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Cake day: December 13th, 2024

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  • There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don’t allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers.

    That “speech police” traces to the government in the form of labor laws & regulations in the remit of the EEOC, eg, Title 7 of Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Americans with Disabilities Act. Employers didn’t conceive of such workplaces policies on their own to invite lawsuits & put targets on their backs.

    These laws do not apply to social media as a communication platform. Offensive expression doesn’t deny equal access/opportunities to platform resources they are under any legal obligation to provide. Should we put much confidence in social media companies voluntarily assuming unnecessary obligations just because?

    It never made sense.





  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comtomemes@lemmy.worldBooks
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    17 hours ago

    If your whole schtick is about decluttering, you should be able to differentiate between “less” and “fewer.” Getting things down to a countable number achieves “fewer”-ness.

    Bullshit dogmatic rule by pedants who make up rules & pass them down like schmucks instead of observing & studying the actual, standard language. True: fewer is only for countables. However, less is fine. It has been used with countables for about as long as written English has existed as documented by linguists & English usage references:

    quoted passage

    The primary point is that the now-standard pedantry about less/fewer is in fact one of the many false “rules” that have recently precipitated out of the over-saturated solution of linguistic ignorance where most usage advice is brewed.

    But not the usage advice at MWCDEU. This is the start of its entry on less/fewer:

    Here is the rule as it is usually encountered: fewer refers to number among things that are counted, and less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured. This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault—it is not accurate for all usage. If we were to write the rule from the observation of actual usage, it would be the same for fewer: fewer does refer to number among things that are counted. However, it would be different for less: less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted. Our amended rule describes the actual usage of the past thousand years or so.

    As far as we have been able to discover, the received rule originated in 1770 as a comment on less:

    This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. No Fewer than a Hundred appears to me not only more elegant than No less than a Hundred, but strictly proper. —Baker 1770

    Baker’s remarks about fewer express clearly and modestly—“I should think,” “appears to me”—his own taste and preference. […]

    How Baker’s opinion came to be an inviolable rule, we do not know. But we do know that many people believe it is such. Simon 1980, for instance, calls the “less than 50,000 words” he found in a book about Joseph Conrad a “whopping” error.

    The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great—he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin—more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language. After about 900 years Robert Baker opined that fewer might be more elegant and proper. Almost every usage writer since Baker has followed Baker’s lead, and generations of English teachers have swelled the chorus. The result seems to be a fairly large number of people who now believe less used of countables to be wrong, though its standardness is easily demonstrated.

    Less is more general than fewer, and the references identify common constructions where less is preferred with countables.




  • Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?

    From the article

    Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground.

    Chenoweth points out that nonviolent protests also have fewer physical barriers to participation. You do not need to be fit and healthy to engage in a strike, whereas violent campaigns tend to lean on the support of physically fit young men. And while many forms of nonviolent protests also carry serious risks – just think of China’s response in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are generally easier to discuss openly, which means that news of their occurrence can reach a wider audience. Violent movements, on the other hand, require a supply of weapons, and tend to rely on more secretive underground operations that might struggle to reach the general population.

    Violent protests seems to mean a violent campaign of armed, planned attacks.

    I doubt that would include unplanned outbreaks of violence from people not organized for that purpose.





  • To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something.

    Thanks to dumbass EU laws fussing over nonproblems like (check notes) targeted advertising. Really? I voluntarily give out information to an ad-supported service I don’t pay for, they turn around & use this to try to show me more relevant ads, and I’m supposed to pretend the internet was ever private & shit my pants over this? While I can understand safeguards from identity theft, cookies aren’t that, I don’t understand how this concern ever blew up.

    Before those laws, those cookie banners didn’t exist & I was happy not clicking them. I was under no illusion that online privacy exists with free services running on ad revenue that can track online activity and try to harvest voluntary information that’s mostly worthless to me. Free shit in exchange for mostly worthless information & ads I ignore seems like an obvious bargain, but some hypochondriacs had to stir everyone into a frenzy to bitch & moan about it. Do they think the world just runs on magic?




  • Features

    Nice things about PieFed:

    • Written in a common programming language that many developers understand and which has a bright future ahead of it. Python, of course! This will enable more contributions from a wider range of people than if it was made with Erlang, Ruby, Rust or PHP, for example.
    • Constructed in a simple and straightforward manner that new contributors can come to grips with quickly. No fancy algorithms, special design patterns, fragile build process, or front-end framework. Just Flask with sprinklings of vanilla JS and htmx.
    • Keep third party dependencies to an absolute minimum, to make server administration easier. Python + database (PostgreSQL) and you’re good to go! Redis optional.
    • Consume few resources, to make it cheap to run. Many examples of federated software are bloated Rube Goldberg machines that require hefty servers and serious server administration skills, making money a constant problem. PieFed instances will be small and nimble.
    • Emphasise trust, safety and happiness, drawing inspiration from the Mastodon Covenant.
    • Built to last using tried and true technology that will still work decades from now.

    Differences between Lemmy and PieFed

    • Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
    • Communities are organized into topics. See https://piefed.social/topics.
    • Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/pics@lemmy.world
    • People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
    • Hide all posts based on keyword filters.
    • Keyboard shortcuts.
    • Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
    • Better UI design (somewhat subjective!)
    • Improved hotness ranking algorithm (subjective)
    • Voting is private.
    • See also features for healthy communities.
    • Each community has it’s own wiki.

    Mastodon Covenant & “safe spaces” are overmoderated trash. Features for healthy communities consist of Reddity moderation tactics.

    Heavy handed moderation is the main reason Reddit disgusts me, so no thanks, & fuck that shit.