Honestly, people would probably object more to advanced math than advanced biology if they were exposed as much to it. Or basic math. Or elementary math…

I suspect my first Linux ran on an 80mhz AMD K6. I did however also run it on a retired dual core UltraSPARC some years later I had somehow gotten my hands on. It might have been faster, but at that time it sure felt slow. And it sounded like a train passing through when it was on. In retrospect installing Gentoo on it was an optimistic endeavour.

So many things. Sometimes I feel like going into politics, because everything there is so crazy. I take this as a sign that my brain is fried from too many meetings.

It would be cool to do a startup making something cool, but honestly I don’t want to put in the extra hours and I don’t want to risk the comfortable lifestyle my current job provides.

That sounds cool. Have new people entering taste 3-5 wines and score them. Based on that they get a recommendation. Score that to further refine the tasting profile. When they return they can just enter a code or scan a card from last time to pick up their profile to keep evolving it.

I would have that. If not for the fact that no one around me seems to have any clue what’s going on (either). You don’t have to be perfect, no one is. Everyone knows no one is. But compared to the people around you, who are also putting up facades, maybe you’re actually doing a pretty good job?

USA buys too much from China compared to how much they export. Restricts exports to China. Truly genius!

We got gifted a plastic rack for garden utensils. My mother in law bought it for us from the local supermarket (which has various cheap crap every week). Anyway, we placed a few items in it and it broke in a day. Utterly useless.

Language evolves because people force it to.

Sometimes, yes, often, no. New slang is naturally picked up and often makes it into the common vernacular, not because people are forcing other people to use it, but because people voluntarily start using. The same goes for loan words. The enter the language, and sometimes get mutated over time in that particular language. When “tablet” became popular someone tried to pick a Danish word for it, but it didn’t stick. Same goes for many other computer-related words, which ended up just being the English word.

But, if you choose not to respect the wishes of others, you will suffer consequences.

This is the aggressive attitude that immediately makes me reluctant to adhere to any special pronouns people may choose. I don’t know if you meant this as a lightly veiled threat, but people can become very aggressive if you “misgender” people.

The reason some languages have a gender binary is often because that society forced a gender binary on people to control them.

I haven’t heard this before, do you have some reading material I can explore?

Inventing entirely new pronouns is no more ridiculous than inventing yet another television show character or yet another tiktok dance craze or yet another romance novel or yet another $15/month subscription service that does the same things other service do or writing yet another magazine column.

I would tentatively agree, if not for the fact that “the consequences” you mentioned above for ignoring any of these things are that I don’t have to suffer them. The consequences for misgendering Elliot Page is ostracization, even if he isn’t in the conversation or likely to ever hear about any conversation I will ever have about him.

Where you put your effort shows you what you care about.

That is true. And I really don’t care that much about trans people. I want them to live a life without oppression with the same freedoms I have, but aside from that I care as much about them as do about the guy who lives in the apartment down the street, whom I’ve never met. And to that end, I think there are things that are reasonable to request from others in society, and I think there are things that are not. And changing the language for them I don’t find reasonable, just like I would ask anyone to change the language for me, and shame them if they didn’t. In the same vein, if people are so horrified about trans people using the wrong bathroom, just stop gendering them. To me, the only reason why we gender them anyway is because men take their bits out in front of everyone, so if we remove that part, they are virtually identical.

Pronouns. I get that they matter a lot to some people, and of course it’s super annoying (if not worse) to be referred to in the wrong way, but I find it unreasonable to demand being referred to something outside of the gender binary, simply because that’s the way language works.

I am aware that English has used “they” for a person of unknown gender for ages, but for one, I don’t think it’s something that you should demand people call you when they actually know your gender, but also I really hate that this is making its way into other languages like my own, that has never had this convention. Inventing entirely new pronouns is just ridiculous, I have a hard enough time to remember your name.

I am also aware that language evolves, but this is not evolution, it’s forced, and if one group of people can try to force a change they prefer, I’m as much in my right to resist it if I don’t like it.

People are super passionate about this though and in fifty years I’m sure I’ll be seen as a fossil for not getting with the times now - in fact I’m sure certain people see me like this now.

I don’t know, I think I’ve seen a frog it might look like more than Kermit…

People don’t care about federation. Or vendor lock-in.

I haven’t tried bluesky, but mastodon seems a little broken by design. I’d you go to a post you are always told that the host server may have more replies. Things like that make it seem immature and perhaps just a bad solution compared to a monolithic approach.

If you don’t like the instance (why wouldn’t I?) you can just move to a different one. Yes, and restart my network. It’s not really a good solution. I would like to exist on mastodon and just use some server. If I don’t like it, continue somewhere else.

Guys: Fascinate her with a wheel of cheese.

Is no one going to comment on the “magnified five times under a microscope”? Five times? What kind of weak, low refraction plastic lens, cost of bubblegum microscope are you using to magnify your enormous monster ants?

Use hand lotion. Dude, my hands are dry, back off!

Spotify daylist (search for it). Better than discover weekly imo, and changes multiple times during the day.

So, if they were endangered cows and your friend didn’t like milk, the milk would be vegan…?

It dissolves, that’s where dust comes from.

Farscape. Always farscape.

I had to rent an apartment for two months in between my old apartment was sold and my new house was ready. The apartment was furnished, so everything had to go into storage. Immediately after we moved in the owners told us they had put it up for sale and we would have potential buyers coming by now and again.

I wasn’t homeless, and in the grand scheme of things this was just a small pitstop in a fairly great (if somewhat badly maintained) apartment, but then, my other moves have been much smoother, so here we are.

My university mainly ran Solaris, pretty much everything also ran on Linux. In the rare case where Windows was required a remote desktop was available.

My university probably isn’t your university though, so answers may not be worth much…