Techy geek. Dad of an amazing daughter and a crazy dog.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I use Garuda and love it, but I also don’t think it’s the best for a first Linux distro, unless you’re good with needing to consistently use the command line for things, and you are interested in learning more about Linux and want a distro that requires you to occasionally get your hands dirty.

    From what I’ve seen, Linux Mint is a great first distro. If you want something that’s more purposed to gaming, then Nobara is great. It’s made by GloriousEggroll, who makes Proton-GE. It’s not going to be as new-user friendly as Mint, but more so than Garuda.



  • This ^^. It turns out that Elon is just a narcissistic idiot who doesn’t actually have good business sense, at least in the software world. The types of things he’s been trying are better explained as someone who wants Twitter to make more money but doesn’t understand how people actually think and behave and doesn’t realize that these decisions will alienate users and destroy the product. Spez decisions seem similar, although on the whole I think he’s less of a people idiot than Elon, and is probably just under tons of pressure to improve the financials right now and is making bad short-sighted decisions as a result.



  • Honestly, you’re not wrong. As someone who cares a great deal about the accuracy of my communication, I always avoid the word “biweekly” at work for exactly this reason. It’s just that…it’s complicated. Language is essentially a really big democracy where meaning, structure, etc, are all constantly decided by everyone speaking it. If something becomes allowed by enough people, then it becomes de facto “correct”, even if it muddies the system as a whole.

    I prefer to take a very pragmatic approach to it all. (For my linguistics friends, I’m not using “pragmatic” in the technical sense.) In situations where communication is important or you don’t know your audience well, I would advise people not to use “literally” in the non-literal sense. But if I were teaching English as a foreign language, I would absolutely teach this meaning of “literally” to an advanced learner. To not do so would be a disservice to them and potentially engender misunderstandings. (Whether I would teach something to an advanced second language learner is a good litmus test for whether something is linguistically “correct”.)

    The other thing (sorry for the long comment) is that humans are generally better at inferring meaning from context than we realize. For instance, I would be willing to bet that most people reading these two sentences pretty easily understand the intended meaning of the word “literally”:

    1. Oh my gosh that man is literally the creepiest guy alive.
    2. When you drink, you are quite literally ingesting poison. (Just an example sentence! Not a medical expert!)

    In both sentences, the topic of the sentence and the addition of the words / phrases like “oh my gosh” and “quite” go a long way to clarifying the intended meaning.

    Also also: I just realized that my use of the word “drink” for “drink alcohol” is an unintentional second example of our ability to infer meaning from context.