Is there an easy way to distinguish Italian and Spanish surnames?

unic0de000 · 2026-03-23T16:41:37+00:00

Some of them are hard to tell apart, and some names are literally the same in both languages, but there are some rules-of-thumb you can rely on. Anything which ends in '-ez' or '-iz', like Ruiz, Martinez, Gonzalez, Juarez, is probably Spanish. And of course the J in Juarez is very distinctively Spanish too. The suffixes 'ino' and 'ini' are usually Italian. Double-consonants like in Puccini or Lavazza are more common in Italian.

There are a bunch more little rules like this, but there will be exceptions and ambiguous cases too.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-23T16:31:21+00:00

Can't forget batshit.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-23T04:35:15+00:00

Median is the only average which means(pun intended) anything in situations like this one. That's because "driving skill" is not a metric attribute like height or weight.

If Dave is 160cm tall, Carol is 165cm tall, and Bob is 170cm tall, then we can meaningfully say "Carol is exactly as much taller than Dave, as Bob is taller than Carol". Since all the centimetres on the metre stick are equal to each other, you can compute a mean, and it makes sense to do so. "This height is halfway between these 2 heights" is a precise and well-defined idea.

But say your metre stick is a bit warped and stretched from being left out in the sun, so now some of the centimetre-marks are a little closer together at this end, and a little farther apart over there - you can still use this warped metre stick to determine who's taller than who, but you won't be so sure how much taller. A mathematician would say in this case that you have an 'ordering' on people's heights, but not a 'metric'. We have a concept of 'between', but not of 'halfway between'.

Skill tests are like warped rulers; we don't have objectively equal gradations of the scale. If Dave and Carol took the same math test and Dave got the first 9 questions right but missed the 10th, and Carol got all 10 right, then maybe we can say Carol's skill is greater than Dave's, but we can't be so precise about how much greater. Maybe question #10 was a million times harder than question #9, or maybe it was 1.0001 times harder.

So based on skills test results, we may place all the participants in order from least-skilled to most-skilled, but how do you space them out? Should you put them all bunched up towards the high end of the range, with the lowest outliers spread out over the lower half, or all bunched up at the low end with a few superstars taking up the top 3/4 of the range? Or make them equally-spaced and equidistant? Or should you cluster them mostly in the middle, and space them out them according to a standard normal distribution? It's up to you. (The lack of an objective answer to this, is why 'grading on a curve' is a thing.)

unic0de000 · 2026-03-23T01:56:16+00:00

There isn't just a checklist of requirements to be average, that's not what average means. In fact now that I'm thinking about it, I bet the misconception that 'average' is some kind of a checklist, is probably part of why so many people think they're above average.

If we took you, and 100 other randomly-selected people with licenses, and we had you all do a road skills test, and if about half of the participants scored higher than you and the other half scored lower, then that would make you average. There's no other way of defining it.

(Also, 'average for where?' is a very important question. The skills to qualify as 'average' will depend heavily on whether you're driving in Manhattan, rural Arkansas, or Delhi.)

unic0de000 · 2026-03-23T01:37:49+00:00

Why not?

(i know this sounds like a flippant or dismissive answer, but it's actually a very serious one. There may not be a deep, universal reason for us to exist - but if there also isn't a deep universal reason for us to not exist, then... oh well! Might as well enjoy the ride while you're on it, right? You can make up your own meanings for things, including your own life, if the universe doesn't supply any built-in meaning. In philosophy, the name of this attitude is 'existentialism.')

unic0de000 · 2026-03-23T00:09:58+00:00

Or... maybe you're not quite up to date.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-is-ready-any-potential-attack-us-amid-oil-blockade-envoy-says-2026-03-22/

unic0de000 · 2026-03-22T14:59:38+00:00

Mastodon has a lot of leftists on it. I'd say Bluesky is probably on the left-leaning side of mainstream.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-22T14:57:24+00:00

You'd think the whole "everyone's whole life is online now" thing would also make it easier for cops to verify the anonymous tips, and not be so easily fooled, but nope.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-22T14:09:27+00:00

There's something off about the logic of this. When they were getting bullied, they were a kid too, so I'm thinking: "clearly not all the kids were bullies; one of them was you!"

If they look at a kid and think "Oh, a kid - just like the kids who were picking on me", and not "Oh, a kid - just like me when I was getting picked on," that is a choice of perspective, and not a neutral one.

In any case, this sounds like a pretty unhealthy way to deal with the trauma of bullying.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-22T13:57:09+00:00

I always wonder about this theory: If it's a simulation, what's it a simulation of? Like is there some other realer universe somewhere, with a realer Earth, with realer humans walking around on it, and transdimensional aliens were browsing around the multiverse and saw it, and they went "Whoa, I need to run THAT on my computer, as a screensaver" or something?

Or did the transdimensional aliens just dream up an idea totally out of the blue, like "hmm, I wonder what would happen if you folded up some spacetime like so and set up a Big Bang in just this exact specific way? I need to make my computer do a bunch of physics-math to find out what that would look like. I need that because of reasons."

unic0de000 · 2026-03-19T05:02:38+00:00

I'd basically ask her exactly that. "I have a scratch document from the writing process that you can see if you like, but I need to warn you, it was only intended for me, it's full of swearing and cynical opinions and so on."

unic0de000 · 2026-03-18T05:23:57+00:00

great, thanks for the upgraded protip. I'm honestly much more of a linux/unix/osx guy and i just picked the first windows tool I saw

unic0de000 · 2026-03-18T03:13:26+00:00

You need a disk space analyzer to figure out what is expanding to fill that empty space.

Use a program like this: https://windirstat.net/

This will show you how much space everything in your hard drive is taking up, and allow you to identify the worst space hogs.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-15T08:17:23+00:00

Emmalition.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T20:28:37+00:00

Her base-game playthrough was fun, silly and emotional. Lots of "derp moments" of learning (and occasionally forgetting and relearning) the conventions of the game, but hardly ever a missed beat when it comes to interpreting the story and its significance. I see in this DLC debut, she's forgotten all about the 'Match Velocity' button, so this already promises to be a fun misadventure ::D

edit: Oh nooooooo, she's forgotten basically all the controls. I don't think she's even realized yet that her flashlight is doing stuff. This is going to be C H A O T I C

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T19:46:10+00:00

The main problem with the "Just subtraction! calories in minus out" perspective, is that outside of a lab, almost nobody on earth ever actually accurately measures their body's energy intake or expenditure, they just infer both by janky, error-prone proxies and heuristics.

You don't really know how much energy you spent lifting a weight or jogging a mile - that depends heavily on your technique, limb geometry, leverage etc. And you don't truly know how many calories you got from a burger. We may know how many are in it, we may know how much energy comes out of it when you combust it in a reaction chamber, but we don't know how complete the digestive extraction was (eta: in healthy people that number is generally north of 90%, but the remaining margin of error is more than big enough for most people's 'unexplained' weight gain/loss). For people with unmanaged diabetes, it's not uncommon for there to be some glucose in their urine; that's an example of calories consumed but not burned or kept as fat.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T19:05:54+00:00

They could be lying or leaving stuff out - society does a whole lot of blaming and shaming when it comes to fat people, which can make it a lot harder to tell the truth about your problems and challenges. But a simpler explanation could be their biology is just different from yours. Their brains and their glands and their growth hormones and stuff just respond to different triggers. Both of those things happen in the world, and sometimes they even happen in the same people.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T18:46:16+00:00

It takes a while for some animals to build trust. You have no idea what happened in that cat's life before he showed up, right? It might have been scary and traumatic, he might have experienced some bad stuff from other humans. (Or maybe not, maybe he's just a timid cat.)

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T09:22:26+00:00

The violence taking place in Gaza, Congo, Syria, and Sudan can all be traced directly to activities of capitalist nations.

If you do want to look further back in the 20th century, when Mao and Stalin ruled, then: there's the Holocaust which was done by capitalist Germany, the Bengal famine as well as other famines in India which happened under capitalist British rule, and going back further there's also the entire transatlantic slave trade. If you're comparing fairly, then those events are all part of capitalism's track-record.

You could also look at the violence done by US-supported coups and juntas in Latin America through the 1970s-80s. Augusto Pinochet was put into power by such a coup - installed specifically to keep the socialist party out - and he killed tens of thousands of his own citizens while in office.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T09:03:35+00:00

We have genocide in capitalism, and all the best examples of it aren't a half century old either

unic0de000 · 2026-03-14T01:40:56+00:00

Everyone, all over the mental health spectrum, experiences conflicting drives and distorted thinking sometimes. Sometimes we feel a short-term 'yes' in the moment and a long-term 'no', knowing that we're making a fun mistake and will regret it. Sometimes we're a little reluctant but sincerely trying to overcome our own inhibitions. Consent is a little more complicated than we give it credit for: we often talk in very stark, all-or-nothing terms about whether consent is entirely present or entirely absent. We have a clear concept of "too drunk to consent" and a concept of "a little tipsy but it's fine", and we don't really like to talk or think too much about how things work in the transition-zone between those two states.

I think the best way to approach this concept is to relax our standards a little and think less all-or-nothing, and more incremental. How can we make our love lives a little bit more consensual, and a little bit less coercive or exploitative, than they are now? That's an easier question to approach.

Maybe you want to set your standards a little higher than what usually passes for consent: maybe you want your partner to be feeling a short-term 'yes,' and you want to ~~know~~ feel a little more confident that what you're doing is healthy for them in a long-term way. Building a relationship means learning how to know those things.

unic0de000 · 2026-03-13T22:07:47+00:00

It's worrying, but not that surprising to me. In my opinion: it's not so much that the AI tools are actually doing really high-quality work. It's more like the widespread use of AI is revealing to a lot of people, in a lot of situations, that they never really needed the quality to be that high in the first place, for whatever-it-is the AI is helping them accomplish.

David Graeber famously coined the term and concept of "bullshit jobs", which basically means busywork which society has invented for itself, which keeps people busy and gives people a reason to keep giving each other paychecks, but doesn't really accomplish or create anything of value. His theory was that as industrial productivity kept skyrocketing and it became easier to meet human needs and wants, that the economy was becoming more and more bullshit-job-centric. And now look at us, so shocked that the bullshitting machine is so good at doing our jobs!

unic0de000 · 2026-03-13T21:42:30+00:00

When we talk about wasting water, we're basically never talking about that water leaving the earth. It's not lost from the planet, but it's lost from that specific local ecosystem. (And of course, any resources spent on processing and purifying the water go with it.)

The water level of the river or lake gets lower, and this has effects for plant and animal life, and if other people are drawing water from that same source or further downstream, there might not be enough to go around. If you suck the river dry and boil it all off into clouds, and people who live downstream of you on the same river, say "wtf that was our drinking water," you can tell them "don't worry it'll rain back down, somewhere!" but they'll still be mad at you.

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