Nato membership ought to help with that.

You're right, I can learn the basics of regex in 30 minutes. Then I can write my one regex. Then I can forget the basics of regex in 3 minutes, because regex's syntax is random garbage that makes no intuitive sense, and I hate and suck at memorizing nonsense. Repeat every 4-16 months.

It's true though that regex is entrenched enough that even if something is easier to read, it's unlikely that it'll replace regex any time soon. You'd need a couple big names to adopt it, then many years.

But if there's a readable replacement that can convert to and from regex - well, screw it, I'm in. Even if I'm required to use regex in some program, if I can write something that makes sense without the requisite half hour of googling crap, I'll just use it as a separate tool to make and read regex strings.

I'd need a lawyer.

Does perfect health last forever? No brainer then. Definitely don't take the time pauses when you sleep /are unconscious without perfect health though, because then no one could perform surgery on you that requires general anesthesia, which could cause problems.

And arguably, being sleep deprived is not being in perfect health, so if you take perfect health you might not ever need to sleep again anyway, depending on the fine print.

And how precise is the telekinesis? Does it work on things like liquids and gasses? Could you use it to separate liquids and gasses according to type, for instance? If so it'd be more than just fun, it could be quite valuable for sciencey stuff, and you could probably make bank separating out things that are quite hard to isolate. And even if not, you might have a good career in hazardous material handling, and or manipulation of things through clean room windows.

The infinite money trick is also incredibly tempting. Does it work on things like houses and boats? Is it legal? Would you have sufficient proof of its legitimacy that if you, say, pulled a couple hundred grand out of your pocket to buy a house that the sellers would trust that it's real and above board even if it were?

And so on. Temptation is health and telekinesis, but the various details might cause money to win out over telekinesis.

Maybe natural talent health, but I'd have to plan out what talents to acquire first, as well as information on degree. If with slight work you could become the optimal physicist etc, to the point where you could sit down and just write a perfect theory of everything that matched all our observations on paper, then that would of course be awesome. But if it doesn't come with essentially super skills - well, I'm pretty ok with what I can do/how well I can learn now, and telekinesis sounds fun.

but is it really inconceivable that aliens visited earth? Or that they influenced our culture?

Yes.

I have no feel for what, "In 140 yards, turn right", means.

"In a bit less than 140 meters, turn right."

Once Kawakami and Hatsumi have passed away, ninjas will forever cease to exist.

That's what they want you to think.

Exam questions should be designed so that answers (that follow any instructions) demonstrate understanding. If they are not, that's the exam's fault, not the student's, and so should have no impact on the grade.

In this case, the exam could verify understanding by either asking additional questions (in the number 123, what digit is in the tens place), and/or by modifying the existing questions to require circling the correct place or not using the specified number outside that place. But regardless, if an answer is correct, then it is correct.

I'd agree that it's perfectly fine for a teacher to follow up with the student to make sure they know what they were expected to know. But they should not make the exam score itself dependent on the follow up.

The exam is over, the questions and answers were what they were, the student should not have to worry that they will have to continually resit exams as teachers decide that they didn't like the questions that they asked.

I agree a fair amount - I've been aggressively blocking communities far more than I expected. Seems like many are focused on being anti-something rather than pro something.

I will say, that's one thing I miss about the default subs reddit had. A few were annoying and I unsubscribed, but most were inoffensive and mildly entertaining.

So my reddit experience was "scroll default subs, rarely subscribe to a niche sub, go to niche sub directly sometimes".

Whereas here I'm scrolling all, and more and more edgy anti-capitalism or angry atheist or anti whatever communities that I'm not interested in keep popping up every day, and I keep blocking them.

Don't get me wrong, it's still entertaining and informative. But I'm hoping to eventually craft a subscribed list of communities that's both a) not just an echo chamber for what I believe, but also b) isn't likely to have randos go off on rants against fairly normal things that just barely tangentially related to the topic at hand.

Hope I get time soonish. But until then, I feel you.

These people need to learn how to conversation then. Remember: it's not an interrogation or exam, you don't have to exactly answer the question as though you'll be flunked out of a class for the wrong answer. So:

"Oh man, I don't remember. But I really like x by y. What kind of music do you listen to?"

It's not that hard.

No. Most people are decent people, even the people with dumb political ideas.

I can't speak for anyone but myself.

I am not attached to the fediverse. The federated aspect is, to me, interesting from a technical standpoint, but irrelevant to my decision to be here. I'm also not particularly attached to foss principles.

I came here because I got annoyed at reddit. I'll continue to poke around here exactly as long as it's entertaining/informative. That purpose is not contradicted by leaving here for threads (it'd have to be a reddit clone instead of a Twitter clone to pique my interest at all, but leaving that aside).

So if, over the next few years, more and more of the content that I was interacting with was coming from threads, then threads split off, it's reasonably likely that I'd want to continue interacting with threads. And if the majority of the stuff I was interested in was on threads, I probably wouldn't bother coming back here.

A reasonable reaction to that is "don't let the door hit you on the way out", and that's fine. But what could conceivably happen is that something like threads uses what has been built here to gain ground, then starts leeching away communities. They start moving to Facebook servers because Facebook has butt tons of money so the servers are stable, and besides, everyone else can still get there from other instances. Then Facebook starts adding incompatible features, which motivates more migration to their instances, and so on and so on, then there's a split.

Now Facebook's threads has devoured your communities, taken your users, and so taken your content, mostly just to jumpstart it's own growth. To get what they are familiar with, people like myself stay on/move to Facebook, leaving the fediverse to rebuild the communities that it built in the first place, out of the people who care more about foss principles. While appearing to external observers like an inferior clone off the Facebook threads thing, to add insult to injury.

So the issue is that you wouldn't lose just the new stuff from Facebook, but a fair bit of the preexisting stuff that sided with Facebook after the split out of convenience. What you'd keep are the people who stick it out out of loyalty to foss or federated or some other principle - and that may not be enough to carry on the level of content that's desired, even with the fediverse's "size isn't everything" philosophy.

Of course, it's possible that either a) none of that would happen even if there were federation with Facebook and everything would be fine forever, or b) all of that would happen even without federation with Facebook, just without the intermediate stage where there's interaction. But the above seems to be the concern, and it's not without merit (both because of past examples and, well, because I know I personally wouldn't stay if the content were more appealing somewhere else and I don't think I'm unique).

Personally, I think that with Twitter reeling at the moment, all the Facebook version has to do is be similar enough to be familiar, have good performance, and be easy to use to have a shot at that nabbing that part of the market (including users from the fediverse) - interoperability with mastodon or not. But predicting the future is rather difficult, so it's hard to say.

That's not contrary to what he said at all, it's just another layer of why things are the way they are.

If you want the average joes, you need good ux. If you don't have it, you won't get/keep them.

Maybe there are good reasons why you don't have decent ux. Maybe other people only do because they spend money. Maybe you can find a way around that, maybe you can't.

Doesn't matter. Good user experience means you keep users, bad user experience means you don't.