azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than "we can"), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft's meddling.

Villains are stereotypically older fat queer bald men (e.g. Vladimir Harkonnen). These are all factors people have little-to-no control over.

Media will sometimes subvert those expectations, but most of the time the iconography matters more to the filmmaker than decency. It's quite fucked up the insecurities these portrayals breed, no amount of positive affirmation will make up for the fact that some natural body types are fundamentally associated with villainy in the Western visual canon.

I've witnessed similar corporate screwups from the inside, I know the greed and political games and misaligned incentives that allow for such an obviously and catastrophically badly scoped project to be pushed dead-on-arrival in production, against the advice of literally anyone with a pair of eyes and literally any honesty.

Intellectually, I understand. Yet my heart doesn't, because it refuses to believe the sheer amount of collective stupidity and outright malice at every level of management, consistently for years on end, required to achieve these outcomes. How anyone can sleep at night with "Product Manager for New Outlook" on their resume is beyond me.

In formal language are those kinda similar the same way je vais manger and je mangerai are at least mostly the same thing

I think I confused myself lol. Explaining intuitive grammar rules formally is surprisingly hard. You are right, "Je mangerais" == I would eat, "J'aurais mangé" == I would have eaten. Very bad example on my part because the conditional tense is actually one that escapes the general tendency of modern French to slowly move away from those simple past/future tenses which have a formal connotation. It's very much not a complete transition, but "vous allez manger" and "vous mangerez" are semantically equivalent but the former would be used in a lot of (but not all) day-to-day situations, even though the more formal future tense would probably used in an equivalent but formal or literary context.

To say "you will do as I say", an angry mother will say to her kid "tu vas faire c'que j'te dis!" but an angry boss will say "vous ferez ce que je vous dis". Completely different tenses, exact same meaning.
Whereas English generally only changes tenses to imply a change in habituality/causality. "You will have done as I say" implies another causal event between "now" and "you will have done", and French doesn't have a clean way to convey that from conjugation alone.

Even in English, without that level of cultural baggage or institutional oversight, there have been many proposals for spelling reform, none of which ever go anywhere.

I would say that reforming English would be counter-intuitively harder than reforming French. French spelling is rather orthodox, and getting rid of exceptions + simplifying orthographic rules would be pretty straightforward and could be done incrementally (it was supposed to be the job of the Académie before they turned conservative; they weren't always which explains how they survived the French Revolution!). English spelling is so inconsistent, if you were to make up strict pronunciation rules, adhering to them would require a completely new vocabulary and you might as well switch to Hangul (which would admittedly be pretty dope).

What’s wrong with je mange, il mange, ils mange‽

Nothing in theory, but my native ass recoiled in horror at "ils mange". I know it's literally equivalent and I shouldn't care, but French is culturally very attached to its written form, even moreso than English (the reasons why being outlined at the end of my comment).

But yeah, I thought that apart from the passé simple my examples were pretty standard. Is that not so?

In the written form, yes. In the oral form, it depends. Futur proche has evolved to be used quite generally.

• Je mangerai: Can be rather formal? Not unusual but I'm more likely to say "ce soir je vais (j'vais) manger une salade" than "ce soir je mangerai une salade". Or in an email I will say "je verrai ça avec X" but on the phone I'll say "je vais voir ça avec X". I think the comparison to will vs going to is adequate, the main difference is that going to uses too many syllables; I'd say futur proche has the ease-of-use of "gonna" but the somewhat formal connotation of "going to".
• Je mangerais / ils mangeraient / vous mangerez: Basically the same thing but with "j'aurais mangé / ils auraient mangé / vous allez manger" as the thing I'd be most likely to say orally.

French conjugation is incredibly complex by any standard, and especially compared to English. There are tenses (e.g. imparfait du subjonctif) that are so archaic they're a complete meme and they shouldn't be used even in the most formal literary setting.
Sarkozy (well-known for being a feisty classist right-wing money-laundering asshole) using it as an obvious flex made the news at the time and everyone made fun of him. To this day I'm not even sure if he actually conjugated that correctly (and neither are the people in the comments lmao). That video is absolute gold, the eyebrow raise he does as if to say "and there" tells you everything you need to know about his character.

That is fun! My favourite fun French dialect fact is about septante, nonante, and huitante/octante being used in Swiss French and maybe Belgian and non-Quebec Canadian French instead of soixante-dix, quatre-vingt-dix, and quatre-vingt. I’m not sure of the history there, but I like it.

The Celts! No, seriously. They used a vigidecimal (base 20) system and since they counted in "twenties", "four twenties" is an artifact of that. So are 'single digit' numbers up to 20 (quatorze/quinze/etc). In that way "Quatre-ving-quatorze" is arguably correct base-20, but "quatre-ving-dix-huit" is not (because there is no dedicated number for 18 anymore so the whole thing is clunky, but "quatre-ving huitorze" would be fine conceptually).
I wonder if the germanic "eleven/twelve" is related or if it's an equivalent but unrelated evolution for counting scores.

Regarding the history of the language and its lack of reform, I am not a specialist but this guy and his colleagues are (if you're willing to go through half an hour of French with admittedly very good auto-generated English captions). But generally the idea is that the Académie and the system which created it have worked together since the early 19th century (which not uncoincidentally had the last major reform of the French language) to turn language into a very strong marker of social status. Like, very.

French people (and esp. Parisians) have a reputation for being assholes who will get mad at foreigners for mispronouncing words or using the wrong grammatical gender. That's asshole behavior but there are assholes everywhere, so why the French in particular? Because the French are taught from the age of 5 that their mastery of the French language (both written and spoken) will be the main thing for which they will be judged in life. As the middle class rose in the 19th/early 20th century, they got access to more/longer education where grammar/spelling was very heavily emphasized. Proper grammar/spelling then became a huge indicator of a good education and predictor of social mobility.
This fundamentally classist idea persisted well beyond the industrial revolution and it remains a very big talking point. "Young people can't write anymore" is probably the most common/recurring moral panic, and the idea that children age 6-12 should do mandatory daily (!!) graded spelling bees again is a regular conservative talking point because that's how they grew up (and it's still the policy with more... catholic-conservative teachers, I had some of those).
We don't usually even have spelling bee competitions (in all my schooling there was only ever one that I knew of), because stellar spelling is the expectation, not the over-achievement.
I'm sure that happens to a lesser degrees for English speakers, but now consider how much harder French is to write. I hope I got across how incredibly neurotic the French are over these matters.

Silent letters make boys grow into men! Or something. You can know how to pronounce those if you read them, but you definitely can't know how to write those if you hear them.

Thankfully informal French gets rid of a few of the examples you gave by always using the composed form. Je mange, j'ai mangé, je vais manger, ils auraient mangé. All the tenses you actually need (don't mind the irregular forms of être/avoir). And we still fuck up and write mangé and manger interchangeably anyways.

Fun socio-linguistic fact: Mangerai and mangerais are distinct in Belgian (and I think Swiss?) French (é vs è ending) but not in France French (è in either case). There are a few other archaisms like this such as the Belgian/Swiss distinction between the pronunciation of "brun" and "brin" that the French don't make either.

French is definitely way more complex than English grammatically which is comparatively dead simple. Although things get deceptively hard at more advanced levels (get up/to/at/through/off all mean wildly different things for instance and that's just crazy).

Where learning English actually gets tricky is the unpredictable pronunciation with zero rules. Through/Thorough/Thought/Cough/Geoff? Read/read? French has some exceptions when it comes to pronunciation but mostly follows a standard (albeit complex) set of rules that lets a native speaker approach an unknown new word with relative confidence. When I learned how y'all pronounce "Hermione" my eyes just about popped out of their sockets, why tf does "ione" have as many syllables as "secretary"?

• Greenfield (new) nuclear's LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables' intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven't seen a study on that).
• Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
  Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It's not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn't care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).

The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn't is that much more damning.

I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.

Beta road signs: Unreadable if you don't speak English, take a while to process, do not stand out

Chad Vienna convention signs:

En France, Au Canada, À New-York, Aux Seychelles, À Cuba.

Don't try to find a logic, there literally is none and anyone who tells you otherwise is just retrofitting rules to chaotic data and will inevitably have a list of exceptions longer than a French politician's criminal record. Half of it is literally just "what was grammatically fashionable at the time this toponym was discovered/imported/created".

This does not excuse English's abuse of prepositions though. Why do I get on the bus but in the car? Why, English?

I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.

Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.

I remember when "new" Wikipedia came out with big press I was confused because it had already been in use on the French wiki for months.

My guess is as the biggest wiki, the English wiki is naturally more conservative on the rollout of new features.

I mean, bad programming sucks regardless of the "paradigm" (and vice-versa, mostly). But as someone whose job it often is to sift through production logs hunting for an issue in someone else's component, at least I have a chance with OOP, because its behavior is normally predictable at compile time. So with the source and the backtrace I can pretty reasonably map the code path, even if the spaghetti is 300 calls deep.

Now where shit really hits the fan is OOP with dependency injection. Now I'm back to square 1 grepping through 15 libraries because my LSP has no idea where the member comes from. Ugh.

Anyone who praises FP is either a student, works primarily in academia, or otherwise never had to look at a deep stack trace in their life.

Every time a production system spits out a backtrace that's just 15 event loop calls into a random callback, I lose 6 months life expectancy. Then I go look at the source, and the "go to definition" of my LSP never works because WHY WOULD IT, IT'S ALL FUNCTIONAL hapi.register CALLS

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it. I support UBI because the people pushing functional programming in real production systems should be reassigned to gardening duties.

Another long term goal of the EU is to promote peace and democracy across Europe.

Allowing Orbàn to further democratic backsliding at home and undermining of the EU's democratic processes and missions goes contrary to that goal, and the usual withholding of EU funding isn't a sentence at all to a quasi-dictator who revels in the fact that reduced funding means more social misery means easy elections for a populist who blames every problem on the EU.

Kicking out Hungary is a solution of last resort and we aren't there yet, but in a system where Member States could turn totalitarian (and as Sovereign states we have no legal means to force out a dictator), exclusion must be on the table if we are to uphold our democratic values.

Comparing Cloudflare to insurance companies is not how you'll convince me they're not acting like jerks lol

You don't need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.

This is why in remote areas your phone may say "Emergency Calls Only". Your carrier isn't available, but someone else's is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.

Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn't a huge leap. But it's a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.

IIRC Joanne stated in interviews that she intentionally made the game beyond uselessly broken on purpose, to spite football fans or whatever. She is, very fundamentally to her person, a spiteful bitch.

Further proof to the stupidity of this: in the recent video game, ya can't even play quidditch. The feature doesn't exist, because the game would be literally unplayable.

Many of those boomers retired comfortably without ever learning the slightest bit of computer literacy. Even now, plenty of jobs require little-to-none.

Furthermore, we are in the "dotcom bubble" stage of "AI". The people least knowledgeable about it are the ones throwing billions of dollars at whoever claims to "use AI" for literally anything. We are on, (or maybe for those of us who are paying attention, right after), the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

Remember when 5-ish years ago all anyone would talk about in the tech space is how being a truck driver would be an obsolete job in the near future? I remember.