I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • ryan@the.coolest.zonetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldReal talk
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    7 months ago

    Real answer: these are actually real languages! They’re just conlangs, or constructed languages, instead of natural languages. The major problem with conlangs generally ends up being the limited vocabulary, but the grammar foundations are usually solid.

    I actually really like Klingon as a language because it was intentionally designed to be alien, and specifically to be very Klingon. Most languages are Subject-Verb-Object (like English and other Western languages) or Subject-Object-Verb (like Japanese or Hindi). Klingon, however, is Object-Verb-Subject - it’s very direct with the emphasis placed on the target of the sentence, which makes sense with the Star Trek world and Klingon culture.

    Fun fact, Klingon has at least one native speaker - some guy raised his daughter to speak Klingon as well as English. (I’m not a fan of this - on one hand, learning multiple languages from an early age is a huge leg up in being able to learn more languages in the future, but on the other hand Klingon is entirely useless as a primary language given its structure and the few other people who speak it.)






  • So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

    The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

    The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

    So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

    However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.


  • I think this is mostly what you want, but as far as I can find online (and I’ll test it again later today) it no longer shows traffic warnings and your current speed like the destination maps does. I think it used to, though, which is what’s annoying about this whole situation.

    I actually lost this feature for a while - it used to be under the hamburger ≡ menu as “Just Drive” and then the hamburger menu disappeared, and I’ve just recently found it again as a widget.

    So, yeah, Google kills all good things and I’m sure it won’t last for much longer, but it’s nice in the meantime.





  • Devil’s Tower is apparently not even a volcano according to science, but “but was injected between sedimentary rock layers and cooled underground. The characteristic furrowed columns are the result of contraction which occurred during the cooling of the magma.” source

    Anyway, science can be wrong, assume everything is a volcano until proven otherwise. Devil’s Tower? Volcano. The hill outside your house? Volcano. Your dog? Believe it or not, volcano.




  • Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.

    The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your “outbox” messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.



  • I feel like the Fediverse hasn’t yet reached the Eternal September moment, and I’m happy for that. A smaller footprint means we get to have our own culture.

    On the other hand, even though it means losing this culture, I would like to see greater general adoption of the fediverse and decentralized social media in general. Sure, there will likely be some big-name domains serving fediverse instances, the same way email is primarily served by Gmail et al, but anyone should be able to spin up their own instance and interact as well. I don’t believe Internet communication should be locked behind various walled gardens, and people should re-acclimatize themselves to a version of the Internet where anyone can host and contribute.


  • @ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone Let me know if you need rehab.

    But seriously… yeah, I get it. Especially this part about the workplace:

    Nevertheless, [addicted programmers] can also pose significant risks, especially because they frequently deviate from the planned course. They follow their own agenda, introducing challenges where none were necessary, or dedicating hours to minor, tangential aspects of a project. In the process, they diverge from the project plan, programming what they believe is necessary rather than what the project itself requires.

    I have been that person before, and now I’m in a position where I have to keep those folks on a tight leash and remind them “our goal is to deliver a product right now, and we can enhance it in future sprints. Let’s just focus on what our primary goal was right now.” It’s easy to fall down rabbit holes, and that’s where having proper planning and a ticketing system to backlog and prioritize future enhancements is so critical.


  • Details:

    On January 1, 2020, Lowtax changed a setting so that unregistered users could not see the forum index. Anyone not logged in would be given the banpage because of ‘=’ in place of ‘==’ in a section of the code. This led to discovery of an ancient bit of radium code that changed ‘unregistered user’ to a homophobic slur. Jeffrey fixed the bug, but this load bearing slur will live on forever.

    While details are scarce at this point, my best assumption as to what happened hinges on the idea that non-logged-in users with a presumed username string value of unregistered user were meant to be forwarded to the login page, but because a separate section of the code changed the string value of unregistered user to [homophobic slur here], hence nobody actually got the correct forwarding and they were all sent by default to the ban page. If I recall, this led to the unintended side effect of non-logged-in users being unable to log in.

    @favrion@lemmy.world @KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz @Klear@lemmy.world