I always found this argument funny because how would you use pronouns for someone whose gender you do not know? They. It’s they. E.g. you are given the sentence: Jordan went to the store to buy apples. And you want to ask a followup question regarding how many, you reply: How many apples did they buy?

And that’s not how English was taught to me or 99℅ of the population (including English as a second or third language) 20+ years ago. Singular they was only used for situations where the gender (read as superficially visible sex) was factually unknown. You see a forgotten umbrella and never saw who forgot it: “Somebody forgot their umbrella.” As soon as you only got a glimpse on the person forgetting it you would make a guess about he/she.

They has been used for gender ambiguity in everyone’s lives since grammar school.

If you’re younger than ~30 and from Great Britain, maybe. GB were the first to formalize and teach it like that less than 2 decades ago (if I recall correctly).

People just have an inherent bias towards trans folks and it’s incredibly depressing and sad.

That’s bullshit projection.

I, a non-native speaker, complain about increased ambiguity of the language because of singular they as a personal pronoun and make a proposal about new pronouns for the purpose.

You: Ah, must be transphobe. Let’s ignore everything he said (which doesn’t relate to transphobia at all).

It’s so frustrating not to be able to have a discussion about stuff making a language harder than it needs to be without people invoking transphobia, like, instantly.

But hey, I called it: can’t have a discussion about it and I’ve given up on it.

edit: tiny add-on. I was still taught gender-neutral he and only heard about they later while being discouraged to use it in writing.

Doesn’t feel like you want to have an honest argument when you ask how far we should go back on a proposal about going forward and don’t address the single motivator ambiguity.

I criticized singular they/them for increasing language ambiguity and suggested replacing it with something new like xe/xer multiple times. The reply is usually a shitstorm and downvote tornado. I’ve given up on that front.

It doesn’t make it flawless (at all), but installing the microsoft fonts helps. Most distros have a package or helper tool for that.

I’ve been using linux as a daily driver for more than twenty years. At the same time I had to use Windows for work. Windows has always created more headaches and wasted more of my time than linux. The people who fail on linux are those who expect/demand it to work like windows and those who are not willing to invest the same amount of time they used to learn their way around windows on linux.

“Windows just works” has always been a lie. It’s a fragile heap of crap that constantly breaks or misbehaves. People spend a metric shitton of time with workarounds for failing updates, registry hacks … or externalize that cost to others. Windows “just works” if your kids, company IT, or someone else keeps it working.

If you invest the time to learn a distributions/linux ways, and make a reasonable pick for distribution, linux is much more stable and low maintenance than windows.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Take your pick from anything that isn’t recent and by computer scientists or mathematicians, to call stuff intelligent that clearly isn’t. According to some modern marketing takes I developed AI 20 years ago (optimizing search problems for agentic systems); it’s just that my peers and I weren’t stupid enough to call the results intelligent.

I’d welcome actual AI. What is peddled everyday as “AI” is just marketing bullshit. There’s no intelligence in it. Language shapes perception and we should take those words back and use them according to their original and inherent meaning. LLMs are not AI. Stable diffusion is not AI. Neural networks trained for a singular task are not AI.

I’m doing a combination of 3 to 6.

Do you have an HR fetish or something?

neat

Though, obviously I had to come up with some ridiculous solutions:

bool IsEven(int i) => ((Func<string, bool>)(s => s[^1] == 48))($"{i:B}");

This one works without conditionals :)

bool IsEven(int i)
{
    try
    {
        int _ = (i & 1) / (i & 1);
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {
        return true;
    }

    return false;
}

Not to take from all the funny answers … but

bool IsEven(int i) => (i & 1) != 1;

(C#)

fixed title

If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.

Watching that movie was a drug-infested nightmare. The drugs were my fault, the nightmares were on the movie. The fire extinguisher scene went on for what felt an eternity. Showing the head for punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch after punch until it was a pulpy mess not recognizable as a head with blood seeping out of it. Actually, I think the right-hand side of the meme is a pretty apt categorization for that movie, except, maybe, the unenjoyable part. Enjoyability just depends on your own perversions and morbidity. And the title of the movie is a lie. I reversed the fire extinguisher scene: it becomes a love story of a kind and dedicated fire extinguisher reconstructing a dead man’s head. I sometimes masturbate to that.

Tell me you haven’t seen the uncut version of Irreversible without telling me you haven’t seen the uncut version of Irreversible. That’s like, peak entertainment. Thank me for the trauma later.

I’m going to pistol whip the next guy who says sheernanigans!

To be fair, intelligence isn’t found in anything marketed as “AI”. This one being a scam using humans, actually featured intelligence.

I like to style visited links blue and unvisited links purple, just to mess with people.

Then again, there’s not much point to super long passwords. They’ll be turned into hashes, commonly of 128, 196, or 256 bits length. When brute forcing, by a certain length, it’s pretty much guaranteed there’s a shorter combination computing to the same hash. And an attacker doesn’t need your password, just some password that computes to the same hash. With 256 bit hashes a password with 1000 characters isn’t more secure than one with 15 in any meaningful way.