Nougat

That’s just God telling you to go to the bad gateway.

Who’s not interested in whose opinion now?

That you’ve employed a slippery slope analogy far too widely?

I have also hired exterminators and taken antibiotics.

You shall not think of living things in hierarchical order (x is better than y)

Having to choose between my child and my dog would be a horrible choice to have to make, but I know exactly how I would make it.

Would it really matter? It’s just as easy to subscribe and then say/do whatever. Only accounts that have been subscribed for a period of time? Subscribe and wait. Have a certain post and/or comment reputation? It’s not terribly hard to speak to a specific audience and accomplish that. Make any of those extra parameters too severe, and you limit the community growth.

Crowdsourcing of ideas means that bad ideas are no worse than good ones, and in an evolutionary way, they’re probably better at replication, strength, retention - and when a core tenet of that “bad” idea is that you must actively reject the opposing good ideas, that’s how bad ideas overtake good ones.

I’ve been kind of watching this from the sidelines. Requiring separate admin and general use accounts is definitely a good idea, but it doesn’t absolutely solve the problem of “someone who possesses greater power expressing themselves in confrontational ways.” Once you’re wearing an “admin hat,” you can’t ever really take it off, and you have to know that your actions are always going to be under greater scrutiny, regardless of the user account in question.

However.

I’m a big proponent of “we call people what they want to be called,” but this is the very first time I have ever heard that using generic pronouns is somehow consciously offensive. I get that if Party A has made undeniably clear what pronouns they use, and Party B insists on using generic pronouns, yeah, that could be an action consciously intended to offend or put down - but I also think that it’s not necessarily and always that way. Context matters, and the context in this particular incident suggests (to me, at least) that transphobia has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Language is an ever changing thing, although it may change more slowly than desired. When you’re talking about extremely foundational bits of language - like pronouns - it takes a huge amount of effort (especially for older people, of which I am one) to get your brain to change gears and use the words and thoughts that you want to. I know this from personal experience. When I am talking to or about a person in my own family, who I have known since his birth 18+ years ago, it is extremely difficult to adjust to a “new paradigm,” even when “new” means “several years in the making.” I suspect that I will always have to make conscious efforts to think and speak in ways that I want to, and that I won’t always get it right. Just because I don’t always get it right doesn’t make me a transphobe.

Forklift that situation over to text on a screen with someone who is essentially anonymous to me, with whom I may never have interacted with before, it’s highly likely that I’m going to get it wrong even if I try. Then, if I use the generic pronoun “they” in order to avoid misgendering someone, and I get smacked down for that? That’s just plain unreasonable, and I have no interest interacting with anyone who would throw shade for that reason.

For blahaj to threaten defederating with an entire instance over just that is completely unreasonable. Maybe that threat was taken based on an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the facts. Maybe there are facts that I don’t know. What I do know is that just because someone uses strong language to disagree with someone else doesn’t mean there’s any bigotry at play.

Request for clarifications “for beginners”:

systemd, XOrg, Wayland - you have mentioned those without an explanation of what they are.

Last time I did anything with linux, Ubuntu was all the rage. I’m interested in hearing more details about what makes it a distro to avoid.

@snaptastic, please let me know if this comment is relevant enough.

Somebody mentioned Voodoo cards, I had a bit of information that related to that. That’s how discussions work; they kind of go where they go.

But I’ll make absolutely sure to get your permission before I comment again.

I bet you’re fun at parties.

Voodoo cards are worth money to the right people. They’re used in a bunch of coin-op arcade games.

oh no somebody’s mad

No idea, I don’t use it.

Nobody does.

https://github.com/ZaDarkSide/ArrangeByPenis

Most people who drive cars are not mechanics. Most computer users are not also computer engineers; they don’t want to be and shouldn’t have to be.

If you want to drive your car with spare parts and tools in the back, outfitted with gloves, goggles, a scarf, and an oilcoat; you can do that. That doesn’t mean that everyone else should do that. It’s not 1992 anymore.

And I’m going to burn a whole bunch of those hours falling asleep while the audio still plays.

I thought that we only required one button.

I can’t hear you.

I’ll explain UDP, but I don’t care if you can hear me, and no questions.