_cnt0 @ _cnt0 @sh.itjust.works

Master of Applied Cuntery,

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7

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383

Joined

2 yr. ago

Fuck you, too 😘

The man bun is more of a mental thing. And, hey, I'm a vegetarian too according to the saying "you are what you eat".

Do you do CrossFit™?

I can feel your anger. It makes you stronger, gives you focus.

Yah, I'm a huge fan of factual content. Biased people suck.

You really shouldn't run fedora on production servers.

Not in the good old days. Back in 2000something I built a custom installer image with a backported kernel from testing and some firmware to get debian installed on a new laptop.

You can join btw :P

How do you feel about camping and anal?

I didn't consider the moderation angle; likely because I'm not moderating anything around here. Now that you say it, it seems so obvious, and sub par to put it mildly.

If they didn't do it the mods and admins will.

Yah, I was about to mention that, but left it out to keep the post brief and on point.

Power mods shape conversation here far more than Reddit mods ever did.

I'm not sure of that. My experience feels the other way around.

Little add-on: The current behavior kind of makes the creator of a post the "owner" of the comment section. If they dislike an ensuing conversation, even if they're not involved in it, they just delete the post - "Fuck you, you're not having that conversation!". I find that problematic from an ethical perspective.

Shakespeare used the singular they in his works. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html

That was an interesting read. I think you "over-quoted" me here. Only the first sentence is about singular they for when the gender is unknown. I can't remember where I picked up the thing with the ~100 year old novel. I read it somewhere. But that might have been specific to use of singular they in the US or something. And I might misremember the number entirely. What's really fascinating is that Shakespeare even uses 'they' when the gender is known. I wonder, though, whether that allows for any inference on how people spoke back then? After all, it's prose for the theatre and Shakespeare is credited with inventing a lot of new language, not all of which would have stuck (I'd assume).

One could also think of they as that new pronoun. A lot of languages reuse sounds (including English) even in fairly common grammar components so one could think of this as a new word with a familiar sound assigned to it.

You're right of course. Though, that adds another meaning to an existing word and hence increases the ambiguity I mentioned. I know it's common among all natural languages (that I know of) to have multiple context-dependant meanings for some words. The computer scientist in me, that prefers interacting with compilers over humans, finds that revolting ;-)

Let's party in party of the party. (celebrate, in company of, political organization)

TL;DR: yes, no, wrong

TL:

Do they still teach that?

As far as I know, singular they (/them) as a personal pronoun, not for when the gender is unknown, is only common in two places: the UK and the internet. It's only formally taught in the UK.

Nobody talks like that ...

I'd claim that the 'nobody' is categorically incorrect here. Most people who learned English as a first or second language outside the UK and/or more than ~30 years ago were tought about gender neutral 'he' and not 'they'. I know that I only learned about 'they' as a personal pronoun in the last decade or so on the internet.

and they(singular) has been common since the 1300s.

It's been a while since I read about it because I was so baffled that the young ones on the internet were unable to distinguish singular and plural pronouns, until it dawned on me that there was a pattern and that I needed to do some research and learning. So, from the top of my head, hence the numbers could be off:

The first verifiable use of singular they for when the gender is unknown was in a novel some 100 years ago. The concept of 'they' as a personal pronoun was only developed in the latter half of the last century in the UK and has only been formally taught there for about three decades.

As far as I know, all guides to formal writing outside the UK discourage the use of singular they even for when the gender is unknown (not to mention the much younger use as a personal pronoun).

Now, I'm not a native speaker and my information might not be up to date. I'm curious to hear from people from the US, Australia, NZ, India, ... (wherever English is the first or a formal language) if and when they were taught about 'they' as a singular pronoun for when the gender is unknown and 'they' as a personal pronoun.

As a side note/some personal opinion:

As a non-native-speaker who was taught about gender neutral 'he', seeing people use 'they' as a singular pronoun was hell of confusing at first. I mostly got used to it, but I don't really like it. Sometimes I still find texts where I find it very confusing. A recipe for disaster is writing about a group and one individual of that group by referring to them (the individual) as 'they'. Such constructs will have me constantly go back and reread sentences wondering whether something refers to the group or the individual.

I think I would prefer two new sets of pronouns: one for when the gender is unknown, and another as personal pronouns other than he/she. It would make things much less ambiguous and easier (at least for me, I think).

While I get your sentiment, I'm always baffled how people fail to just memorize some basic formulas/equations and then just to plug and play:

1÷kⁿ = k⁻ⁿ

% = 1÷100 = 10⁻²

k×10ⁿ equals k with its floating point shifted by n to the right for positive n, or to the left for negative n

That's really all one needs to know for the "problem" at hand. For your concrete example of "40% of 59" that would just be

59×40×10⁻²

Just solve that whatever way is easiest. I don't get why people get panic-stricken when they see the % sign.

Innovation or regression? Gnome used to have optional desktop icons. They removed them. Let's settle on gnome is progressing, while keeping in mind, that progress is neither necessarily nor inherently good.

No.

Good cat

The good is implicit with cat.

Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they're not there in the first place.

Does the author explain how to get your hands on an "ancient" french MAS-38, as seen on the cover? Selling that on the collectors market should bring in some money.