Lvxferre [he/him]

In addition to all of that, since your comment is spot on:

When people claim some variety is more conservative than another variety, they tend to cherry pick a lot. It’s easy, for example, to look at rhoticity and claim “American English” is more conservative, or to look at the cot/caught merge and claim British English is more conservative. But neither claim is accurate or meaningful; and when you try to look at the big picture, you notice changes everywhere.

To complicate it further, neither “British English” nor “American English” refer to any actual variety. Those are only umbrella terms; they boil down to “English, arbitrarily restricted to people who live in the territory controlled by that specific government”. And the actual varieties that they speak might keep or change completely different features.

Backstory of the spelling of that word:

Latin colōrem (accusative of color) gets inherited by Old French as color /ko’lor/.

Somewhere down the line Old French shifted /o/ to /u/. I believe this shift affected at first stressed vowels, or that the distinction between unstressed /o/ and /u/ was already not a big deal; so there was more pressure to respell the last (stressed) vowel than the first (unstressed) one. So the word gets spelled color, colour, colur.

Anglo-Norman inherited this mess, spelling it mostly as colur. Then Middle English borrows the word, as /ku.'lu:r/~/'ku.lur/. It’s oxytone in AN, but English has a tendency to shift the stress to the first vowel, creating the second pronunciation. Spelling as usual for those times is a mess:

• colur - spelled like in Anglo-Norman.
• color - swap the ⟨u⟩ with cosmetic ⟨o⟩. Scribes hated spelling ⟨u⟩ in certain situations, where it would lead to too many vertical lines in a row; that’s why you also got come, love, people instead of cume, luve, peuple.
• colour - mirroring an Old French spelling that was more common up south, around Paris.
• coloure - that ⟨e⟩ was likely never pronounced, I think it was there to force reading the previous vowel as long
• coler - probably from some /'ku.lur/ pronunciation already reducing the vowel to */'ku.lər/
• kolour - ⟨c⟩~⟨k⟩ mixing was somewhat common then. And no, KDE did not exist back then, they did no lobby to spell the word with a K for the sake of a program that would only appear centuries later (Kolourpaint).

Eventually as English spelling gets standardised, the word settles down as colour.

Then around 1800, Noah Webster treats this word as if it was directly borrowed from Latin. Since in Latin it’s color, he clipped the -u. And his dictionary was popular in USA, recreating the mess, even after it was already fixed.

D. cinnabari aka dragonblood tree:

D. trifasciata aka snake plant:

…the resulting hybrid would look nothing like a snake tree :(

*Caution* the sexy girl in my avatar may have fire.

Aren’t the named tribes a subset of native Americans, so it can be true without the original statement being false?

The original statement implies the technique was widespread across Native American groups. It’s almost certainly false for the ones here in South America; there’s a lot on terrace farming and slash-and-burn, but AFAIK nothing that resembles the companion system of the three sisters. (I wonder if it’s due to the prominence of subterranean crops. Taters, yucca, sweet potatoes.)

The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois and the Cherokee/Tsalagi being related hints me it was something they developed.

While “Iroquoian” is still used as a technical linguistic category

I’m guessing this won’t last for long, given some people already call the language family “Ogwehoweh” instead of “Iroquoian”. Example here.

Don’t speak please

How am I going to phrase requests then? sudo make me a sandwich style?

February 04, 2025

I wonder if they gave up, after seeing how poorly Copilot was received.

I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.

Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be

1. You got some experience with that distro and you’re willing to help the newbie in question, with issues that they might have.
2. The distro offers sane out-of-the-box defaults and pre-installed GUI software.
3. The distro is reliable, and won’t give the newbie headaches later on.

why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?

Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.

You don’t know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don’t know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.

Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma

I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It’s by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.

Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don’t know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that’ll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.

So, why don’t I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.

That’s circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.

Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS

Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.

Yes, there is. But it’s more like a bunch of tiny nature reserves in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, full of “BUY IT!” flashy signs. When the old web was more like an expansion of wilderness, you didn’t need to look for amateur stuff to find it.

(I agree Lemmy has that same vibe.)

still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.

I guess the tools are better but the passion is gone. The whole web was amateur back then; now it’s all… you know.

Nowadays this would be seen as insanity. (Back then, too.) Like, Flash wasn’t exactly the safest platform out there, specially not to handle money.

Snaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake! Snaaaaaaaaake!

We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives

And simple games, too. But yes, I agree with you; what people remember fondly isn’t Flash itself, it’s what it enabled.

Fuck. FUCK. I’m seeing it.

Ellesmere and nearby islands are Patrick’s head. Bob’s cig is Alaska. Baja California is the cape. That dick-shaped province in SE USA is the seahorse’s snout. Quebec is the seahorse’s “mane”.

The funny… if this stuff continues we’re going to need a new USA flag.

Indeed. It’s too cluttered, violating good design principles. For example, four stars would be enough. Of course, this means merging a few provinces here and there, but that’s easy. Also make sure to rename them, to fulfil Glorious Taco Hair’s ambitions.

Here’s my proposal.

This made me think on the potential roles the three outer planets* (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in the scheduler.

• Uranus: looking at things from a new angle. Innovation, intuition, ruptures with tradition. Higher octave of Mercury; so if Mercury is ruling network and I/O tasks, perhaps Uranus could rule specifically data creation and writing?
• Neptune: elevating things past the concrete, into the abstract. Inspiration, illusion, refinement. Higher octave of Venus; so if Venus rules desktop and UI processes, Neptune could focus on the windowing system.
• Pluto: changing the nature and “hidden-ness” of the things. Metamorphosis, unearthing, cycles of [con/de]struction. Higher octave of Mars; so if Mars handles CPU hogs, Pluto could handle specifically things that have to do with cryptography.

*before the “ackshyually” crowd points this out, the word “planet” in Astrology is used to convey any moving (from our PoV) celestial object. It includes things Astronomy wouldn’t consider as planets; such as the Sun (a star), the Moon (a satellite), and Pluto (nowadays a dwarf planet). So the situation is a lot like tomatoes being fruits, you know? “Yes” or “no” depends on the definition, and the definition is built around a purpose.

Also I’d like to point out that, although I learned a fair bit of Astrology in my teens and 20s, I don’t take it seriously. It’s mostly babble, like tarot; but just like tarot, it’s fun babble.

Be glad they didn’t include Neptune, Uranus or Pluto.

Imagine some system task running like your computer was a potato. Then you look for the reason, and it’s because the task is a CPU hog, and its associated planet is in Cancer/Scorpio/Pisces. Now imagine the associated planet was Pluto, that spends ~20 years per sign. (Note some astrology schools do take those planets into account.)

In fact even system daemons and kernel threads (Saturn) will be a mess, 2.5 years per zodiacal sign.

So yeah, fucking dumb idea. But brilliant at the same time.

Lewd cellular automata.

Just as a heads up, you accidentally posted the same question four times.

That said yes, it’s piracy.