People are saying “whenever” when they just mean “when” and I hate it with a fiery passion.
“Whenever I was at the game yesterday…”
When. WHEN!!
All dates should be formatted according to ISO 8601 standard (YYYY-MM-DD).
Months should be adjusted so September, October, November, and December are the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month respectively (so the literally meaning of the names accords with their actual meaning).
Not cleaning your kitchen knife after sharpening is trashy and contaminates your food with metal shavings.
Appliances and cars should never have an internet connection for any reason.
Also fuck touch screens give me buttons.
Pretty big hill if you ask me
Im dying on it either way.
Im dying on it either way.
To a self-driving car, no less!
Agree with this. With cars it makes them vulnerable to hacking unless safety critical systems are isolated. Fly-by-wire airplanes specifically isolate the flight control computers from anything that could connect to the internet for this reason
Though as a kind of “exception”, I think that charging poles for electric cars should have modbus or Ethernet and a local protocol (matter maybe?) to use with smart home systems for automation and cars should have a standard affordable way to check errors and status of sensors.
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I fucking love my wifi enabled heat pump. Turn that shit on half an hour before I get home. Comfy shit.
That does sound nice. Is it a proprietary system?
It does not connect to any of the smart home systems, it’s a system by the manufacturer of the unit (Mitsubishi)
touch screens can be justified IMO, IF the company let it function as a diagnostic computer but the auto industry seem terrified of actually making something resembling a competent configurable UI. Internet could be nice if the appliance just used SNMP or similar protocols that have been around for decades, but the companies seem to love that shitty malware they call an App.
Oxford Comma.
To this day I use it and refuse any other option.
Fuck yeah.
Also missing from sub-clauses, at least in America, is the trailing delimiter comma.
Took me a minute of googling to be vaguely sure you meant what I think you mean: the comma marking the end of your dependant interjectory clause there?
at least in America**,**
If so: I have no idea what you are talking about, that’s drilled into us in school. Maybe people get lazy on the Internet but it is part of the rules and gets taught and used here
If I’ve misunderstood: what are you talking about, then?
I’m a comma-crazed Burgerstani, and I use those as well as the serial comma.
I reject, protest and censure your endorsement of the Oxford Comma.
Ending a case that electrified punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs, Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute with its drivers that hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.
Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million
My company has standardized document templates and none of them have Oxford commas. I will go through and add them any time I have to use one.
TIL.
Are you for or against it? I mean, it does have it’s uses.
For it. Its lack of use in a union contract was a factor in a court ruling some years back. That’s when it went from pedantry to real-world consequence for me. Something was ruled similar to A and B rather than A or B.
Anyone who puts always-on blue LEDs in electronics deserve the oubliette. People who put such LEDs in electronics meant for the bedroom deserve an oubliette that’a slowly filling with water.
Or just excessively bright LEDs. Just because LEDs are super efficient, doesn’t mean they should take them as bright as they can go.
Allow me to try and persuade you. The problem is bright blue LEDs. It’s still stupid that they make them so bright, but the problem isn’t the color. A hypothetical bright red, green, or amber LED would also be a problem.
Shorter wavelengths hit different though. That’s why we have blue light filtering glasses, Redshift, etc.
a non-diffused, bright, monocromatic red led would still be painful to look at in the dark, it’s just that blue LEDs tend to be brighter + our eyes are more sensitive to blueish green light at night + the damn companies don’t bother putting a diffuser in front of the diode.
Diffusion and overall brightness do make a difference as well.
Those glasses are pseudo anyway.
This is fair. I have had to put tape over a red alarm clock because it was too bright before. Those manufacturers also get the oubliette
That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.
But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.
My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.
Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(
You can muffle the beeper pretty effectively with some tape, the old air fryer we had terrified one of the dogs because of the incessant beeping. My coffee scale by default beeps whenever you touch it, thankfully that’s 100% mutable.
I also hate this.
The beeping! My damn air fryer has to let everyone in the neighborhood know that I’m making food at 3:00 am, I hate it so much
Gonna ignore the fire alarm someday because I’ll just assume someone is air frying something
“Because fuck your sleep cycle that’s why”
void main() { //code }Is better than
void main() { //code }Why would you want to put it on a separate line? Are you paid by the height of the source file or something?
Pedestrians have the right of way. Most of the other hills are survivable.
I had someone speed up to scare me and call me a bitch when I was using a zebra crossing… he wouldn’t have even been close if he was going the posted speed.
Where I live, it’s the law that on crosswalks you have to stop to let them cross, doesn’t matter how fast you’re going.
Except where trams are involved. Those have a license to kill.
Cloud-based. If a product won’t work if my internet dies, or I can’t access my data without internet or a subscription, I won’t buy it.
Tabs, not spaces.
I don’t give a shit if your arguments perfectly align to the function. It’s only semantic indication. Use the goddamn special character that has its own dedicated key.
The Office means the British version. The American office refers to the American version.
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The British one came first, hence my view. It doesn’t matter though cause you’re missing the point of the British one.
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As an American, this disagrees with my worldview. But I also don’t know enough about the British version to say your wrong 🤷♂️
I never watched the British one, and I don’t care for the American one, too cringey. Makes me sympathetic cringe.
lol. I get that. I say what I say cause the British one came first.
Also, if you feel like that about The American Office, you will not like the British one.
Good to know lol, thanks
Time zones shouldn’t exist. There should just be UTC time and you would go to work at the equivalent of your morning time.
English verbs have historically had present form, past form, and past participle form, eg. go / went / gone. I’m sad to see the past participle form being phased out of American English. People I went to school with and who I’m sure were taught differently (not to mention innumerable podcasters and public radio personalities), now say things like: “By the time I got home I found he’d already went,” eliminating the past participle and instead using the past form. Had saw is not uncommon either. I am old enough I refuse to incorporate this development in the language. If I ever encounter had was/were in the wild I might blow a gasket. Now entering my fuddy-duddy years :(
Okay I believe you and all, but I genuinely don’t understand. My partner has even criticized this in my language but I don’t get it.
Sincerely someone who wants to understand and was unfortunately homeschooled by dumb fucks
Thanks for asking–I’ll try to keep it brief (so as not to bore), and my apologies if I am retreading stuff you already know, but I’ll have to do some lead-in to explain why I care about this at all.
Why past participles?–and why I love them:
Starting with a couple of example sentences that could help differentiate the “simple past” form versus the “present perfect” form that uses the past participle:
- I saw a shooting star last night.
- I have not seen a shooting star.
In the first example, the time mentioned is “last night”-- a time period that in the mind of the speaker is finished or closed.
In the second, there is no time frame mentioned, but we intuitively understand that it is making reference to a period of time that is unfinished or still open–in this case that period is “in my life.”
I really appreciate the nuance that a change in verb form can impart, and so elegantly done!
Participles in telling stories
When it comes to telling stories to each other we almost exclusively keep the main actions in the sequence of events in simple past forms, eg.:
- I woke up.
- I got a shower.
- I ate breakfast.
- I couldn’t find my car keys.
- I had to take the bus to work.
But what if I wanted to have a little twist in the story where I make reference to stuff that happened before my narrative? In English we’ve got this great trick up our sleeves. I could use the past perfect, formed by had + past participle, eg:
- I couldn’t find my car keys. Little did I know that my wife had accidentally dropped them into the laundry basket. So I had to take the bus…
Simple, clean, elegant, and provides a satisfying twist :) Otherwise I would have to tell it like:
- My wife accidentally dropped my keys into the laundry basket. I woke up. I got a shower…
Or like this:
- …I couldn’t find my car keys. Earlier my wife accidentally dropped my keys in the laundry basket, but I didn’t know that at the time. I had to take the bus to work.
I guess all are valid, but I certainly find option 1 the nicest. Option 2 has spoilers. Option 3 is what many other languages do.
Verbs and simplification in languages
If I recall from my dabbling in linguistics, there’s a tendency among most languages to become simpler in terms of their grammar over time. Most English verbs are now “regular,” and you can make the simple past and past participle just by adding -ed to the end of the verb, eg.:
- yell - yelled - yelled
- ask - asked - asked
- smile - smiled - smiled
But among our oldest and most common verbs we’ve got bunches of “strong/irregular” verbs, eg.:
- go - went - gone
- take - took - taken
- see - saw -seen
These are the verbs that people are changing in spoken American English at present. People are “regularizing” the past perfect forms by dropping the past participle and using had + simple past. I know it mainly comes down to linguistics drift and personal choice, but I appreciate that these irregular participles have purpose (by being a part of the perfect tenses, and the nuance they can create), and history. Moreover, I think having greater mastery of these forms in your speech and writing helps make reading texts written in English before the end of the 20th century so much easier.
Long story short: people can and will speak English however they want. No big deal. But in the case of excising the irregular past participles from English, I’ll hold on to what I was taught and grew to love about English grammar.
got a shower
That made me shudder. Are you a dog and being showered by someone else, or was it a gift granted to you for hard work that day? ;)
In my dialect it’s the equivalent of took or had a shower. :/
I’ve also noticed an increase in using “had [done]” instead of [did] in places I wouldn’t expect. I’m sure a linguist could break that down more thoroughly.
Oh no…
If a motorcycle has to be ear-splittingly loud for “safety”, then it’s too dangerous to be road legal.
It’s explicitly the opposite, scientifically, according to my safety class
The deep rumble being loud overwhelms anyone’s ability to properly locate the bike quickly, and they demonstrated this live. It’s definitely harder to locate a LOUDER bike
I used to ride. People who say that know it’s just a bullshit excuse to be a dick. Just roll your eyes and/or flip them the bird. Actually, most of them get off on you flipping them the bird, because they’re dicks 🤷
No, it’s morphed into one of those pearls of wisdom that people pass down and truly believe. They all have their ‘true story’ of blipping the throttle and “suddenly the car that was moving over to smush me stopped!!!” The assholes who know it isn’t true can be discerned from the true believers by the humor they find in their tales of blasting people with sounds.
Search engines should not use locational data including IP address to provide “more relevant” results. Checking for restaurants or weather forecast? You should have to manually add the relevant search terms. Want results in a specific language? You should have to manually apply this filter.
Convenience is not worth the potential harm of locationally biased search results.
For example, where I live is like White Nationalist Central Station. My search results are thus far more likely to net me results with a pro-US/nationalist skew, thus potentially entrenching or normalizing harmful beliefs.
Whenever I’ve tried bringing this up with Techlords, I get a feeble, “B-but then you couldn’t say ‘restaurants near me’ UnU” and like … good? It’s not like it’s hard to type city and state in the search field.
I’ve never found a search engine that even has this as an option. Even Sear XNG instances net results that are clearly aligned with the location of the instances server.
A Kagi dev even lied to me when I was looking into that as an alternative, saying they don’t use location, when it’s pretty easy to determine that they do.
I also don’t want a “good” algorithm. I also don’t want to see big corporate sites prioritized either. If some backwoods nobody has a site that’s more relevant, show it to me. I feel like pre-Google search engines were better, but that’s another vent for another day.
Now where did I put my false teeth and walker???
Not a small hill and I could not agree more. This is relevant to Noam Chomsky “manufacturing consent”.
100% agree.
To add to this, when I’m looking up something online I want info provided by the internet in general, not just by my next door hillbilly.
EDIT: Downvoted by my next door hillbilly and his siblings
With duckduckgo you can disable the country filter thingo to get international results, and you can also change it to another country
Oh believe me, I know. DDG was the first one I tried, and I tested it with every configuration possible. Like many other search engines such as startpage and kagi, you sure can do this in the settings, but it will do absolutely nothing to stop it from using your IP address to net locationally biased results specific to your current location. You may assume it would function like this, but it doesn’t.
I even tried their html and lite versions, but although it was less cluttered and much more pleasant to use, it still provided results that were very clearly based on my IP address.
I’m not even sure what those settings do because they appear to have no function. Maybe they change language and currency on some sites for convenience, but again, that’s not what I’m talking about in my comment! I’m saying a search engine should not use any locational data whatsoever to adjust results. And if you reply “well, good luck finding one because it doesn’t exist,” then congratulations, you understand my comment! They don’t exist because we’ve all sacrificed our societal wellbeing for the sake of the smallest convenience.
Even if changing it to another country/region worked (it doesn’t), we’d still have the problem of netting biased results based on what country I switch it to. That would be akin to searching while using my VPN, which once again, does not solve the problem of search engines using IP address to provide locationally biased results.
have you actually properly tested that the results in your location are more extremist? like compared with using a vpn on ddg?
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You know what’s hilarious about this basically non-functional setting? If I toggle the switch off, it provides results based on my IP address’s location, but if I toggle it to “UK” it will also provide some results for the UK city that my town is named after, without me ever providing the name of my town lol
DDG is a for-profit brand that’s a lot more nefarious than people think. They’ve even succumbed to AI.
Just tried setting no country, then ducked “wine”.
Results were definitely still from my country first.
When I set display language to US English, results came up from the US, instead.
When I set it to French, it shows French websites at the top.
So the language you set affects what websites you are shown in the results. That sucks.But you can actually just turn off ads in the settings. That’s pretty fucking neat!
ip adress only gives the nearest big city. information like this is pretty useful to show you info based on your state/province.
yes I don’t think a search engine should promote more extremist views but it’s pretty nice if when I search ‘left party’ I get a left party from my country, and not the American democratic party.
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The first time i searched for a business online the results came from a city on the other side of the planet. I’m ok with getting search results in my area.
That’s on you for not entering the proper search terms. User error.
Edit: Also, good. That’s the way it should be! Which search engine did you use to get that result? I’ve been looking for something like that.
I live in a pretty mountainous area, but I can think of a couple blind corners on small hills near me. So probably the one on the way to the bakery while running or biking.
But I do a lot of ski touring so I’d rather die on one of the big ones.
