• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Yeah, so by all accounts i’m the kind of person most likely to love the french language: native speaker, effortless spelling and grammar, avid reader of BD, i even like the flowery and decorative aspects of the language (language soutenu); but then i also speak other languages, and this gives me the perspective that, from a practical standpoint, there’s a lot of issues with french. There’s layers of sediment accumulated over centuries, a lot of rules and spellings are vestigial and serve no purpose anymore other than make it harder.

    Also, a lot of rules and spellings come from grammarians just saying so, and writing prescriptivist style guides to make people spell The Correct Way. To a point, i even think the ability to invent and follow an arbitrary The Correct Way hass been a class signal.

    Even native french speakers sometimes have bad grammar, or at least that’s much more common than english speakers having bad grammar.

    English speakers say the same things about their language, but they don’t know about ô <— this accent and the agony of trying to guess when it should be used or not. It’s supposed to indicate a difference in pronunciation, but this difference depends on the accent and is also obvious from context. I’ve known teachers to dock points for shit like this, and it radicalized me against arbitrary rules despite being completely capable of following them. In my opinion, people use features that have a purpose; if people don’t use it, then it’s pointless.

    And from a global perspective, fewer people speak french than a lot of other languages. On the one hand this doesn’t matter, lots of people speak mandarin, it’s about who you’re likely to interact with; but i’d say your more likely to interact with spanish speakers.

    Unless of course you’re that much into BD. That doesn’t surprise me at all, lots of english speakers learned japanese for weeb reasons, i think it’s completely legit to learn a language for the culture. Actually i find it pretty impressive




  • I’m in France and my cousin married an American.

    Cost of living is high and the language is bullshit, but the standards of living are some of the best in the world. Very old established democracy and rule of law, workers rights, social security, and whatever the complete opposite of political apathy is. Culture is rich with a disproportionate level of global relevance for the country’s size. The location is ideal in the middle of europe, with a good variety of landscapes and climate.

    Internet is cheap and fast, but i don’t know anything about the state of tech jobs.

    I don’t know much about the tax system either but my assumption is you might save money just on the healthcare alone.

    Overall i wouldn’t recommend, you’d be better off in a country with a language closer to english, such as most countries north of France. They’ll have better english proficiency and you’ll learn the language easier.


  • It’s like a graveyard of companies that Microsoft has acquired over the years. Sharing files is one brand name (Sharepoint if i recall), making video calls is another name, planned events is another - every function has a brand name to it, which made me feel like these were the last remaining trace of long-absorbed companies.

    But that’s just my recollection, i haven’t touched Teams since Covid




  • The owner of my laundromat claims that it’s cheaper to do your laundry there than at home. At first i thought “of course a laundromat owner would say that”, but then he argued that his machines are more efficient than the ones we buy and that they are collectively heated.

    I still think he’s fulll of shit because he only argued about energy costs, not including his rent taxes or profit; but it did get me thinking that it would be cheaper and more efficient to wash our clothes collectively.






  • Lemmy is an improvement over Reddit in terms of its business structure. We don’t yet know what the downsides will be of decentralized social media at scale, but we know that it beats a tech company that went from venture capital to publicly traded while already deep in enshittification.

    Lemmy is not an improvement over Reddit in terms of design: it’s designed the exact same way, so it has the same set of advantages and disadvantages.

    The improvement in community is hard to guesstimate, and will change as the site grows. Aside from the company, it was often the users that made Reddit suck, and Lemmy is completely capabe of sucking in the exact same ways.




  • Honestly, i predict people and businesses will keep using Win10 years after it’s become unsafe. We’ve all seen the local warehouse still running Windows 7, i’m thinking that scenario but for millions of users.

    That’s a cybersecurity problem, but what i’m most concerned with is the e-waste problem, because there’s still going to be a lot of users that do replace their PC. There aren’t enough Linux users to buy all the computers that will be rendered obsolete, and there won’t be by then either. I myself am a new Linux user but i’m already covered, i don’t need more computers, not even for cheap.

    I just really hope this doesn’t end with millions of good computers landfilled or parted. The third world already buys a lot of our e-waste, so i hope they’ll get a crapton of relatively good computers for cheap and run either Win10 or Linux