azertyfun

@azertyfun@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The phonology of “moth” is just bad (not just subjectively but in a way that I’m sure linguistics could pick apart). It’s adjacent to “moist”. That’s the kind of name you give something you don’t like, a name made to be spat out. Contrast to other monosyllabic names like “fly”, a decidedly more despicable insect but with a much prettier name. Which one would be easier to use in a song?

  Also I just checked and moths are butterflies, etymologically it’s just that old Germanic peoples assigned a different name to the less colorful butterflies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nighttime pollinator gang rise up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t even know disliking moths was a thing until recently.

  Guess why? In French they are called “night butterflies”. It’s just a nocturnal butterfly so of course it’s brown, duh.

  This feels like the Orca/Killer Whale debate again. Why do the English give such terrible names to animals like they’re trying to give children nightmares?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do Americans win their country back?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Whether it’s 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don’t seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.

  Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is “yeah, mostly”. Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.

  Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn’t force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scales that refuse to measure if the battery isn't brand new⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My cheap scale will not work with my freshly recharged amazon basics AAAs. Apparently those do not hold up well enough under load. And of course any set of batteries that does work, discharges over a few months.

  So I just bought a cheap mechanical scale (not from Amazon) and I eyeball it for weights under 50g. Good enough and dead reliable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably yeah. But also the European honeybee is not the only European bee nor pollinator so the argument holds true to some extent.

  However I’m not convinced the impact is worse than the monocultures which makes up the majority of our calorie intake. Thousands of hectares of nothing but beets or corn probably does more for killing insect diversity than a handful of beehives, but what do I know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon takes the welding pill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Welding sounds 50% nicer though. Problem solving, but not head-breaking problems that follow you night and day for weeks on end. And after a project you have a tangible result that is actually generating some kind of value.

  When’s the last time a web service Lego ever did anything but been a financial black hole for VC funding that actually fails to deliver anything of value to society?

  Damn it, I think my cynicism dial got stuck again. Time for bedge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

  The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

  That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Checkmate⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s so easy to tell this map was made by a Brit. Wales gets its own color (despite largely not speaking Welsh) but Belgium and Switzerland are monochrome (despite having multiple federally recognized and geographically partitioned monolinguistic regions and their own flavors of historical-but-rarely-spoken language)?

  Only the Bri’ish would be haughty enough to assume their flavour of federal governance is so unique.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An important update on Concord⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.

  Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.

  Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.

  The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon isn't a fan of Judas⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t agree. If anything right now we have the opposite problem where the English world for instance pretty exclusively uses a more than 500 year old translation of the Bible, despite much more modern-English versions being translated from some very early Greek versions of the texts (therefore being more readable and less telephone-y). The reasons for the KJV being preferred are many but none make any real theological or linguistic sense.

  What really happens though is not so much a game of telephone than the fact that every culture gets to decide on its own (usually provably incorrect and inconsistent) interpretation of the texts, because the whole thing is so internally inconsistent it’s basically a Rorschach test no matter which way you translate it. Progressive Christians will basically tell you that literally none of the Old Testament is to be taken literally which… okay? Extremists sects will do the opposite. Then there’s the whole dogma around Lucifer and Hell, whose existence is clearly an inconsistent amalgamation of old polytheist religions and no matter which way you read or translate it doesn’t translate to the Lucifer or Hell that most Christians ever think about when they say “Lucifer” and “Hell”. That part was just straight up made up over the centuries because it was a convenient scarecrow, yet is is absolutely load-bearing to the dogma of almost every Christian sect. And let’s not even get into the feminists and queer people who’d put Simone Biles to shame with their mental gymnastics justifying the Bible being an Ally, Actually™. That’s not a game of telephone, that’s just Weapons of Mass Denial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bumble⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We need an app that keeps the gender ratios even.

  Isn’t that what Tinder is indirectly trying to achieve with its “Get Super Gold+++ insta premium” business model? To get a somewhat even gender ratio you need to get a bunch of men to drop out, and asking for absurd amounts of money is certainly one way to go about it. Though I hear even premium tinder users vastly outnumber the women.

  A raffle could work in theory, but upwards of 80 % of men will have to be thrown out and as a woman I wouldn’t see why I would settle for that instead of an app where attractive men will be falling over themselves to talk to me.

  AFAIK the only proven methods for not-super-attractive men to get matches is to either go offline, or be bi/gay. Do with that advice what you will.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trash Icon 🗑⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Frutiger Aero my beloved. The apotheosis of skeuomorphic design, killed by a neverending downward spiral towards the least distinctive, creative, and inspired designs imaginable.

  It’s really ironic that this design cycle coincided with the rise of high-DPI displays. All those pixels used to upscale monochrome boxes with square corners. What a tragedy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google sends emails that 100% look like phishing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like that works but my bookmark is on teams.cloud.microsoft and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google sends emails that 100% look like phishing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

  And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

  The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon makes up a word⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It goes deeper than parents being nostalgic. The veneer of meritocracy is load-bearing to neoliberal ideology, especially post-WWII. If we, as a ~society~, acknowledged that no matter how big kids dream and how much they work they’ll probably never make it more than maybe one or two steps up the social ladder, our entire social model would collapse.

  At its most fundamental level, that’s what the war against “wokism” is. It’s the privileged correctly identifying and targeting the existential threat that is the mere acknowledgement that we do not live in a meritocracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cursed wretched marketing⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a real color (as real as colors can be, which is not very). It’s not a spectral color, you won’t find it on the rainbow. It’s actually the result of your red and blue cones being activated together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon learns that his grandfather dodged being drafted⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, I have abolished my government but the other guys have not. Now what?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon learns that his grandfather dodged being drafted⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Get out with this class essentialism.

  Going from prole renting a shitty apartment who barely owns a car and a washing machine, to forcibly deported or forced to renounce your culture and teach your children the invader’s language and culture is not “potato, potato”.
  Sometimes there are other things to fight for than capital, even if this might sound like a foreign concept to Westerners whose country hasn’t been directly involved in a meaningful non-imperialist conflict since 1945.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

  What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on console hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new mobs for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, etc.

  Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Justice for Sid⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Villains are stereotypically older fat queer bald men (e.g. Vladimir Harkonnen). These are all factors people have little-to-no control over.

  Media will sometimes subvert those expectations, but most of the time the iconography matters more to the filmmaker than decency. It’s quite fucked up the insecurities these portrayals breed, no amount of positive affirmation will make up for the fact that some natural body types are fundamentally associated with villainy in the Western visual canon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Protesting is getting weird...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Beta road signs: Unreadable if you don’t speak English, take a while to process, do not stand out

  Chad Vienna convention signs:

  Belgian Road Work End sign, which is simply a crossed out diagram of a road worker in the blue rectangle which denotes informational signs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In our post-AI era, is job security strictly mythical? Or How to believe in careers as a concept worth doing?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Many of those boomers retired comfortably without ever learning the slightest bit of computer literacy. Even now, plenty of jobs require little-to-none.

  Furthermore, we are in the “dotcom bubble” stage of “AI”. The people least knowledgeable about it are the ones throwing billions of dollars at whoever claims to “use AI” for literally anything. We are on, (or maybe for those of us who are paying attention, right after), the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

  Trough of disillusionment dot jpeg

  ---

  Remember when 5-ish years ago all anyone would talk about in the tech space is how being a truck driver would be an obsolete job in the near future? I remember.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon has nerdy hobbies⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … So what you’re saying is you’re choosing the bear?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Imagine denying other living and breathing lifeforms agency to thrive amd change lol lol lol⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who is going to keep them accountable? Trees have a record high abstention rate, and if these representatives are elected by humans that’s just proportional voting with veneer on top.

  Democracy is about balancing levers, and that’s why there is more than one branch of government. Special interest groups do have power, and so does the judiciary (who may sue the government for unlawful cutting down of trees) and the executive (who may have power to declare certain government-owned land to be Protected).

  The real ecologist move would be to write a duty to protect the environment into the constitution, so that the judiciary can strike down any law that does anything to the contrary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Found this great deal on a new chair for my living room. Almost 50% off!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I saw that in someone’s house I’d think “well that’s terrible but no-one’s first woodworking project looks great, at least it’s creative problem-solving”.

  Hearing the price tag is where I’d probably faint.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨acceptable screws⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve heard that was more of a European thing, but the only two serious contenders are Pozidriv vs Torx for screws (and hex vs Allen for bolts).

  I just checked my local hardware store’s website, and out of the 176 kinds of 4/4.5mm screw boxes in their inventory, 74 are Torx, 55 are Pozidriv, and 38 are Phillips (ew).

  Either Torx or Pozidriv is fine when used properly, however most DIYers don’t understand the difference between PZ and PH and end up stripping their heads. Also it’s much harder to use the wrong-sized bit with Torx than PZ.

  So yeah, Torx wins in just about every category and other heads only get manufactured to appease old people and penny-pinchers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨bioluminescence⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  We do that all the time to diagnose cancer.

  Except the glow is gamma rays from radioisotopes that clump up in fast replicating cells (i.e. tumors) but potato potato, do you want your insides to glow or not?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They lied to us⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, they’re close enough to French. As a Belgian, it pains me to admit that they probably originated in Paris anyway, though we perfected the recipe (and they’re called French fries in American English for a different reason).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They lied to us⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s crazy to me that they felt the need to include safety instructions lol. Handmade Filet Américain for sure I’d eat same-day or at most next day, but the store-bought variety uses preservatives and can last for 3 days in the fridge no problem.

  Americans be acting like beef is like fugu or something, but if fresh raw beef gives you E. Coli you need to be suing people! My understanding is this pathological phobia of raw meat goes back to the mid-20th century where long supply chains and untrustworthy cold chains led to the advice that all meat had to be done well, but that’s outdated advice that would not develop nowadays. Red meat just can’t go bad that fast at 4°C, so if the supplier is trusrworthy there’s no issue.

  Brits have kind of the same thing with electrical plugs in bathrooms, they’re scared to death of them and you can’t convince them it’s safe and that the rest of the world does it just fine. Interesting how there are these localized “fear islands” around certain topics that people take for granted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They lied to us⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Belgium and Northern France have Filet Américain (American Filet). So an American dish right? Well no, it’s raw ground beef, basically the last thing most Americans will ever willingly eat. Here it’s basically the default sandwich topping.