Notices by Ellie 🐍 🎄:trans_heart:​ (noelle@chat.noelle.codes)

A stick!

Good morning! It's April Fools' Day and, as is my way and an antidote to the prank-based AFD observances that much of the internet is accustomed to, I spend the day telling bad jokes. If you don't want to hear them, you can just mute this thread.

I'll start you off with one of my favorites.

Two fish were in a tank. One turned to the other and said, "I sure hope you know how to drive this thing."

You might not know that I keep jokes on hand for days like this, but they're not all good-bad enough to make it into the April Fool's list. This year I had stockpiled almost a dozen bad jokes about scissors for today, hoping that one of them would make the cut.

No pun in ten did.

The ones that you'll recognize from everyday use are the "in ___ place" set:

here: "in this place"
there: "in that place"
where: "in what place"

But the rest of them were once in common use too:

hence: "from this place"
thence: "from that place"
whence: "from what place"

hither: "to this place"
thither: "to that place"
whither: "to what place"

Mostly you'll see "whence" in the set phrase "from whence you came", which means "from from what place you came (from)". The "__ither" set have largely disappeared except for the set phrase "hither, thither, and yon", used to indicate motion to a bunch of places in quick succession.

English has a bunch of adverbs for motion regarding places that have largely fallen out of use or exist only in set phrases, but I still think they're cool. They follow these patterns:

"in ___ place": __ere
"from ___ place": __ence
"to ___ place": __ither

"this": h__
"that": th__
"what": wh__

oh

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/737431/the-bakery-dragon-by-devin-elle-kurtz/

There's a word I can't remember that means, essentially, "has no side effects, has no randomness, and accepts no input other than user input", and describes a function for which, given an input X, always returns the same input Y, and given an input X1, always returns the same input Y1, which is not necessarily the same as Y.

It's not "idempotent", which is "always gives the same result regardless of input", but I can't think of what it is.

@Polychrome companies LOVE Agile. It provides Metrics by which individual contributors can be judged! It's marginally better than "lines of code committed" and makes developers feel like you know what you're doing!

@Polychrome wow, even longer ago than that - most of the site was shut down in 2005! Apparently the Doctor Who section lingered a little longer than that, but even it only goes up to Matt Smith... It looks like 2014 is just when they put the most recent "this has been archived" marker on it. o_o

Fun fact: the "rules" stating that you can't end a sentence with a preposition and can't split an infinitive exist only because the men who compiled those rules were trying to force English to be more like Latin, which they considered to be the perfect language. You can safely ignore them.

what

why

who thought this was a good idea

this is a storybook for toddlers

@brooke This is because in the pre-Julian Roman calendar, that's where February was interrupted for the intercalary month Mercedonius. (24 days of February, 30? of Mercedonius, 4 more days of February.)

And although the distinction is largely elided these days, Leap Day being February 25th is still important in some places - there's at least one country (Sweden?) where that's in the laws, and some liturgical calendars rely on it.

Maybe tomorrow I'll call and see if I can get my HRT appointment bumped up.

No appointments before May. :(

#mastoadmin This happened to me with a live server, and I've verified it experimentally, and so I pass it on to you:

If you're upgrading to Mastodon 4.3.x, it no longer supports Postgres 9, and it's tempting to export your PSQL 9 database and import it directly into a more modern version like 12 or 16; this is supposed to auto-convert it to the new format.

Please don't. Step upward by one version at a time. The direct upgrade trashes Mastodon's performance somehow.

What's the cyberpunk equivalent of noir's sleazy jazz?

Did you know that liquid butane will float on top of any other liquid? This is because, of the two, it's the lighter fluid.

them: "don't be silly, corporations don't want to replace humans with robots"

me:

@thegibson meanwhile, every Linux program these days: "just run curl https://mysite.blg/definitely-not-suspicious/script-with-unknown-contents.sh | bash and you're all set!"