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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I think “a slice of bread” is a lot more common than “a bread slice”. Not to say I haven’t ever heard “a bread slice” used. I’m sure I have at least a few times. It would be pretty rare, however.

    Though, I’m not sure “a pizza slice” is all that much more common. Maybe there are regions where it’s very common? Or maybe it’s more common in certain contexts? Like maybe sell-by-the-slice pizza places might tend to refer to “a pizza slice” rather than “a slice of pizza” when talking with coworkers? (That said, I’d imagine they’d just shorten it further to “a slice” since the “pizza” part would tend to be obvious in that case.)

    Also, @[email protected] mentioned “water bottle”. I think if I hear “a water bottle” rather than “a bottle of water”, I’m probably going to assume it may or may not be an empty bottle intended for water rather than a bottle filled with water as “a bottle of water” would imply.

    Way off the topic of programming, but linguistics is fascinating too!


  • The Go programming language documentation makes a big deal about how it “reads from left to right.” Like, if you were describing the program in English, the elements of the Go program go in the same order as they would in English.

    I say this as someone who likes Go as a language and writes more of it than any other language: I honestly don’t entirely follow. One example they give is how you specify a type that’s a “slice” (think “list” or “array” or whatever from other languages) of some other type. For instance a “slice of strings” would be written []string. The [] on the left means it’s a slice type. And string on the right specifies what it’s a slice of.

    But does it really make less sense to say “a string slice”?

    In Go, the type always comes after the variable name. A declaration might look like:

    var a string
    

    Similarly in function declarations:

    func bob(a string, b int, c float64) []string { ... }
    

    Anyway, I guess all that to say I don’t mind the Go style, but I don’t fully understand the point of it being the way it is, and wouldn’t mind if it was the other way around either.

    Edit: Oh, I might add that my brain will never use the term “a slice of bytes” for []byte. That will forever be “a byte slice” to me. I simply have no choice in the matter. Somehow my brain is much more ok with “a slice of strings”, though.



  • My company recently announced to the whole IT department that they’re contracting with Google to get Gemini for writing code and stuff. They had someone from Google even give a presentation rife with all kinds of propaganda about how much Gemini will “help” us write code. Demoed the IntelliJ integration and everything. I wouldn’t say we were “asked” to use it, but we were definitely “encouraged” to." But since then, there’s been no information on how actually to use our company-provided Gemini license/integration/whatever. So I don’t think anyone’s using it yet.

    I’d love to tell everyone on my team not to use it, and I am kindof “in charge” of my team a bit. But it’s not like there aren’t many (too many) levels of management above me. And it’s clear they wouldn’t have my back if I put my foot down about that. So I’ve told my team not to commit any code unless they understand it as well as they would had they written it themselves. I figure that’s sufficiently noncommittal that the pro-Gemini upper management won’t have a problem with it while also (assuming anyone on my team heeds it) minimizing the damage.



  • Yeah, maybe they were just more “sneaky” about keeping me from getting into Pokemon. I didn’t have cable, and nobody broadcast the Pokemon anime in my area. I was dissuaded from the card game because it was a money sink. (After Pogs, they didn’t want me participating in any other collectable stuff. They liked to pretend I had a “problem” or something with Pogs.) I don’t really know why I never had any of the video games. It’s likely my parents engineered that behind the scenes or something.

    Of course, my whole peer group was obsessed with Pokemon. And I was unable to participate in that. Really made me an outsider. So when my local Fox affiliate started carrying Digimon from episode 1, it was kindof my opportunity to have something over which to actually finally connect with my peer group in a way I couldn’t before.

    But my mother, who had a habit of not showing her face until at least noon most days, happened to get up that one Saturday morning for some reason and found me in the middle of an episode of Digimon. She never made a “thing” about Pokemon. I had no way to know before right then that watching the Digimon anime was something “against the rules.” But she flipped her shit about Digimon that day. I guess she didn’t realize I was watching it until that day, or maybe it was seeing the art style that tipped her off or something. Who knows.

    I should also mention that was far from the first thing that was banned for similarly bad and fundamentalist Christian reasons. Just a few others that I remember:

    • The Mighty Max animated series
    • He-Man (“there’s only one ‘master of the universe’”)
    • A great Sega Genesis dungeon crawler game called “Shining in the Darkness”
    • All anime. (Digimon was kindof the first time she realized that “satanic Japanese brainwashing shit” was getting into our house, I guess)
    • Popular secular music





  • Where’s this “notification feature”? I’m more interested in community notifications than user, post, or comment notifications. But I’m looking at the community page and at my settings section and I’m not seeing anything about community notification settings. I can join/leave a community, of course, but it sounds like that’s not what you’re talking about. (I’m looking at Lemmy-UI at the moment. I use Jerboa on my phone, but it’s honestly a little limited in a few ways, so I’d be surprised to find those settings in Jerboa.) Are you talking about the “send notifications to email” feature?


  • I’m not sure it’s really possible to make votes private (at least not without sacrificing some functionality we have now.) Right now, instance admins can see vote information while non-admjns can’t, which I do think is a bad thing. It does create a privileged class with additional information that ordinary users don’t get. If there was a way to make votes private, I’d probably be ok with that, but again I’m not sure that’s possible. (Instances have to be able to prevent double-/triple-/etc voting on a single post/comment by a single user. Maybe there’s some cryptographic blind-signature wizardry that could be used to accomplish that while denying instance runners access to the information. I want to say I might have even come up with such an approach in a previous post and I might look back through my history for it, but it might also involve some concessions functionality-wise.) If that information has to be open to some, though, I think it should be open to all.

    Aside from that, I like the upvote/downvote system as it is. It’s simple works nicely. I honestly use “new”/“all” sort (excluding the communities I’ve blocked) nearly exclusively, so I don’t have all that much invested in the “hot” sorting option that is the default probably on most Lemmy instances. But I like not having an algorithm (even one as good and fair as Lemmy’s) curating my content for me.

    Oh! On the sorting front, though, I’d love to have a “boost” option for specific communities. Like “hey Lemmy, no matter what sort I use, make sure any post that was made to [email protected] in the last 48 hours always appears right at the top of my feed.” Like, new/all (excluding blocks) is great, but there are communities I don’t want to miss even a single post in ever and it’d be awesome to have that.

    Actually, now that I think of it, I could just only subscribe to those “don’t want to miss a single post” communities and check new/subscribed before I start doomscrolling new/all.


  • I’ll try to say this delicately enough to not get banned…

    The modlog (which also contains the full text of my post) cites as the reason for the removal of my post “rule 1” which according to the sidebar is “Be civil and nice.”

    I think they consider any criticism of the government of Iran to be “incivility” and/or “meanness”.

    (Hopefully I’m not misinterpreting the mods here. Mods, please feel free to step in and correct any such misrepresentation.)



  • I gave you an upvote.

    I could see a case for using “working person” instead of “worker.” It’s definitely not the sort of thing that’s agreed to be exploitative language (yet?) though.

    What I do for sure bristle at a lot more is referring to people as “resources.” Like, when planning a project, discussing how many “resources” can be “put on the project”. Definitely feels dehumanizing.