Notices by Thomas (tfb@functional.cafe)

@mdhughes @clacke It looks like whatever they're using to build their documentation website is just broken. The last snapshot from the wayback machine is the same annoying mix of difficult to navigate, grand presentation, and meager actual documentation one would expect
https://web.archive.org/web/20260311162716/https://cons.io/

@clacke Very tangentially, just yesterday I was defending modern K-Pop as a clear descendant of progressive rock

@clacke that's probably true 😹

@clacke There are definitely newspaper style guides. To the extent that your needs overlap with a newspaper's, The Guardian's guide is perfectly fine (on their website). Hart's Rules is also fine, very book orientated, and is good at pointing out the elements of style about which one needs to take a decision.

Generally, I find questions of style strangely fraught in English. There's the question of the many dialects, but also a systemic pedantry that aspires to the loathsome Académie française. So many style sections of dictionaries and style guides, will give rules that are not followed by the great writers in the language. Rather than cite T. S. Eliot and Virginia Wolf and William Faulkner and James Baldwin and so on, they'll make "rules" that none of those writers followed.

The OED is mostly a decent counter-example, relying heavily on citations of known good works. But then, to answer your comment

I don't know quite where the Greeks come in

If you look up the question of ise vs ize endings in the OED, you'll be treated to a pedantic discussion involving classical Greek, the letters iota zeta eta, Latinisation, Middle French, etc. So they go contrary to conventional British usage and make a weird pedantic argument. The peculiar style they advocate exists and is relatively common in certain circles, but is a bit of an elite aberration.

@clacke Common British spelling uses -ise and -lyse forms, but Oxford spelling insists on dying on the molehill of but in the original Greek pedantry thus -ize but -lyse. In particular, newspapers don't follow the pedantic Oxford style.

@whitequark certainly gives a new shade of meaning to "drill, baby, drill"

stolen content from Wikipedia

You can't steal something if I give it to you for free. In this case, it seems the articles copied from Wikipedia correctly follow the license, so this is perhaps the single thing about grokipedia that should not be criticized.

https://mastodon.green/@ronanmcd/115641162221045310

@stefano They're calling Unix users "tech boomers" and apparently it's the BSD communities that are the toxic ones?!?!

@solidsanek I assume this is fake, but it's hilarious and the point still stands

@clacke sometimes ? I struggle to remember the last time I encountered a case that was not that

@clacke That ought to terminate sessions owned by other users 😹

@schappi Strange how this keeps happening !

@fitheach We have a tentative swallow nest by our place (yay!) so hopefully they'll stick around (not get driven away by magpies) and hunt mosquitos/midges

Do they make it up to where you are?

@clacke That's what I suspected. I wonder what percentage of their trade is using this versus SWIFT, but that's probably a difficult number to find out

@yogthos

@clacke I hope you're right, it'd be great if it really did displace SWIFT. As that linked article mentioned, the Caribbean also needs something similar (and maybe they just link in to the eCNY)

@yogthos

@yogthos

implying that about 38% of global trade could bypass the US dollar dominated SWIFT network

I'd be curious to know what the real figure is, but 38% is a potential, not a reality

@solidsanek As someone in a parasocial triangle with coffee and tea, I understand

The US and UK tracking and arresting people for political speech is a reminder that even if you're doing nothing wrong, privacy is important

@loke two letters whose names differ only in a voiced/unvoiced distinction, what could possibly go wrong !

@clacke It's interesting that we're about as far from Middle Chinese as from vulgar Latin, but the change seems more than in the Romance languages ? Though I guess if French had a billion speakers, it might have diverged even more