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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • It could be a David Foster Wallace reference. “In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk.”


  • One could say that “u” is a lazily written “V”. This was before we had the concept of upper and lower case letters. The roman alphabet used for fancy writing is pretty much exactly as our upper case letters. This was written with a flat brush, but they also had a more cursive everyday alphabet which is quite hard for us to read. Eventually writing with pens made the alphabet evolve into uncial letters that look kind of Tolkienesque. To mark the beginning of a verse they used the old roman fancy letter to have something that stood out in the text, i.e. a versal. “V” is a versal, and “u” was the running text version, but it was considered the same letter. For example they would write “Vniuersum” where we write “Universum” now. Then some complicated things happened in history that necessitated different sounds and the pronounciation split into v, u, and w, over time.








  • The author of JSLint wrote:
    "So I added one more line to my license, was that, “the Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” And thought: I’ve done my job!
    /…/
    Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company. I don’t want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I’ll just say their initials, “IBM,” saying that they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that they wrote and they’re pretty sure they weren’t gonna use it for evil, but they couldn’t say for sure about their customers. So, could I give them a special license for that?

    So, of course!

    So I wrote back—this happened literally two weeks ago—I said, “I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.” "


  • There are some old interviews with George RR Martin where people ask him about various characters, and GRRM would adjust his pronounciation to match the person asking the question. So he’s pronouncing names differently in different interviews depending on how others pronounce them. I wonder if it is to make the other person comfortable, or if he just doesn’t have a canon pronounciation.



  • I guess it becomes a matter of strategy. Maybe progressive women aren’t the ones who need to hear it the most, and they may feel offended at the suggestion that other women could be part of reinforcing the patriarchy. It mirrors the way men are asked to shut down other mens sexist remarks and actions. I’m sure such behavior is prevalent, but I never witness it. So the question to me is, how do we communicate this whole thing to women as a group? The ones willing to listen aren’t the ones who need to hear it, and the ones who need to hear it are probably not willing to listen.



  • I agree that those are sane approaches. I do think that there can be immediate unintended consequences. If someone didn’t pay for a meal, there’s propably less chance of a second date. Etc.
    I imagine women went through similar consequences while entering traditionally masculine jobs and behavior.
    What I’m getting at is that I think that we often think that this pressure is all in our minds, and to some extent that’s true, but there are many stories of men opening up and being vulnerable and then their partners lose attraction. That’s a hard sell to young men. “Yes, you will be alone forever, but it’s necessary because in a couple of generations from now things might be better.”