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The greatest thing about learning music theory is learning how every single thing has a name for it

@levisan the writer chooses their dialect of English. If they randomly jump between color and colour in the same project, take points off for being sloppy or copying and pasting random text from everywhere.

Also, never say "2 miles, or 3.2 kilometers…" If the reader can't picture miles or kilometers in their head, I don't care where they're from; that's illiterate and it's not the writer's problem. Pick one measurement system and use it.

If people are allowed to use Christmas songs in their TikTok videos in November, I'm well within my rights to have one stuck in my head and hum it while puttering around.

Should post-secondary teachers (a) specify which localisation of spelling rules (colour vs color, for example) they expect things to be written in and/or (b) deduct marks for incorrect localisation?

If you’re setting up “Christmas” decorations now, they’d better actually be dark-season-brightening decorations and you’re keeping them up through February

Is there any work of fiction that addresses the fact that a time machine, unless also a teleportation device to compensate for the movement of the earth/whatever between origin and destination times, would cause people to time-travel into outer space 99% of the time?

This might be my favourite "label my politics" thing I've seen yet.
ideosorter.github.io/

New project: categorise my friends based on their political opinions using this.

I don't like the two-letter month-name abbreeve of MA. (Yes this is real; I've seen it on milk jugs.) Sure, you could figure out if it's May or March with the context, but the context isn't always there. Why not use MR and MY?

If my doctor were to ever recommend Viagra, I think I'd instinctively look for the "mark as spam" button

It's kind of wild that "attribution" just means you say where you got a thing and doesn't include informing the creator or showing how what you're saying is true

I need to migrate my Unabomber quote bot from @kaczynskiquotes@botsin.space to a different fediverse instance… any suggestions of one that won't dislike having the writings of a convict being tooted on a regular basis?

All we had back then was good arguments and maybe, if you're lucky, an encyclopaedia in the house.

Now you can make a shoddy argument and back it up with a link for proof and win.

Obviously in the grand scheme of things this isn’t a good thing, but I have to wonder if the garbage truck operators consider this to be worth extra points.

24 years ago today, humans stopped living only surface of the earth.

Humanity is in the very early stages of a post-earth era.

I don't need a "smart" thermostat. I just want one that connects to wifi and gives a half-decent web and/or mobile interface

i'm not mr. AI doomer, and i don't actually dislike a lot of the generative features being added, but can we make it less AI! AI! AI! in-your-face all the time?

examples:
- sleep cycle has been analyzing my sleep patterns for over a decade. great app. gladly paid for it. but loaded it up yesterday after a long break and now they're calling it AI. subtext: "are we cool now that it's a buzzword?"
- today i opened notion and a big "notion AI" nav item's been added to my sidebar. on top of the many "please use AI" prompts popping up across their UI. big pick-me energy.

many such cases!
i feel like a curmudgeon, but it makes me like your products less.

Does everyone assume those ZoomInfo "notice of personal information processing" emails are not, in fact, because they have to or want to be nice, but because they know some people will click through to see what they scraped? Or is it just me?

While I would appreciate a little more context, I think this is fine. It’s really saying “…when you can” rather than assuming the recipient has the same priorities and timeline.

If it were a real emergency, my mom would call. The rarity of her calls shows how urgent they are.

Rude: someone chiming in with a factually-inaccurate answer in a group chat while the asker of a question is awaiting your opinion to a question directed at you (asked in the group for everyone's benefit of your opinion, not for discussion purposes)

Social media: it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform so the market said,

"Here. Perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason."

It's prison. It's horrific. It’s performer and audience melded together.

What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member.

I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

— Bo Burnham

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