This is so mind numbingly fucking stupid. I have linguistics training and my dickhead uncle tried to pull this one on me. He’s never tried to flex his grammar on me since.

Next time this shit happens to you, try this trick.

In the above question, the word “can” could be interpreted in one of two senses.

• One is the deontic sense, which denotes permission or approval.
• The other is the epistemic sense, which denotes capability.

As a competent English speaker, you will easily infer that vampire is using the deontic “can”.

The confusion seems to derive from the recipient’s inability to understand that modals in English grammar can possess different senses depending on context.

It is worth noting that the deontic “can” has been documented in writings for hundreds of years. It is a normal and standard element of English grammar. Case in point: the idiot trying to flex on you knows what you mean but they’re pretending they don’t.

It’s not my problem that you don’t understand basic English grammar. Maybe you should go read a few books and educate yourself.

I wish that naked TLDs were a thing. Like https://com/ or https://london/

I used to love forums back in the day, but I must say I’ve really gotten over the format of the medium. It promotes email-like long form responses with space used up with avatar images, handles and signature blocks. Nested replies become a nightmare steer several layer’s and you’re cooked on mobile.

Would love a Lemmy-like plugin to parse vBulletin forums. Endless scroll for topics, minimal non-content fluff, easy and quick replies. (The irony of this reply length isn’t lost on me. Most of my replies are short, promise!)

Thanks for the suggestion I’ll follow it up!

I remember HATING clothes for Christmas. But now it’s all I want (so long as it’s my style). I don’t want random useless shit at Christmas, I want stuff I can use for years and wear out.

FHS is an absolute dumpster fire that would never be dreamed up in this day and age

One pothole and it’s done for

People using carriage returns as paragraph breaks 😭😭😭

I’d agree with this. When I first started using Excel in school and university, I’d follow the instructions and not really know why I was doing what I was doing.

But then, having to work with Excel at work and make it do new shit, the penny dropped in my head and I understood how spreadsheets worked.

I use spreadsheets for heaps of things now, even if I don’t need to use formulas. Excel has some weird idiosyncrasies but it’s a good product overall. It’s not as bad as Word, which most people use incorrectly.

I forget who said it, but:

There are four types of economy.

• Developed
• Developing
• Japan
• Argentina

Regardless of how you interpret the statistics, I think that this is a sign that the long vexed problem of software distribution for Linux has been significantly improved. Not quite solved, but for most desktop apps this is fantastic news.

I’ve started using Tree Style Tabs in Firefox and really like it. Maybe vertical tabs aren’t so bad?

This is slightly unrelated, but I’ve been slowly moving to Linux from windows for a while. I haven’t made the full plunge yet, but here’s my biggest strategy:

Use as many apps on windows as you can on Linux.

I’m using Okular, Ghostwriter, Libreoffice, Cider, etc. every month or so, another app is moved across.

Then, I make the switch and all my apps are there as I’m used to them.

If you have the room, you can often buy these second hand for a bargain from colleges etc. They’re built like tanks and you can wash almost anything inside them. When they do break, laundry operators try to DIY so there are videos everywhere on how to do repairs.

NGL the thumbnail looks like the first dance at the themed gay wedding

Needs collab features somehow 🥲

Thanks for this one! I’ll be giving it a go in my next project

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, which is very unusual for my discipline. Now that I’m done with that, everything we’re doing it’s collaborative Word docs. Collaboration features in 365 have been transformative. (Remembering the dark old days of emailing the Word doc around like a hot potato.)

I’m very used to Word and can get it to do some great stuff that most people don’t even know about, but I wouldn’t touch it for something over 20,000 words.

As for LaTeX, I was fine once I got a good template going. Writing one sentence per line is a fantastic way to draft. But there are some fine tuning things that I remember took up a lot of time that I would have had no problem fixing in Word. I distinctly remember trying to get tables to look right when you had paragraphs or dot points in cells.

Oh, and that one reference whose URL refused to break in the line and instead just went off the page. I never found a fix for that.

Go to overleaf.com and say goodbye to a chunk of your weekend. 😉

I often use fields, so I have to go back to desktop Word eventually to add them in. 🥲

Users only use a fraction of the feature set but everyone uses a different fraction 😂