I had the exact same experience when starting a new job. The team had very strict rules that absolutely could not be broken. When I finally asked an architect he said the same thing: it’s just a general guideline, but of course if it makes more sense to deviate, then by all means.

They fostered this culture because they mostly had junior programmers, but they never evolved beyond that because they were taught “good code” but never learned why it’s good code.

To me, what sets apart good coders from mediocre ones is one thing: understanding why we do things. Don’t just implement the thing because that’s the task. Understand why it’s required and your implementation will be better. Don’t blindly follow best practices. Understand why they are best practices and when they apply. Understand what’s going on rather than just do what you’re told (but probably also do what you’re told if you want to keep your job).

I know people who have been at it for many years and they don’t understand why we do things this or that way, they just know that’s how we should do it.

What do you intend to take macro photos of? I have the canon EF 100 f/2.8 and it’s pretty versatile, not to mention a pretty good choice for portraits (although on a crop sensor you do get a bit far away). For macro a little distance is good so you don’t block the light or, if that’s your deal, scare off the insects.

Lemmy is kinda rat related, so the feature of collecting multiple communities together, say, by tying their tails together, could be described as rat kings.

“Resynthesizer is a Gimp plug-in for texture synthesis. Given a sample of a texture, it can create more of that texture. This has a surprising number of uses: Creating more of a texture. (including creation of tileable textures)”

In case you, like I, didn’t know.

Genius, why didn’t anyone else think of doing that? Absolutely brilliant, world class mind on that one!

Denmark has dba, den blå avis (used to be a news paper of sorts where you could trade). Owned by ebay. We also have a bunch of other services like Reshopper for everything baby related and gul og gratis which paradoxically is neither gul (yellow) nor gratis.

Citation Needed.

The Støvle Dance is from an old Danish Christmas show. My daughter just got super into it. https://youtu.be/Lhka0pjBzAQ?si=1PC_Yd00lU_x3zWk it is a mix of Danish and English.

Det jul det cool is an even older rap Christmas song about the commercialization of Christmas. They didn’t expect it to get any kind of traction so they just sampled some music without caring about the rights. It has been included in all Danish Christmas music collections since the 80ies. They don’t collect royalties, the band they sampled from do. https://youtu.be/FuyKWtF5aqU?si=C2wkvpaKIkvnoV2V

Or convince him he’s rich, I guess. He just pardoned a bunch of rich despicable people.

Silo - I like it, suspenseful mystery sci fi.

Pantheon - Saw first episode. Sci fi cartoon, looks interesting. It managed to keep me watching. :)

Skeleton crew - Star Wars for kids. Slightly ridiculous in that kids show way, but probably amazing for the target audience. Pretty interesting for me.

I think this is a much more useful strategy for convincing people to change. If someone like I did, mentions they aren’t happy about, for instance, pronouns, then people start lashing out. I might have had a conversation on this, but honestly the tone in some of the responses isn’t likely to convince me to listen. Even when I start out saying I’m going to end up on the losing side of this.

Language evolves because people force it to.

Sometimes, yes, often, no. New slang is naturally picked up and often makes it into the common vernacular, not because people are forcing other people to use it, but because people voluntarily start using. The same goes for loan words. The enter the language, and sometimes get mutated over time in that particular language. When “tablet” became popular someone tried to pick a Danish word for it, but it didn’t stick. Same goes for many other computer-related words, which ended up just being the English word.

But, if you choose not to respect the wishes of others, you will suffer consequences.

This is the aggressive attitude that immediately makes me reluctant to adhere to any special pronouns people may choose. I don’t know if you meant this as a lightly veiled threat, but people can become very aggressive if you “misgender” people.

The reason some languages have a gender binary is often because that society forced a gender binary on people to control them.

I haven’t heard this before, do you have some reading material I can explore?

Inventing entirely new pronouns is no more ridiculous than inventing yet another television show character or yet another tiktok dance craze or yet another romance novel or yet another $15/month subscription service that does the same things other service do or writing yet another magazine column.

I would tentatively agree, if not for the fact that “the consequences” you mentioned above for ignoring any of these things are that I don’t have to suffer them. The consequences for misgendering Elliot Page is ostracization, even if he isn’t in the conversation or likely to ever hear about any conversation I will ever have about him.

Where you put your effort shows you what you care about.

That is true. And I really don’t care that much about trans people. I want them to live a life without oppression with the same freedoms I have, but aside from that I care as much about them as do about the guy who lives in the apartment down the street, whom I’ve never met. And to that end, I think there are things that are reasonable to request from others in society, and I think there are things that are not. And changing the language for them I don’t find reasonable, just like I would ask anyone to change the language for me, and shame them if they didn’t. In the same vein, if people are so horrified about trans people using the wrong bathroom, just stop gendering them. To me, the only reason why we gender them anyway is because men take their bits out in front of everyone, so if we remove that part, they are virtually identical.

Pronouns. I get that they matter a lot to some people, and of course it’s super annoying (if not worse) to be referred to in the wrong way, but I find it unreasonable to demand being referred to something outside of the gender binary, simply because that’s the way language works.

I am aware that English has used “they” for a person of unknown gender for ages, but for one, I don’t think it’s something that you should demand people call you when they actually know your gender, but also I really hate that this is making its way into other languages like my own, that has never had this convention. Inventing entirely new pronouns is just ridiculous, I have a hard enough time to remember your name.

I am also aware that language evolves, but this is not evolution, it’s forced, and if one group of people can try to force a change they prefer, I’m as much in my right to resist it if I don’t like it.

People are super passionate about this though and in fifty years I’m sure I’ll be seen as a fossil for not getting with the times now - in fact I’m sure certain people see me like this now.

I don’t know, I think I’ve seen a frog it might look like more than Kermit…

People don’t care about federation. Or vendor lock-in.

I haven’t tried bluesky, but mastodon seems a little broken by design. I’d you go to a post you are always told that the host server may have more replies. Things like that make it seem immature and perhaps just a bad solution compared to a monolithic approach.

If you don’t like the instance (why wouldn’t I?) you can just move to a different one. Yes, and restart my network. It’s not really a good solution. I would like to exist on mastodon and just use some server. If I don’t like it, continue somewhere else.

Guys: Fascinate her with a wheel of cheese.

A salesman for the company forged sales orders. As soon as the company started billing the supposed customers he was discovered and asked to leave immediately. No severance (which you by law are entitled to), just leave, and we won’t file charges. I have no idea what possessed him to do something so stupid…

He’s good at talking to dictators!

In the 80’ies and 90’ies there was a mandatory sex scene in any action movie. I feel those kinda went away in the aughts. Now that we need at leas one major gay or bi or trans character in everything we have at least one scene of someone kissing someone of their own gender, often followed by cuddling.

So not only did they bring back sex or at least a big focus on people making out, but they’re doing it at a time when TVs have grown a LOT! Filling the frame with a kiss was sort of ok on a 24" screen, but having my 77" TV portray lips on lips, corner to corner is just not something I need for every single piece of modern media I’m trying to enjoy!