Because Windows can view and extract them out of the box without installing any additional applications. If it supported anything better out of the box I'd guess people would use that instead.
It was, back when software development was run by hackers and not suits and security people. Easy access was a feature for users, too; back in those days, software was a tool that worked on data, it didn't try to own the data.
Subsume your agency. Stop writing. Stop learning. Stop thinking for yourself. Become hylic. Just let the machine think everything for you and act as it acts. Those that own them are benevolent and there will never be consequences.
I don't see why it couldn't be. It has a pretty large corpus of decent literature/poetry/other media/etc, and the worst people seem to complain about is its inconsistent spelling rules that even native speakers struggle with. In general I'd rather deal with spell check failing on some common homophone from time to time than say, having to memorize arbitrary genders for inanimate nouns that lack any consistent marker and then tables of grammatical cases to apply on them based on those genders. Or having to shove a verb to the end of a complicated sentence and having to unroll the whole thing to figure out what's being said (not to pick on any particular language(s) I've learned).
Oh thank god, someone said it. Who cares if "tree" is masculine or feminine, it does not give my any information. In Italian, tree is a masculine word: what can I do knowing "tree" is masculine?
Grammatical gender can serve as disambiguation. I just heard this sentence recently while watching something in Spanish:
"No me compares con alguien como tú, que llegaste aquí de una isla oriental sólo porque te impresionó un espectáculo de magia barato."
In the phrase "un espectáculo de magia barato," which means "cheap magic show" here, you can tell from the genders of the nouns and adjectives that it's that "barato" modifies "espectáculo," meaning that the show is cheap and it's not that the magic is cheap.
It's not that useful here, because it's not hard to figure out the correct meaning from the context anyway, but it's a tool that helps clarity regardless. And when you learn a language well enough, it's not like you're thinking about this super consciously, you just know the word and gendering it and its adjectives flows right off your tongue. I think this is probably easier for a non-native to learn than all the irregular spellings of English, but I wouldn't know, being a native English speaker.
It seems like we can invent better checksums and referents than grammatical gender. Arguably that's a fascinating part of the pronoun discussions in English, being one of the last remaining bastions of grammatical gender in English (that and familial relationship words). I don't expect us to invent better things at all quickly, but it seems worth trying and it is interesting seeing various experiments.
One of the things I liked in studying lojban (a conlang of interesting background) was the use of mathematical identifiers as pronouns and "math genders" more related to linguistic role, referents like "the first noun", "the third verb" as pronouns. Referring to things by number is particularly great either, but it was interesting seeing a different approach to it.
Similarly, I think the language with the best pronouns I've experienced is ASL (American Sign Language). Signed languages have the ability to use three dimensional space in ways to anchor references that are impractical in spoken languages but so useful in signed languages.
QuickBASIC or even Visual Basic 1 immediately come to mind. They have good, discoverable navigation and documentation.
I have no idea where you'd be able to find it since it's a proprietary product but InfoLease 9 had one of my favorites TUIs from a long gone era. You could navigate through and edit complicated contract information extremely quickly through a series of fixed number based menus and views. Once I got the hang of it I could blaze through entering tons and tons of data without any effort. I suppose a lot of BBSes had a kind-of similar interface but without the field validation and documentation (you could write ? virtually anywhere to get quick documentation about what you were editing or what something was intended for, and fields were validated in this really "perfect" way where it never felt like you lost time if you fat-fingered something).
> Sometimes I wish I could get an honest answer from trolls about what they hope to achieve, but of course that will never happen.
It's usually not that complicated: They enjoy provoking people, particularly people that can be reflexively upset by reading words. It's a game to them, against a party that they do not respect. The words they say might upset you, but the words ultimately mean nothing to them outside of provoking you, and the more chaotic they can make the situation the more amusing it is.
1. Spite/damage a community for perceived or effective injustice/discrimination. I remember this happening on Reddit and Stack Overflow circa 2010-2014.
2. Actually a neurodivergent person mistaken for a troll. I remember this happening on HN. Remember him being either schizophrenic or autistic. Another example might have been the creator of Temple OS.
Having set up and administrated both an XMPP and a Matrix server, XMPP is way less a pain in the ass. I've enjoyed dealing with prosody much more than either synapse or dendrite. XMPP doesn't tank my server every time I try to join a new room and it doesn't take forever to start talking in a room after you join it. And provided you're running the server, getting people onto XMPP has not been hard in my experience. I made a basic registration page with simple instructions. I have gotten people with low technical know-how to successfully register accounts and use it without issue. They just create an account, enter their username into a client I recommend, and they're ready to go (I've never even had them complain about OMEMO).
If you go through your contact list right now, how many people are on iOS, and how many of them do you think you could successfully convince to use XMPP as the primary method to reach you?
I don't know iOS users, except one, who already used XMPP. Most people I talk to on a regular basis already use it. The ones that don't either don't bother with apps at all (my grandparents), or are not close enough / frequent enough contacts to bother with anything beyond SMS.
Oh sure, but it's still a counterexample to your statement. I can convince people to use XMPP, and almost nobody is using Matrix if you don't do the convincing.
When I was working on the road/relative's houses, the height adjustable desk was the only thing that I missed from the office. You have to get one that has a motor though - I've never found the manual ones worth the effort (they usually seem to be low quality and very wobbly). But being able to switch between standing and sitting has been valuable for keeping me comfortable.
