merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 days ago:
Just a little.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 3 days ago:
English has a rote greeting in “How are you doing?” But, you can respond with anything from “great!” to “oh, okay”. It would be a big faux pas to take that as an opportunity to launch into all your medical issues. Maybe in Chinese it’s ok to respond honestly, but just not to assume someone is actually asking you if you want to eat something.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
IMO, English Canadians don’t really have a food that they can call their own. Quebec has poutine, tourtieres, pea soup, and other things. English Canada eats many of those things, but also a lot of generic North American or European things: hamburgers, steaks, North-American style pizza, pasta, stew, etc.
Where I think Canada might be a bit different is that after decades of high levels of immigration, Canada has a lot of foods from other parts of the world. It’s common to find South Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, Turkish, Persian, Carribean, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Mexican, etc. restaurants in a city. Many of them cater to immigrants from those countries, so they’re authentic tasting.
A lot of that is made at home too. While a home-made stir fry probably wouldn’t taste authentically Chinese to someone from China, there are many meals from around the world that have been adapted for Canadian tastes. Very white people in Canada often cook adapted versions of Indian curries, Chinese stir fries, Mexican tacos, Thai curries, etc.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
How do you know people don’t like spicy food? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
And what’s the correct formulaic response to that?
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
That’s a great video.
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
German bread and beer is good. The only problem is that they have extremely narrow definitions of what makes good beer and bread. For example, the Reinheitsgebot law means that most German beer tastes the same. It’s not that it tastes bad, but the number of varieties is lower as a result. Similarly, with bread, Germans like a very specific style of bread. Sometimes they put seeds on it. But you have to search to find naan, corn bread, challah, roti, milk bread, injera, etc.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 5 days ago:
I also think it’s hard to imagine that something that bad would happen to someone if they didn’t really do something wrong. It seems like an online death penalty punishment, and you’d think that for that they’d really have to have proof that you were doing something horrible. It’s hard to believe that they just make mistakes, and that having a human being review these cases costs them a few dollars, so they just let people’s lives get ruined to increase their profits by 0.000001%
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 5 days ago:
Apple, like Microsoft, Google, and others has a real web of dependencies for all its software. Even if he did back up all his important data, unless it was in an open format with open metadata it probably still requires an Apple program to open, which will require his Apple ID to be working. And every one of these big monopolists makes it really hard to fully export your data and metadata in a useful, unencumbered format because keeping people locked into their ecosystem is part of their business plan.
We’re all doing the best we can to live in unregulatedcapitalismland while staying sane, keeping our data backed up, eating healthily, getting enough sleep, getting exercise, spending enough time with friends and family, and so on. Things eventually slip.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 5 days ago:
It’s their fault for being born into a world where antitrust laws stopped being enforced a quarter of a century ago. They should do better.
- Comment on An Apple fan says they lost '20 years of digital life' after using an Apple gift card 5 days ago:
How many cases like this aren’t making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.
- Comment on Actual theft 1 week ago:
Did people care enough about the Best Buy commercial for this to be on Gamestop’s radar? Did she have a fan club or something? She’s fairly attractive, but not in a memorable way. It seems like good casting in the sense that she looks like she might be someone who works a retail job.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 week ago:
I never signed up, mainly because there was never any need to sign up. You could just go there, paste an image, and get a link to it.
Why would you sign up? It would be like signing up to use a URL shortener.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 1 week ago:
It still surprises me that people use Imgur as a social media site. Imgur to me is a place that hosts image to be used on other social media sites. Using imgur as a social media site is like using a url shortener as a social media site. What’s next, Captcha becomes a social media hangout?
- Comment on Expand North! So much room up there. 1 week ago:
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 1 week ago:
I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.
The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 1 week ago:
One reason why there are so many nonsense lawsuits in the US is that unlike Europe and the UK, it’s unusual that the loser has to pay the winner’s costs. In Europe that’s standard. As a result, an American person or group is much more likely to sue, because if they lose all it costs them is their own legal fees. AFAIK they also do the reasonable thing and cap fees so that if someone sues a rich multinational corp and loses, they’re not out millions of dollars because the multinational hired a huge, expensive team to defend themselves.
Justice would really be a world where these nonsense lawsuits didn’t happen at all.
- Comment on Pedo planet 2 weeks ago:
Languages evolve in weird ways. Pedophile comes from “pedo” child and “phile” for love. It could just be a mother or father, someone who loves children. But, it has been used to describe people who love children, but in the wrong way. Similarly, homophobe has been used for people who hate gays, but the “phobe” part is about fear not hate. Also, “homo” isn’t necessarily homosexual, it could be homogeniety. Homophobes could be people who are afraid of people of their own race, but instead we’ve decided it’s the term to use for people who hate or are angry at homosexuality.
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 2 weeks ago:
I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 2 weeks ago:
Web services, and then various components of an email system.
- Comment on Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days 2 weeks ago:
I’m using automated renewals.
But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 weeks ago:
Sometimes, sometimes not. Many 401(k)s have restrictions not that “you can’t invest in X”, just “you must choose from the things offered by this account”.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 weeks ago:
He got a job making $100k a year
$100k per year writing code at a defence contractor isn’t very much.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 2 weeks ago:
A good example of how you can do amazing things with steam is looking at the very last of the steam locomotives. Before they switched to diesel or electric, the steam locomotives were engineering masterpieces. Yes, you still got the classic steam locomotive puffs of steam coming out of the locomotive, but they only let the steam go once they had extracted the maximum possible energy from it.
Here’s a good video going over the whole design.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen
People have come up with ideas since forever. I’m sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was “Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!” The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don’t think there’s a hierarchy.
Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
My neighbors, friends, family, all of us
That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]
That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.
Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.
- Comment on Waiting for Capitalism to collapse, so we can get this over with so we can reverse climate change and have nice memes, technology and the good end 3 weeks ago:
If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.
- Comment on Existential cowposting 3 weeks ago:
The problem is that they’re not doing anything illegal.
The bigger problem is that they have the power to keep anybody from passing new laws that would make what they’re doing illegal.
