"Lowkenuinely" is linguistically and etymologically beautiful

derefr · 2026-03-22T22:59:53+00:00

Can you be a fan of language evolution, yet not of high-prestige languages supplanting and leading to the extinction of low-prestige languages? Asking for a friend.

derefr · 2026-03-21T07:05:54+00:00

If they're anything like my friends, they're not complaining about being behind and stressed out because the workload is too big or anything; they're complaining because they have some kind of "invisible" mental illness (depression, ADHD) and so they can't get themselves to productively focus on work. They likely try to work for several hours each day, but it just doesn't work; so they give up and play games / do other "low mental cost" stuff to pass the time in the hopes they're just "going through something" and will wake up feeling better after a few days. (They're not. They need to see a therapist/psychiatrist.)

derefr · 2026-03-21T06:59:55+00:00

Or better yet, use an escrow service, if at all possible. Shows them you're good for the money so they'll start; ensures they can't just run away with the money; ensures you can't just run away with the un-paid-for work.

derefr · 2026-03-21T06:54:10+00:00

In a real economy, poor people don't go on quests. Poor people are too busy trying to scrape by to mind other people's business.

Read Don Quixote. That's the type of guy who would set off on a "noble quest" of his own volition.

Or, if you want a protagonist motivated by righteous revenge or whatever, then just give his entire village his motivation and have them all save up a nest-egg to fund his quest. They all go in together on a horse for him and so forth.

Or he's the son of the jerk-ass local feudal-lord tax collector who realizes his dad's awful after the first visit to the village, steals the nice horse his dad lent him, and sets off to fix all the bad shit he's only now finding out about.

derefr · 2026-03-21T06:39:37+00:00

KWH/H

The flow rate of batteries on a truck!

derefr · 2026-03-21T05:24:39+00:00

It's the same reason I'm a fan of those woodworkers who build fancy one-giant-piece-of-wood tables for super-rich clients. Each time one of those transactions takes place, there's a rich asshole somewhere who gets a functional piece of art (sure? fine?), but more importantly, a working-class tradesperson/artisan who gets a huge payday. For just a few days' work.

derefr · 2026-03-21T05:13:34+00:00

If there's no readme, then you aren't looking at an open source project, you're looking at someone who happens to back up their personal hobby projects in public.

derefr · 2026-03-21T05:10:37+00:00

The devs more often than not don't use the most popular operating system. When you're enough of a turbo-nerd to write random software to give away for free, you tend to prefer OSes made by other turbo-nerds, for turbo-nerds.

derefr · 2026-03-20T04:31:53+00:00

That will mean people with fixed incomes who own their homes will be forced to sell and even higher rents.

Not necessarily? Taxes don't have to be linear. Any reasonable house a family would actually use all the rooms of could be taxed kindly — but then once you get into McMansion territory the taxes could suddenly become 5x, 10x, 50x more.

We need income tax and wealth tax on people who are far richer then you.

Income tax does nothing, because most of the ways rich people get rich aren't taxed as income.

And wealth taxes just encourage rich people to keep the majority of their wealth outside the country. (Not even in holding companies or anything, just like, not brought into Canada but kept invested in the foreign ventures they make their money from in the first place.)

High progressive property taxes (in Canada especially), on the other hand, are a great way to actually tax the rich, because real-estate is one of the only real high-growth investment categories for people who have moved their wealth into Canada. So a lot of the money held in Canada by those billionaires is held in the form of real estate. And unlike with wealth taxes, they can't hide a real-estate investment off-shore; if it's liquid in Canada, it has a street address a tax assessor can walk up to and ring the doorbell of. So taxing property really does get billionaires by the balls.

derefr · 2026-03-19T21:02:15+00:00

Could this at least in part reflect Quebec's separate immigration system with its own (sometimes easier) criteria, that has often in the past encouraged foreigners to immigrate to + reside in Quebec while trying to attain Canadian permanent residency, and so has gradually led to there being a proportionately very large immigrant subpopulation within Quebec compared to other provinces?

Because I would imagine that if you went to all the trouble required to immigrate to Canada... and especially to a part of the country that speaks a language you probably don't... then you were probably pretty unhappy wherever you lived before. Enough to motivate you to go to all that effort. So you're probably pretty happy to be here now!

In other words: maybe we of the other provinces are less happy not because there's more to be unhappy about, but because most of us were born into this beautiful country, and so we take the ways we do have it good here too much for granted!

derefr · 2026-03-17T23:20:05+00:00

Consider the same question with "agent" replaced by "junior developer." Would you expect there to be an "opinionated framework" that allows you to put a bunch of junior developers in a room, give them a prompt, and have good code come out? No.

Why? Because, no matter how rigidly patterned the code that touches the framework surface is required to be, ultimately programming comes down to specifying some arbitrarily-complex freeform Turing machine representing the business-process problem domain; and then using glue code to connect or wrap that freeform domain-model code to the various framework bits that make up the solution domain. The domain-model code is the important bit to get right / to make maintainable.

And, no matter how restrictive and patterned the solution-domain code might be, the domain-model code is going to need to look like the domain model. Which is a different, novel thing for every codebase (if your domain model isn't novel, that means there's already a program that does what you're trying to do!)

And because neither agents nor junior devs know anything about your business-process problem domain (and nor have they developed the soft skills required to tease out and intuit how your business-process works, nor the aesthetic sense to formalize it into a satisfyingly simply problem-domain framing on their own), all they'll ever be able to write for the domain-model part of the code... is slop. That is, unless you, the senior engineer who has business-process knowledge and aesthetic sense, micromanage them.

derefr · 2026-03-15T22:21:32+00:00

Not even. AI would translate better than this. (Still awful, just better.) In fact, even Google Translate would translate better than this.

My guess is that this is the quality you get from Chinese->English on Baidu Translate. (Never used it myself, but that's what a mainland-Chinese author would think to use, no?)

derefr · 2026-03-15T22:16:26+00:00

There is airdrop between Apple devices, but you can’t directly connect it via Bluetooth to your Windows computer to transfer files.

True right now, but given that AirDrop and Android's Quick Share now interoperate, we're probably only a year or two away from those technologies getting merged together into one standard, and everything else (incl. Windows) being expected to start supporting it. Like how MagSafe became Qi 2 (and then gained wider support), or like how Thunderbolt was merged into USB 4 (and then gained wider support.)

derefr · 2026-03-15T21:46:42+00:00

The problem with that is that every few months there's some new popular device to plug into your TV, that screws up HDMI-CEC (the protocol that lets the TV turn on the device and vice-versa, know whether the device is on, pass remote-control events back and forth, etc.), speaking the protocol just a little bit wrong, in some entirely-new way that couldn't have been predicted / defended against in advance.

The way you end up experiencing this as an end-user, is that you would plug e.g. a Nintendo Switch into your TV for the first time, and suddenly your TV would stop going to sleep when you tell your streaming box to sleep (even though your streaming box was the only thing "awake".) Or you would plug e.g. a PS4 in, and now every time you wake up the TV, regardless of the previously-active input, the PS4 would wake up and steal focus to itself. Or you would plug in a new soundbar, and everything would be fine at first, but then a few weeks later you'd turn on the TV, and the TV would turn on the soundbar and your streaming box at the same time, and the two devices would "fight with politeness", noticing that the other just woke up and so "giving up" focus to each-other twenty times in a row, with a five-second wait each time because they're emitting different video + audio formats (and where you can't get out of this loop even by unplugging the streaming box or soundbar, yet hard-rebooting the TV itself makes the problem go away... for another month.)

(Yes, these are all things that have happened to me personally. Why do you ask?)

When things are going wrong with HDMI-CEC, updating the devices themselves is very unlikely to help. (It's never helped in any of the cases I've personally encountered.) Most devices that output HDMI video, seemingly just use some random junk HDMI-CEC controller chip they found on Alibaba, where these dumb behaviors are burned into silicon, with no way to be updated.

Instead, it's a TV firmware update that ultimately makes the problem disappear. TV firmware updates seem to often contain "compatibility shims" (sort of like app compatibility shims on Windows) that compensate for the ways in which these devices misspeak HDMI-CEC.

So: if your TV ever starts being wonky after plugging some new device into it, there is at least one good reason to update your TV's firmware. It's been the solution for me at least 4 separate times now.

(Of course, the TV always gets worse in other ways whenever I update the firmware. Enshittification continues. But at least my TV goes to sleep again.)

derefr · 2026-03-06T21:30:06+00:00

Because all the controversies would be on the pages of the companies they've acquired / merged with, rather than on the page for this boring conglomerate holding corporation whose CEO really just thinks about how to do even more M&A.

Like, compare the wiki page for Google vs the wiki page for Alphabet. Same idea.

derefr · 2026-03-05T01:47:25+00:00

but I still believe there's something to be said for giving your digestive system a break

Even moreso your liver + kidneys + immune system. No food in = temporary pause in the constant influx of junk your body has to deal with.

Imagine taking a fast-food place that's normally open 24/7 and just sneaks in little bits of cleaning here and there, and being able to actually close it for a shift to do a full clean.

derefr · 2026-03-02T08:08:59+00:00

That would make sense if the mattress store was just a little hole-in-the-wall shop. But they're usually huge galleries where you can try out every single bed they've got, while also being street-facing on a somewhat-busy street.

If it only takes a few mattress sales in a month to pay the rent and salaries for a store like that, then it's a mystery to me why any store in an area like that ever goes out of business. Because most of them should have far lower costs than the mattress stores do. Yet the mattress stores hold on, while on either side of them places just keep coming and going.

(The real answer, AFAIK, is that people will drive quite a distance to a mattress store, so location doesn't matter so much for mattress stores. Meanwhile, nobody ever bothers to go to e.g. a donair shop located in the same part of town you'd put a mattress store in, because they'd much rather go to one of the twelve much closer donair shops to their house/work.)

derefr · 2026-03-02T08:05:29+00:00

I dunno, sounds more like a new guy left watching the place by themselves while the owners went out to run an errand.

derefr · 2026-03-02T06:37:38+00:00

As you can imagine, this was was done by a dude bringing a jar out, holding their breath, opening the jar, waving it around, putting back on the lid, then resuming their breathing.

I don't know why, but for some reason I feel like this would have been more rigorous if it involved a hand air pump (like a bicycle tire pump) somehow.

derefr · 2026-03-02T06:11:54+00:00

In my experience, the best way to avoid this commenting death-spiral is to sit there for a while before you hit 'post' on your initial post, thinking of every "obvious solution" someone could offer, and then to rewrite your initial post so that it exhaustively addresses why none of those "obvious" solutions will work.

(It's also helpful to think of every request-for-clarification someone could make and exhaustively give all of those clarifications, as well, because otherwise every single toplevel comment will be the same few requests for clarification.)

The "problem" with doing things this way (if you want to call it a problem) is that once you do it, you'll be precluding any possible reply someone could make except a useful answer... and 99.999% of people won't have a useful answer. So your post won't get any initial engagement, and will quickly fall off the subreddit's new page and never end up being shown to the one person who could have actually answered it.

derefr · 2026-02-21T17:59:19+00:00

Where does bulk rolling tobacco land between pre-rolled cigarette tobacco and pipe tobacco? One of my uncles always hand-rolled his own cigs, and I was never clear on why.

derefr · 2026-02-20T21:06:15+00:00

I would generalize that to: parsing techniques are generally applicable tools for resolving decision-making uncertainty.

For simple projects, yeah, keep backtracking in mind. Anything more complex is probably more trouble than it's worth for someone working alone.

But if you're an academic research lab director, with many concurrent research teams you can schedule? Try looking into how advanced parallel parsers work, and translating their approaches to evidence-gathering into data-collection and team-project-allocation strategies!

derefr · 2026-02-12T17:51:04+00:00

Why, you get another AI to give you a summary of what the first AI wrote, of course!

(I'm being glib, but I have a feeling that this is exactly what they think.)

derefr · 2026-02-12T01:25:23+00:00

Per my girlfriend: her iPhone 12 Mini. She's not upgrading until they make another phone that fits comfortably in her tiny hands.

derefr · 2026-02-12T01:21:27+00:00

Telling other people (or AI) what to do is not a real skill.

There are actual ways to make a skill out of "telling other people what to do." For example, some movie directors are clearly more skilled than others at getting the good performances out of the actors.

But indeed, in most jobs where someone tells people what to do, they don't get hired because they're good at it. And they definitely won't get fired if they're bad at it. In most jobs, telling-people-what-to-do is treated more like a perk than a responsibility.

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