onceuponaban's recent activity
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Comment on What is a non-problematic word that you avoid using? in ~talk
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Comment on I think I’m done thinking about genAI for now in ~comp
onceuponaban (edited )LinkI deeply relate to the author's struggle to focus on the core of your thoughts on a broad topic (as opposed to endlessly going into secondary tangents). And I think that's actually part of the...I deeply relate to the author's struggle to focus on the core of your thoughts on a broad topic (as opposed to endlessly going into secondary tangents). And I think that's actually part of the issue: "AI" is such a broad topic that any attempt at meaningful discourse on the subject is often derailed from the get-go because people aren't on the same page regarding what the subject even is. Are we talking about decision making algorithms in their entirety? Specifically machine learning? More specifically those relying on transformers, the architecture which was central to the currently ongoing "AI boom"? Are we even more specifically talking about the subset used for generating content, like here? Are we talking about Artificial General Intelligence? The layman often doesn't even know all of these are meaningfully different topics, and I don't think anything useful can be gained from discussing "AI" without understanding at least this.
I think this is also what's happening with the "anti-antis" Glyph mentions, which outlines a pattern similar to what I've done myself trying to talk about AI; The amount of discussion in the wake of the AI boom combined with, frankly, most people talking about it not properly understanding the topic as a whole means that quite often the issue isn't even that you disagree with someone's arguments but more that they're going in the wrong direction entirely. I personally hold a very dim view of how generative AI is currently being implemented but I cannot meaningfully express my concerns with it if the criticism starts and stops at "ChatGPT is evil incarnate, will take over the world and boil away the oceans". And within this context, I would find it pointless to talk about something like the use of generative AI as a mass-disinformation tool or any other gripe I do have when the part I actually need to clear up is "No, I don't want to start the Butlerian Jihad".
Though the thought becomes more appealing by the day...For example, I believe that the data gathering/training process for generative AI models is ethically in a dismal state and would be favorable to heavily regulating it (the uncontrolled data scrapers alone are doing measurable damage to critical aspects of the Internet's infrastructure, for one, which this very article rightfully calls out), but meaningful discussion about how we should go about it to actually improve the situation requires a general awareness of what the problem is and right now that's definitely not the case. This makes clearing up misconceptions about flawed criticism of genAI an important part of working toward a proper solution to the very real risks posed by its currently unfettered proliferation, and I don't think that should just be dismissed as "getting mad at people that do not exist" because I can guarantee you that they do exist. If we are to ever curb the abuse tech companies are perpetrating with the AI craze, public awareness of what isn't a problem to address is IMO critical to make sure any effort at proper legislation doesn't end up focusing on the wrong thing, and there is a lot of precedent regarding hamfisted digital laws around (be it simply because of cluelessness or active interference from bad actors) that backs up this specific concern.
While I've been lucky enough to mostly dodge the various ways companies keep trying to force feed genAI to me (If I ever find a valid use for feeding my data into a turbocharged autocomplete I'll do it on my own terms and on my own hardware, thank you very much), I do agree with the author that it's been getting annoying enough that I'd love nothing more than for all the genAI server farms to spontaneously melt away and for everyone to shut up about it forever. But given how relentless the push has been for adopting this technology everywhere regardless of whether it's appropriate and the damage this will keep causing, I don't think we can afford to just ignore it. The technology is already there and ultimately does have its uses, so hoping for it to fully vanish would be wishful thinking. Pushback does needs to happen (and the very vocal debate on the subject thankfully shows that it is happening), but it needs to happen in the right direction and given how many people and companies have a vested interest in preventing that, we're unfortunately not free from this mess any time soon.
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Comment on What is a non-problematic word that you avoid using? in ~talk
onceuponaban Link ParentSpeaking of they: I have an (admittedly very minor) gripe with the singular they because it throws a wrench into what is otherwise pretty much the only English conjugation rule: adding an S to...Speaking of they: I have an (admittedly very minor) gripe with the singular they because it throws a wrench into what is otherwise pretty much the only English conjugation rule: adding an S to verbs conjugated in the third person singular. All the other singular third person pronouns apply the rule as normal (including neopronouns), but using they is grammatically treated as third person plural even if used to refer to a single person. It's still currently the best candidate for a gender neutral pronoun so I'll default to it unless requested otherwise but that bugs me regardless.
I'm not sure how I would go about "fixing" this, though. Conjugating they differently depending on whether it's singular and plural feels just as arbitrarily weird as the current situation (why would we still be using the same word for this pronoun if we're effectively making it two different ones?), removing the third person singular conjugation rule entirely seems like a disproportionately wide change, and introducing a dedicated singular third person pronoun means having to choose what it would be, and presumably if there was a popular enough candidate for adoption we'd already be using it.
(I also usually avoid mentioning my dislike of the singular they because that tends to attract the sort of crowd that has a significantly more malicious motive behind speaking out against its use but that's another subject entirely...)
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Comment on What is a misconception you are passionate about and would like to clarify? in ~talk
onceuponaban LinkThe assumption that children who grew up during or after the period where personal computers became omnipresent are naturally computing experts... which has been going on for long enough that the...The assumption that children who grew up during or after the period where personal computers became omnipresent are naturally computing experts... which has been going on for long enough that the "children" this originally applied to are now adults. This couldn't be further from the truth. Computer literacy is a skill that needs to be trained like any other, and while learning how to use a computer effectively might have required a deeper awareness of the underlying systems in the past, that has not been the case for over a decade. If anything, this belief that children automatically become "good with computers" without needing to be taught actively drags down the general public's computer literacy and should really be done away with by now.
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Comment on I dont want Windows 11, how easy is it to use Linux? in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )LinkYou can check if the software you use can be found on Linux (or an acceptable substitute if it cannot) by installing it in a virtual machine, which will let you try out a distribution of your...You can check if the software you use can be found on Linux (or an acceptable substitute if it cannot) by installing it in a virtual machine, which will let you try out a distribution of your choice without affecting your current Windows installation. I'll echo most of the rest of the thread and recommend Linux Mint. It fits the "just works" criteria very well, has a solid knowledge base and community support if you do run into issues, and its flagship desktop environment, Cinnamon, has an interface layout that is familiar to users coming from Windows, which should help getting used to a new OS.
You can use Virtualbox to set up the virtual machine. The virtualization process has limitations that wouldn't be there on a full install (like the virtual machine not being able to directly use your GPU and having to share resources with the host OS which will limit performance), but it should be enough for testing things out.
The installation media itself can also be used for further testing prior to installation, as most distros provide a fully working live environment alongside the installer. Note that the internal file system isn't persistent, so any changes you make to the environment (other than editing files on your machine's actual storage, of course) will be reverted upon restarting.
There are quite a few Windows programs which can be made to work using Wine (though testing reports for CorelDRAW in particular aren't encouraging) so that's something you can try if you can't find an alternative you're happy with. If that doesn't pan out either, if you have a decently powerful computer you could also go with running Linux as your main OS but keeping a Windows virtual machine that you can occasionally launch for whichever programs you can't do without and will not run on Linux, which would let you reduce dealing with Windows to a minimum while not having to abandon the software you depend on. Note that if you go that route, while Virtualbox should also work fine, I personally prefer using virt-manager on machines where Linux is the host OS.
As for a more direct answer to the question in the title, I'd say that by now Linux is pretty much as easy to use as Windows for the average user, with the obvious caveat of software compatibility, and even that has improved massively over the years. Naturally, since you'll be dealing with a different OS there will be some idiosyncrasies and different ways of doing things you will need to adjust to, but I'd say the goal set by the current general purpose distributions to provide a user-friendly experience has been achieved.
EDIT: One more thing I've noticed, CorelDRAW seems to have a web version available which would therefore run just fine on a browser on Linux, and Corel also offers Corel Vector which is web-based as well. Might be worth looking into.
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Comment on I dont want Windows 11, how easy is it to use Linux? in ~tech
onceuponaban Link ParentCurrently I would refrain from recommending Pop!_OS to new users, not because I don't like the distribution (quite the opposite, in fact) but because they are currently developing their own...Currently I would refrain from recommending Pop!_OS to new users, not because I don't like the distribution (quite the opposite, in fact) but because they are currently developing their own desktop environment to replace the current one, which is a customized GNOME, and the transition is expected to happen sometime this year. A change this major is bound to be disruptive to a new user. I agree it'll be a great choice once COSMIC gets a stable release and is implemented into the distro proper, but until then I'd steer newcomers to Linux Mint (or other distros in the Debian family) instead.
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Comment on Have you ever witnessed the Butterfly Effect? in ~life
onceuponaban LinkYou may know about or even have participated in /r/place, an event hosted by Reddit where any user could place a colored tile from a limited palette on a large canvas, at a rate of one pixel per 5...You may know about or even have participated in /r/place, an event hosted by Reddit where any user could place a colored tile from a limited palette on a large canvas, at a rate of one pixel per 5 minutes per user account for a limited time before the canvas eventually freezes. This event occurred three times, in 2017, 2022 and 2023. An individual user (...unless making use of a bunch of bot accounts, which definitely happened too especially in 2023, but for the sake of not getting myself lost in details I won't cover that) can't do much on their own, but an organized group could manage to have a meaningful effect of the canvas, as hinted by the event's tagline:
Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.
This naturally drove people to gather in groups ...and with Reddit not exactly being well equipped for real time coordination, most of that funnily enough happened on Discord servers (with Twitch and Youtube livestreams also being a common way to coordinate starting from 2022), while Reddit itself served at most as a redirection point to the various coordination centers. While the canvas was large, at the scale of Reddit's userbase it was small enough to get filled up pretty quickly (in fact, the 2022 and 2023 iterations both had the canvas expanding over the course of the event as a gimmick). As factions emerged on the increasingly crowded canvas, some unique to the event and others being representatives of existing communities and groups, this had the kind of consequences you'd probably expect.
With the knowledge that the event would eventually end and conflict arising over what gets to stay on the canvas (and more importantly what will not), this suddenly wasn't just about messing around with pixel art anymore, it was about protecting what you've made. Now, obviously, events taking place within a glorified online mspaint are not exactly of critical importance to the world at large, but this was something that a lot of people participated in, and I do think it works well as an example of individuals being capable of affecting things on a large scale.
Most people stumbling upon the canvas probably just took a casual look and placed a handful of pixels to help maintain artwork they liked, other more invested users looked more closely into what the groups they were in were doing on the canvas and headed to the coordination servers to help out... And of course, there were the people who took up the task of organizing these coordination servers and getting in contact with other groups who did the same, and for those people the event became less of a virtual graffiti wall and more of a pretend geopolitics game (with some shades of actual geopolitics because as everyone who heard of /r/place knows, groups representing their countries popped up all over the place to the dismay of many, but I'm getting off track here).
The thing is that while by numbers the amount of organized users in these coordination centers were far, far lower than the total amount of users interacting with the canvas, this much larger group of less organized people are much more likely to engage with something they can recognize, such as helping complete an artwork in progress or spread a pattern like a country flag or a grid of some sort, than to create one of their own. Part of the game was therefore to manage to establish enough of your desired artwork that the broader userbase would recognize, and hopefully contribute to it. Properly leveraging this effect (often jokingly referred to within the coordination centers as "the hivemind") allowed groups to punch well above their weight compared to what they could achieve on their own. Even within the coordination servers, plenty of people were content with simply following the instructions of whoever decided to take charge so long as their plans didn't wildly differ from the overall group's intent.
A common practice among the organized groups was to set up pixel art templates that could be distributed to the whole group in the form of a browser userscript that highlighted desired colors on specific positions of the canvas, allowing people to contribute to the exact same artwork much more reliably and enabled much more effective defense against groups trying to wipe it out (or simply natural decay from people placing random pixels). So long as someone could provide pixel art for it, one could potentially secure a desired artwork on the canvas simply by convincing an established group to add it to their template, and many alliance networks were formed on that basis. If you took part in the diplomacy layer of this event, you could potentially single-handedly influence the canvas in ways one wouldn't expect someone to be able to in an event where millions took part.
And, speaking from experience, the barrier for entry wasn't high. While many well known content creators obviously took advantage of their existing reputation and audience of dozens of thousands (if not more) to massively impact the canvas for better or for worse, I, despite being otherwise pretty much a nobody as far as the Internet in general is concerned, can point to many artworks particularly over the 2022 and 2023 iterations of the canvas that I was personally involved in getting established, and even led a faction of my own. Many other people have similar stories of getting to influence the overall canvas from participating in the event, and I think that's neat, even if in this case the only lasting effect is as part of a PNG file.
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Comment on Do you have a game that you love from “before your time?” in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )LinkBit of a boring answer on my end as "before my time" includes the first half of the 2000s, which puts the entire Playstation 1 library on the table and a significant part of the Playstation 2...Bit of a boring answer on my end as "before my time" includes the first half of the 2000s, which puts the entire Playstation 1 library on the table and a significant part of the Playstation 2 library, alongside any handheld from the same timeframe (and of course PC games, though I don't actually have many examples of very old games I specifically play on PC in mind, at least not ones I played recently). In fact, since I tended to lag behind quite a bit regarding game releases, plenty of the games I did play regularly would qualify. There are however outliers that come to mind:
- The Generation 1 to 3 Pokémon games
The oldest memories I can recall of playing video games in general involved the Gen 1 Pokémon games on Gameboy Color which set the stage for a long running interest in the franchise. While I no longer keep up with the modern games, I do still have a soft spot for the series. I'd also fold them together with the Gen 1 remakes and Gen 3 games on the GBA, which I also played a ton... but which were also old enough that by the time I played them I was doing it on a Nintendo DS (in fact, I never actually owned a GBA in the first place, skipping straight from the Gameboy Color to the Nintendo DS).
- Metal Gear Solid 2
While significantly newer than the above (at least regarding gen 1), it still came out way before I was young enough to play video games but it was still one I enjoyed to the point of clearing it multiple times when I did get around to playing it, which is something I've rarely done for any narrative-heavy game, recent or otherwise.
- The PS1 Gran Turismo games
Racing games were among my favorite genres as a child (and I still have an interest in them), but the Gran Turismo series was what kickstarted it. I started with Gran Turismo 4 (which I wouldn't actually consider old enough to qualify as "before my time") but I also looked back to both of the PS1 games afterward which are both pretty strong entries in their own right and I ended up clocking quite a few dozens of hours in both GT and GT2. The GT games are among my favorite overall and Moon Over The Castle registers as the anthem of car racing in my mind to this day.
Honorable mention goes to the Destruction Derby 1 and 2 games, also on PS1. While I don't think they stood the test of time quite as well as the older GT games might have, I did also play them way past their prime and I suspect they were the catalyst for me eventually getting both BeamNG.drive and Wreckfest...
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Comment on Playing DOS and Windows 98 games on a retro PC (real hardware) in ~games
onceuponaban Link ParentIt should be noted that the video in question is 5 years old, which in the ReactOS project's time frame might as well be the Neolithic. I would probably still rely more on the "intended" software...It should be noted that the video in question is 5 years old, which in the ReactOS project's time frame might as well be the Neolithic. I would probably still rely more on the "intended" software of the era than ReactOS for this specific use-case (...or any, really, ReactOS is still very much experimental), but it's definitely better now than back then.
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Comment on Looking for low-precision, mouse-only Steam game recommendations in ~games
onceuponaban LinkIf you haven't already played through it, the Henry Stickmin Collection are nice little choose-your-own-path games that shouldn't be hurt by a touch-screen only control scheme.If you haven't already played through it, the Henry Stickmin Collection are nice little choose-your-own-path games that shouldn't be hurt by a touch-screen only control scheme.
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Comment on Looking for low-precision, mouse-only Steam game recommendations in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentJust chiming in to further support the claim that pausing is vital to the game's core gameplay loop. While you could play the game fully in real time, "No-pause" is understood by the community to...Just chiming in to further support the claim that pausing is vital to the game's core gameplay loop. While you could play the game fully in real time, "No-pause" is understood by the community to be an extremely difficult self-imposed challenge. Playing on easy but without pause is undeniably much, much harder than playing on hard with pause, and this is a game where "easy" mode is already pretty hard. That being said, FTL has been made to work on phones through other means so I would assume using Steam Link would work fine.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
onceuponaban Link ParentSee, that is exactly why I use the "y'all" spelling, because I specifically intend to convey that I'm actually using a contraction of you and all. The similarity to the southern ya'll is a...Saying it’s because it’s a contraction of you and all is saying you don’t know the culture. We don’t say you, we say ya.
See, that is exactly why I use the "y'all" spelling, because I specifically intend to convey that I'm actually using a contraction of you and all. The similarity to the southern ya'll is a coincidence, I just want to bring a "true" second person plural pronoun back into English because y'all dropped the singular version and been using the plural one for everything ever since.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentWhile I agree with your overall point; people usually don't think of non-literal use of "literally" as "I'm including the meaning of the word figuratively in how I use the word literally"...While I agree with your overall point; people usually don't think of non-literal use of "literally" as "I'm including the meaning of the word figuratively in how I use the word literally" similarly to how someone saying "Yeah, right." to voice disagreement is just using sarcasm, not redefining "right" as meaning "wrong". Saying "literally" is being used to mean "figuratively" was a mental shortcut I failed to elaborate on, fair enough. That being said:
To summarize by way of example: Nobody has ever said "I am figuratively going to kill you if you don't stop talking about your new boyfriend."
Counterexample: myself. As a direct result of noticing this tendency, I have deliberately started using "figuratively" (or "figurative" in the specific linked example) whenever I would have been tempted to use "literally" for emphasis, and I have noticed other instances of people doing the same (I also tried "proverbially" before realizing that wouldn't match the meaning of the word except in specific cases). This is uncommon (for now?), but this does happen. As for why I do this, I figured highlighting a word that is usually only used implicitly would promote using it for emphasis instead of "literally" down the line, which would help shifting the understanding of "literally" back to what I consider to be its actual intended use.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
onceuponaban Link ParentYeah, "word" in this context is more of a generalization of the concept of "some amount of bits a computer is capable of treating as a discrete unit" than a specific case (...until it's not), I...Yeah, "word" in this context is more of a generalization of the concept of "some amount of bits a computer is capable of treating as a discrete unit" than a specific case (...until it's not), I mostly wanted an excuse to write "word" thrice in quick succession.
Fun fact: in French, while the overwhelming influence of the English language in computer science means people will still understand you if you say "byte" (though you would need to stick to the English pronunciation as French has also adopted bit as-is and you would end up pronouncing it the same way), the standardization of the 8-bit byte led to its use quickly falling out of favor (probably because of the pronunciation issue I mentioned) and being replaced with, you guessed it, octet, alongside a lowercase o as a matching unit symbol. Alternatively, "multiplet" apparently exists as a more direct translation of the generic byte, but to be honest the first and so far only time I saw that word was 5 minutes ago before writing this while checking if one did exist.
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Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists
This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it...
This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it specifically on Tildes from a cursory search (though I did find more specific threads about some aspects of it like this one as well as the broader prescriptivism vs descriptivism subject here and even the mirror opposite of what this thread is about, that is deliberately using non-standard language in a constructive manner) and I think that it might spark worthwhile discussion.
By and large, I agree that language should be seen from a descriptive point of view, meaning a language's rules are defined by how people speak it, not the other way around. As the need to communicate evolves, so does any given living language and a rigidly enforced ruleset would get in the way of this process. By opposition, the prescriptive approach views a language's rules as defining a "correct" way (making any other way incorrect) of speaking the language to be enforced accordingly. Following either approach to its respective logical extreme would be a dead-end but I do think the most reasonably balanced way to approach this tends a lot more toward descriptivism than prescriptivism.
While agreed-upon rules are still definitely useful to establish a language's identity and defining a standard helps both with learning the language and structuring how the language should evolve (and when learning it's probably best to operate by the book at first, literally or otherwise, until you're familiar with the language enough to reliably tell when bending the rules is advantageous), getting yourself understood is much more important than strictly "following the rules", and that's before considering the cases where the rules themselves are ambiguous, or their validity is a matter of debate, which itself brings up the much more controversial issue of what constitutes an authoritative source for a language's grammar in the first place. In practice, even if there is a consensus on something being a grammar error, most are benign enough to not risk the meaning of the sentence being misinterpreted anyway. And of course, there's the issue of people ostensibly wanting to be helpful using "correcting someone's grammar" as an excuse for gatekeeping, toxic behavior or derailing conversations into a pointless grammar debate.
For example, while my latent pedantry constantly incites nitpicking on those smaller mistakes, it's obvious that someone using "Your welcome" instead of you're is acknowledging gratitude and no one would argue in good faith that this could be misinterpreted as referring to an abstract hospitality belonging to the person they're addressing. Similarly, using "irregardless" (which presumably arose as a contraction of irrespective and regardless) might be argued as meaning the opposite of "regardless" since ir- is a negation prefix, making using that word a mistake due to the ambiguity. In practice, interpreting it that way in any sentence where the word actually appears would be very unintuitive so the ambiguity doesn't actually manifest... Though the argument I see much more often against its use is that irregardless is "a made-up word" and therefore incorrect (as opposed to all the real words which are, what, woven into the very fabric of the universe?), which is silly. I personally don't use this word, but I wouldn't bat an eye if I saw it becoming normalized either.
That being said, I believe there is such a thing as incorrect use of language that actually hampers communication and therefore should be discouraged, some of which I'll give examples below. I... got wildly carried away while writing it so I made it an optional collapsible box.
Warning: long
Using "literally" to mean "figuratively"
Obligatory relevant xkcd. While I understand the argument of validating this use as a natural extension of using exaggeration for emphasis (and it's intuitive enough that I sometimes catch myself doing it), I do think the words that are supposed to mean "I am not exaggerating, using a metaphor or joking, I mean this in exactly the way I worded it" should be exempt from this. Language history is no stranger to words shifting their meaning until they're the opposite of their former meaning, and there are plenty of situations where words simultaneously have opposite meanings (in fact, enough of them that a term exists for this which has its own Wikipedia article) where I don't think it's much of an issue, but I do think this matters here, especially since this is happening to many similar words used for that purpose (such as "actually" and "genuinely"), not just "literally". Unambiguously clarifying that the meaning of your statement isn't figurative is something important enough that the words for it shouldn't have their meaning diluted IMHO.
bytes vs bits
More of a matter of technical standardization than pure linguistics, but two separate albeit related issues are happening here. First, a "bit" here is a unit of digital data, being either 0 or 1, whereas a "byte" is another unit usually made of eight bits. While you can define bytes following a different amount as some older and specialized machines do, in practice there is no ambiguity with 8 being the accepted norm and other words (including the word "word" itself, funnily enough) being available should the distinction matter. The bit/byte distinction is commonly understood and usually not a matter of confusion... until you start bringing up shortened unit names and disingenuous marketing. Despite the unit that the average user is most familiar with being the byte, shortened to an uppercase B as a unit symbol, while bits are in turn shortened to a lowercase b, unscrupulous advertisers will often take advantage of the fact bits are a lesser known unit while using almost the exact same symbol to refer to, say, network speeds for a broadband plan they're trying to sell using bits, not bytes, allowing them to sneak in numbers (in bits) eight times bigger than the values (in bytes) the customer would expect in the unit they are more accustomed to.
Using SI prefixes in place of equivalent binary prefixes
The second part (and with it another relevant xkcd) is the distinction between decimal SI prefixes and the IEC binary prefixes, or lack thereof in common usage. For context, a convenient coincidence for computer science is that the value of 1000x and 210x (equal to 1024x) are similar enough for a low enough value of x to map binary prefixes according to the usual SI metric prefixes (so while 1kg is a kilogram equaling 1000 grams, 1KiB is one kibibyte equaling 1024 bytes, 1MiB is a mebibyte equaling 1024 kibibytes, and so on) and using them to refer to data sizes, which is a lot more convenient to deal with when everything related to computing is binary rather than decimal. This also led before the adoption of those binary prefixes to the practice of "incorrectly" using the SI decimal prefixes' names and symbols when referring to binary data sizes. I'm perfectly fine with this in informal contexts precisely because it's a convenient shortcut and the inaccuracy usually doesn't matter, but this also means a company can pretend, say, a storage device they're selling has a higher capacity than it really does by mixing up the units to their advantage. Worse, a company that does want to convey the capacity of their devices to the user in good faith has another issue: MacOS defaults to computing sizes displayed to the user using the decimal prefixes (1MB = 1000kB = 1 million bytes), while Linux generally defaults to the binary sizes (1MiB = 1024KiB = 10242 = 1048576 bytes).
In which I manage to blame Microsoft for a grammar error
Not much of an issue if you stick to the correct units, but given which OS I pointedly didn't mention yet, you probably realized where this is going. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, elected to show data sizes on Windows that, while computed according to binary sizes, are displayed using the decimal prefixes, leading to 1"MB" = 1024 "KB" = 1048576 bytes, but displayed in units that imply it should be 1000000 bytes. This is a holdover from the older practice of using the metric SI prefixes' names as binary prefixes when specifically referring to bytes I mentioned above, which is nowadays discouraged in favor of the international standard for binary prefixes established back in 1999... but clearly Microsoft didn't get the memo. Is it a minor problem in the grand scheme of things? Absolutely, but I consider this negligent handling of a pretty fundamental question where a clear consensus has been established given that this is coming from the company that publishes the consumer OS running on the overwhelming majority of personal computers. As someone who is familiar with computing, I understand why the mental shortcut makes sense. As a consumer, if I buy a kilogram of something, I expect to receive as close to a thousand grams as the manufacturing process reasonably allows, not consistently end up with 976.5625 grams instead of the advertised kilogram. In any other context, "it's more convenient to pretend we count in base 10 but we're actually counting in base 2 and not properly converting the numbers back, usually to the detriment of the customer" would be seen as absurd, but the IT industry apparently got away with it. By not following the internationally standardized terms in their own OS, Microsoft is perpetuating this issue which is doing us a disservice... and I'll move on to the next example before this becomes yet another computing rant in what's supposed to be part of a thread about language, and not even the programming kind.
I could/n't care less
I'm starting to see a pattern here. Another case of "saying something but actually meaning the opposite" which I think is important to be mindful of. Granted, "I couldn't care less" is a common enough stock phrase that omitting the negation usually is recognized as such and not interpreted to mean the opposite, and there are other (and probably more intuitive) ways to convey the literal meaning of "I could care less", but given that there are generally a whole lot fewer things people care about (and therefore occasions to state it) than the alternative, I think it matters more to keep a way to mean that something does actually matter to you intact than expanding the way people can say that they don't care about something by including the exact opposite. I've also seen this used in yet another way to refer something they care about to at least some degree, but still little (with the reasoning that feeling the need to state explicitly that you are able to care less implicitly states that you cared very little in the first place) which is very similar to the meaning of "I couldn't care less" but still has makes an important distinction that I think should be preserved.
Wrong homophones (or otherwise similarly sounding words) when the correct one is not obvious
Mistakes derived from those are usually not an issue since it's very easy to tell which is the correct one... until it's not. For example, "brake" vs "break" when talking about cars, "ordinance" vs "ordnance" when the topic intersects bureaucracy and the military, and "raise" vs "raze" might lead to very unfortunate misunderstandings in construction. More generally, "hear" vs "here" can quickly make the meaning of a sentence incomprehensible especially if the mixup happens in a sentence where both are used, and "than" vs "then" can radically change the meaning of the sentence. Similar sounding words can have pretty significant differences without mixing them up being necessarily obvious, such as amuse/bemuse, persecute/prosecute or prescribe/proscribe. Ironically, the common mixups that people tend to find the most annoying to see (e.g their/they're/there, to/two/too, loose/lose, affect/effect, should or could of instead of should or could have, definitely/defiantly) aren't the ones that are likely to actually introduce ambiguity (I would suspect bad faith from anyone claiming a mixup between "angel" and "angle" is actually ambiguous, with one notable exception), or, if they do, not in a way that would radically warp the sentence's meaning (inflict/afflict is a common one and the two words are similar enough that it would be difficult to notice if the "wrong" one was used... but that goes both ways: they're so similar such a mixup would most likely be of little consequence to the overall meaning)
Leaving unclear links between clauses
While the above is mostly about word (mis-)use, another big category of mistakes that gives me a headache is made up of sentences where the ambiguity comes from the structure of the sentence itself. I would include Garden-path sentences and certain cases of dangling/misplaced modifiers in this category (though not all of them as context is often enough to clear up any possible confusion). For the former, news article titles that are too clever for their own good by trying to fit as much information in as few words as possible are notable offenders. I've actually given up trying to understand a news headline for this reason at least once. For the latter, there are already many examples out there of leveraging it for comedy, so I'll use the following as a more straightforward example: in the sentence "I need to invite my best friend, the CEO and the mayor", it is unclear whether I'm referring to a single person that is my best friend, the CEO and the mayor at the same time, two people one of which is both my best friend and the CEO and the second person is the mayor, or three different people. Ambiguities like these are something I consider important to be mindful of because they can quickly result in the meaning you intended to convey being completely warped.
Which turns of phrase would you consider to be categorically incorrect?
Did I commit one in this very post?If you chose to read through the content of the collapsible box above, do you disagree with some of my examples (or the entire premise of the question in the first place)? While I'm assuming English as the default for my own answer, feel free to talk about any other language you might know (ideally with context for non-speakers of the language).Also, since I mentioned it in the post, another optional subject: which mistakes that people seem to care a lot about (and sometimes not even mistakes, given that the same treatment is occasionally given to perfectly correct turns of phrase due to misconceptions about grammar rules) do you think aren't actually important at all?
38 votes -
Comment on Why blog if nobody reads it? in ~tech
onceuponaban LinkMy take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of...My take on this is that I treat my blog (and its grand total of one article so far) in the most basic meaning of the term. The word originated as a contraction of web log, meaning it's a record of events you keep on the Internet. With me being acutely aware of my memory being seriously deficient, having somewhere I can properly structure my thoughts in writing and access them later gives it all the purpose it needs to exist as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I could have decided to keep that "log" elsewhere, as local files in my computer, written down on physical paper, or in cloud storage, but while I have no explicit desire to build up an audience (nor set up expectations of what I'd put on there and how often, which would logically follow from that) I figured having it be publicly accessible could only be beneficial. If I put it into writing, then by definition at least one person, me, wants to remember it. Maybe someone else might?
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Comment on Seeking suggestions for Windows virtual desktop (for Photoshop schoolwork) in ~comp
onceuponaban Link ParentGiven that AFAIK Photoshop should work well enough in a non-PCI passthrough VM (at least on a machine where Photoshop runs well on bare metal) and neither this nor dual booting has been deemed a...Given that AFAIK Photoshop should work well enough in a non-PCI passthrough VM (at least on a machine where Photoshop runs well on bare metal) and neither this nor dual booting has been deemed a valid option by OP, I'm assuming they don't want to be running Windows through local hardware at all, VM or otherwise. However, if I'm misreading the situation and a Windows VM with direct GPU access is acceptable, that would indeed be a possible solution.
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Comment on a/s/l? Tildes user survey question. in ~tildes
onceuponaban Link ParentThat's fair, I personally already hopelessly overshare on the Internet (in fact you could easily find out the answer in my case just by checking my Tildes profile and scrolling down enough...That's fair, I personally already hopelessly overshare on the Internet (in fact you could easily find out the answer in my case just by checking my Tildes profile and scrolling down enough comments), an A/S/L answer on an indexed section of the Internet directly pointing to my nickname would probably be unwise on my part as well. I'll leave that to whenever the next census is where I'm at least just a data point among others.
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Comment on Just pick a static site generator and start writing in ~tech
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentMy main gripe with it is that modern web browsers are horrifyingly complex. As more features kept being bolted on what was originally a glorified document viewer over a network, they effectively...My main gripe with it is that modern web browsers are horrifyingly complex. As more features kept being bolted on what was originally a glorified document viewer over a network, they effectively became a second OS running on top of your actual OS. Meaning they also consume a ton of resources, orders of magnitude beyond what a more carefully designed native desktop application for a given specific purpose would. On my i9 powered laptop with 16GB of RAM and a competent GPU, this is fine, and I have to admit that lowering the skill floor of UI design down to "Can you write an HTML page and some CSS?" is something I'd consider a good thing with regard to democratizing programming for the general public. But this also means a perfectly serviceable email/office suite machine from, say, 2013 is now hopelessly slow the second a web browser is needed, despite the tasks you'd accomplish with that machine back in 2013 not being any more complicated than what the layman would use their computer for in 2025.
Combine that with "native" desktop applications having become separate instances each of a web browser hiding under a trenchcoat, and you get a bunch of what should still be perfectly serviceable hardware becoming borderline e-waste for no reason. That is the part I don't like about everything becoming a pseudo-web app. Compare Discord's official client to this third party client here.
I happen to own an old 2013 laptop beside my main one with a venerable dual core AMD processor of some description (and laptop-grade, at that) and a grand total of 6GB of RAM. As you can probably guess, even thinking of running the official client would make that laptop detonate. That third party client that is optimized enough to run on Windows 2000 with period accurate hardware, though? It works just fine, as any instant messaging application should. That was a solved problem back in the days of IRC, before the advent of GUIs.
This needless buildup of spec requirements for software that still accomplishes the same purpose is to me a harmful regression of our software ecosystem. Obviously I'm not advocating to go back to the pre-GUI days and dropping Discord for
irssi(and yes, I'm aware Discord isn't just for text messages), that would be silly. However, we do have the knowledge necessary to keep our modern software working on older hardware and I dislike that not nearly enough effort is being put toward this when over-consumption of our very much limited resources to continue producing said hardware is a significant concern.I do understand the value in simplifying UI development that the webdev tech stack brings and why people would consider it to be worth it despite the above, but I also think way too many people are carelessly disregarding traditional UI development methods in favor of the all-consuming Electron and co. without considering the implications of the performance tradeoff that brings.
And while I took them as my example, this isn't just about old computers. Garbage-spec overly cheap machines do still come out of factories brand new to this day (even if that part has been getting vastly better compared to the bad old days of the 2010s). These are usually bought by people who simply can't afford any better, so this trend of ignoring the resource bloat induced by putting an entire web browser into the tech stack for each application is doing them a disservice too.
Also Javascript scares me and it's gotten everywhere, please send help -
Comment on What video game mods do you play, or have played in the past? in ~games
onceuponaban (edited )Link ParentRight, in that case it was definitely a failure to communicate my intent for the thread, then, as "I also play (game here) and here are the mods I play" is exactly along the line of comments I...Right, in that case it was definitely a failure to communicate my intent for the thread, then, as "I also play (game here) and here are the mods I play" is exactly along the line of comments I intended this thread to receive. I guess it hierarchically makes it ambiguous to decide whether you should talk about the mods you play as a reply to another comment mentioning mods of the same game (if one exists) or make your own top level comment to talk about them, but in practice there are enough mods that are elaborate enough to provide completely unique experiences compared to the base game that it would make just as much sense IMHO to dedicate a top level comment solely to that one mod rather than following a stricter "top level comments bring up a specific game to talk about relevant mods, replies bring up other mods of that game they also play" logic.
Also, nothing prevents you from leaving multiple top level comments for each subject you wish to address (say, mods you like from completely different games) if you wish to make the discussion about each more granular :)
And while I outlined these situations among other as part of the thread's intended scope within the topic's text field, I presume it fell "out of focus" compared to the top level comment I also added to the thread and ended up being a lot more prominent than the thread's own main body while also being narrower in scope. I guess I could mitigate this next time around by reminding the reader of the overall thread's scope as part of the top level comment I leave as my personal answer right after posting the thread so people aren't misled into thinking that top level comment is the scope (especially since in this specific case my top level comment also ended up being voted right to the front of the comments list, making it even more prominent compared to the actual submission's own text. The eye-catching bold (OP) marker didn't do me any favor there.
Funnily enough I've seen the term yap and associated grammatical variants suddenly barge into the vocabulary of the online circles I'm in, namely vtuber fanbases, usually referring to the streamer's tendency to go off tangents while (or instead of) doing whatever else was planned, though since this tendency was already extremely widespread among vtubers (and I assume livestreamers in general) since before the term was adopted and the audience largely accepts or even outright considers it part of the appeal, the connotation is actually neutral to positive.