More people use laptops (or even tablets or smartphones) more of the time nowadays, so fewer people turn on their devices that way nowadays.

In Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, the NPC who asks “where are you from” and we get the options “yes” and “no”.

(He has not heard of yes town, nor does he believe we don’t come from anywhere at all.)

Well, for most real-world programming languages, you do have to teach syntax. You do not have to use the word “syntax”, you can call it something else.

Obviously there are things like Scratch that are intended for your exact use case.

I don’t think you need to use the word “syntax” at all when teaching anyone basic coding. There are many ways to paraphrase the concept. It is kind of an odd question, why that specific word?

In any case, the IPA above doesn’t seem “unpronounceable” at all to me as a native speaker of German and fluent speaker of English. The pronunciation isn’t intuitive from the spelling, that is quite a different thing from being unpronounceable.

yes, somehow people keep inventing less funny versions of that

I’m too young to have gotten chain emails 30 years ago, but https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/courtroom.quips.html may be from that era too.

In any case, there have been way more people than those two in world history who have had the first name “Joseph”, and it works equally well for all of them.

I don’t use one except for work (to connect to corporate networks).

A VPN mostly changes which entity you have to trust (from your ISP to your VPN provider). I don’t have a reason to distrust my ISP any more than any VPN provider. I don’t have any need to regularly get around any geoblocking.

When I do privacy-sensitive things, I use Tor, which is actually effective at hiding who I am and what I am doing.

You mean the part about spinning counterclockwise?

In the original text form https://what-if.xkcd.com/42/ this was just a link to the comic, I guess that wouldn’t have worked in a video.

We native speakers of German intuitively pronounce an audible “g” followed by an audible “n” when reading “GNOME” and find it weird that the ordinary word “gnome” is pronounced with a silent “g” in English. The cognate in our first language is “Gnom”, pronounced with two consonants in the beginning, like the desktop environment.

What’s the difference between USA and USB?

One connects to all devices and accesses the data. The other is a hardware standard.

That would cause me to miss many interesting threads that were created at a time when I happened not to be looking at Lemmy.

“New comments” it is for me, that causes threads to get bumped to the top as long as other people still find them interesting.

no, exit codes work the other way round: 0 = success, !0 = error

I remember when similar screenshots circulated for how to tell if i am running jdk or jre, which is even more surprising.

It doesn’t fit very well in this context, the idea behind “beinhalten” is that the subject “includes” the object (i.e. the object is part of the content of the subject), but the #include command in the C preprocessor isn’t about describing that kind of situation, it’s a command “I want to include one file in another”, a better verb in German for that is “einbinden”. (I realize this isn’t a very good explanation, but I’m a native speaker of German and can tell you that no one would use the verb “beinhalten” in this context.)

The previous commenter’s German teacher likely prefers “enthalten” instead of “beinhalten”, which has the same problem in this context though.

nederlands ees nur duits met veelen dooppelbuuchstaaben, ooder?

Do you have a link to a source for this?

and if you extend the graph to before 2006? ;)

Is it part of the joke (“oversized”) that the comic is way too big for the page, I wonder…