Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.

I’ve heard that in Germany it’s “Golf von Mexiko (Golf von Amerika)”. That’s really annoying. I can vaguely understand it having the parenthesized name in English. Say in 3 years some kid in England is doing a report about something in the US and the Gulf of America comes up. Maybe you’d want the kid to be able to find it on the map. But, maybe it’s fine if the kid has to look it up somewhere else, realize that’s the stupid name, then search for Gulf of Amerikkka.

But, it doesn’t make any sense to do that for other languages. Just like we don’t get Finland (Suomi) when searching for Finland, Finns shouldn’t get something like Meksikonlahti (Gulf of America). They aren’t going to be exposed to / hearing the Finnish translation of the English name, so it’s not helpful in any way to have that parenthesized version.

Because you have to make a choice. If you go to a restaurant and say “I’d like a meal, please” they’ll make you choose one from the menu. It doesn’t matter to them which one you choose, you just have to choose.

In this case, some Lemmy instance needs to be the one where you sign in. Most of them probably don’t care if you choose them or not. But, if you want to use Lemmy, at some point you have to make a choice.

“Extremely” confusing?

Maybe to someone who has never once used email. But, even then, you could say “It’s like choosing a car, some look different, but they can all use the same roads.” If someone has never used a car, you could say “It’s like choosing a brand of underwear”. If they don’t use underwear, do we really want them here?

None of them really explained the user experience, and how different instances might affect it, let alone the existence of the local and global feeds and how your instance choice affects those

I almost never use the local feeds. Technically my instance choice does affect them, but I could switch to any other random Lemmy instance and the experience would be 99.99% the same for me.

To me it’s not forks vs. chopsticks, it’s someone looking at a fork with 3 tines instead of 4 and getting paralyzed not being able to decide between the two.

Everyone has heard of fire, water and grass, sure. Do they have any idea what that means in the Pokemon universe? I certainly hadn’t.

Not everyone is gonna immediately know what an instance is, or what it does, or what it’s there for

You know how you might use gmail and your friend might use outlook and you can just email no problem? Like that.

Is it really a “bad” experience?

A “bad” experience is something like applying for a job online, submitting your resume, then manually entering all the information that’s already on your resume into a thousand little boxes. A “bad” experience is trying to unsubscribe from a service that relies on the pain of that unsubscribe process keeping people paying every month.

Having to choose a server is at most a speed bump. Is it a “bad” experience to choose an email provider?

If that mild speed bump is keeping people from joining, that’s fine. If someone cared enough to make some kind of a GUI that hand-held people through the process of choosing a server, that’s fine too.

IMO, if we’re talking bad experiences, ads on Reddit that are designed to look like posts, that’s a bad experience. Ads that are designed to look like comments, that’s a bad experience. And, the feature coming soon of communities locked behind a paywall, that’s a really bad experience.

What’s dumb about this is that in their jurisdiction (Mexico) it is actually the “Gulf of Mexico” in Google Maps, they don’t get the “Gulf of America” name. In the US it’s labelled as “Gulf of America” without mentioning “Gulf of Mexico” which you could argue Google has to do because it (theoretically) follows national laws everywhere it operates.

That’s why Korean users don’t see the Sea of Japan to their east, they see the East Sea. That’s why in some locations the Persian Gulf is referred to as the Arabian Gulf instead. It’s also why inside India the borders you see for Kashmir don’t match the borders you see for Kashmir if you’re in Pakistan. The rest of the world sees a third version of that area with areas marked as disputed.

What’s really annoying is that every other country in the world is exposed to this “Gulf of America” silliness, even countries where people don’t speak English. I can understand (just barely) having “(Gulf of America)” under “Gulf of Mexico” in English-speaking countries because if someone is hearing news from a US source and they refer to the Gulf of America, it might be useful to know what they’re talking about. It’s in the news now, but in 3 years say you’re a high-school kid trying to do a geography report and can’t find the feature on the map, that could be annoying.

But, this parenthesis rule apparently even extends to Germany, where it’s “Golf von Mexiko (Golf von Amerika)”. There’s no reason to include a name that doesn’t exist in your language on your version of the maps app. If I, as an English-maps user look at Germany, I don’t get Munich (Munchen). I don’t get Florence (Firenze), I don’t get India (Bhārat). There’s a long-standing tradition that maps show things in the name that’s local to the map user. Sometimes, over time, a name gets changed to be closer to the way it’s said in the local language, so Peking became Beijing.

Also, google addressed this in a blog post from 2008, almost literally describing this situation:

“How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth … if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage”

Other than the ruler not being female, the body of water being a different one, and “America” not being Donald Trump’s mother, this is the exact situation.

Edit: I guess technically Donald Trump is female.

The actual original names of baseball teams are fun. Almost all of these teams changed names (or locations) since their founding. The Atlanta Braves used to be from Boston, where they were the Boston Braves (much better alliteration). Meanwhile, Miami gained alliteration because they just used to be the Florida Marlins.

The Phillies were known as the Phillies pretty much from the beginning, but their official name was the Philadelphia Ball Club Limited. But that was a mouthful so they were nicknamed the Phillies (and also the Quakers).

The team that’s now the Washington Nationals used to actually be Canadian: the Montreal Expos (named after Expo '67). Seems a bit weird to me that the baseball team in the US national capital is a transplanted Canadian team.

Also, while looking this up, I found probably the worst-named team ever. The Philadelphia Phillies came to be because the league needed an 8th team to balance things after this other team was dropped from the league. Its hometown was too small to support a pro team. But, it did do some historic things before it folded, like being the first pro team to visit Cuba in 1879 and having the first pitcher in MLB history to throw a perfect game, but it wasn’t because they were an amazing team. They also set a record as the first team to be defeated at home without even a single hit.

The name of this historically interesting team? The Worcester Worcesters. Also, if things were pronounced then as they are now, that would have been pronounced “The Woostah Woostahs”

Insert meme: “That’s on me, I should have set the bar higher”

And then there’s cricket…

I miss the Elbows. 😕

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.

Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?

Most music files may be MP3s, but music files are rare these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people under 30 have never interacted with a music file at all, they just use streaming services.

Well, you know those guys are extremists. Their slogan is literally “It’s Nerf or Nothin’!”

Average ebook size: 2.5 MB or so.

Meta downloaded 81 TB, or 81,000,000 MB.

81,000,000 / 2.5 = Approx 30 million books.

30,000,000 books * $250,000 per offence = $7.5 trillion

(are you sure you’re from programming.dev?)

Nice. I was being lazy, I was thinking of writing my own add-on or tampermonkey script, but I didn’t get around to it. I should have known there was already one out there.

There’s still a lot of old, useful and informative posts on Reddit that I find via a Google search. It annoys me that whenever I find one of those posts, I have to go and edit the URL to be old.reddit instead of www.reddit otherwise it’s so hard to use. Like, the useful thing is in the comments, but the comments are collapsed by default, so if you search for something you won’t find it until you expand those comments.

If they get rid of old.reddit I think I’m going to end up using the wayback machine to get that old post rather than trying to use that horrible new reddit interface.

For a while I was reading and posting on Lemmy, but still going over to check things out on Reddit (without an account) because Lemmy just wasn’t getting enough traffic to keep interesting posts popping up. I’m having to do that less and less these days.

Especially important to understand decentralization when it comes to topics like piracy. Unlike Reddit, a non-commercial Lemmy instance isn’t going to be shut down by a CEO who is worried about how it might affect their ability to sell ads. But, admins can get threatened, they can get overwhelmed, they can get hit by a bus. It’s good to know how how to find other communities on other servers, etc.