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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Womble@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldIs "retard" a slur?
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    2 months ago

    Any excuse you use to explain why you can use a slur is exactly that: an excuse.

    I guess that is what I take issue with, that statement makes it sounds like any use of a slur is always wrong regardless of context and that any reason for using it is just to wiggle out of you being a bad person.



  • Saying FTL is possible is equivalent to saying effects can proceed cause, the two statements saying the same thing from different frames of reference. You can demonstrate this with the Taychon pistol paradox (you could use a gun that fired FTL bullets to shoot yourself in the past).

    Wormholes could avoid this but only if the mouths of the wormholes moved away from each other at slower than the speed of light.


  • No, correctness is defined by usage. There is no high authority that lays down rules and you are wrong if you break them. 100 years ago you would have been considered incorrect if you asked “who am I speaking to?” rather than “To whom am I speaking?”. There wasnt a committee meeting some time in the 50s where it was decided to change the rules and depreciate cases in who/whom it just happened naturally and what is “correct” evolved.

    Dictionaries themselves say that that they document how language is used rather than setting rules to follow, hence they now inculde a definition of literally as “not actually true but for emphasis”.


  • This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770,[3][1] and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then.[a] However, modern linguistics has shown that idiomatic past and current usage consists of the word less with both countable nouns and uncountable nouns so that the traditional rule for the use of the word fewer stands, but not the traditional rule for the use of the word less.[3] As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, "Less refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted.”

    “Correct” was a suggestion by someone which got over zealously picked up by grammarians despite in flying in the face of common usage. There is no acedemy of English to dictate that this rule change is the one true way of speaking and even if there was it would have about as much effect as the French one trying to suppress “le weekend”.


  • Whichever sounds more natural to you, because the whole countable/non-countable less/fewer is crap made up by Edwardian snobs and then repeated by school teacher gammarians too into being “proper”. To quote wiki

    The comparative less is used with both countable and uncountable nouns in some informal discourse environments and in most dialects of English.[citation needed] In other informal discourse however, the use of fewer could be considered natural. Many supermarket checkout line signs, for instance, will read “10 items or less”; others, however, will use fewer in an attempt to conform to prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammarians consider this to be a case of hypercorrection as explained in Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage.[7][8] A British supermarket chain replaced its “10 items or less” notices at checkouts with “up to 10 items” to avoid the issue.[9][10] It has also been noted that it is less common to favour “At fewest ten items” over “At least ten items” – a potential inconsistency in the “rule”,[11] and a study of online usage seems to suggest that the distinction may, in fact, be semantic rather than grammatical.[8] Likewise, it would be very unusual to hear the unidiomatic “I have seen that film at fewest ten times.”[12][failed verification]

    The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.[13]





  • The point being made is that “where does it sit on the current US political spectrum” doesn’t matter. Why should I care is CNN sits slightly left or right of the current American Overton window? Why is a news organisation more credible if one guy judges it to be in the centre of that window? How does Judging the BBC or NHK based on where they would sit if they were American do anything other than cement the ridiculous idea that the current US status-quo is an inviolable constant of the universe?





  • Biggest reason Linux fails where Windows 11 sucseeds is because the vast VAST majority cannot figure out linux’s user experience.

    Nope, the bigest reason why windows is more popular than linux is the same as youtube is more popular than peertube - its the default and most people dont look past that. Honestly default Gnome UX is better than win11 these days unless you already have thousands of hours of windows muscle memory, which a very large chunk of people do.


  • Local models WOULD form the basis of FOSS AI. Supposition on my part but entirely supportable given there is already a open source model movement focus on producing local models and open source software is generally privacy focused.

    Local models ARE inherently private due to the way that no information leaves the device it is processed on.

    I know you dont want to engage with arguments and instead just wail at the latest daemon for internet points, but you can have more than one statement in a sentence without being incoherent.