wizzwizz4 / is on Nostr

I like tools. Tools exist to serve a purpose; good tools serve many purposes. The purposes are the important part – but I'm no good at solving problems. I hope my tools will be enough.

Testimonials from satisfied costumers:
• "this pun is so fucking bad and i hate you for it" — @miko

If I'm doing wrong, please tell me. Either I don't know (and you've saved everyone a lot of grief), or I do know (and I should face consequences).

Last Notes

2024-11-16 19:22:36

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@nprofile…g2yn The contents of an <object> element are the fallback for if the content doesn't load, but you're not asking it to load any content; I'm not sure what the semantic meaning of that's supposed to be. You can use <object> to reference an SVG, though: it's an alternative to <img> or <picture>/<source>.

2024-07-19 07:35:31

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@npub16uk…pv7k Looks like it's related to CrowdStrike Falcon® Sensor, not Microsoft® Windows® per se. (It's not Microsoft's fault the house of cards fell over: somebody jogged the table!)

2024-07-12 21:04:44

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@npub1836…8jp6 Is this an integer? 1 for "enabled", 0 for "disabled"?

2023-11-09 01:45:08

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@npub16uk…pv7k Judging by what little EFL educational materials I've had the displeasure to look through, though, what's holding them back is that they're mostly based on Victorian-era prescriptive grammar rules that nobody (not even the Victorians) actually subscribed to, and you have to sound like a total muppet if you want to pass the exams.

2023-11-09 01:44:12

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@npub16uk…pv7k If they're being taught the rules of some Standard NZ English, then sure: but that's never how schools present grammar education. They say "this is right", "this is wrong", "the way everyone you know talks is wrong and that's bad" – and sometimes teachers will even try to "correct" their own speech patterns, but much of the time they'll just come across as utter hypocrites. If they actually taught it as "this is a formal common language, but the way you speak is fine", great!

2023-11-09 01:32:53

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@npub16uk…pv7k Ah, yeah, I don't know that teachers have ever been given formal training in grammar. They're just sort of expected to know it, which means they usually just end up teaching the memetic rules:
I have to constantly correct split infinitives. If a student uses singular 'they', they're wrong. Prepositions aren't for ending sentences with. And nobody should start a sentence with a conjunction, either.
This could well contribute to the 'exclusionary' perception.

2023-11-09 01:22:12

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@npub16uk…pv7k Because grammar education in schools is almost uniformly *awful*.
The names of word classes (common nouns, Proper Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions), the fact that connectives were sometimes called "conjunctions" (actually I learned a more subtle distinction, which I have since forgotten) and how to use a semicolon: this is the extent of the grammar I learned from my schooling. All my other *correct* grammar knowledge came from reading.
My school was very good.

2023-11-09 01:16:51

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@npub16uk…pv7k That's not a national thing: https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/ makes several references to “grammatical conventions”.
Likewise, England's National Curriculum still has it: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-framework-for-key-stages-1-to-4/the-national-curriculum-in-england-framework-for-key-stages-1-to-4#section-24
Much of the grammar taught in schools is cargo-cult, with little basis in modern linguistics. Sure, some of it's useful, but I spent rather too much time at primary school showing teachers examples of published authors using “incorrect grammar”, in an attempt to prove that their rules were wrong.

2023-11-09 01:04:43

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@npub16uk…pv7k "Me and Jacob went to the shops with Hailey" has been around for hundreds of years, and never reached dominance. People pushing against it has, however, created the arguably-worse "Hailey went to the shops with Jacob and I."
Where have they stopped teaching grammar? I wasn't aware they'd taken it out of the curriculum anywhere. (That said, much English “grammar” education is nonsensical faux-Latin categorisation, about as useful as those spelling rules that don't work.)

2023-11-09 00:54:57

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@npub16uk…pv7k Those are status signals, and have nothing to do with intelligibility.
I would say that the RP in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Recording_of_speaker_of_British_English_(Received_Pronunciation).ogg is actually harder to parse than the average dialectical speaker would be: the consonants are similar to each other and there's very little flourish (is that the word?) for me to pick out.
And it's just not how people speak nowadays. Being a standard, RP will just become more and more distant from normal, everyday, intelligible English as time goes on.

2023-11-09 00:49:25

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@npub16uk…pv7k There's no such thing as "not dialect" in spoken language.
By the end of her life, the English that Queen Elizabeth II spoke in public had diverged quite significantly from the affected speech of her youth, to the point where she actually sounded like a normal person – and yet that variety of RP (and the related BBC English) was considered “the proper way” by many.
Who actually speaks BBC English now? Certainly not BBC News presenters.

2023-11-09 00:06:17

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@npub16uk…pv7k English is full of loanwords, whose pronunciations get gradually butchered over time (along with the rest of the language). They also *diverge* from the pronunciation in the original language (which is also changing), and the resulting hypercorrection can make things yet worse still (e.g. the spelling change from 'sisours' to 'scissors').
If just going along with it is too tricky, might I suggest coming up with your own linguistic improvements, and using those?

2023-11-08 23:34:13

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@npub16uk…pv7k It would be totally wrong if they were speaking Latin, I agree.

2023-11-08 23:09:51

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@npub16uk…pv7k In French, the t in "et" is silent.

2023-10-28 14:59:01

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@npub129g…4kwg If you can get a small example that reliably reproduces the crash, I'd be tempted to report it anyway. It might be failing to crash by coincidence in beta/nightly, with the underlying issue still present.