It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month? P1M. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days? P30D. Want to say it in hours? Add the T separator: PT720H.
I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:
20230701T0000-07–P30D…v101_pressure.csv
(“–” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/” in file names)
If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me uptime but expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.
When I hear this, I wonder if people are playing the wrong types of games for them. Most AAA games have great graphics and cutscenes, but the core gameplay loop is just tedious and feels like you’re following a GPS from chore to chore. I don’t fault anyone for feeling bored with 10hr interactive movies.
I still love games that challenge me and offer a real risk of failure, for example. If there’s no chance of losing, then beating the game just feels like “finishing” it, like how you would describe a movie or TV show. I’d get tired of that too.
Yeah that‘s my point as well. I play games on the lowest difficulty possible because after a day of work I do not want to be grinding during my free time. And even on easy mode it‘s sometimes just too tiresome.
Like I love Minecraft but I will explicitly play to have fun and build things, my building resources come from what I gather around my area, you’d never catch me using concrete as a primary component in my builds for example.
But MMO level grind? Never. I just want games that respect my time
Exactly. If I’ve got time and energy to play something, it’s going to be for the experience. Not to die repeatedly until the bossfight is ingrained in my memory and I hate myself.
Yeah having the time and energy to log on every night and play games is something I constantly daydream & fantasize about, but when I rarely get an opportunity to do it, it’s extremely hard to enjoy it because I know I’m not gonna get another chance again for who knows how long. My enjoyment is directly related to looking forward to the next time I’d be able to continue what I was doing in game.
This is why I bought a steam deck and have accepted joy in Stardew Valley.
In my experience, they sell the debt to a collection agency and you start getting nasty phone calls. That, on top of the other stuff you would expect like credit history hits. These charges I got insurance to figure out they were bogus, like billed for receiving treatments my grandmother never got, medications never administered, you name it. Took a lot of phone calls and getting a lawyer though. The whole system is irredeemable.
US healthcare is full of waste, greed, and deception. For how much we pay as a country, we should be getting better outcomes and our healthcare workers should be paid better, but neither is happening.
at least where I am in texas, they tell you what it will cost before you go. When I was in utah, I asked them beforehand what it would cost and they said it would be impossible to know until after the procedure was done. The front desk person said even they weren’t even allowed to know the prices beforehand.
OH MY GOD THEY CALL YOU. THE HORROR! WHATEVER WILL I DO?
Seriously, though, who cares? All you gotta do is not pick up the phone. If you’re younger than 40, you’re not answering calls from random numbers anyway. So they ding your credit. Big freakin’ deal. Credit scores are pointless since none of us can afford to use credit anyway. And it all goes away after 7 years, like it never happened.
The only people who agree to pay hospital bills they can’t afford are suckers.
This comment is so out of touch that it sounds like you’re drowning in a swimming pool of gold wtf.
I can barely afford regular-ass doctor’s appointments and my monthly meds. My credit score and abysmal income literally defines where I can rent an apartment, and that’s why my commute is over 40 minutes via highway without traffic.
If I go to the hospital and it’s not worker’s comp, I’m SUPER DUPER FUCKED, and I know that’s a pretty typical situation.
Medical debt will ruin a person’s credit record, denying them access to housing and even some employment. It absolutely does matter and is not trivial.
Man, this is depressing. While I wasn’t “raised online” since I was raised on dialup and couldn’t block the phone line all that long.
I still remember when google was the new kid on the block and the general feeling about them across early Internet forums.
Microsoft was evil because they copied everybody else’s stuff and wanted to charge for it. Apple was clueless making expensive junk. Sun was a darling for a while at least until they started pulling shit.
Enter mother-fucking-Google. Ethical. Honest. Not evil. Smart. Supporting open source. And on top of all that, FREE to use. Like Microsoft wants to charge you for hotmail if you want an inbox > 2MB? Fucking EVIL!!! Google is ethical because they are completely free!!! And I hear they are working on an email service too. Google just wants to shepherd the internet and protect it from companies like Microsoft, Apple, and AOL.
Any company that becomes publicly traded gets turned to the dark side. That’s the factor that does it because they have a legal requirement to do everything they can to maximize profits.
Trying to sustain perpetual growth will always lead to companies fucking over their customers and employees.
I live Valve, but there’s always that nagging bit in the back of my mind reminding me that they can always turn evil in the span of a few years. And the recent debacle with Dolphin doesn’t help
No, Dolphin was their fault. Valve reached out to Nintendo before Dolphin was added to the store. If Valve hadn’t asked Nintendo for permission first, Nintendo probably would have said nothing
It makes sense though. People can already install Dolphin wherever they want, including the Steam Deck. But Valve probably thinks they can get Nintendo to publish on Steam. It wasn’t so long ago that Sony and Microsoft maintained exclusivility on their platforms. Valve doesn’t win anything allowing Dolphin on Steam, but it can potentially anger Nintendo.
No. That is not at all what happened. No DMCA takedown notice was ever sent in this.
What happened is that Dolphin applied to go on Steam and announced that. Then Valve emailed Nintendo asking for permission. Nintendo said they didn’t want it on the store, pointed to parts of the DMCA which were not actually valid for a theoretical case, and Valve blocked Dolphin from going on Steam
Valve is already evil: they locked down their steam client (unacceptable in the times of GOG, and Epic Games) and allow developers to put DRM in their games. Outside of that they were the pioneers of digital gambling with CS:GO and TF2 and using anti-features as a way to entice people to purchase micro-transactions.
There is also the B Corp designation (short for Public Benefit Corporation) which allows a company to balance its responsibility towards the share holders with some other benefit it aims to provide where the share holders aren’t the (only) beneficiaries.
On Reddit I always assumed that so many people can’t be that stupid uneducated and make these obvious mistakes for engagement bait.
But now that we are on Lemmy, and engagement gets you nowhere, I’m losing faith in humanity at a faster pace.
In my experience, these mistakes are made primarily by native speakers. Because they learned it by hearing and can’t tell the difference. Those who learned English as a second language learn through books and are explicitly taught the difference.
You would HATE being a person who could read in the Middle English era. There was no standardized spelling, people used many different conventions/regional spellings, and it was mostly either phonetic spelling or random French bullshit. Also some earlier writers used really conservative spelling to emulate Old English. It was the wild west out there.
For example, here’s a (not comprensive) list of the variant spellings you may see for each second person pronoun:
You can find a lot more about Middle English spellings in LALME (A Linguistics Atlas of Late Mediæval English) (electronic version here)
Some of the more innovative spellings come from Northern Middle English/Northumbria (northern England and southern Scotland, though the dialects of the latter would largely split off and develop mostly on its own in the early stages of Middle English and become Scots) and to a lesser extent Midlands Middle English/Mercian, in large part due to significant past influence of North Germanic/Scandinavian languages; i.e., Old Norse, which was somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English and caused/progressed both the loss of inflections and the formation & solidification of Modern English syntax (in particular, Old English syntax shifted to become near-identical to Old Norse syntax; Old English also entirely lost inflection of grammatical gender, grammarical case, etc. and adopted many core vocabulary of Old Norse). Those changes happened primarily to facilitate communication with vikings in the Danelaw, since Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were very eager to communicate with each other; things like declensions were very different in the two languages (the 12 different declensions of “the” probably weren’t fun to deal with for Scandinavians), so Old English speakers started omitting or simplifying them, and they mostly died off in (early) Middle English. English also completely lost dual pronouns (pronouns with exactly 2 referents). Word order was primarily SVO in Old Norse, so Old English’s relatively liberal word order (or lack of consistent word order) was simplified/regularized significantly to be more SVO.
Southern Middle English – the dialects of West Saxon and Kent – were significantly more conservative (partly due to having next to no influence from Norse). Those are where many more conservative spellings are from. The West Saxon dialects were the most influential/dominant (especially due to the Kingdom of Wessex’ great power) until the Norman Conquest, when East Midlands English (especially around London) took over that role.
Southern American English & Maritime Canadian English varieties were both primarily based on more southern English varieties – specifically, the time’s London English and West Country English. Appalachian English was also heavily influenced by Scottish English and the English of northern England. Canadian English in general was based on both Southern and Midlands English. Meanwhile, New England’s English was primarily derived from East Midlands dialects. Generally, dialects derived from the time’s West Country English are significantly more conservative and more similar to the general speech of ~15th century England, while more Midlands (of the time) influenced American and Canadian varieties are similar to standard ~17-18th century English. Dialects influenced by the time’s Scottish English and Northern English also generally contain a lot more conservative Anglic constructions – modern Appalachian/Southern American English varieties and modern Scottish/Northern varieties share a large amount of vocabulary and other features which were lost in other dialects.
Standard varieties of Modern British English are comparatively generally significantly more innovative and don’t share many features with Middle & Early Modern English varieties – general British English started diverging greatly from most other English dialects around the mid-to-late 18th century and early 19th century. This is also a reason why Australia and New Zealand English have a lot of features which seem to only partially agree with other English varieties. For example, the trap-bath vowel split, which was partially completed in Australia and is present in certain words, but not all words, and has variation in some words. When Australia was being colonized, Southern English varieties had recently begun undergoing the split, and it was considered a “Cockneyism” until Received Pronunciation was formed in the late 19th century and embraced it; it wasn’t fully progressed until around that time, which is why New Zealand English (which came from immigrants in the mid 19th century) mostly agrees with Southern English on those vowels.
Since you seem to be a good person to ask, and will probably give a better answer than Google, was the thorn somewhere in our current 26 letter alphabet at some point and got deleted, or was it already gone out of style by the time we settled in our current order?
Þorn was in use since Fuþark (Germanic runes) but wasn’t used to write Anglo-Saxon until around the 8th century. It died out after the printing press came into use, usually imported from France (or Germany or something occasionally) and not using some characters found in English at the time. Because of the lack of a Þ/þ key, typers started to use “Y” as a substitute (which is why you see e.g. “ye olde” instead of “the olde”). Eventually þorn just disappeared and people used the spellings using “th”. A similar thing happened to Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), where it was substituted for by “Z” (With e.g. “MacKenȝie” yielding “MacKenzie” instead of “MacKenyie”) until it disappeared and spellings using “y”/“gh” (or “j”/“ch” when appropriate) replaced spellings using “ȝ”.
Ðæt (Ð/ð/đ) was mostly replaced by þorn by Middle English so it didn’t get to be slain by the printing press. Wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) was replaced by “uu”/“w”/“u” by Middle English too. Ash (Æ/æ) didn’t die off, in large part because it was available on many printing presses of the time due to its usage in French and Latin, but it became obsolete for English words and was mostly used to replace “ae” in loanwords (especially from Latin and Greek).
There were some other funny things in Old English & Middle English orthography; like omitting n/m and writing a macron over the preceding vowel to indicate the sound (like “cā” instead of “can”), in the same way that it occured in Latin/Latinate languages which lead to “ñ” and “ã”/“õ” in Spanish/Portuguese/Galician.
Haha yeah. Soon after becoming a linguist your first realization is how little everyone else knows about or cares to know about linguistics. Btw I edited to add a little more information if you’re interested.
Alternate theory: The human brain is reacting to unfamiliarity and not alien features. We strongly associate Uncanny Valley with things not-quite human but it’s my thinking that it’s a tribal thing. Nowadays we see a ton of faces of all variations but I bet when we were hunter gatherers, we only saw features of our own tribe. The moment you meet another tribe, I’d bet this response is to create fear of the unrecognized human. It’s also probably there as a punishment mechanism for us seeing faces in everything.
The times that the uncanny effect hit hardest is when you think something is human or is a face potentially before finding out you’re wrong. So that’s my basis for thinking its there to keep us from being mistaken.
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