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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • It’s not just sports. It can also be intellectual pursuits.

    Look at the kids who are in the top tier spelling bee competitions, and then look at their parents, and tell me whose dreams are coming true.

    Same thing for a lot of child prodigies. A lot of child prodigies suddenly become less “prodigious” the moment they move away from their parents.

    Same goes for so many different things. Child beauty pageants are another famous example.

    Obviously this doesn’t mean all of the kids who do these activities are being pushed by their parents. Some of them are self motivated. Some are not.










  • I think they’re downvoting my comments to try to be funny in this particular situation.

    If people used the downvote like you suggest, it would be less of a problem. But speaking of policing, there is no real policing of votes. There’s just a button.

    You give people a downvote button, and they’ll simply go through threads going up, down, up, down, up, down. It’s like they double their vote and it drowns out any more ethical downvotes. It hasn’t happened much on Lemmy, but it happens as a matter of course on Reddit. It will eventually be here, too, if Lemmy continues to grow. There is nothing to stop it.

    Besides, apart from your point about essentially unmoderated areas, I think the upvote button is enough to achieve all the goals you listed. And if it’s unmoderated, it’s going to become unusably toxic no matter how people vote.


  • If it’s poorly made, then you’re supposed to simply upvote other comments if they’re better.

    If a comment is unfitting, then it is off-topic and can be removed by mods.

    I honestly think comment downvotes should be disallowed, or if that isn’t possible, then the users who downvote each comment should be easy to find, like with a “click to expand and list downvoters” sort of link. I think you’d find downvoters to be mostly trolls and non-participators. Low value accounts.


  • So, in my case, enum is programmer jargon and is not something that I’d pronounce at all to a layman or larger audience. I don’t think anybody has ever misunderstood me. I often also simply say “enumeration”. But again, that is still jargon. For a programmer, an enumeration is a data type, and for the layman, it probably just means something like “numbered things”.

    Spoken language is too ephemeral to be imprecise or use your own flair

    I would say that this is a good rule of thumb.

    But then, how do I put this? I think people who are on the spectrum are much more concerned with misinterpretation than neurotypical people. I understand why, as I’ve struggled with being misinterpreted in the past. Being misinterpreted feels like a major disaster. But I noticed that other people basically assume that they’ll be understood, no matter how poorly their message is conveyed. I suspect that you’ve noticed the same thing. I don’t go that far, but I definitely think there is room for self-expression.

    In the end, if you understand and feel comfortable with the normal rules, then you can understand where it’s okay to start to break them. Some estimates say that Shakespeare invented 1700 words in his written works. I’m sure that in the majority of those instances, he expected to be understood, despite using a word that nobody else had ever used.

    Your fashion metaphor is actually a pretty good one, I think. There is room for expression, but there are also general guidelines to follow. In a typical office environment, nobody comes in to work nude or wearing a toilet seat around their neck. Okay that’s extreme, but nobody wears tons of jewelry like Mr. T, either. What I’m saying is that, outside of high fashion like you see on runways, people do follow a basic set of clothing rules, some of which are social and not specifically practical, and their self-expression is only built on top of that base.

    The basic rules for clothing are to conceal certain areas, to provide comfort and protection. That sort of basic thing. So with that, everybody’s clothes serve that purpose. And then, like I said, there are some social rules. You know, like don’t wear a white dress to a wedding. When people violate those rules, other people notice and are often confused. And once the basic purpose of clothing is met, then there are areas for flair. I would say that the same thing applies to language.