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Joined 9 months ago
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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.










  • quaddo@lemmy.worldtoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2912: Cursive Letters
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    2 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.