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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

  • It’s “I am working” not “I be working”.

    From how it’s used and understood, it’s a lot closer to, “I am in a situation where I find myself working from time to time”. “I am working” suggests you’re doing it right now, “I be working” does not. This example is a unique, condensed way to convey a very specific idea that your idea of “proper English” cannot convey without a boatload of extra words.

    If that’s still bothersome to you, well, I guess have fun kicking that proverbial land-crawling fish back into the sea if that’s where you get your jollies. IMO some prescriptivism is okay to get people on the same page, but the moment you use it as a cudgel to beat people who are very clearly already being understood, you’re being a prude.




  • pixelscripttoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldWhy are peole hating on .world?English
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    5 days ago
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    I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.

    The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.

    This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.

    The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.



  • pixelscripttoTechnology@lemmy.worldMicrosoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependencyEnglish
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    6 days ago
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    Happy Debian daily driver here. I would never ever recommend raw Debian to a garden variety would-be Linux convert.

    If you think something like Debian is something a Linux illiterate can just pick up and start using proficiently, you’re severely out of touch with how most computer users actually think about their machines. If you even so much as know the name of your file explorer program, you’re in a completely different league.

    Debian prides itself on being a lean, no bloat, and stable environment made only of truly free software (with the ability to opt-in to nonfree software). To people like us, that’s a clean, blank canvas on a rock-solid, reliable foundation that won’t enshittify. But to most people, it’s an austere, outdated, and unfashionable wasteland full of flaky, ugly tooling.

    Debian can be polished to any standard one likes, but you’re expected to do it yourself. Most people just aren’t in the game to play it like that. Debian saddles questions of choice almost no one is asking, or frankly, even knew was a question that was ask*-able*. Mandatory customizeability is a flaw, not a feature.

    I am absolutely team “just steer them to Mint”. All the goodness of Debian snuck into their OS like medicine in a kid’s dessert, wrapped up in something they might actually find palatable. Debian itself can be saved for when, or shall I say if, the user eventually goes poking under the hood to discover how the machine actually ticks.




  • Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.

    Not completely true. It’s mostly true. I’ve daily driven Firefox for years, and the number of websites I’ve crossed that wouldn’t function in it correctly but would work just fine in Chrome was very slim but not zero. Definitely not comparable to the complete shitshow of the 90’s and 00’s. That’s true. But it’s not a completely solved problem.

    And with Mozilla’s leadership practically looking for footguns to play with combined with the threat of Google’s sugar daddy checks drying up soon due to the antitrust suit (how utterly ironic that busting up the monopoly would actually harm the only competition), that gap can get much worse in very little time if resources to keep full time devs paid disappear.


  • I recently had a rather baffling experience trying to preemptively avoid this by downloading the stupid app right away, only to discover I needed the website version anyway.

    I was attempting to add my Known Traveler Number to an already booked trip with Southwest Airlines, booked by someone else. I was able to link the trip to my account right away in the app, no issue. And I could see the KTN field for my ticket sitting there, empty, greyed-out, and not interactible. I opened up the moble version of their website, completely unsurprised to find it was identical to the app, except for the detail that the KTN field there was functional. Put in the information, changes reflected in the app instantly, and I was in the TAS-pre line that afternoon.

    Why did the two versions obviously built from the same codebase have two different sets of capabilities? Why was the website the more capable of the two this time? I have no clue. All I know is I never want to be a developer at a corporation where I’d have to be responsible for this flavor of trash.


  • pixelscripttoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAdsEnglish
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    16 days ago
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    If adblockers would allow ads that adhere to the acceptable ads criteria, the world would be a better place. Less paywals, less ads and maybe some companies would pay their employees a little bit more.

    I disagree. The system may have began in earnest goodwill, but financial incentive inevitably erodes goodwill. ABP becomes incentivized to adapt its definition of “acceptable” based on potential revenues they stand to gain from increasingly persuasive advertisers. Your vision of a better world under this system is at best temporary.

    The alternative model, simply paying for goods and services directly, is a far more robust solution.








  • pixelscripttoComic Strips@lemmy.worldIn the doghouse [Clearly Confused]English
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    21 days ago
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    As a fanart hoarder, the number of great artists I know of who seem to exclusively post their work on Twitter, a completely unsearchable platform that lossy compresses anything you upload to it and makes it a pain in the dick to get highest quality downloads, as opposed to a browsable upload platform like deviantArt, Pixiv, or Tumblr, infuriates me.

    I think I know why a lot of them do it, too. To them, their work is intentionally ephemeral. They want to draw a thing, release it to the world, be admired for a day, and let it fade away into the aether. They don’t want a browseable archive of their past work. Art they draw is disposable. Twitter is the best platform for this, as everything on Twitter is naturally consumed this way. That, and its audience is way larger than any of the other platforms I mentioned, so they get more eyes on their work.

    Yeah, an archive exists on Twitter, but unless you want to scroll scroll scroll through every single tweet they’ve ever made in reverse chronological order, you’re never going to find what you’re looking for without some kind of external indexing tool. All of this before Elon bought it and further enshittified it within an inch of its life. You can’t even browse posts without being logged in anymore.


  • pixelscripttoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlHow about we play, "Never have I ever"?English
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    21 days ago
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    Fellow tattooless here. Uh, neither?

    I simply don’t see the appeal of putting on something I can’t easily take off if I wanted to, for its own sake. Yeah, tattoos aren’t permanent, a removal process exists. But they cost money and require an appointment to be rid of, on top of the investment of time, money, and pain to buy in. The barrier to entry and the barrier to exit are both too high for my liking.

    Ideally you get a tattoo and enjoy it for life. I can’t commit to that kind of decision. Not for a funny body picture. If I need a memento to cherish memory of a thing or event I’ll get a tchotchke or something.

    I have no complaints about others’ tattoos. They’re more often than not incredible works of art.


  • pixelscripttoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat's a handy terminal command you use often?English
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    24 days ago
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    There are exactly three kinds of manpages:

    1. Way too detailed
    2. Not nearly detailed enough
    3. There is no manpage

    I will take 1 any day over 2 or 3. Sometimes I even need 1, so I’m grateful for them.

    But holy goddamn is it awful when I just want to use a command for aguably its most common use case and the flag or option for that is lost in a crowd of 30 other switches or buried under some modal subcommand. grep helps if you already know the switch, which isn’t always.

    You could argue commands like this don’t have “arguably most common usecases”, so manpages should be completely neutral on singling out examples. But I think the existence of tl;dr is the counterargument.

    Tangent complaint: I thought the Unix philosophy was “do one thing, and do it well”? Why then do so many of these shell commands have a billion options? Mostly /s but sometimes it’s flustering.