jonathankoren

Missed the whole thing about spelling reforms are about making everything consistent huh?

>The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility

We literally had a wide spread conspiracy about secret DNA editing viruses that were controlled by 5G cellular antennas, because They™ wanted to mind control people and make them sterile for population replacement by Them™.

I’d say that it’s not about being plausible in any sort objective sense, but rather a successful conspiracy theory must reinforce existing beliefs and biases.

See also: Ultraterrestrials, and UFOs as satanic entities battling Jesus.

Just drop all the diacritics and go on and live for live music. Also the removal of diacritics and other fancy letters like o-slash simplifies text processing.

7 bits are enough for everyone.

Yeah. Woodstock '99 was basically the Fyre Festival, but with more burning.

I'm pretty amazed someone didn't try to burn something down at Fyre Festival. Maybe because there was nothing to burn.

That's just a fancy c. Diacritics are for cowards that are too scared to make a new letter for a sound that doesn't have a single letter.

Those are often transliterations into the latin alphabet or direct adoption of foreign words and therefore are not English. For example, 氣 is only spelled "qi" in pinyin. "Chi" is also a perfectly fine transliteration if you use Wade-Giles. They're equivalent in every respect, except orthography. Same with "koran", "quran", "coran", and "kuran". They're the same word. You don't need the Q. I can say with complete confidence, because Q is not a letter in Arabic. "Sioux" while an American word isn't English either. It's Lakota. The only reason we spell it with an "ioux" instead of an "oo" is because it got transliterated into French.

If you want to completely change the orthography of these words to better match the adopted English pronoucations of these words, I'm all for it! I'll get the shampain and the kapaqeno! But you don't get to

No. You need a letter for “ch” regardless. You can just reuse the Q for that. It’s pretty much useless as well. Can’t be used by itself because it’s always in “qu”, and that’s just “kw”

I lost interest as soon as they decided to use digraphs. If you’re going to change spelling, stop uses a letter for more than one sound.

Didn’t even have the guts to eliminate the most useless letter in the entire English alphabet — the C.

That’s because it’s industrial

Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I’m old enough to remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0]

The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems.

[0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.

> People forget that a lot - if you raise wages you also have to raise prices, which ends up hurting the exact people you are raising wages for.

This is simply false. It’s false just thinking about it, and it’s false from multiple economic studies in the real world. It’s a common falsehood spread by corporations, but it’s false.

First, you can’t have it both ways and say companies “can’t raise prices without losing sales” and then turn around and say, “if you raise wages, you have to raise prices” and “people are paid according to their economic value”. If all of these statements are true, then no one could ever be paid more than their starting wage, because if their pay increased, then sales would go down due to price increases. Even if a person’s perceived economic value increased, they could never be paid commiserate with their value, because that would lead to a decrease in sales. This is obviously false.

Minimum wage increases simply don’t lead to price increases or unemployment or any of the sky is falling predictions typically touted. We’ve known this for over 30 years now. Of course, lest we forget, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 has been fixed since 2009, months much represents a real wage cut in 2024.

Not to be a complete pessimist, but there was an active disinformation campaign, not dissimilar to the tobacco companies lying about cancer rates going on. Mix in useful idiots and as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," and you've got decades of outright denial and obstruction.

The only choice is out organize and take direct action, because elections simply aren't enough.

https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_repo...

In both cases the companies are specifically trading on creating confusion of a celebrity’s likeness in an act that celebrity trades in, and with the motivation of circumventing that very celebrity’s explicit rejection of the offer for that very work.

Just because one is a singer and the other is an actor isn’t the big difference you think it is. Actors do voice over work all the time. Actors in fact get cast for their voice all the time.

Yelling, “Parody!” Isn’t some get out of jail free card, particularly where there is actual case law, even more particularly when there are actual laws to address this very act.

Doesn't matter. Waits v Frito Lay

Yeah. Sh needs to be abandoned. There's a million better alternatives, including those without such an asinine syntax.

What’s the point of a job, if you can’t live on it?

If you feel anger when reading that the largest and most profitable companies in the world won’t pay a living wage, the. You should be. There isn’t two side to simple greed and exploitation.

Are you really saying, “But Walmart doesn’t pay a living wage either so it’s okay?”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

Sit by and let nothing happen while you’re out!

You can keep assert these things, but do you really think this is acceptable progress of two and a half decades? Look around. It’s not.

I gave a concrete example of a task that is trivial in 2024, and it just does not work nearly as well or as easily. It’s the same functionality of 30 years ago.

Instead, you’re sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming, “it is progress!” Yeah, well maybe technically correct, but the gap has widened. As a project it should be shutdown. It’s zombieware.

Two and a half decades for a text tool, when the rest of the functionality is stuck in 1996?

Seems fair

You’ve proven my point. A bunch of data loading crap, but nothing substantial on the usability.

This is a simple tutorial task. Is it this easy in Gimp? No. It’s not. But hey, we have the same crappy ScriptFu plugins from a quarter century ago. Anyway, you have the source! Shut up and be grateful you insensitive clod!

https://youtu.be/K25F9RPrP9Q

It’s not just that. It’s also ugly and awkward to use. I tried to use it after learning Fusion360, and it’s just lacking. I wasn’t even trying to do anything particularly complicated, and it just kinda sucked.

You see the same problems with a lot of “flagship” oss ware. Gimp seems to have the same awkward feature set for 25 years. Apparently the only thing that has changed is they no longer compile against Gtk 1.0, and they decided to have all images in a single window.

Still can’t do smart background erase.

Inkscape kinda works, but it always seems like attachment points for easily alignment, and a non sucky text editor are forever out of reach.

I’m sorry. I know software is hard, but it’s been literally decades of stagnation.

All subscription software is just a protection racket.

Nice files you got there. It would be a shame if they suddenly become unreadable, eh?

Even the so called "open" core is a joke. Just try to add anything useful. It will get rejected in favor of a paid option.

The whole thing is just an offensive anathema to open source.

Let me connect the dots for you.

Company identifies celebrity voice they want. (Frito=Waits, OpenAi=ScarJo)

Company comes up with novel thing for the the voice to say. (Frito=Song, OpenAI=ChatGpt)

Company decides they don’t need the celebrity they want (Frito=Waits, OpenAI=ScarJo) and instead hire an impersonator (Frito=singer, {OpenAI=impersonator or OpenAI=ScarJo-public-recordings}) to get what they want (Frito=a-facsimile-of-Tom-Waitte’s-voice-in-a-commercial, OpenAi=a-fascimilie-of-ScarJo’s-voice-in-their-chatbot)

When made public, people confuse the fascimilie as the real thing.

I don’t see how you don’t see a parallel. It’s literally best for beat the same, particularly around the part about using an impersonator as an excuse.

This has been settled law for 34 years. See Tom Waits v Frito-Lay.

They literally hired an impersonator, and it cost them 2.5 million (~6 million today).

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-st...

I believe the windows key is just ctrl-esc

Huh. You’re right. Some keyboard have both windows and the menu key, and others have only one menu key. I don’t know if this means Microsoft relaxed their “Made for Windows” standards, or higher profile manufacturers don’t care.

If only there was some sort of technology that could directly measure the distance to objects. Perhaps as some sort of point cloud.

Guess we'll never know.

> Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

It’s Watson.

Ha ha, only serious. You’re right. It feels like an umbrella brand they’re just tossing around, because AI — and Copilot in particular — is hot in Redmond.

I find the new Copilot key funny, because it feels like a pantomime of the Windows 95 keys[0], but with Logitech characteristics.

[*] Okay, it’s been 30 years. I haven’t used a Windows computer in almost as long, and so I ask. Do people who use Windows actually use any of those keys? It always seemed weird that you’d need the start menu at a single button press, and the right click menu at a keyboard press felt even weirder. I think I only used the Windows key as a meta under Linux, and I don’t think I ever hit the context menu key out of anything but curiosity.

The fact that he is an astronaut because of a congressional junket is just perfect from a bad faith argument perspective.