I’m fine with finding my own way, but taking directions from people in my hometown is impossible. They’ll use things like the main grocery store, but call it by a name it hasn’t had since going out of business 25 years ago, with two other companies giving it a go between now and then.

It would also seem like bad business to leave it out of your niche game, unless the niche is specifically about the difficulty level. Why would you want to eliminate whole chunks of your already limited number of potential customers by only offering a very challenging difficulty?

That thing better be running on TempleOS and be coded with HolyC, or I’m calling BS and telling people they’ve just found a new way to make LLMs even more annoying than they already were.

The taste isn’t that bad, but on its own, I’d give the common yellow bananas a “Meh, but not worth that texture” for taste. I’m actually fine with them in other foods, like, I can eat illness-inducing quantities of banana bread. It’s just that the most commonly sold bananas have a texture that in other fruits would probably indicate it’s rotten. I’ve tried giving them another chance several times, but as soon as I take a bite, it makes me start gagging.

I’ve found the odd variety here and there that were actually better in both regards, though. I remember the grocery store briefly had these little red bananas, about half the size of a yellow one, and I tried it on a whim. Those actually tasted good, and the fruit was firm enough to seem like it was something a person was actually meant to eat.

I assume the common, yellow bananas are just bred to be big, produce lots of fruit and have a consistent flavor, even if it’s not a very good one compared to other bananas.

And idiots lap it up and moan about how the Schumer shutdown is going to impact their appointment at the doctor next month if all those crazy socialists, like Nancy Pelosi, don’t listen to reason.

Gastrointestinal Distress Nuggets seems like an unfortunate name for a horse, but here I am.

That’s not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.

If we keep on saying, “Well, it’s not good enough now, so forget about it,” we’ll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn’t take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.

National Socialist, I’d guess.

Not just employment, but all sorts of things. For example, the NYPL runs all sorts of free classes at its various branches. People could also more easily access other services. Plus, if the buses are free and reliable, it could also provide incentive for people to just go out and do stuff that they might otherwise not. Even if you’re doing okay financially, something like the cost of gas and parking, in addition to the actual tickets, could discourage you from going to a concert or a baseball game. If there’s a convenient enough bus option for you that doesn’t cost anything, you might go out and spend some money you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Plus, I would argue it would also make a city more attractive to anyone looking to move to a new city, which could bring in more money to local businesses and expand the tax base for the city.

It really would have been more concise to just write “I don’t care what you write, I’m right and screw everyone who disagrees.”

You keep treating every single innovation as though it’s assured that it will one day be adopted into the “standard” (as much as such a thing can be said to actually exist) language at some point in the future, and dismissing anyone who disagrees. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is actually part of that natural evolution of language you hold so dear. If enough people see a novel form or word and reject it, for whatever reason, that innovation has hit a dead end and won’t last. The sort of names you’re championing might be enjoying rising popularity right now, but it’s a mistake to assume that means all of them will inevitably become accepted. Some of them will, and many more will fade into obscurity.

These names are not immune to any criticism just because you’ve decided that anything goes and to say otherwise is bad linguistics. Names come and go all the time, some for some fairly rational reasons, some for entirely arbitrary ones. It’s not hard to rationalize why Adolf has fallen off precipitously as a given name in the US, but what’s the basis for Clarence going from one of the top 50 names for boys in the US to not even cracking the top 1000 for the last 45 years or so? The truth is, it could be anything. Sometimes people stop using a name because it’s considered old fashioned, sometimes it’s supplanted by a new variant that proves more popular, and other times it’s just because tastes have changed and people find it ugly or embarrassing, rather than being the perfectly normal name it had once been.

I am, however, unaware of any case in which a name faced with losing its popularity or acceptability has been saved by someone riding high on their own self-righteousness telling anyone who dares criticize a name “You’re all ignorant cretins, don’t you know linguistic prescriptivism is not widely accepted amongst linguists?” while ignoring the fact that they themselves are trying to be prescriptive in their own way. Natural language is not, to the best of my knowledge, a teleological phenomenon. Just like evolution in living beings doesn’t have any special design or end goal to be worked towards, there is no perfect form, no grand design that languages are all working towards that you can compare against to assess whether a given innovation will be accepted or rejected in the course of time.

Outside such obviously insane stuff like the child abuse masquerading as a name that Elon Musk inflicts upon his children, none of us can say with certainty whether a given name will stand the test of time or not. People choosing to adopt them or not, giving their opinions on them and popular sentiment is all part of how that will ultimately get determined, and you just want to come along and browbeat people for engaging in that and expressing their own views on names. How about you propose your own objective criteria for analyzing the viability of a given name going forward, oh wise one?

Okay, so, “-ly” is equally valid as an English place-name spelling varient of “leah”. Don’t believe me? Ask the English Place-Name Society:

And? Again, thank you for admitting that despite cranking out a fair bit of text, you don’t seem to do so great on reading comprehension. Just to repeat it again, with emphasis for you.

You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley.

Huh, what do you know, the -ley/-leigh bit actually means something in the name Ashley, and it shares this meaning the -leigh used in place names. Yet Emily is derived from a patrician surname from ancient Rome adapted to better conform to the norms of English, or as a feminine form of the name Emil. In either case, the -ly in the name Emily is not cognate to the English -ley or -leigh. So instead of being one variant amongst many equivalent lingering forms that predate modern efforts to standardize English orthograpy, that -ly isn’t even a discreet morpheme on its own, and the name would be better treated split into Emil and -y. But sure, tell me again how it’s unconscionable to say that people deciding to jazz it up and be extra by turning it into Emmaleigh are the cool-headed, linguistically grounded voices of reason in this case.

Having no root in language, dialect, religion, history or culture.

This part was important, it’s not just phonetics.

Emmaleigh

This is still a dumbass name that serves no purpose but to reveal the parents’ ignorance and desire to give their kid a “unique” name. You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley. Emmaleigh is just try hards desperate to be different.

“Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).

You’re fine with Graycyn, right?

This sort of thought process is, as I understand it, exactly what @[email protected] is complaining about. Graycyn is stupid as fuck. Yeah, I could name my kind Pterry or Psimon and say “Yeah, but we have words like pterodactyl and psychic, so it’s consistent with other exceptions to the standards of English orthography,” but it would still be stupid as fuck and cruel to name a kid that.

I think you would have a better argument with people naming their kids Khaleesi or something. Yeah, it’s not a name that I would give to a kid, but it’s already entered the language as an explicit borrowing of a character’s title that entered popular culture. I don’t see how that’s any different than something like a person learning French and deciding they prefer the name Guillaume to William and naming their kids that. Deciding you want to name your kid Mychael, or Mathyew, or Jeze🔔, or something because your child is just too precious to share a name with all the plebs who have the same name with a conventional spelling isn’t some grand evolution of language, nor does it add any novel meaning to the name. All it does it let people know that your kid is the child of a couple of feckless muppets.

The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion. Wearing your respirator and other PPE will go a long way towards mitigating these risks, but they’re not the most pleasant things to wear for hours on end. He told me that lots of younger guys would come in, start working and see all the old guys at it with their respirators on, but they’d opt not to wear them whenever they thought they could get away with it, since they didn’t personally know people who developed black lung in the field. That’s just what he had told me, so I couldn’t say how accurate it really is, but given the attitudes I’ve seen from guys in other fields towards wearing all their PPE, it wouldn’t really surprise me if it were largely true.

It wasn’t immediately clear what mechanism Trump would use to make the designation, and Antifa lacks centralized structure or defined leadership, making it unclear who or what precisely would be targeted.

Honestly, seems pretty clear to me. It’s a blank check for them to lock up anyone inconvenient. If you participate in a protest, talk trash about whoever happens to be the MAGA darling of the day, or do anything else they dislike, they can accuse you and/or the event of being associated with Antifa, and job done. Maybe it won’t hold up in court (for now), but that’s still a threat that will help to chill dissent.

Would all the Linux versions out there be subjected the same 15 years of updates??

They shouldn’t be, since the model for updates is quite distinct from Windows or iOS in a way that I would argue should effectively meet the requirements anyways. If a distro releases a new version twice a year, outside of enterprise situations where a company is paying for support, there’s nothing to really stop anyone who wants from upgrading. They don’t charge for it, and while new versions might add out-of-the-box support for new hardware, it’s pretty rare for Linux to suddenly change minimum hardware requirements in a way that requires you to buy a whole new machine in order to run the latest release. The only case that immediately comes to mind is that of distros increasingly removing support for i386 machines, but in fairness, Intel discontinued manufacturing of i386 chips 18 years ago.

Of course, this all assumes that the people in charge of making these decisions actually understand the technology in at least a general sense, and it’s not being left up to a bunch of idiots who have refused to keep up with any innovations more recent than the fax machine, so odds are kind of crap.

To me, another be part of it is that the British seem to have an awful penchant for giving delicious things names that sound like Victorian euphemisms for something awful. Spotted dick and toad in the hole sound like they would be ways for Victorians to talk about their STIs, and I’m unsure what exactly Gentleman’s Relish would mean, but it strikes me as some sort of medieval form of punishment on the peasants.

I think it’s just old tribal knowledge that people have turned into a meme at this point, just like people thinking all versions of Linux are so arcane and obtuse, you need to be a master programmer or hacker to be able to make it run without crashing. When I was first starting out with it, around 2009, I remember having somewhat regular issues with my sound and my wifi just randomly deciding I was unworthy of either sound or wireless internet access. That was across distros when I was initially checking things out, as well as across releases of the same distro once I (mostly) settled down.

These days, I can’t remember the last time I had such problems that weren’t either the result of a specific bug that was shortly fixed, or the fallout of something stupid I did myself while tinkering with something and not paying enough attention.

And even for those that do have email and internet access, rural America isn’t exactly known for having robust infrastructure or government programs to respond to disasters, so they could quite likely find themselves unable to access their email in the aftermath of a disaster, anyway.

Going to college purely for a career is a hell of a gamble

Sure, but it’s a gamble that everyone tries to tell you is a sure thing in your youth, and they pile immense pressure on you to do. Maybe things have changed recently, but it hasn’t been all that long since I was in high school, in the grand scheme of things, and I remember how you were basically treated like the world’s biggest idiot if you didn’t plan on going on to get a university degree. Maybe the only exception was if you were going to join the military, with the understanding you were doing so in order to get a degree on the cheap when you finished.

I think everyone who wants to do so, and who has put in the work to be at the appropriate level academically, should have the opportunity go and study at university, but I also believe that the vast majority of people have no need to do so, and ultimately will not benefit from it. Unfortunately, modern society treats universities not as institutes of education and monuments to the pursuit of knowledge, but as glorified vocational schools. It seems largely to be at the impetus of companies who have decided to externalize any training costs onto potential hires, substituting any sort of on the job training for “Did they check the box that says they have a degree?”

In the past 30 years, I’ve seen massive changes in how companies operate just by watching the sort of jobs my father could get. When I was a kid, he could get hired on with nothing more than “I like computers, I’ll actually read the whole manual for the system I’m working on, and I understand there’s a 6 month probation period to see if I actually do that.” for jobs that he would be summarily screened out for today, despite having successfully done in the past.

Like, don’t get me wrong, he’s dumb as hell in a lot of ways, but I’ve still seen extra stupid stuff in his career trajectory that reflects this. I recall him being fired because he got an IT job at Ernst & Young that he’d been successfully doing for years, because they suddenly said “Everyone doing this job needs to have a degree and the following certifications, and if you don’t have them and do this job now, you need to get them ASAP and reinterview for your role.”

Probably varies largely on where you’re talking about, and even then, which university program you’re looking at enrolling in. If you go and look at universities in the UK, for example, a BA studying a foreign language generally seems to assume that this is a language you’ve already been studying for several years in secondary education. You’re meant to be entering the program with roughly a B1 level in the language, and allegedly develop up to C1 over the course of 3 years of study. Meanwhile, in the US, you can rock up to a university and be a Japanese language major with nothing more than “Well, he says he likes anime and his grades are okay.” and the degree program will start you off in a 100-level class that expects negligible prior knowledge, if any.

Then again, having attempted university in the US, and now doing it at a UK school, university education is pretty drastically different. The US schools take 4 years to grant the same degree, and you spend almost the whole of the first year and a good chunk of the second just doing general education requirements that are, at best, only tangentially relevant to your chosen field of study. If I were doing my current degree program for a BA in French and Spanish as a first time student in the US, unless I did a bunch of AP courses or took night classes at a community college on the side, I’d need to do a general English composition class, a few math classes, probably get to pick between a biology or chemistry course, something to do with world cultures or music and the arts, and a handful of other electives I’m forgetting about. For that degree in the UK, from start to finish over the course of 3 years, I exactly 2 modules that aren’t either French or Spanish, with one being the “Hey, we need to make sure you can actually write in English competently, too” module, and the other being a free choice of an introductory language module for something else.

I’d also assume the US’ lack of a national curriculum also plays into how things work out with universities here, as well. Since things can be so variable at a regional and local level, not only in terms of the established curriculum, but what courses your particular secondary school has the funding to offer, universities can’t really assume much of incoming students’ education. You can have a kid from one state whose school was a Spanish language immersion school offering bilingual education from day 1 of Kindergarten, and later offering French, German, Japanese and Arabic as a third language for the final 4 years of compulsory education sat side-by-side with another from a different part of the country who only had the chance to take 2 years of Spanish classes. Even for subjects with a better baseline, someone whose studies covered all the available math classes up to geometry and algebra is going to have a totally different starting point from another whose school partnered with a local college to offer college level courses in calculus and statistics in high school.

I don’t play too much in the way of action RPGs, but it’s definitely an annoying thing that tends to pop up in JRPGs, though less so nowadays. Still, I do appreciate being able to dial the difficulty down as an option if I’m enjoying a game, get 30 hours in, and run into one of those two issues. If it’s not an option, I’d just drop the game, but it gets annoying when you’ve sank in a month or so of free time, only for a game to pull that on you.