josemanuel @josemanuel@qoto.org

@vaartis My grandma couldn't eat tomato seeds. We were told she couldn't digest them and they gave her diarrhea. Hope that's not your case.

To be honest, I wouldn't want to invest in a country that has a tendency to shut its borders for years, or even centuries, for the darndest reasons. Call me weird, but I don't find that trustworthy, business- or otherwise.

Some of the places I stayed in when I was there years ago were forced to close due to the pandemic. 赦せない.

@vaartis That makes sense. I do object to referring to sucking tomato juices through a hole as “eating a whole tomato raw”, though, but that's just me.

Are you planning to do something with the seeds? This could be the beginning of a beautiful hobby.

@BitBun As I always say to everybody in your same situation, “if you build it, they will come.”

@vaartis Do you do that often? Either way, why? Did you make much of a mess?

I like to repost job offers because I was unemployed for a long time years ago, and I don't want anyone to have to go through that. Recently, I decided to make a rule of reposting requests for meetups, too, because I know how hard it is to make friends online and I want to make the process as easy and painless as possible for everyone.

@kaia Carl Sagan, but I wonder whether Richard Feynman might have been even more enjoyable.

In Spanish, a cartoonist and architect nicknamed Peridis who made documentaries about Romanesque and Gothic churches and cathedrals.

In movies, Krzysztof Kieślowski and Takahata Isao.

@thor M2 was similar to Pascal (they were brother languages, after all). One thing that made it, IMHO, unsuitable for real-world use was that all the keywords had to be typed in uppercase. I guess it was a poor man's form of syntax highlighting.

It was very good for learning because everything in it was neatly organised and it made understanding the program and checking its correctness by hand very easy. For example, functions and procedures had a slightly different syntax. All other languages don't distinguish between them. Functions return a value while procedures are just executed for their side effects. Modula-2 would have given you a syntax error if you had used them incorrectly. Cue to modern languages where everything is a function and you don't even have to declare a return type if you don't want to.

Sad news indeed. I learned to program using Modula-2. The language itself was awful in many ways, but it was perfect for learning. I will always be grateful for his work. RIP.

@olmitch ¡Viva México, cabrones!

Most people think the Y2K scare was a scam because they were sort of forced into buying new, “Y2K ready” computers when computers themselves didn't need fixing.

I personally owned a Unysys 486 from 1991 that worked fine many years after 2000, and I bet my MSX2 would have worked fine, too.

If anything, it was a software problem, but computer and software manufacturers made it everybody's problem. That was the scam and the disinfo.

Should software engineers be treated as heroes because they had to solve a problem that they created themselves? That's the real question.

@lina Exactly.

@lina I wasn't really bothered. The point of my OP was to counter the narrative that the Fediverse was a better platform _just because_. (Remember the “Twitter without the nazis” slogan?) No, a platform is as good as the people who use it, and people on Fedi are not exactly the cream of the crop, me included.

@lina I can handle it just fine. It's them who block me.

@condret For lack of a better word. No, they didn't touch my peepee, no.

What do you call it? Mild disagreement? Ok, let's use that from now on.

All I want from social media is to have interesting conversations and make friends. Maybe I'm bad at it.

@kaia

@lina
> as for the goals, well, i don't think fedi has any goals here, it's just a crazy network full of crazies

That's my point: there's no algorithm psyopping them to be dickheads. They just are.

@lina When I say the platform, I don't mean the moderation policy. Depending on the instance you're in, you may or may not say that.

What I mean by “the platform” is the platform's goals. When people moved from Twitter in 2022, they came here saying how awful it was that _the platform_ gave prominence and visibility to certain accounts because confrontation was good for it.

I called that bullshit because 1) if something made me angry or depressed, I wouldn't be interacting with it, and that lack of interaction is bad for business. And 2) most platforms allow one to curate their experience, Twitter included. If you see stuff that makes you angry and you feel the need to respond and escalate, that's on you.

@kaia They usually block me first. It's usually the kind of people who, when faced with polite disagreement, reply with an insult, then block and subtoot.

In the rare cases when they don't block me, I usually mute them (with or without mentions, depending on how annoying they are).

I have to be honest: I have received more abuse here than I ever did on Twitter, and it's getting increasingly common, which goes to prove what I said a few years ago: it's not the platform, it's the people.