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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I'm an amateur writer. One of the worldbuilding things I wanted to explore for my fantasy/steampunk word was the fact that the life of vampires who originate from commoner class must really suck, pun very much intended. You'd end up as a "high functioning" undead who gets even the few rights you previously had stripped from you. Fertile ground for social commentary.

    So in this setting there's an autonomous vampire state that's essentially communist. In other nations, vampires are, if not persecuted outright, at least constantly struggling for recognition, and are exploited as night shift workers in the emerging industry.

    I wish I could find the urban fantasy story that inspired me to explore this. It was also based on the "hey, not all vampires live glorious lifestyles" premise. I think this was in some Humble Bundle.

  • GIMP didn't "just figure out non-destructive editing by 2025". You're talking as if it was something that the GIMP development team just decided to randomly add recently, after previously ignoring user demands.

    The foundation for that functionality (GEGL) has been in development for ages and was also used for some functionality in 2.6 for a long time. The reason why it took this long is that it's a pretty fundamental change to how the app works. Also, that meshed with other upcoming changes at the time. Also, small development team.

  • Well I do use Linux on various devices and on my Raspberry Pi, it's just that my laptop is Windows. No, don't throw rocks at me, I use WSL too.

    Also, I've somehow yet to post on Mastodon from Emacs. The existence of such Emacs addon didn't surprise me, because I've posted to identica and twitter from Emacs. You know, back in the day.

  • If I go to a prominent government building, and there's posters of people on row, my first thought would be that these are either candidates or the freshly elected officials.

    [looks closer and squints]

    Ah, being a foreigner I don't know much about the details of American politics, but these must be the "Senate", right? A drug lord here, a kiddy fiddler there.

  • Me, I'm old, so I just keep using apt-get, because that's all we had back in the day, and I never bothered to learn what's the big deal about apt. It's just a frontend, isn't it?

  • I think it wasn't even an OCR bug per se, it was a bug in the image compression algorithm implementation. "Yeah these squiggles on the paper look basically the same, guess we'll save space here."

    OCR would have at least been mitigated by the fact that you could see if the text didn't match the image. And since OCR isn't perfect anyway, you could even anticipate that. But if the image is screwed up, well, what do you do then?

  • These days both Twitter and Reddit have wacky UI messages written by completely different teams. One team is all business-like as in "Here's some stern warnings you're not going to like." The other team is all casual and wayyy too friendly and fellow-kidsy, like "Did someone say MEMES?" (to which most reasonable people respond "fuck you Elon/Spez, you're not funny")

  • I'm a random amateur fantasy writer. One day, long ago, I was working on an interactive fiction game which was billed as a dating sim where you get to have a night out with one of my characters, who is an alchemist.

    Bulk of the game was supposed to involve helping her examine various ingredients on the shelf of her shop and seeing which had gone bad. You know, dating the stuff can be crucial.

  • It's a single car company. World economy doesn't depend on Tesla's success. Not even the American economy. If Tesla dies, it's just a canary in the coalmine for much, much bigger economic problems. Like, you know, how they put dipshits in the White House, or something. So it's kind of interesting that Elon has a moment of lucidity here, because no one around him seems to realise how screwed they are.

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  • In the days of yore, Roman generals, upon conquering new lands for the Empire and receiving highest cheer and adulation from the crowds in Triump, would specifically assign a slave to whisper to their ear, at the height of the ceremony, "remember that you're but a mortal."

    Spez is like "fuck that nonsense. If I keep kissing enough asses at bigger tech companies, maybe I'll get a blood donor virgin dude of my own. And then I'll live forever!"

  • It has! At least on the web, if you view user profiles - but most of the time they're pretty useless because in the comments they're scaled down to text size. And the Lemmy clients don't bother with them at all. Communities do have icons which are at least more widely used and supported.

  • Mastodon is my go-to "shout in the void about my goings-on" platform.

    Pixelfed is where I post my original photography and artwork.

    Bookwyrm is for my book nerdery, mostly.

    Edit: Oh and I have a Matrix account but despite the fact that I mentioned it to literally all of my friends, nobody uses it. I keep it around in case someone actually wants to send me private messages because Mastodon is kinda badly suited for that.

  • Welcome to Lemmy. We don't have collectible avatars on blockchain. Sorry if you were into those. But you can make your own avatars if you want, which I think is even better!

  • train cars only for women

    Good thing nobody can actually suggest that in this day and age. Because that's a concept that makes everyone immediately go "Ooooh, how delightfully 1800s. Wait, why are we doing this, I thought we were better than that."

    ...If someone actually suggests that, have them be detained by a few chimney sweeps until the police arrives by horse carriage.

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  • I am definitely going to need my morning coffee. I see the word "Y'all" and I'm somehow thinking "shouldn't it be Xall if we're taking about X11? Wait what's wrong with my brain"

  • I'm already alone, and I'm just fine this way, thank you.

    Fortunately I don't live in Douchebaglandia.

  • "Showing up on time" is the lowest possible bar, isn't it?

    Recently I found an old school yearbook. My entry was written by someone who barely knew me. Said something about me showing up on time all the time. Now, I was like "holy shit that's cringe, I don't want that on my tombstone".

  • The bespoke software that runs most of the business world is actually way simpler than a lot of people think.

    If you're a university student and some company hires you on the first year to work on a business analysis system to be used by a major regional retailer, you might be thinking you must be some kind of a wunderkid, but it also just might be because this system really isn't that complicated, and you had no idea about the average salaries on this field, so they hired you on the cheap.

  • My immediate thought was that there's some inconsistency with various types of metadata. For example most software will pull the date from the Exif DateTimeOriginal field. But there's also XMP tags that have the same purpose. Or similar purpose. These standards have plenty of date fields for various uses, and while they serve a noble purpose, the software just craps all over them. (Don't ask which software. All of them.)

    My guess is that at some point of time, one of those tags got updated, but not the other tags of similar purpose. So the program you're using could be pulling the date from one field, and when you update it, you're actually changing some other field.

    Of course all of this is wild because usually no one needs to touch the datestamp anyway (unless you, like, have to correct daylight saving time or clock drift or something). Software changing this to a batch import time? That's weird and silly.

  • Native here. I think this is pretty accurate. Politeness is usually tied to other phrasings or modes of speaking, and as an ESL speaker I just think "please" is just a word that gets sprinkled in. In everyday conversations like buying something, it's kinda more polite to get the thing over with as fast as possible. If you just want a coffee, you don't need more than "hey" and "thanks" to be nice, right?

    That said, it's definitely not impossible to be explicitly polite: "Ole hyvä"/"Olkaa hyvä" ("[You] (2p. sg./pl.) be kind") is basically "please" as in "could you do..." or "here you go, have this" or "go ahead and do that" depending on context. "Ole kiltti" ("[You] (2p.sg.) be nice") is "please" as in "would you be especially kind to do..." But as you can see, these are basically direct orders, it's "be kind", not "please be kind".