What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?
What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?
For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!
That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"
Preach brotha.
Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.
Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.
Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).
So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.
And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.
Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?
The "is a hot dog a sandwich" and similar discussions are solved with the mighty sword of language and not some rigid taxonomy about fillings and bread.
Imagine a set of food items on a table, hot dog amongst them, but not other pseudo-sandwiches. I ask you to "Please pass me that sandwich." If there is but a moment's pause in your mind before you reach for the hot dog, even if it's as you surmise I must be speaking about the hot dog as there are no other sandwich-like items available, then it is not a sandwich.
The medical symbol of the staff with the snake is only supposed to have 1 (one) snake on it. A staff with 1 snake is the Rod of Asclepius (the son of Apollo and Greek demigod of medicine), a staff with 2 snakes is a Caduceus which is carried by Hermes as a messenger or herald.
Physicians get 1 snake. Couriers and heralds get 2 snakes. Any medical professional or organization that uses 2 snakes is wrong and needs to go study the humanities and classics for a bit.
"Spectacle Fighter".
In the late aughts, game critic Ben "Yathzee" Croshaw came up with that term to describe games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, beat-em-up type games where the point is less "can you get through" and more "how high can you get that combo meter? How COOL can you make yourself look while beating up all these fodder enemies?"
A few years later the industry coalesced on an agreed-upon term for this subgenre -- And called it "Character Action".
Yathzee has just accepted defeat and uses the term everyone uses, he has to, he works in games media.
I refuse. Character Action is a dumb, DUMB term because every action game is a character action game, because there is ACTION and CHARACTERS in all of them.
Whereas "Spectacle Fighter" was perfectly descriptive of just WHAT made those games special. You are FIGHTING, and the objective is to LOOK SPECTACULAR.
The word "literally" has been forever ruined by people who use it to mean "figuratively." Worse, there is now literally no way to actually convey the original meaning of the word "literally" in a concise, clear way.
You have to say something like, "A is literally 10 times bigger than B...and I mean that ACTUALLY literally." And then people will STILL assume that you're speaking figuratively.
When people say 'I could care less'. I know what they mean, but it is absolutely not what they said. I hate it even more when I hear it in a song or a TV show/movie. That tells me it made its way past a whole slew of writers and editors. I hate it. It's 'I couldn't care less'. COULDN'T!!! Like you care so little that you couldn't care any less.
Pluto is a MOTHER FUCKING PLANET
It has enough mass to deform into a spheroid, it orbits on the major plane of every other planet.
"Clearing their orbit" is utter bullshit, Earth hasn't even cleared its orbit that's why we get the Perseid and The Leonid meteor showers.
Fuck you NDT, I know you didn't start it but you SURE as FUCK popularized it.
And I will literally fistfight any of you who disagree idgaf where or when.
I live in a high altitude area. It gets very hot. People will say that it's because we're "closer to the sun" as if the 6000ft/1800m difference is what matters vs the 93,000,000mi/150,000,000km distance to the sun is affected by something so small.
The difference is the lack of atmosphere to soften the various types of light from the sun.
I hate hate hate when people try to discredit a theory because "it's a theory not a fact" as if the label of "fact" exists on some kind of science ladder for an idea. "Facts" is a colloquial word like any other, it's not some special category above theories.
Moreover, the most tried and tested theories are facts. Science rarely just disproves an established theory outright. Einstein's General Relatively equations reduces into Newton's Laws of Motion in most situations. Newton's Laws of Motion weren't "wrong", it's just General Relatively is more specific and accurate.
The Scientific Method usually just builds on what already exists without claiming we were all unfactual for working with what we had.
Begging the Question is a logical fallacy, a circular argument. So when a position brings a question to mind that is other than a challenge to its validity, it raises the question.
Load the goddamn plane by column, window seats to aisle seats, grouped by odd/even seat numbers and make people line up largest seat number to smallest. It takes an extra five minutes before you board the plane and saves you twenty or thirty. It wouldn't even cost you the five if it was the standard.
Standard wedding photography is set up to make photos look “old”. And it’s so hideous and awful. Most filters used for wedding photography look atrocious.
Let major moments in time look like they were experienced at that time! I’m looking at you, black and white photograph from 2016. Artificially making something old, when at one time they were the present, gives so much incongruity to the experience.
Let something as important as a wedding day look like it’s a product of that time. Not from decades previously.
Everyone just accepted that company's changed wording from customer to consumer
And.it very much bothers me to this day that noone cares about the implication
"Roguelike" has become overused to the point that it's basically meaningless. Nobody's even played Rogue so it just means "a game that's like other games that are described as roguelike," which is like, any game. There's a set of games where the term originated where it actually made sense, games like Angband, ADOM, Castle of the Winds, etc, that are all closely related where the term makes sense. Cogmind and Pixel Dungeon are more recent examples.
Some of it gets resolved by describing those as "traditional roguelikes," and using other descriptors like "action rougelike" for Hades or "rougelike deckbuilder" for Slay the Spire, but like at that point why not just use "Hadeslike" or "Spirelike" instead of constantly harking back to this 40 year old game?
Slackware is still an important and useful distro.
It doesn't make any assumptions about how you want to use your computer.
Do you want a system that's more stable than Debian or as bleeding edge as Arch?
Do you want a minimal system that runs on an old 486 or a full-featured KDE desktop?
Do you want to compile from source, download tarballs from Github, install .deb packages, .rpm packages or FlatPaks?
Are you running a web server or a laptop?
Slackware don't care. There's no "Don't break Debian", no "Partial upgrades are unsupported", no "Don't mix in other repos", no "Don't edit this file, it will be overwritten". Do whatever the fuck you want, it's your PC.3 meals a day is completely unnecessary, and just eating one large meal works just as well. Saves time, too. I can sleep in because no breakfast to worry about cooking, lunch can be used to just relax or do something else, and then dinner is larger, but cooking more of the same food doesn't generally take that much longer.
People trying to stop an industrial war machine built on religious differences and racism by saying "I'm not voting for ______ until _____ happens" are ineffective idiots too stupid to understand the blatant bullshit they're peddling or the power they have in their vote.
If you want to change a politician's mind, you don't do it by dangling your vote on a carrot.
It's pronounced Herb not Erb
The miss use of the term "billet". As in "Made from Billet Aluminum to military specs" I have literally sourced metals from all over the world. Ain't no one ever tried to sell me "billet" anything.
A billet is an old term that was used when iron and steels were smelted and then poured in to either kind of a bread loaf mold or a round shape called a bloom. It would then be reheated at a later time and then formed into the final shape. No one would use "billet" or a "bloom" to make anything from it. It would have been "sponge" like and to soft to be useful for anything.
Fecking sales trying to market to ignorant people with a term that doesn't mean what anyone thinks it means.
My pedantic hill to die on is the word "jealous". For example:
"I'm going on vacation!" "Ugh, I'm so jealous!"
No, that's envy. Jealousy is a weird way of behaving about things you already have, it's not wishing you had what someone else does! Weirdly, explaining this does not cause people to use the correct word. At this point the battle is probably lost and the meaning has officially shifted.
It's addictive, not addicting.
Businesses keeping bankers hours, especially banks, should stop immediately. How could it possibly be a good idea to only be open during the main times that no one has free time to run errands? Why do I have to use PTO to go to the mechanic, or the doctor? Why can't these places, which require you to visit them in person, be open during the days and hours during the week that people actually have time to visit them in person?
People should stop purchasing things from Nintendo. The literal worst company I've ever been a fan of.
Having general AI on games makes me skip them, I'll be skipping Mecha Break after I saw that NPC that you can literally talk to, just a giant waste of time and a reason to not pay voice actors, I really don't want to go back to the time where you had to type what you wanted to do in an interpreter in King's Field.
Oxford comma.
Nuts only make sense in something that's already hard, like a cookie. It complements it by going from something hard-ish to another hard-ish texture.
Nuts in cake DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. I hate having to chew something smooth and spongy and suddenly - CRONCH. It's repulsive. 99% of the time it also tastes worse than the cake itself. If you actually want to put nuts on your damn cake, put it on the top so I can slide it off and eat it separately. Thank you.
Anyway not anyways. I don’t care what the dictionary says. Anyways sounds backwoods, plural, and the “s” is pointless.
That my wife HAS to dust off her feet before getting in bed. Dirty bed? Go fudge yourself!
That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"
Funny: Mine is correcting people who try to enforce a prescriptive distinction between “less” and “fewer” when “less” is often used with count nouns. They can be interchangeable, and it’s been this way for hundreds of years.
US newspaper headlines.
"Polilitician lies, world ignores, carries on."
I get the idea is to abbreviate to fit as much in, but it hurts my mind every time! There has to be some retention of language!
The kilometre—with the accent on the ki and the re ending—is a unit of distance. A kilometer—with the accent on the lo and the er ending—would be a device that measures kilos, like perhaps a bathroom scale? centimetre, millimetre, speedometer, altimeter.
I'm actually fairly forgiving about people saying it the wrong way, but when Siri gives me GPS directions, it really grinds my gears. She should know better!
You can be a duck and a banana at the same time.
People say "I'm just gonna go try and do it"
No.
Say "I'm just gonna go try to do it."
really stupid, really pointless, I've never corrected anyone on it, but oh, how I want to
TP rolls here always have the open end siding the wall. Otherwise my cats shred them.
I mentioned this in another thread, but IMO people who distinguish ⟨v u⟩ in Latin are as annoying as someone hypothetically replacing English ⟨a⟩ with ⟨æ ɑ ə⟩ depending on the sound.
The use of "whenever" in place of "when" has been on the rise and it drives me insane. It makes you sound fucking stupid.
Never playing games online unless it's something like an MMORPG like Dofus or Wakfu where interacting with others is completely optional, or unless with a friend. Rule applies to almost every single game I play besides Krosmaga.
By the time I become somewhat decent at a game, I can already guarantee I'll be consistently paired up with either hackers or people way above my skill grade. Then it'll drain all the fun. Same reason why back in highschool I only ever really played games like CS:GO with my friend and haven't touched them pretty much at all in my free time.
I can recline my seat. And you can recline yours.
On the toilet paper debate, as far as I can tell it largely has to do with whether people stand up or sit down to wipe. People who stand up want the paper unrolling on the front (because they can't easily reach under the roll), while people who sit down and wipe can go either way.
For my petty hill, "Duck" brand tape is awful and should never be bought. It's just slightly above generic dollar brand tape in quality, and should absolutely never be bought if you have any other options. Go with Scotch or anything else really.
There's a Wikipedia link and a hundred others if you bother to search even a little.
Besides, doesn't matter if it's real. It's a story. It's entertainment. And it's just as real as any other opinion here.
As an English major and history buff, Anti-Stratfordians live in my head rent-free. I hate their stupid, classist arguments that utterly depend on misunderstanding the context of Elizabethan theatre, Shakepeare's story, his work, that of his peers, and how truly well documented he is for a 16th-century commoner.
Jokes on you, I'm polydextris
I visit lemmy pretty often so I probably pick a few new ones every week.
Not sure what counts as "petty", but there's one that is relevant to a recent discussion I had. If you say something considered "offensive", it is arguably equally so no matter who says it and/or who it is towards. I run a few groups and people have a hard enough time here that it almost seems like it's a matter of a vote now.
Using 12 AM or 12 PM is useless. Midnight is both and noon is neither.
The saying "hindsight is 20/20" is stupid. 20/20 is average. As someone with better than 20/20, my hindsight would be worse than normal.
JRPG
Just because 1% doesn't match the male=man/female=woman dichotomy isn't reason enough to ditch the whole concept.
Permanently Deleted
Funny; probably the opposite of yours.
Facing the toilet paper outward increases the chance that the paper rips with the roll being in such a position that the loose portion of the roll is lying exactly against the roll: I don't want to have to spin the roll to be able to get to the loose bit. Having the loose bit closer to the wall – probably by virtue of being further away from the user – more often results in it being ripped such that a bit is hanging below the roll, making it easier to grab more often. It's, in total, a much more consistently enjoyable user experience.
Also, less being constrained only to countable objects is an artificial and unintuitive definition. It's not like
furthervs.farther, describing two distinct concepts which never overlap.Feweris in reference to counting by individual elements so it wouldn't make sense to apply to things which aren't inherently segmented but it's entirely possibly to measure less of the total of a segmented collection. To say less milk is to take a reduction of the total amount of milk available; this is perfectly feasible with a segmented collection, like cookies. To say less cookies is to take a reduction of the total amount of cookies, something fully measurable and actionable. It is merely thatfeweris applicable to a subset of the things whichlessis applicable.To argue otherwise is to try and create an artificial construction against the intuitive logic inherent in the natural construction.
I had not realized the latter was a hill I'd die on but, boy, will I, now.
Vehicle airbags are crude blunt instruments at best, and way too many of them shoot out metal shards. Millions of vehicles do that and they keep expanding the recalls. Let's try something else. If my car stereo is manufactured wrong it won't lacerate my face and upper body.
assuming we're allowed to get political, the israel/palestine shit, there are people on the left that care way too fucking much, it's the one issue they complain about and if it took them dissolving the entire US government structure and forced us to all starve they would do that, and then be really fucking bored when they realize they have nothing to be mad about anymore.
Little advice from me to you, doesn't matter what your opinion is, or what it's about. You probably care too much about it if you're getting mad on the internet about it. Stop being mad on the internet about it, it quite literally has almost no effect on your life. You're allowed to protest, and be unhappy about things, you're allowed to challenge things in court, that's all fine, but please stop calling people genocidal zionists, and aggressively insulting them, you've created a vile echo chamber not dissimilar to COD and league lobbies, and nobody wants to be compared to a league player.
assuming we're not allowed to talk about politics, all of web dev, the entire field was a mistake and we should fucking start over, the web browser is literally turning into it's own OS that runs on top of an OS. Why? I don't know, great question. Have you ever wanted to run a bare metal operating system, and then run a virtual machine on it, and then run a software container inside that virtual machine, and then launch software inside that container on that virtual machine on that hardware? And then felt like you needed that software to have it's own containerization and entire OS stack running inside of it? Yeah me neither. Why is that a thing we can do?
aside from that, every web app i have ever used is fucking awful, the networking fucking sucks, it's all based on subscribing to the modern DNS and reverse proxy meta, which is fucking annoying for testing. And even more annoying if you don't feel like paying for a fucking domain name if you want to host something privately. It's super fucking restricted and just doesn't work half the time? Like firefox and chrome webrtc don't work together in my experience? It's so insanely bloated that it's a fucking nightmare to troubleshoot anything, and fixing certain problems sucks because the web doesn't fucking want to use http anymore? Like fuck you it's a static HTML page eat shit.
Mumble is quite literally one of my favorite pieces of software i have used, and it's client is broken and has a memory leak. It just fucking works, it has it's own security and cert handling, it runs natively on IPs which means it can also work over proxy networking trivially by just, setting that up separately, like a normal person. Or you could even just, not do that. It's incredibly flexible and does basically everything you want from a voip app. The server is minimal and quick, bots are trivial to deal with. It's all around a great platform.
The phrase "I could care less" makes more sense than "I couldn't care less." They're both idioms and therefore are both considered correct linguistically speaking.
But "I could care less" indicates you would prefer to not have to care about a subject so is expressing that you'd prefer to stop talking about it.
"I couldn't care less" doesn't indicate the current level of caring so you might say "there isn't anything in the world that will make me stop caring about my children; I couldn't care less about my children." Without the idiom those aren't contradictory. It's only because of the idiom there's an assumption the reason the person can't care less is because they don't care at all. But nothing about the phrase indicates this.
The level of concern for something with the phrase "I could care less" is indicated by context and the phrase indicates whatever someone may have assumed about one's concern from the context is actually more than the person actual concern for it.
But people will often say "I couldn't care less" is better than "I could care less". They're wrong and I could care less about their wrong opinions on idioms.
Fahrenheit is a better measurement for ancient human temperature.
