ActiveSheet? Please no

I’m in a superposition of knowledgeable and ignorant until you ask me something, in which case I produce either a good or a stupid answer, depending on various random factors such as whether I’m versed in the general topic, happen to know the specific subject of the question or just get lucky with guessing.

(This analogy breaks apart if you consider the possibility of giving a mediocre answer that’s neither accurate nor entirely stupid, which probably makes it the perfect self-defeating counterexample)

As a thin veil of excuse, the DCRI incident involved what they considered military secrets rather than defamation charges. Still dumb to do that extrajudicially, of course.

The article on the lawsuit is blocked, which is standard procedure for participants of an ongoing lawsuit: Talk to your lawyer about it, and nobody else, because anything you say without your lawyer’s counsel might jeopardise your legal position. Even if it’s just people editing that article, the foundation will want to protect itself until the matter is settled.

Don’t forget that non-profits, too, are beholden to laws. If they want to continue offering their services in India, they don’t really want to be charged for contempt on top of the other case.

People here prefer the federation of Mastodon

I browse all a lot to look for interesting new communities. Every now and then I come across a new community from ani.social, the NSFW instance or something, and on Voyager I can’t seem to block entire instances. I also don’t know if there’s a way to filter only the communities without blocking the users too, but as it stands, I may have to look for another app to block the instances entirely.

Shouldn’t, definitely. But for a while, it will keep running, because that’s how a lot of speculative investment works.

Poor lady, victim of a fucked up religion enforcing sexist bullshit, became an bullshitter in turn. I feel sorry for her.

Doesn’t mean I excuse the crap she’s dumping out there, of course.

It can! For a while. Isn’t that the nature of speculation and speculative bubbles? Sure, they may pop some day, because we don’t know for sure what’s a bubble and what is a promising market disruption. But a bunch of people make a bunch of money until then, and that’s all that matters.

Misunderstandings happen, I don’t think any malice was intended

Those evil leftists always pushing… checks notes corporate culture!

I think the point was that some numbskulls try to pull a “checkmate vegans” claiming that. You probably know the type, obnoxiously trying to butt in on vegan discussions and go “but if you’re fine with breastfeeding, you’re not really vegan”, misunderstanding (or misconstruing) the motivations in the same vein as mentioned before.

Oh believe me, I would change some things about that database if I could. Alas, I’m just the analyst building data models from it.

(To be fair, it’s otherwise easy to work with and for most use-cases, it doesn’t matter since they’re aggregated per month anyway, so I just load the last month’s data on the 2nd of each month. I definitely have worse patients to operate on.)

Unrelated to the topic, but I deal with a database storing timestamps.

In local time.

For systems all around the world.

You’ll see current entries timestamped 12:28 from eastern Europe followed by ones 6:28 from America and then another 11:28 from central Europe.

Without offset.

You can, but why would you? Reality has enough examples to make fantasy obsolete

Ah right, a walk around nature! Because I have so much nature around me!

(Also, I’d prefer to get meetings and impromptu requests from colleagues in the morning, because I tend to get way in the zone around 14h-15h, with the drawback that I often run way in excess of 17h when I’m supposed to leave so I’m home by ~1815.)

It’s even older: The myth of individual excellence is at least as old as the phenomenon of a distinct class of a warrior aristocracy. All throughout history, you’ll see the elite (as most historians and poets were, because a peasant working for subsistence doesn’t have the time to write deep musings about that time he got conscripted for war and stood in a line with all the other common peasants) writing of this or that great general or warrior, despite most of just about everything being done by groups.

You might know about the great heroes of the Iliad, excelling in battle by taking down a key figure of the opposing side, but most people probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the mass of “common” infantry on either side, let alone about the servants carrying the hoplites’ stuff.

You might find a lot of medieval works focused on the glory and honor of a knight, but the (comparatively) poor spear-and-shield conscripts receive attention mostly in official documents detailing the way their army was to be raised (see the section “Ninth-Century Rohirrim” here).

Even when thinking about heavy cavalry charges, for the longest time I never gave much thought to the value of coordinated cohesion between them. The knights’ charge is still a group effort, where an isolated warrior - great hero or not - would be doomed. And while we may be aware that knights had a squire, the rest of the retinue wouldn’t be clear to everyone:

Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).

(Citation copied from this entry of the same blog as before)

Ever since there has been an elite with the leisure to write and document, served by a lower class who didn’t, there has been a tendency to emphasise these elites’ individual value and omit the group effort of all the invisible people contributing to that value.

I don’t know if that is the cultural inspiration for the modern trend of focusing on single individuals or simply a symptom of a similar cause, but there is a certain resemblance that I suspect isn’t pure coincidence.

But if I have nothing of substance to add to the point? “This. Also…”? I don’t have a Cybertruck or know anyone that does; I can’t comment on their quality.

Besides, it wasn’t even particularly important to me, just a quick aside. If I care deeply about making people use “they” for inclusion reasons, I’d have written more than a sentence.

I’m not sure they ever doubled down on it.

They didn’t. Hence my insistence: the original comment probably wasn’t intentional as such, nor do I ascribe any malice.

Plenty other people felt the need to ascribe intent, however. That’s what I don’t understand - why are people so eager to defend a phrasing and potential intent without ever consulting the original commenter?

I just don’t want to limit how people express themselves

I made a suggestion and argument why I find “they” better, without ideological insistence or being forceful about it. There’s no limiting going on.

Its more important to me that someone express themselves honestly rather than they are politically correct.

The above note and specific context aside, I don’t categorically agree. While reasonable argument should be the first resort, there are honest sentiments rejecting reasonable argument that deserve no expression, no space and no opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric. I think it’s more important to foster a tolerant environment, suppressing intolerance if necessary to preserve that environment, than to grant universal freedom even to enemies of freedom.

Again, this probably doesn’t apply here - I doubt the original comment made a point of exclusion. We’re getting way off topic here when all I wanted was to offer an alternative argument for inclusive phrasing.

Some horse fly blankets and hoods have a zebra pattern, probably for the same reason.