Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 86

@Ricardus It's mandatory in the schools, yes, but they don't teach you the subtler parts of it. You get some solid basics, but then immersion takes over, and the learning becomes unguided.

@Ricardus Nordic speakers of English are often surprisingly fluent, with good pronunciation, but I've noticed that the *registers* of English are often lost on them, causing them to mix up rude, casual and formal language.

@Ricardus Linus' style of English reminds me of what one might call "Euro Hacker English", somewhat formal and academic, but with strong words inserted at strategic moments when a feature is broken ("fucked") or poorly implemented ("stinks"). It's what results when a nerd learns English mostly from technical texts, IRC and visual media.

@Ricardus Before he made the announcement, I wondered if perhaps his abrasive language was due to him not being a native speaker and having an emotional distance to English, causing him to make very strong statements without sensing their gravity. English is on everyone's lips in the Nordic countries, but it's often the pop culture version of it, with hip hop slang and movie quotes, and that's quite different from polite conversation.

@kokan I'm a nerd. See my other related toots. Yes, nerds are not the only myopic ones, but it's a very typical trait *of* nerds. Whatever the truth is, my line of thought seems to have resonated with a lot of people.

@dredmorbius It's my opinion that the best software is written by people who are going to use it. If you're going to write software for doctors, find a doctor who is also an excellent programmer and have him architect the system. If that's not possible, hire a doctor to sit next to a GUI programmer all day. Meetings are not enough, because the programmer will need constant little corrections to make the best software.

@dredmorbius The minimum viable user is just another way of saying that users are stupid. Stupid people are much easier for nerds to create mental models of than users who are *different* to nerds, because all the nerd has to do is take his own personality and eliminate all his skills. Meanwhile, real users have skills that don't overlap with that of the nerd, but he's not able to design software that fits them, since he can't empathise.

I say all of this as someone who is himself a nerd. It's just that I've noticed that, unlike most nerds, I'm a polymath. I have deep knowledge in more areas than most nerds I've met, and it goes across the arts, humanities and sciences, and also into applied psychology. More importantly, they aren't separate spheres of knowledge for me. Everything is connected to everything, so I often make mental leaps that may come across as a bit crazy to others.

Nerds think they're so smart, but look at how long it took Linus Torvalds to understand that maybe, just maybe his abrasive comments might actually hurt someone. Decades of lacking introspection. If he can make that mistake, so can other nerds, and they do, all the time. Nerds aren't some kind of enlightened cult. They're just people who spend a lot of energy on one thing, usually to the detriment of everything else, including people skills.

Nerds can be extremely myopic, both figuratively and literally. While nerds argued for the technical merits of Betamax and Video 2000, the world went right ahead and adopted VHS. There are thousands of similar stores, yet the nerds never learn. They think their opinion matters, but it doesn't. They think that a product that's useless to them is useless to everyone, because they lack the imagination to imagine what it's like to be someone else.

@SuperFloppies And even if it did, how many would have time to stop and examine that data in the grocery store? They could include a datasheet with every product and all it would do is increase the mental overload of anyone who dares to read it.

@SuperFloppies ...and the information you actually want isn't there. It doesn't tell you how much of the product will get metabolised in a way similar to sugar.

@SuperFloppies My case is extreme because of the calorie control involved, but keeping track of how much sugar you consume is also extra effort. You can't just pick something that looks tasty. You have to squint at the nutrition facts and check for sugar, and also refer to your mental database of sugar equivalents. It's a complicated landscape to navigate.

@SuperFloppies People through the ages have always looked for shortcuts and simple explanations. If I look at the amount of mental energy I have to spend in order to maintain a 1400 kcal/day diet, it's ridiculous. I keep a table of calories per portion of everything in the fridge, and have to pull out the calculator and a digital kitchen scale to compose a meal. Meanwhile, all I want to do is put some food on my plate and eat it.

Just watched a documentary about sugar and sugar substitutes. People gladly buy all sorts of high-sugar foods if you just put "no added sugar" on them.

The reality is that avoiding high-sugar foods is hard. If you look at the nutrition facts on the packaging, you can easily be deceived:

Freeze-dried packages often don't state the amount for the prepared product, some products contain air/CO2 and others contain starches easily broken down into sugar.

Ordinary consumers want shortcuts.

Postmodernism is an ingenious term. It describes how we stopped believing in the idea of one truth and embraced the idea of many truths.

This one word encapsulates individualism, relativism, modern art, feminism, political polarisation, LGBT activism, post-colonialism, spiritualism and a host of other concepts.

More than anything else, postmodernism and its constant deconstruction of society's values explains why humanity never settles into a stable equilibrium.

I like how republicans in North Carolina, USA, backed by real-estate developers, voted to ignore rising sea levels six years ago, yet since then, the sea has risen by an inch a year.

I always felt that, in cases where you can either trust science or create new jobs, you're usually better off trusting the science.

In our postmodern culture, every truth is relative. Scientists are inconvenient in this scheme, because they find evidence for absolute truths.

The worst kind of AGC (automatic gain control) for microphones in consumer products is also the worst kind: A brick wall limiter with a slow release. A single loud peak in an otherwise quiet audio stream, and your gain is down 20 dB.

What you actually want is a compressor with a slow attack/release for overall gain, followed by a brick wall limiter with a fast release for peaks. Any loud peaks are ignored by the compressor and hits the limiter instead.

Never going to happen, of course.

@Blackknight I've been avoiding Windows third-party terminal emulators ever since I learned that they all work by running a hidden cmd.exe and screen scraping it, because Windows lacks PTYs. Or, at least it has lacked them until recently: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/tag/pty/
It's going to take a little while for the various third-party terminal emulators to update their code to use the new ConPTY API, so I'm just going to wait and see.

What Microsoft is doing with Windows 10 isn't exactly innovative, but they're definitely catching up to what's been going on in the Linux/Mac world. For Windows natives, this must feel like innovation. For the rest of us, it provides some much needed sanity.