Musk says X advertiser backlash is "going to kill the company."
GOOD! Just fucking die already!
By stopping asking how to make it more popular and starting making it a place that could become popular.
Every once in a while I find myself looking at the Internet without ad blockers. Like, newly-installing a browser on a newly-installed OS, or trialing a new browser on my phone or whatnot. And when it happens it's a massive shock to me just how unusable the modern Internet is without an ad blocker.
If I were forced somehow to not use an ad blocker, I would probably stop using the WWW portion of the Internet and likely grossly cut down on other facets of the Internet.
It's always hilarious introducing stories (in general, not just SF) from another culture to people outside that culture. You hardly ever get someone who pauses to think about how weird their own stories may seem to outsiders. And nobody ever seems to grok that other nations' people might have pride in their own nation. So to American eyes, American patriotism is natural and normal but Chinese patriotism is obviously the product of propaganda, or as in the story mentioned at the beginning of this article, that a North Korean writer may actually want to write good things about their own country, even if the patriotism is aspirational, say, instead of saying what it is now.
Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.
I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical "gender" divisions that's in use in many languages isn't masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.
So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there's classifier words. (In English too: "a sheet of paper", not "a paper", but it's waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, "paper" (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with "spider" (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it's harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.
So I'm positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.
In many, many, many cuisines it is common to leave even the large spice elements in whole. Partially for the aesthetic and partially as proof of ingredients.
I'm down with that. I have been since I first figured out that my boss values office furniture more than he does people. He was bemoaning the lack of loyalty when I quit. I told him that loyalty flows both ways or doesn't flow at all. Since he'd stopped the downward flow, I stopped the upward flow.
This scales nicely to society.
Oh God, don't get me started on Youtube "prank" videos. Festering pustules of wannabe human beings that lot are!
For a subtle prank I went into my boss' office once and rotated everything 90° while he was out on a business trip. (By "I" here I meant "I led a team of coworkers".) By a freak of layout his office was an almost perfect square with the door arranged in a way that you could do that and everything would fit, so it was like someone went in, lifted up the walls, rotated the floor 90°, then lowered the walls again. (In reality it was a WHOLE LOT MORE WORK, let me tell you!)
And it's such an insane thing to do that when he walked into his office he knew something was VERY wrong but it took him a long time to figure out what. About an hour later he came to me and asked "... Did you guys change my office somehow?" I think he got his answer when everybody broke out laughing.
In university we filled someone's room with computer paper: just took a box of fanfold paper and tore off one sheet at a time, crumpling it into a ball and throwing it into their room. Until it was filled from floor to ceiling with paper balls.
The keys to making these pranks funny (for everybody) were:
No mean-spiritedness. We didn't do this because we hated someone and wanted to "get" them. We did it because we liked them and wanted to play with them.
We knew each other well enough to know what would or wouldn't go down well.
We didn't do anything that permanently harmed anybody, their possessions, or their status in the group.
We cleaned up after ourselves after we had our laugh. That work to rotate the room? Yeah, we did it twice. That room full of computer paper? Yeah, we emptied it.
I think a few people on Youtube need to learn some of this.
What you say: It's easy!
What you (hopefully) mean: Don't be intimidated! You can do it!
What they hear: You must be stupid if you can't do this.
What you say: It's so simple even a child can figure it out!
What you (hopefully) mean: Calm down and work through it. You've got this.
What they hear: Even a child is smarter than you!
Keep in mind that if you're dealing with someone who is struggling it is self-evidently not easy for them. Claiming that it is invalidates their experience and makes them feel small and stupid. Don't do that.
What you should say: I get it. This can be pretty intimidating. Let's work through this together.
It really is that simple.
Ah. The Google+ approach to signing up "users".
A non-technical end-user once had a problem with Windows. A technical friend said "SWITCH TO LINUX". Now they have thousands of problems.
I've been a non-stop user of Linux as my primary OS since before Ubuntu was a thing. I do not recommend Linux systems to my non-technical friends.
As a coda: Tesla Drivers Upset That Government Wants Their Cars to Be Safer
Apparently driving on misplaced faith that kills people is enjoyable. Tesla is a cult, not a car company.