Posts by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
(DIR) Post #Aq0DCgUGki44hEeRt2 by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-01-12T09:59:55Z
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@mike Yeah, I'm surprised at how little of a problem they are here. It isn't _zero_, but still far, far better.
(DIR) Post #Aq2GRSZZSNLM40mvo0 by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-01-13T09:42:53Z
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@llewelly @futurebird Why do we still have to kill creatures just to know that they exist?
(DIR) Post #Aq4NKh7M4JjB8sEPMO by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-01-14T10:12:12Z
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@futurebird I feel like there's a Kevin and Kell strip here just waiting to be written (if it hasn't been done already).
(DIR) Post #Aq6XIshHQvLqKkjGPw by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-01-15T11:13:20Z
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@futurebird While not typical in English, using the singular for a generic statement would not be odd cross-linguistically. I unfortunately don't have anything like actual typological statistics at my fingertips though.
(DIR) Post #Aq6XnLxvB84bnO2j7A by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-01-15T11:18:49Z
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@futurebird (Plural marking after an explicit number word is also not a given even in languages with a grammatical plural. E.g. Hungarian uses singular nouns with explicit numbers; the plural would be incorrect.)
(DIR) Post #Aqg4d9RB052h434EUq by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-02-01T14:41:38Z
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@futurebird @ineiti Also plausible deniability for anyone who might get harassed over being trans.IMO there's also value in having a few users who _don't_ have pronouns in their bio, so that closeted or questioning people can keep quiet without having to actively misgender themselves, but the people doing it should be a majority or a very significant subset at least.
(DIR) Post #ArH6trPJePZ5DRGZfs by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-02-19T11:31:25Z
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@futurebird You would probably want to do two experiments, one where they draw the keyboard and another where they just label all of the keys on a blank keyboard wireframe drawing (largely to correct for people who just can't draw). But yeah.
(DIR) Post #ArNd6V56KgOhDddq7c by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-02-22T14:47:08Z
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@david_chisnall @futurebird You've read "The Road Not Taken", right?(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story) for anyone who hasn't.)
(DIR) Post #As5VjohyUOukCTshwe by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-03-15T19:05:17Z
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@futurebird ...5?
(DIR) Post #AujP69Ewbxt1ck8NjU by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-06-02T20:43:30Z
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@futurebird There is a species like that in @Jenthulhu's Fluency series IIRC. They're presented as an antagonist, but there's no reason the idea has to be limited to that.
(DIR) Post #Ax8DxEuVzuvcYWz5Ci by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-08-13T15:42:07Z
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My (native speaking) Finnish partner says they were told as a kid that if there are ants in a place, there won't be vipers. Because apparently ants eat vipers.(@futurebird, any comments?)
(DIR) Post #AzMdlvWI6zvXV0s2Jk by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-10-19T10:30:07Z
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@futurebird Idk, an "MTF unit" sounds like a decent alternative to blockers, hormones, and surgery.
(DIR) Post #AzhRUaKQcq0equbBOi by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-10-29T11:21:28Z
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@futurebird Just represent adding and subjacting one as base-level unary operators and let zero be the sole numeric value. Optionally let the language be lazy so that rounding issues can be postponed until the last possible moment.
(DIR) Post #Azpmq4TpN0NqkVlG2C by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-11-02T11:58:21Z
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@futurebird Honestly I'm surprised that you're willing to say "without knowing what they are". We know a lot about what ants do, but what do we actually know about what they _know_?
(DIR) Post #B1Cw8sJMKAz1Hy73Jo by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-12-13T13:53:03Z
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@futurebird Whenever I see something like this, I feel obligated to bring up the scene in Iain M. Banks's _The Player of Games_, where an enemy general — after promising not to destroy even a single character of an occupied world's treasured library — renders it unusable by sorting all of the characters and/or bytes of binary date, creating pages of A's and images of a nearly contant hue.
(DIR) Post #B1GyJp0hujtemGZlFw by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-12-15T12:36:17Z
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@futurebird If the students have school email addresses, it's hard to imagine an intranet social network creating additional legal implications.(And besides, if more than one school did it, they could pool resources to get an actual lawyer to look at what they were doing and ensure compliance with relevent liability standards.)
(DIR) Post #B1Iz6UKRz7zZ8lw6pk by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2025-12-16T11:54:31Z
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@futurebird One thing that Ada Palmer likes to point out is that the "Liberal Arts" are called that, not because the arts themselves are liberal, but because they constitute knowledge worthy of a free person (or perhaps knowledge that a free person needs to have, I don't remember exactly which one).Understanding how the digital devices that are now omnipresent in our lives work is definitely part of that, even if the knowledge imparted on non-techy people is relatively shallow.
(DIR) Post #B1ryo72QuM0Ih66C24 by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2026-01-02T09:06:04Z
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@futurebird @SnoopJ This is what I assumed as well. It may also just be an art project or an inexperienced amateur bicycle hobbyist's work, though.
(DIR) Post #B24bzlB0v9pTWqUaxM by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2026-01-08T11:21:40Z
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@futurebird Find examples of words transcribed by people speaking roughly the same variety of English as you do, and match symbol to sound. That will get you the basics quickly.
(DIR) Post #B24eqUiB4HoZifHIMS by kechpaja@social.kechpaja.com
2026-01-08T11:53:40Z
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@futurebird I don't know how much this has actually influenced the pronunciation of the word, but it's possible that the truncated form _bot_ — always pronounced with an unreduced vowel — has influenced how people pronounce the original long form.(No American is ever going to produce anything like the original Czech pronunciation without extensive practice, though, of course.)