palordrolap

What’s your opinion of the word “neologologist” and are you proposing that these “most linguists” are in fact described by it? And what do you think their opinion of it would be? ;p

I envy these linguists’ ability to either not be irked by grammar errors at all or to be able to deal with their irritation when errors arise.

I’m about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why.

Today I seem to have worded it in a way that’s rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some.

And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.

*whose

“who’s” is “who is”[1] or “who has”[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make “who” all or part of a name[3], but it’s the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased “which person’s”, which is mostly what “whose” means.

(An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I’m not as capable.)

[1]: e.g. “Who’s there?” [2]: e.g. “Who’s let the cat out again?” [3]: e.g. “This is you-know-who’s box of tricks.”

NPC.

Oh. I have do the quiz?

It gave me “Multiclass”.

There’s a joke about inheritance in there somewhere. And the fact that no-one will want whatever I leave behind.

Can I choose NPC now?

Greybeards are an increasingly rare commodity, it seems.

There’s an ancient UNIX copypasta that’s basically the plot of this comic, but it’s troublingly hard to find the original online.

Here’s one version I found: http://www.anvari.org/fun/Web_Tina/CREATION.html

I don’t remember “technocrat” being part of the original, but it wouldn’t be the first time my recollection has been wrong.

Imagine, if you will, the person who is wise to the effect on a floppy disk, but uses a CD instead (Or DVD). They use it a few times but then it too stops working. Why?

You had me concerned for a second, but “mists of time” shows up on Wiktionary (easier to be wrong), Merriam Webster’s site (likely to be right) or the Oxford English Dictionary (practically canonical), whereas “midst(s) of time” does not.

Collins Dictionary and Dictionary.com don’t list either, but the existence of the former in other places would seem to suggest that that’s the right one.

You should have seen it when the typos were still in it. Now try to figure out whether the parenthetical was there before the edits.

You like cursed?

Way back in the mists of time I got a 32MB (not a typo) upgrade for an 8MB computer. In total: 40MB.

Since I knew it ran fine with just the 8MB, I set up a RAM disk of 32MB and put the Windows swap file in it. Windows absolutely insisted (and maybe still does) that there be a swap file, so why not put that back in RAM?

It worked perfectly, but that memory was better used for other things, so the cursed setup didn’t last all that long.

Edits: Typo city baby.

I feel like proponents of that calendar might be better off giving all the months completely different names. It would avoid some of the potential confusion during the changeover. Sol could keep its name, I guess, but the rest, no.

On the other hand, that still wouldn’t disambiguate numeric YYYY-MM-DD and the like.

Due to the omission of the year number on the grid, it’s somewhat reusable too. 2037 is the next time all the dates and days of the week will match.

I figure they’re more likely related, in spirit and vocalisation if not etymologically, to the French phrase «et patati, et patata», translatable as “blah blah blah” or “yada yada yada”.

The venerable Jargon File has the French metasyntactic variables (i.e. the equivalents to foo and bar) as toto, titi, tata and tutu.

Or to take this in another direction: foo sounds like French “fou” which means “mad” (as in “insane”), so “coucou” might be an interesting alternative.

I assume they’re using (year - 2000) as the version number, which happens to match “last two digits” and will do until 2099. So any version of Minecraft released that year under the new system would be Minecraft 1002.x, not 2.x.

And here’s me thinking it was called Vintage Story.

Actually, Minecraft 26 comes out this year. They dropped the “1.” and bumped the sub-version from 21 to 26 to match the year. They’ve also changed the way the new second tier works to be related to the quarter-year.

26.1 is due next month.

So yeah, there’ll never be a Minecraft 2.0. The versioning no longer allows for it.

(This doesn’t rule out a game called “Minecraft II” with its own set of unrelated but identical version numbers. Minecraft II 36.1 drops in ten years. Maybe. But probably not.)

Ha. I’ve heard of Amazon offloading heavier parcels to municipal mail carriers, so I don’t see that working out.

The day they codify in law that public services should not make a profit, the lawsuits will begin. Those to reclassify all and sundry that we think of as public services as not being public services.

A necessity argument would result. Do people need electricity, gas and municipal water treatment? No. They can live off-grid. Therefore these are not public services.

Do people need public transport? No. They can walk or buy rent a car. Therefore public transport is not a public service.

Do people need police, fire, medical? No. Most people can go months, years without needing any of those. Therefore they can’t be public services either.

etc. etc.

I’m not saying I agree with any of that, but the expensive lawyers will be arguing these points and they’ll continue to argue them as long as there’s a profit to be made.