ryan

Maybe if you remembered to put Jupiter back where it belonged after you were done with it, it wouldn’t be lost now, hmm?

Calorie counting through MyFitnessPal. I am unable to accurately gauge how many calories I’m consuming just by eyeballing it, and this is especially difficult given my TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is about 1350 calories. (I’m short.) The only way I’ve been able to manage my weight is by turning it into concrete understandable numbers.

I have a 3,312 day streak of calorie counting now. It’s the one habit I’ve managed to keep up, and while my weight has gone up and down I’ve kept track of it all. At my starting point, I weighed 150lb (obese by BMI), and I’m currently down to 118 (high end of normal by BMI).

Some of my earliest memories are watching The Next Generation with my parents. I never stood a chance! I was always destined to be 🤓

Real answer: these are actually real languages! They’re just conlangs, or constructed languages, instead of natural languages. The major problem with conlangs generally ends up being the limited vocabulary, but the grammar foundations are usually solid.

I actually really like Klingon as a language because it was intentionally designed to be alien, and specifically to be very Klingon. Most languages are Subject-Verb-Object (like English and other Western languages) or Subject-Object-Verb (like Japanese or Hindi). Klingon, however, is Object-Verb-Subject - it’s very direct with the emphasis placed on the target of the sentence, which makes sense with the Star Trek world and Klingon culture.

Fun fact, Klingon has at least one native speaker - some guy raised his daughter to speak Klingon as well as English. (I’m not a fan of this - on one hand, learning multiple languages from an early age is a huge leg up in being able to learn more languages in the future, but on the other hand Klingon is entirely useless as a primary language given its structure and the few other people who speak it.)

• you <3
• caffeine
• caffeine
• if I don’t get my coffee I will either die or kill

There is a Light Gary on your right shoulder and a Dark Gary on your left. They don’t provide any great moral advice, but damn do they love to argue about the best hiking trails.

Self-reply: looks like Clozemaster Pro now has a ChatGPT-enabled “Explain” feature which is extremely helpful and breaks down the sentences. You can do this on your own with ChatGPT of course, copying sentences in and asking (I have done this), but it’s nice to have the option embedded in.

Which language are you trying to learn? There are different answers depending on that.

As someone learning Hindi, I’ve found that Duolingo is wholly insufficient in grammar and vocabulary (the entire course is far too short) and did not concentrate on listening comprehension. I’ve started using a combination of the following:

• Clozemaster for vocabulary in context of (sometimes pretty wild) sentences. (I’ve got a lifetime subscription to Clozemaster, it goes on sale during holidays.) Clozemaster has grouped “common words” and a combination of reading/listening skill and multiple choice / vocab word transcription / entire sentence transcription. It feels very overwhelming at first as you’re just thrown in but keep at it - start with reading and multiple choice and once you know the words and sentences in your grouped section start typing them out via listening.
• A combination of textbooks and websites to explain certain grammatical concepts.
• A listening-based podcast, example Innovative Language, for listening comprehension. (This also goes on sale regularly.)

It’s amazing how something so innocuous can provoke such a viscerally disgusted reaction in me.

Technology was a mistake. It’s time to return to the wilderness.

I’m not great at this sort of stuff, but if Sign is meant to be a third party website that other websites authenticate your identity against, given by step 1:

Initial Step: Visit the ‘Sign’ website and input your email to start the process.

Could this also be likened to a less secure OAuth?

LaTeX resume templates exist if you wanna get extremely fancy with it. Otherwise, any text editing document that allows some basic level of formatting and headers will do the trick. If I get sent an extremely beautiful and well-formatted resume to read, it’s a “good attention to detail” footnote in my mind but ultimately the actual content is much more important.

Since we’re on the subject of resumes though, an open message to anyone who might be reading… Don’t have an LLM help you write your resume. It’s extremely obvious and makes your resume worse because it gets real generic and wordy with it. I’ve seen them, I’ve not been impressed by them, it makes me think this person may not actually be able to write coherently on their own.

And remember, a resume is a personal advertisement for you - make it punchy, and keep to bullet points highlighting impressive things you want a recruiter and hiring manager to know. Include buzzwords as pulled directly from the job posting to get through automated screening. Highlight projects you’ve done and what positive effect they had on the intended audience.

Oh, you “know”, eh? Sounds like we got a scientist over here, boys! Let’s get him!

(But seriously: I added that bit because I went and looked it up myself based on your post, and I thought it was interesting and other readers might also find it neat. One of those TIL things.)

Somewhat unrelated, but I do find it funny that farts aren’t considered acceptable, but sneezes and coughs are. Like, farts have an extra barrier in the form of your clothing (assuming you’re not at a nudist colony or bathhouse) and won’t make other people sick. I guess it’s just because they’re stinky.

I vote to normalize farting with an “excuse me”, and saying “bless you” to people when they fart.

Devil’s Tower is apparently not even a volcano according to science, but “but was injected between sedimentary rock layers and cooled underground. The characteristic furrowed columns are the result of contraction which occurred during the cooling of the magma.” source

Anyway, science can be wrong, assume everything is a volcano until proven otherwise. Devil’s Tower? Volcano. The hill outside your house? Volcano. Your dog? Believe it or not, volcano.

“client side validation is fine, nobody’s gonna open up the dev console”

While I get what you’re saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, “what people say” is only half the story, and “how they say it” (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.

When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. “… he said, cheerfully”; “… he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice”; “she said, while averting her eyes”.

In first person communications like social media, we don’t really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷‍♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit’s usage of “/s” to indicate sarcasm.

We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like “while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above.” (This might be an example of “overly eloquent” and there is probably a happy medium.)

I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can’t tell!

Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.

The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your “outbox” messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.

Is it actually a Mandela Effect if you’ve just forgotten what a guy’s name is? I always thought it was more about mass confabulations.

Hey now, that dumpster deserves love as much as the rest of us.

I feel like the Fediverse hasn’t yet reached the Eternal September moment, and I’m happy for that. A smaller footprint means we get to have our own culture.

On the other hand, even though it means losing this culture, I would like to see greater general adoption of the fediverse and decentralized social media in general. Sure, there will likely be some big-name domains serving fediverse instances, the same way email is primarily served by Gmail et al, but anyone should be able to spin up their own instance and interact as well. I don’t believe Internet communication should be locked behind various walled gardens, and people should re-acclimatize themselves to a version of the Internet where anyone can host and contribute.