namingthingsiseasy

joined 1 year ago
[–] namingthingsiseasy 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Poor computer literacy is really biting people in the ass. Quotes like this really stand out to me:

Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company.

Did you not know that they would be able to do this from the start? Or perhaps you knew and were just being extremely naïve? Either way, not being aware of what kinds of control other parties have when you share data with them is something that's all too common these days. I really wish people would consider the ramifications of what companies can do when you give information like this to them.

Like giving your phone number away for no reason. The moment you share it, you give companies all they need to start spamming the shit out of you (or giving it away to other companies that will happily do it instead). How is a concept like this so hard to understand?

[–] namingthingsiseasy 6 points 10 months ago

Møøse licks can be nasty, you know...

[–] namingthingsiseasy 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I think this is a misrepresentation. What more can Linux really do to get companies like this on board? It already has pretty much all anyone would need to support the platform: GUI toolkits, graphics drivers, etc. As far as I can see, Linux provides all the same functionality that other platforms do to support this, and considering that plenty of other companies support Linux just fine (Zoom, Steam, WPS office, etc.), in my opinion, it's unfair to point fingers and say Linux is bad because other actors pointedly ignore it.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 8 points 10 months ago

Off-topic, but I'm curious why you would put Nim in that list. While I absolutely love the language, I've never heard of anyone using it for anything serious, especially compared to Rust or even Zig. I'd even be surprised if it has more mindshare than D.

(An absolute shame by the way. Nim looks like an absolutely fantastic language.)

[–] namingthingsiseasy 2 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Agreed. I've never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.

I don't think that's purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 6 points 11 months ago

I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/

I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day

[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 11 months ago

Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it's not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it's not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do

[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 11 months ago

The net worth of tech giants also needs a severe correction.

Not just tech giants of course, pretty much all large >billion dollar companies need it too. But tech is a great place to start.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 3 points 11 months ago

Also, if you watch a video you like, do yourself a favor and download it. Save it. Archive it. It's only a matter of time before they either take it down or derank it because they want to push you to some other more profitable video stream. Bonus points because it doesn't give them analytics information on it when you go back to watch it again, or watch a specific part again.

I've started doing this for all kinds of content - technical videos, music, funny clips, games, etc.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 11 points 11 months ago

It's not your responsibility to make up for Google's shortcomings. They're a ~5 trillion dollar company now. They could easily change their payment structure if they wanted to, but they don't because their shareholders are more important. If a company with >10^8 times more net worth than you isn't going to bother, then don't make it your responsibility.

It's sad, but unfortunately, the creators made a deal with the devil, and it's not regular people's responsibility to get them out.

And don't forget, there was a time when nobody made any money for posting things on youtube - it was just a site for sharing things people found novel and interesting, with no expectation of remuneration whatsoever. I would even argue that it was a much better time to be there than it is now - back before they had recommendation algorithms pushing people to all kinds of deplorable content and pushing the biddings of far-right dictators. Rewarding Google for this kind of behavior only makes it worse.

[–] namingthingsiseasy 49 points 11 months ago (44 children)

I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.

The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.

It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.

Apologies... /rant

[–] namingthingsiseasy 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I would say the biggest advantage is that OpenBSD is a very security-focused distribution, in a way that I don't think any Linux-based distro has adopted.

The other advantage is ZFS. 10-20 years ago, there was no equivalent, and btrfs was in its infancy. These days, btrfs has proven that it is pretty stable and resilient. There might still be some advantages of ZFS over btrfs, but I haven't used either one at all, so I can't really be sure.

Outside of that, the BSDs are basically just different distros. Back in the 90s, when there was a lot more diversity in Unix, a lot of people just started out with *BSD because there was no clear choice at the time. People just like to use what they are more comfortable with - but most new users pick Linux over BSD these days, and a lot of people who started out on BSD have assimilated onto Linux.

Still, diversity is a good, nice thing, especially with the advent of systemd. So I'm glad we still have the BSDs around, even if I disagree with their stance toward the GPL.

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