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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • It’s a standard letter in Icelandic, so there are probably plenty of fonts incorporating thorn, even if not everyone uses them. Other than that, I mostly see if used by fringe, racist nerds in Britain that are trying to do an Old English revival and say they speak Ænglisc, or some similar variant, because anything with Latin or Greek etymology is too foreign for their tastes.

    Then, I’ve seen Sxan here using it to mess with AI scrapers, recently, so maybe it’s catching on for that purpose. Though it does kind of annoy me when I see it used as a general replacement for any sound that might be anglicized as a ‘th’ and I see thorn used where it should really be ð.


  • I can’t really answer for anything other than ebikes, but that’s mostly because ebikes have attracted the same group of inconsiderate assholes that dirtbikes and quads in urban areas have attracted in the past. I’m sure there are plenty of people on ebikes that just ride them around as they’re meant to, and I’m all for using them for replacing cars and stuff for commutes. But if you ask me what I think of them, the first things that come to mind are assholes riding them at high speeds in the dark with no lights, cutting through grass, trails and anything else in the parks in my city and nearly running people down. Or people whipping around corners on crowded sidewalks on them. Or delivery drivers running red lights on them and taking people out in crosswalks that had the right of way.

    None of these things are the fault of ebikes themselves, but when a huge portion of the ridership that someone comes in contact with consist of either inconsiderate assholes or desperate people whose livelihoods are determined by inconsiderate assholes, it shouldn’t be a shocker that it leads to an overall negative impression of people using them.



  • I don’t think I’ve ever followed that workflow to be honest. Except for when doing something niche and way above and beyond something a casual user would do.

    I don’t think I’ve ever actually done that after maybe 2010. Package managers are awesome, and package availability is better than ever. Linux has improved massively in this regard since then, but its reputation still seems to be stuck in the “Well, if you’re serious about using Linux, you’re wasting your time with Ubuntu. You should install Gentoo and build everything yourself!” era.

    Even on the odd occasion that I’m unable to find something in the repos, I’d sooner just find the project’s git repo, clone it and build it. Most of the time now, they have some sort of automated helper script that will build and install the package for you, and when they don’t, you’ve gone way off the beaten path and left behind any semblance of pretending to be an average user. But, hey, at least make isn’t a terribly difficult command to use.








  • hraegsvelmir@ani.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBanana
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    1 month ago

    The taste isn’t that bad, but on its own, I’d give the common yellow bananas a “Meh, but not worth that texture” for taste. I’m actually fine with them in other foods, like, I can eat illness-inducing quantities of banana bread. It’s just that the most commonly sold bananas have a texture that in other fruits would probably indicate it’s rotten. I’ve tried giving them another chance several times, but as soon as I take a bite, it makes me start gagging.

    I’ve found the odd variety here and there that were actually better in both regards, though. I remember the grocery store briefly had these little red bananas, about half the size of a yellow one, and I tried it on a whim. Those actually tasted good, and the fruit was firm enough to seem like it was something a person was actually meant to eat.

    I assume the common, yellow bananas are just bred to be big, produce lots of fruit and have a consistent flavor, even if it’s not a very good one compared to other bananas.




  • That’s not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.

    If we keep on saying, “Well, it’s not good enough now, so forget about it,” we’ll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn’t take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.


  • It really would have been more concise to just write “I don’t care what you write, I’m right and screw everyone who disagrees.”

    You keep treating every single innovation as though it’s assured that it will one day be adopted into the “standard” (as much as such a thing can be said to actually exist) language at some point in the future, and dismissing anyone who disagrees. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is actually part of that natural evolution of language you hold so dear. If enough people see a novel form or word and reject it, for whatever reason, that innovation has hit a dead end and won’t last. The sort of names you’re championing might be enjoying rising popularity right now, but it’s a mistake to assume that means all of them will inevitably become accepted. Some of them will, and many more will fade into obscurity.

    These names are not immune to any criticism just because you’ve decided that anything goes and to say otherwise is bad linguistics. Names come and go all the time, some for some fairly rational reasons, some for entirely arbitrary ones. It’s not hard to rationalize why Adolf has fallen off precipitously as a given name in the US, but what’s the basis for Clarence going from one of the top 50 names for boys in the US to not even cracking the top 1000 for the last 45 years or so? The truth is, it could be anything. Sometimes people stop using a name because it’s considered old fashioned, sometimes it’s supplanted by a new variant that proves more popular, and other times it’s just because tastes have changed and people find it ugly or embarrassing, rather than being the perfectly normal name it had once been.

    I am, however, unaware of any case in which a name faced with losing its popularity or acceptability has been saved by someone riding high on their own self-righteousness telling anyone who dares criticize a name “You’re all ignorant cretins, don’t you know linguistic prescriptivism is not widely accepted amongst linguists?” while ignoring the fact that they themselves are trying to be prescriptive in their own way. Natural language is not, to the best of my knowledge, a teleological phenomenon. Just like evolution in living beings doesn’t have any special design or end goal to be worked towards, there is no perfect form, no grand design that languages are all working towards that you can compare against to assess whether a given innovation will be accepted or rejected in the course of time.

    Outside such obviously insane stuff like the child abuse masquerading as a name that Elon Musk inflicts upon his children, none of us can say with certainty whether a given name will stand the test of time or not. People choosing to adopt them or not, giving their opinions on them and popular sentiment is all part of how that will ultimately get determined, and you just want to come along and browbeat people for engaging in that and expressing their own views on names. How about you propose your own objective criteria for analyzing the viability of a given name going forward, oh wise one?

    Okay, so, “-ly” is equally valid as an English place-name spelling varient of “leah”. Don’t believe me? Ask the English Place-Name Society:

    And? Again, thank you for admitting that despite cranking out a fair bit of text, you don’t seem to do so great on reading comprehension. Just to repeat it again, with emphasis for you.

    You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley.

    Huh, what do you know, the -ley/-leigh bit actually means something in the name Ashley, and it shares this meaning the -leigh used in place names. Yet Emily is derived from a patrician surname from ancient Rome adapted to better conform to the norms of English, or as a feminine form of the name Emil. In either case, the -ly in the name Emily is not cognate to the English -ley or -leigh. So instead of being one variant amongst many equivalent lingering forms that predate modern efforts to standardize English orthograpy, that -ly isn’t even a discreet morpheme on its own, and the name would be better treated split into Emil and -y. But sure, tell me again how it’s unconscionable to say that people deciding to jazz it up and be extra by turning it into Emmaleigh are the cool-headed, linguistically grounded voices of reason in this case.


  • Having no root in language, dialect, religion, history or culture.

    This part was important, it’s not just phonetics.

    Emmaleigh

    This is still a dumbass name that serves no purpose but to reveal the parents’ ignorance and desire to give their kid a “unique” name. You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley. Emmaleigh is just try hards desperate to be different.

    “Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).

    You’re fine with Graycyn, right?

    This sort of thought process is, as I understand it, exactly what @[email protected] is complaining about. Graycyn is stupid as fuck. Yeah, I could name my kind Pterry or Psimon and say “Yeah, but we have words like pterodactyl and psychic, so it’s consistent with other exceptions to the standards of English orthography,” but it would still be stupid as fuck and cruel to name a kid that.

    I think you would have a better argument with people naming their kids Khaleesi or something. Yeah, it’s not a name that I would give to a kid, but it’s already entered the language as an explicit borrowing of a character’s title that entered popular culture. I don’t see how that’s any different than something like a person learning French and deciding they prefer the name Guillaume to William and naming their kids that. Deciding you want to name your kid Mychael, or Mathyew, or Jeze🔔, or something because your child is just too precious to share a name with all the plebs who have the same name with a conventional spelling isn’t some grand evolution of language, nor does it add any novel meaning to the name. All it does it let people know that your kid is the child of a couple of feckless muppets.


  • The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion. Wearing your respirator and other PPE will go a long way towards mitigating these risks, but they’re not the most pleasant things to wear for hours on end. He told me that lots of younger guys would come in, start working and see all the old guys at it with their respirators on, but they’d opt not to wear them whenever they thought they could get away with it, since they didn’t personally know people who developed black lung in the field. That’s just what he had told me, so I couldn’t say how accurate it really is, but given the attitudes I’ve seen from guys in other fields towards wearing all their PPE, it wouldn’t really surprise me if it were largely true.


  • It wasn’t immediately clear what mechanism Trump would use to make the designation, and Antifa lacks centralized structure or defined leadership, making it unclear who or what precisely would be targeted.

    Honestly, seems pretty clear to me. It’s a blank check for them to lock up anyone inconvenient. If you participate in a protest, talk trash about whoever happens to be the MAGA darling of the day, or do anything else they dislike, they can accuse you and/or the event of being associated with Antifa, and job done. Maybe it won’t hold up in court (for now), but that’s still a threat that will help to chill dissent.


  • Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??

    They shouldn’t be, since the model for updates is quite distinct from Windows or iOS in a way that I would argue should effectively meet the requirements anyways. If a distro releases a new version twice a year, outside of enterprise situations where a company is paying for support, there’s nothing to really stop anyone who wants from upgrading. They don’t charge for it, and while new versions might add out-of-the-box support for new hardware, it’s pretty rare for Linux to suddenly change minimum hardware requirements in a way that requires you to buy a whole new machine in order to run the latest release. The only case that immediately comes to mind is that of distros increasingly removing support for i386 machines, but in fairness, Intel discontinued manufacturing of i386 chips 18 years ago.

    Of course, this all assumes that the people in charge of making these decisions actually understand the technology in at least a general sense, and it’s not being left up to a bunch of idiots who have refused to keep up with any innovations more recent than the fax machine, so odds are kind of crap.


  • To me, another be part of it is that the British seem to have an awful penchant for giving delicious things names that sound like Victorian euphemisms for something awful. Spotted dick and toad in the hole sound like they would be ways for Victorians to talk about their STIs, and I’m unsure what exactly Gentleman’s Relish would mean, but it strikes me as some sort of medieval form of punishment on the peasants.