For me I say that a truck with a cab longer than its bed is not a truck, but an SUV with an overgrown bumper.
I loathe tomatoes on burgers and will throw it in your face if you serve it to me.
Absolutely pointless taste wise and all that water is what makes the bread and patty move around with no respect for each other.
Ooooh them’s fighting words. Have you tried a burger with a homegrown tomato? Pretty night and day, might just change your mind.
[Image description: a plate with a burger and sides. The burger is open and ready to be assembled, one bun has sauce and a slice of an heirloom tomato, the other has the patty, cheese, pickles and bacon.]
That is exactly why I avoid getting tomatoes on my burgers in restaurants except for when I cook my own, the homegrown tomato has to be there. I am still shocked at how different the taste is.
See reply here: https://beehaw.org/comment/476775
However, I bet that tomato can be removed and you wouldn’t even notice if no one told you
Not telling you how to live your life but if I may offer a different perspective: tomatoes can be very flavourful but the ones you buy at supermarkets won’t be. Your stance might simply be due to not having had good tomatoes? (which is fine in its own right but I will not stand for tomato slander)
They can be, sure. I enjoy tomatoes otherwise. I can enjoy eating them like an apple or those cute cherry ones as snacks. But generally there are other ingredients on a burger (dressing, cheeses, bacon, whatever) that makes the tomato disappear completely and just become a watery slice of nothing but annoyance.
Tomatoes are fine, just keep them of my burgers.
You gotta try heirloom tomatoes. Completely different food compared to the waterfilled Beefsteak and Roma varieties you find in the supermarket.
Man a good tomato could just be eaten on its own with a little salt. Delicious, can’t wait for ours to come in, about a dozen different varieties each more delicious and beautiful than the last. 😋
Microtransactions are not acceptable in full retail single player games. I don’t care if it’s only cosmetics. If i pay 60 bucks for it, i better get the whole damn thing. Looking at you, Diablo 4.
Related: If it’s more than 99¢, it’s not a “microtransaction”. There’s nothing “micro” about $99.99. That’s an “in-app purchase”.
Absolutely. But you can see it the other way, the “micro” now refers to what you are getting and *not *what you are paying.
Further, I’m convinced the term “microtransaction” was introduced by corporations cynically and insidiously knowing full well they would ramp the price up over time deluding the meaning of the term.
Microsoft Word is a bad piece of software that is poorly designed, laughably unoptimized, and mostly dysfunctional. It’s like a passenger car with seven wheels arranged in an irregular septagon, a 1 gallon gas tank, and a kitchen stool for a seat.
Also hype clothes are a tremendous waste and reveal the hollowness and meaninglessness that underlies most fashion
I hate Microsoft Word. It’s so inefficient. When the template breaks and you spend an hour trying to fix some formatting. Just give me a latex template and let me focus on the actual content please.
I am trying to write more on latex as I am trying to switch away from
Just update word 03 with some security and bug fixes and be done with it. It still does literally everything anyone ever did with word.
I had to look up Hype clothing. So it’s just branded super expensive basic clothes? Is this popular for some reason.
Yeah. Supreme is the ultimate example, but also stuff like yeezees. And far be it from me to judge those more fashionable than myself. But most streetwear / hype stuff is just normal stuff but really shit quality and with the price upped by an order of magnitude b/c of intense social media FOMO. So, so dumb
Do you have a suggestion for a replacement? I’ve been looking for something to write in and didn’t want to buy MS office.
Microsoft Word works fine the few times that I do use it, but I mostly use LATEX and maybe some markdown.
This is more of a meta thing, but relevant to a lot of comments I’m seeing here. Having an opinion about pineapple on pizza is the most uninteresting cultural phenomenon. I’ve spent the last 4 years on dating apps, and at least 1 in 3 people write in their bio about this “issue”. It’s not something that people truly have strong feelings about, it’s like straight men saying Ryan Reynolds is attractive, or people arguing over the definition of a sandwich. It’s an opinion that people hold as a proxy for being somebody with strong opinions.
Pineapple on pizza is kinda like a lot of people suddenly having issues with the existence of trans people.
There’s just no need to have such strong, negative opinions about something that doesn’t actually affect them in any realistic way.
Subscription services are not worth it, period. Phone and internet bills are all you need to get everything you want at the best possible qualities in the best possible formats. Subscription services are only convenient for the lazy who don’t know how to use the internet.
Are you essentially saying you pirate movies, games, and tv shows?
I agree 100%. Subscription services have ruined plenty of good software, among other things. I don’t know how people can stand the feeling of not owning anything, just basically renting them and being at the mercy of the corporation that owns them.
Though this may be true for movies and shows, for games there’s basically only one Denuvo cracker in the scene now, which means releases are slow and by (paid) request.
Artificial sweeteners is one of the reasons I’m not obese. You can quote me all the studies you want, diet coke is not a gateway drink to regular coke, and splenda on my black coffee doesn’t make me crave a caramel macchiato.
Yeah. Actually, regular coke was my gateway drink to a coke zero lol, in my case. Like… if I consume too much sugar, I will feel anxious, hyper, and just… meh.
But Coca Cola Zero? I will mostly feel fine. And even more so, I found… the Zero to taste better than standard Coke? So, its a win-win for me :D
Those big SUV like Ford f150 should be illegal, for real. They are super long and tall, the driver can barely see what’s right in front, it’s dangerous for everyone not in the car. Cars should have stricter limits on size, if it’s bigger, you need a special license.
In the US anyone with a basic driver’s license can drive a huge Recreational Vehicle (RV) the size of a bus with 7 passengers. They’re super dangerous and it’s insane!
A 2,500-pound car and a 10,000-pound RV are the same from the perspective of the vehicle “class” on the driver’s license. This is not OK.
I’m 6ft/183cm and those things are taller than my shoulders. If I can’t see the drivers, there’s no way they can see children. Ban these trucks!
Let’s go one further and just… basically ban all cars. Almost nobody should be driving all of the time in a city, and when you start to think about how many problems and how much of a nuisance cars are it seems painfully obvious.
Yes, there’s problems that we’d need to solve in order to do this, and some things would just be a little less convenient… But cities would be so much safer, quieter, and have much better air quality if fewer people were driving. Bikes are very effective for getting around for most people (especially if you don’t have to worry about cars murdering you), e-bikes make it a little more accessible, and you can’t tell me we couldn’t have an absolutely bitching public transit system if 1) we didn’t have to account for so many cars, and 2) even a small fraction of what everybody spends on their own personal motor vehicles went towards public transit infrastructure.
Sometimes we need cars to haul stuff, it totally makes sense to have motor vehicles for emergency situations and stuff, but pretty much nobody needs a giant SUV to commute to an office job by themselves. The amount of huge cars you see driving around with only one person is super depressing when you start looking for it.
For the United States, I agree mass Transit should be a much more prominent thing than it is, but suburbs and mass transit is difficult to deal with. 50% of the U.S. lives in suburbs, 20% of the U.S. lives in rural areas.
I couldn’t live where I live without a car, and we literally have no mass transit. My nearest tiny grocery store is 3 miles away. I’m not putting a family of 4 on bicycles to make a run to the store to buy groceries, loading it on a bicycle, then hauling it home.
Part of the issue of mass transit, cities, and cars, is if I’m in a suburb 5 miles from a proper urban area with access to amenities, and I have no mass transit to get there, I have to take my car. And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?
Mass transit actually has to become a realistic option for the 30% that live in a city before we even start to talk about mass transit for the other 70% of the U.S.
And realistically, those cities need major redesigns to support a mass transit-style system. The fight for public transportation starts with zoning and districting. Get mixed-use neighborhoods up and rolling, some medium-density housing developments with townhouses, duplexes, and triplexes. The fight for a bike system (Why do we need bike lines along car road? Screw bike lanes, I want bike networks.) and buses come shortly thereafter.
Yes, obviously with how things are currently it’s not always practical to live without a car, but I don’t think it means we should be defeatist about it and assume that that’s the way things have to be. Yes, change will have to be gradual, but I think it’s reasonable to look into changing zoning laws so suburbs don’t have to be barren wastelands without any nearby shops. Yes, biking to get groceries is a little less convenient, but realistically many people and families can manage this just fine (especially with a bike trailer), and a 3 mile bike ride is like… 10 or 15 minutes?
Obviously things need to improve for these to be more reliable options for more people, and there will be inconveniences along the way, but I kind of think it’s worth thinking about shifting things in this direction, instead of cementing things the way they are? Like, walkable neighbourhoods are great, and having good public transit and biking infrastructure makes a city more accessible and gives people more freedoms and makes it so not having a driver’s license or car (e.g., due to disability or finances) isn’t a death sentence… And it’s probably better for the environment and people’s happiness and safety too. I’m really just kind of tired by how much money and effort is spent on catering to cars, which in my opinion makes our public spaces so much worse.
And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have to do this? From an individual perspective it’s obviously better to just be able to drive everywhere and park near your destination, I can totally empathize with you there… But there’s plenty of situations where you end up with sub-optimal solutions when everybody tries to follow their own self-interests. When everybody drives into the city all of the time that’s more carbon, more vehicles, more pollution, more noise, you need more infrastructure, more maintenance, and more parking… Things have to get further and further apart to support all of this infrastructure, and there’s more traffic and congestion which makes everything less efficient.
I mean, to be clear, I’m not saying this always makes sense… And I don’t want to see you suddenly have a 3 hour commute either. I want you to have good options for getting into the city… But I also don’t want you to be trapped in the suburb unable to come to work if you lose the ability to drive all of a sudden either, and I don’t want you to have to deal with finding parking or sitting in traffic either.
I get that these are unpopular opinions — people like their cars and they’re convenient for many things, and the thought of transitioning away from needing them as much seems scary because cars are basically people’s life blood at the moment… But I kind of feel like cars are killing us (often literally) with how expensive they are, how they limit access for people, how they shape our cities and make communities more isolated, and how they damage the environment.
Don’t mistake me, I would much prefer to just hop on public transit and get to where I want without having to drive. Whenever I travel I take great pleasure in being able to use public transit that actually just “works” and not having to rent a car or drive my own car around
That being said, I think bicycles and “walkable” cities are the stupidest pursuit people who want to change the system pursue. It’s easy to make a bike lane to point to and go “see! progress!” when no one will end up using the bike lane with any real consistency because the city is still laid out like garbage and getting from one end of even a small city to the other by bicycle lane is frustrating at best and dangerous/suicidal at worst.
I don’t think bicycles and walkable cities are a stupid pursuit at all, but I do agree that often times bicycie infrastructure isn’t given the care or respect it deserves! That said, I think sometimes these changes are incremental progress that can get better over time… Sometimes you end up with bike lanes that aren’t great to get to for instance, but they’ll eventually make more sense when the network expands (and each additional bike lane makes this exponentially better). Plus, I get the sense that drivers often don’t have a good sense of how much other transit infrastructure is used and relied upon by other people. I’ve often heard complaints about having to wait for trains at lights, for instance, and it’s a bit silly because the trains have hundreds of people on them, so they really should take priority, even if the traffic waiting at the light looks bigger because it’s so much less space efficient. I suspect in a similar way the usage of bike lanes is often underestimated because they’re quite efficient at getting people through in a small amount of space with little congestion. Bike lanes support some pretty serious throughput, so even if they get some pretty heavy use they might seem empty and unused… You just never really have a traffic jam or anything on them because they’re so effective at moving people through.
I’m interested to hear your plan as to how we transform the entire country such that no one needs cars and everyone has equal access to public transport. Banning them now would be disastrous for the poor. Not letting corrupt auto industry barons kill alternative transport would have been the play, but that horse has sailed.
I kinda agree and disagree with this POV. I think it’s more of a cultural issue and not a legal one. At least in the US, people think it’s trendy to buy a big truck, but as someone who worked in a blue collar field for years, a lot of these people that drive trucks do it because they need it for their jobs. Trust me, most of these people don’t like spending thousands on repairs and $100+/weekly. for gas
Not sure what the solution would be, but I don’t think banning them would be it. I think it would mostly affect the blue collar worker and not the people who are actually the problem.
Also, I used to drive one of those big ass trucks for work, and I can assure you that visibility is not an issue. They are tall, open, have huge mirrors, and have seats that are high up. I could see a lot more and a lot better than in my current sedan.
What kind of jobs mandate the use of a pickup instead of a regular old van? Maybe tree surgeons and gardeners? Not sure who else specifically requires an open bed. Even then the open bed vans are far more spacious and practical so still not sure where a pickup is ever the correct choice.
Anyone who lives in the suburbs where doing lawn maintenance, tree trimming, and other such stuff is required due to HOAs and other such nonsense typically requires either owning a truck, or having a friend with a truck, because every now and then you have to pack it full of lawn crap and haul it off. I have to do yearly fire protection on my property, that includes cutting out bushes, trimming trees, and creating defensible space. Loading that into a van would be a pain in the ass, loading it into an SUV means I’m never getting the sap out of the carpet. Throwing it in the back of a pickup bed means I don’t even have to think about it.
I don’t own a pickup, but I have multiple friends with pickups, and you get into a beneficial “I’ll buy you a tank of diesel if I can borrow your truck for an afternoon” relationship. They get 100 bucks in fuel, I get my lawn crap taken care of.
In many places outside the US, people just rent a trailer or a truck if they need one once a year. Obviously people who need these vehicles for their daily work should be able to use them, but driving a massive pickup truck because you have one task for it annually doesn’t seem like a good solution.
People go camping twice/year and buy a trailer and F350 to haul it, leaving the trailer vacant 50 weeks of the year and using the F350 as a commuter vehicle. But they nEeD a tRuCK fOr HauLiNG.
It’s insanity.
I understand the general use case what I don’t get is where a pickup is more suitable than something like a flatbed Transit - https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTAyNFgxMDI0/z/VmIAAOSw6DNcrKoD/$_86.JPG
Which has a bigger bed, a far more economical engine and is overall far more suitable as a work vehicle for carrying those kinds of loads.
Also do you not just have garden waste collection services?
Just hire the above for the few times a year you would need it. Honestly I do find it baffling.
A grilled cheese is only a grilled cheese if the most singificant portion of the ingredients between the bread is cheese. Otherwise, it is a grilled X with cheese.
Same opinion. And I like both!
The thing that really bothers me about grilled cheese is that they aren’t actually cooked on a grill (most of the time).
I agree. I’m not one of the silly purists that populate r/grilledcheese, other ingredients can go great in a grilled cheese, as long as the cheese is still the star of the show.
Am purist. Grilled cheese doesn’t have meat, otherwise it’s a grilled x with cheese or grilled cheese with x. Maybe if like, there’s a shit-ton of cheese and a sprinkling of meat crumble it could maybe still be a grilled cheese?, but calling a grilled meat sandwich a grilled cheese is like calling a salad with rasins, soy dressing, and grilled chicken a cesear salad just because it has ceasear dressing. You can call it cesear WITH chicken, but the minute it departs from what a specific and narrowly defined sub-item in a category of things is, you need to clarify that.
Like maybe if you radically improve the original so much that it becomes the standard? Then you can use the name? Like how modern Caesar salads explicitly use anchovy paste rather than Worcestershire sauce, which is where the anchovy flavor came from originally. I’m okay with that being called a Caesar salad because it is really good and close enough that the distinction doesn’t need to be made unless it’s the topic of the conversation, but you still can’t just say it’s the original recipe.
Tldr: A grilled cheese sandwich is specifically a cheese-only filling sandwich.
Former linguistics grad student here: The meaning of “literal” is changing, and sentences like “That guy is literally 500 years old” are correct.
[Waves from the other hill] I will never accept that usage of “literal” as correct.
Sees you from a few hills away: Oh my gosh we’re literally right next to each other! 😜
I agree and will take it further. We don’t even need to posit a change in the meaning of the word, we need only assume that when people use the word literally, they do not mean the word “literally” literally, they mean it figuratively.
Who says you have to use the word “literally” literally? You don’t have to say the word “loudly” loudly!
As a fellow linguistics student here, completely agree. I randomly get those ‘grammar nazis’ like “doesnt that sort of stuff upset you?” like nahh man that stuff is fascinating! Don’t lump me in with you, pleaseee.
So, what’s the new word for what “literal” used to mean?
Honestly, it’s also “literally”. Humans are complex lol.
Back when I was in grade school, there were kids saying “as long as you know what I mean, it doesn’t matter”. If a word means two different/conflicting things, how can we possibly know what you mean? See also: bimonthly.
This makes me irrationally mildly upset.
deleted by creator
Haha good point. Come to think of it I haven’t heard it in a while, but I’m also not exactly running in circles where it would be used frequently.
I hear it all the time in my circles.
Yeah, I haven’t heard anyone say it like that in literally, like, 500 years!
Large Language Models and other affiliated algorithms are not AI and no amount of marketing will convince me otherwise. As a result I refuse to call them AI when talking to people about them.
Will you differentiate your understanding of what AI is from LLMs?
Something with a mind. The term floating around now is “general artificial intelligence.” My primary objection is that a giant pile of poorly understood machine learning trained on garbage scraped from social media bears no resemblance to a thinking mind and calling it “AI” makes the term practically useless. Where do we draw the line between a complex algorithm and an “AI?” What makes it an “AI” vs. a simple algorithm?
As someone with published papers about machine learning, LLMs are artificially intelligent systems. At least according to the agreed-upon industry and academic definitions. I don’t really care about your head canon definition. I just want to be clear for anyone else who comes across this comment and doesn’t know otherwise.
Thanks, been arguing this for ages.
What do you say about LLM’s being better at diagnosing diseases than real doctors? It may not be intelligence, but it’s more than simply regurgitating information.
You should know that the article that headline is from glosses over the multiple choice nature of the data.
Chat gpt didn’t do an examination and get it right, it answered multiple choice questions correctly more often than mds.
I will return anything sent to me in an Amazon package.
I went directly to your site for a reason, which is to avoid Amazon. If you secretly fulfill from Amazon or Amazon Warehouses, I will return the item and shop elsewhere.
But… a lot of people and businesses reuse boxes.
Phones are for talking, navigating, and casual content consumption. Desktops (and laptops) are for actually getting things done. Both are useful, but the former is not a substitute for the latter.
Tablets are oversized phones that can’t even phone. I don’t see any use for them that isn’t better served by something else. They’d actually be useful if they ran a desktop operating system, and some early ones did, but modern ones don’t.
My dermatologist uses a tablet. Seems way more useful than a phone (larger screen) or laptop (handheld, more portable). I use mine mainly for reading, mainly graphic novels, but also for Slack, Zoom calls, and general one-off productivity away from my office where my laptop lives.
Tablets are good for reading comics as well as PDFs that don’t fit very well on an e-reader’s screen.
What about when I want a larger screen than what my phone offers without the added bulk of a physical keyboard? What should I use then?
Funny you should say that. I would very much like a phone that has a physical keyboard, like my old Droid 3 had.
Punctuation that denotes pauses like , ; : should be placed based on where the writer wants a pause and how long the pause should be, or when needed to avoid ambiguity, NOT on the bullshit arbitrary grammar “rules” that got made up to sell grammar books and enforce the class divide.
It’s very easy to find classics full of “bad” grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it’s in fact not bad.
It’s very easy to find classics full of “bad” grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it’s in fact not bad.
This is wrong for at least four reasons:
-
Incidents of “incorrect” punctuation in classics is due in large part to the role of various punctuation marks changing over time. For example, the semicolon was once used at the end of questions like a question mark. The em-dash was used in earlier modern English for long pauses, but is no longer.
-
“Classics” is a broad category, and they were written for many different purposes and audiences: they should not necessarily be held as paragons of style. If you’re trying to write intentionally, and for a large audience, the grammatical use of punctuation is helpful. For example, Emily Dickinson’s poems were primarily written for herself, and were highly stylistic. Not a style you’d want to replicate when writing, for example, a newspaper article.
-
There is a punctuation which explicitly denotes a pause: the en-dash. Why use punctuation which has a specific purpose to do the exact same thing?
-
Different dialects use pause in different ways. Just as purely phonetic spelling would be terrible for internationally audiences, purely phonetic spelling would make texts more difficult to understand. You say punctuation rules enforce a class divide. I say they help bridge class divides by giving a common set of rules not based on and particular English.
-
Wholeheartedly agree, it’s not like the best authors ever follow those rules in that way, grammar should be used to enhance readability, pacing, and tone when you have a good idea how it may be read.
Writer here. Don’t blindly follow dumb style rules. I write how I speak; and when you write how you speak, you end up using a lot of semicolons and em dashes (if you’re competent). Each “pausing-type” punctuation means something specific, and they are all vital for clarity and natural flow. And informal or spliced sentences are good. Style rules are too formal, and sometimes as antiquated as “‘ain’t aint’ a word”. So instead do what works— what makes things natural and easy to read.
Unless it’s boiled before they bake it, it’s not a fucking bagel, it’s doughnut-shaped bread. Bagels also do not contain blueberries, and any suggestion to the contrary should be met with a swift ass whooping.
Blueberry bagels are my second favorite. Spank me daddy
Heathen. Destroyer of all that is good. What is your first favorite?
Bagels also do not contain blueberries
This made me think, “Everything” bagels don’t actually include blueberries, but it’s literally supposed to contain everything! Irrefutable proof that blueberries can’t be in bagels
There are three drinks you can call a martini:
- A martini is gin and vermouth, maybe with some bitters if you like
- A vodka martini is vodka and vermouth, bitters again optional
- A vesper martini is gin, vodka, and lillet blanc
- Any of the above can be made “dirty” with olive brine if you want
Anything else is a cocktail in a martini glass. No shade if you like apple schnapps, lemon juice, and vodka, drink what you like, but it’s not a martini.
Ah, as a fan of martinis this is a hill I could also die on
