Yeah, I love that one.

“Try” is too hopeful. “fuck_around” makes it clear that you know what you’re doing is dangerous but you’re going to do it anyhow. I know that in some languages wrapping a lot of code in exception blocks is the norm, but I don’t like that. I think it should be something you only use rarely, and when you do it’s because you know you’re doing something that’s not safe in some way.

“Catch” has never satisfied me. I mean, I know what it does, but it doesn’t seem to relate to “try”. Really, if “try” doesn’t succeed, the corresponding block should be “fail”. But, then you’d have the confusion of a block named “fail”, which isn’t ideal. But “find_out” pairs perfectly with “fuck_around” and makes it clear that if you got there it’s because something went wrong.

I also like “yeet”. Partly it’s fun for comedic value. But, it’s also good because “throw” feels like a casual game of catch in the park. “Yeet” feels more like it’s out of control, if you hit a “throw” your code isn’t carefully handing off its state, it’s hitting the eject button and hoping for the best. You hope there’s an exception handler higher up the stack that will do the right thing, but it also might just bubble all the way up to the top and spit out a nasty exception for the user.

Is it Loblaws or Metro or another big chain, or is it a smaller store? I’m guessing the big corporate stores will be the slowest to change.

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

I wonder how things will change in the next few months.

It seems to me it would be such an obvious thing for Canadian companies to change their packaging to prominently feature Canadian flags, but that takes time. Until then, it’s still a bit difficult to know which products are Canadian vs. American vs. made somewhere else.

There’s a small chance that Trump will back down and try to play nice with Canadians. But, I doubt it. So, I don’t think Canadians are going to start changing their mind on buying US products any time soon.

I wonder if retailers will make it easy too. They generally try to stay out of politics and don’t want to alienate anybody. But, if anger about the US continues, people might expect retailers to make it easier to buy Canadian and easier to avoid US products.

You should know that until you do renounce your citizenship, you’ll have to pay taxes in the US even if you live in another country. AFAIK only 2 countries in the world still use citizenship-based taxation: USA and Eritrea.

Also, if you ever do try to renounce your citizenship, it’s much more difficult than you might think. The people I know who have done it had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to complete the process, despite being up to date on their taxes and not being at all rich.

Be concise. If someone misinterprets, apologize. Continue to be concise.

NYC is one of a number of world cities known by acronyms or nicknames:

• Rio For Rio de Janeiro
• HK For Hong Kong
• TJ For Tijuana
• KL For Kuala Lumpur
• TO For Toronto
• Joburg For Johannesburg

There’s even a whole country that goes by its initials: UK.

So, stop thinking this is some American thing, it’s just a way that people shorten the names of common cities that have a few too many syllables to be convenient.

I wonder if that’s true. Sewing machines haven’t changed much since they started. Cooking hasn’t either. But, if you’re a computer-using Gen Xer, you can’t still be running Windows 95 or something. You’ve had to keep up with the current tech.

Now, you might be using Windows 11 the same way you used Windows 95, and missing out on some of the newer features. But, I think most people who knew how to debug a networking problem in Windows 95 still can figure out how to do it in the newest Windows releases.

It’s like driving. Yes, older drivers are worse drivers, their eyesight and hearing is worse, their reaction speed is slower, etc. But, cars have changed pretty considerably in the last 50 years, and most older drivers know how to use modern cars. They may not be as good at using some of the gadgets, like the GPS system, as younger people. But, they’ve adapted to keyless entry, push-button starts, push-button windows, backup cameras, traction control, and so-on.

The problem is that too often people interpret tight emails as being rude or angry. But, LLMs aren’t the solution. The solution is to adjust people’s expectations.

Summarizing requires understanding what’s important, and LLMs don’t “understand” anything.

They can reduce word counts, and they have some statistical models that can tell them which words are fillers. But, the hilarious state of Apple Intelligence shows how frequently that breaks.

So, the American populace are fools. That doesn’t really help matters. This isn’t some minority thing, it’s half or nearly half of the population.

A different electrical system would mean that all safety laws about electricity wouldn’t apply, there are probably work-arounds for that, but you’d lose the benefit of harmonized rules for hundreds of millions of people.

And while actual Canadians would like Europe’s privacy laws, the Canadian oligarchs (the Weston family, the Irvings, etc.) probably wouldn’t. Same with parental leave, vacation time, etc. And governments don’t have a good track record of listening to Canadian citizens instead of the oligarchs / business interests.

Personally, I’d love for Canada to become more European, but I know there would be a lot of resistance.

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.

What does it really mean to have each-other’s backs?

I think one thing would be making some agreements in advance when it comes to refugees. Make it easier for Canadians to escape to the EU if the US does something stupid, and make it easier for Europeans to move to Canada if Russia does something crazy.

Other than that, I don’t know what immediate steps could really be done. I’d love it if Canada would adopt some of the European privacy regulations, ditching the American-style laws currently in effect. But, a lot of things wouldn’t be easy to change. Our cars, appliances, construction techniques, electricity voltages, plug designs, etc. are all very American-style, and those kinds of things have a lot of momentum.

But, I don’t really see a downside to making the movement of people a little easier. I think plenty of Canadians would love to live and work in Europe. I think a fair number of Europeans would love to live and work in Canada – at least once Canada finally adopts proper vacation lengths, parental leave laws, etc.

According the most recent elections, most Americans don’t.

There has to be a point where Americans who don’t support chaos stop saying “this isn’t who we really are” and start admitting “huh, I guess we’re assholes now.”

I don’t think Canada should fully be in the EU, but some kind of set of bilateral arrangements like Switzerland has would be a good start.

Since Canada has lots of historical ties with the UK, it might work out well to have some kind of arrangement with the UK, Canada and the EU. That would let Britain start to undo some of the damage from Brexit, while also allowing Canada to reinforce those ties to the UK.

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.