I spent enough time in aviation to know how much drilling it actually takes to teach people emergency procedures. If it’s different than what they usually do, it takes hours of practice. Even something as simple as finding and pulling a different door latch. If you’re stressed, even as stressed as “the doors won’t open the way I’m used to them otherwise everything is okay” your brain will just fail to pivot to the alternate procedures.

Cars got so simple to use in the 90’s. Sure they were simpler machines in the 60’s but fuel injection eliminated chokes and other carburetor issues, automatic transmissions became ubiquitous, children can handle vehicles of this complexity. And now we’re making them more complicated for no actual reason, with electric door latches with manual backups and such, and it’s causing problems.

At least one door should open via a mechanical key and mechanical handle from the outside, and I firmly believe the internal door handles should all function mechanically as well. There shouldn’t be “usually you use a button but in an emergency this thing that looks like a bit of trim is the actual mechanical handle” that shouldn’t be allowable by code.

Pluto wasn’t demoted. It didn’t get a pay cut or see a loss of benefits.

Our vocabulary has gotten richer and more specific as we’ve explored Pluto and things like it. As we launch missions like New Horizons out there, we’re going to need new terms to talk about the things we find. We sent a whole probe to Pluto; Uranus and Neptune had to share.

Science!

Rich Evans once said of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: “Bugs Bunny gave Eddie Valiant the spare tire (instead of a spare parachute) because Mickey Mouse would never do anything funny.”

The irony is that you would think nerfing a nerf gun would improve it, because it’s more nerf per nerf.

Can anyone name me one that is a normal fucking car? With a little dial that tells you how fast you’re going that isn’t an LCD display that can’t be read in direct sunlight connected to an internet connected computer that will never get OS updates? With a gear shift lever that moves forward and back or up and down to select park, reverse and drive, not a nipple in the glove box to lick for “Forward,” a knob on the ceiling labeled “H” and to put it in reverse you honk the word REVERSE on the horn? Where the doors have handles that you pull on to open that look like door handles, and locks that have cylinders that accept keys?

Yeah I don’t know why people do that.

I actively try not to.

Remember the game people used to play that was something like “type my girlfriend is and then let your phone keyboards auto suggestion take it from there?” LLMs are that.

My S10 is a “light truck.” A Silverado 3500 is not.

Yeah they tried to teach me to touch type in middle school, but it was MSN messenger and using an internet-connected computer as a tool for socializing that got me to actually practice typing.

A lot of those typing things start you off with “here’s the home row. Now type several strings of meaningless text. Okay, now we’ll let you type g and h in addition.” and then add one or two letters at a time to slowly build up typing skills. I’m the third fastest touch typist I know and I got that way hitting on coeds.

Let 'em kill each other.

You say that in jest but I am a former flight instructor that isn’t particularly interested in going flying ever again, not since I dropped out of mechanic school anyway.

Rats are on a rolling release model, I prefer to be on a stable release schedule.

I would agree that emoji have basically failed. They confuse communication rather than facilitate it.

Why are there 😀 and 😃 ? “Grinning face” and “Grinning face with big eyes.” Why? There are so many of them with subtle details like this that A. choosing between them is a bigger chore than it should be and B. they have to be rendered at such a high DPI that “bro just increase your font size” becomes the bullshit workaround everyone tells you to do. I can read the English text just fine, but on most screens emoji are indistinct blobs.

Emoji are subject to all the variation that fonts are. You know how there are two lowercase “g” glyphs? There’s the one you probably do when handwriting which is an O and a J, and then there’s the loop over a loop that basically no one hand writes, it looks like the font Lemmy uses has that g. Well, emoji are like that. Like how they had to add “male dancer/female dancer” the the standard because Google rendered the “dancer” emoji as a lame disco man, Apple rendered it as a woman in a red dress.

They don’t get used the way we used to use emoticons. I don’t see people say things like "I can’t go to the park today ☹️ " I see people say "Hey guys 👬 I just got back from the store 🏪 with some groceries 🥫 and took a picture 📸 of my dog 🐕 " Which to me demonstrates a failure to grow past the Sesame Street book with 6 thick rigid pages reading level.

Finally, there are so many symbols that have alternate meanings that you just have to know. Like you can send white or tan or brown faces, but all eggplants are purple and all peaches are pink.

Does the skin tone modifier work on the peach emoji?

Note to self: Buy stock in deadly neurotoxin manufacturers.

I haven’t gone so far as “let’s completely switch roles, you be the man and I’ll be the woman. You pay at restaurants and when something goes bump in the night I’ll sit here in bed holding the blanket to my chest while you go downstairs with the baseball bat.” Never occurred to me.

I used to think I’d like it if women would approach me, ask me out, initiate sex, that sort of thing. Until a few of them tried. To put it mildly, there seems to be a widespread moderation problem. To put it bluntly, I have heard more women say “rape me” than “hey would you like to go out with me sometime?” It’s either that or “hints.” “Hints” aren’t hints, they’re intentionally failed attempts at communication.

When most of the women I’ve been with just outright ignored questions like “what do you like in bed?” “What do you want to do?” “Do you like that?” it makes me stop trusting them. “I don’t know I’m a repressed farm girl from a rural county in a red state, I was taught that enjoying sex isn’t something I’m physically capable of doing” is something I can work with at least in theory. But “Do you like that?” and it doesn’t even register on her face that I’ve spoken…that screams “I’m using sex against you” louder than her voice ever could.

So yeah any fantasy of a woman who takes an active role was dumped in the same mass grave as my fantasy of flying an X-wing. I’m grown up enough now to know that these things just can’t exist in the real world. In the real world I’ve had women that sometimes said “maybe I guess” and I’ve flown a few Cessnas and LSAs.

GIMP has a well deserved reputation for responding to “this is not nice to use” with “Good!” There are lots of ways to design image editors, sure. Many of those ways are awful.

Blender used to suck, too. Then they made a decision to improve. Which GIMP is bound and determined not to do. So it needs to go in the box with HURD and someone needs to do better from scratch.