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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • I agree, it shouldn’t be used as a way to slam someone. Point it out if you’re in the middle of a useful response. I would consider this a form of error detection / error correction feedback, because maybe the original poster genuinely doesn’t know. Speaking for myself, I would wonder what the speaker hears in their head when they’re presented with both spellings.

    But if we’re playing fast and loose with the rules, then we should also accept ‘luce’ as another alternative. The point here being, how far can we take it before everyone agrees that it’s no longer a reasonable alternative?

    I’ve long considered that learning a second language is like learning to play music. So yeah, there’s the precision of classical, versus the freestyle of jazz.

    But if you’re playing some vinyl on a turntable and asking others to listen to it while jumping around on the floor next to it, don’t be surprised if people seem distracted when the needle starts to jump around. Was that a glitch, or was it intentional?

    Tangent time: around 25 years ago I was reading up on DNS (and BIND) and came across something that stuck with me. I might be paraphrasing, but it went something like “be strict in what you send, and flexible in what you accept”. The context had to do with acceptable DNS names being passed around, and a methodology to improve the odds of mutual success.

    Shifting back to being more on topic: I wish I could speak and write at a level far better than I can now. When I hear certain speakers (typically from England) I simultaneously have a great appreciation for their language competence and a regret for my own competence. I do try to be better, although I do fail.

    In the end, I’d like to be able to bring others along when I lift myself up.





  • That’s one thing I noticed about NZ, during my first trip: the speed limits are generally sane. If anything, the rural speed limits have a genuine sense of reality to them.

    In stark contrast, driving in Canada (Toronto area) and the US (Texas) most times I felt I could safely go faster, were it not for the constant threat of speed traps or random / stealth cruisers.

    In NZ if you’re doing a long drive and you don’t heed the slower speed limits as you enter a bend in the road, you may have just fucked yourself. Especially if the roads have a layer of moisture, which is likely.

    And the more built up areas have a decent amount of traffic calming, which is nice.

    Toronto and really all of the GTA need a severe dose of NotJustBikes to get sorted.







  • Back in the 80s one of my first jobs out of university was working downtown Toronto. One of my coworkers was this effervescent woman of Japanese-Canadian descent.

    She would talk about what it was like meeting guys in clubs.

    “So, where are you from?”

    “Scarborough”

    “Uh… no, I mean where are you originally from?”

    (feigning an “oh I getcha now” moment) “Ohh okay, yeah… Saskatchewan”, since that’s where she really was from, previously.







  • quaddo@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldWomen Should Just Be Honest
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    6 months ago

    Let me preface this by saying that I’m old. 

    I was out for a long run yesterday. Playing the Hype Running List on Spotify. Enjoying most of the songs/artists being played thwre, eg, RATM, Beastie Boys, even some older stuff.

    One song I was a bit meh about was The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzie. But this time, the lyrics made me stop and have a wtf moment. Here’s what I’m referring to:

    You know that chick that used to dance a lot Every night she’d be on the floor, shakin’ what she’s got Man, when I tell you she was cool, she was red-hot I mean, she was steamin’

    And that time over at Johnny’s place Well, this chick got up and she slapped Johnny’s face Man, we just fell about the place If that chick don’t wanna know, forget her

    And I was like “hold up, are they saying what I think they’re saying?” Like, why would she slap his face? And why would you guys be dismissive of her and cool with Johnny?

    Being hot/attractive doesn’t give you license to assault someone. So fuck off with that shit.


  • quaddo@lemmy.worldtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2912: Cursive Letters
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    5 months ago

    I’m not sure I would use a nation’s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples I’ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.

    That said, I don’t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.

    Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but that’s where we’re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.

    I’ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times I’ve had that “finally, this is the one” moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.

    I’m not a fan of my handwriting. And I’ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)

    Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldn’t manage.

    Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like you’re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.


  • I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.

    Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.

    I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.

    Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, I’ve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.

    As such, I’ll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, it’s Alexa. For professional notes, it’s a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.

    Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.

    In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.