Otherwise we’re like these Aztecs.

merc,

But, that’s $100k for a hobby.

Like, you’re almost certainly not using that plane to commute. You may use it instead of buying a commercial plane ticket when you go on vacation somewhere, but that’s not saving you any money, it’s likely costing you significantly more in storage fees, etc.

People who own planes aren’t billionaire-rich necessarily, but they’re still people who can afford hobbies that cost $100k.

merc,

Whoa. That area has things that look like roads, but are extended taxiways from the homes to the runway. For the early-alphabet taxiways there’s a clear distinction between the public roads and the taxiways. The roads end in dead-ends before the runways, and the taxiways end in dead-ends before the roads.

But, when you get to taxiway echo, it actually crosses Spruce Creek Blvd. So, you could be slowing down to a stop sign, only to see a plane taxi across the road in front of you. I wonder how often cars end up on that taxiway by accident.

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