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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I use Foobar2000 for music. It is feature packed and so customizable. It’s available as a snap using Wine (I think it’s the only snap I have installed, in fact).

    I really wish there were a Linux binary available but it has been Windows-only forever. The closest Linux player I’ve seen is Deadbeef, but Deadbeef’s library plugin does not work at all like Foobar’s (the later stays updated by monitoring the music folder and shows things by tags, not folder structure). Apparently the Deadbeef plugin is being updated to be more Foobar-like, but it isn’t there yet.






  • It might be true that you get more conservative after you e.g. own property, have a lot of money, or a bunch of other things that happened to boomers in their 30s.

    Now that those things are far less accessible, people aren’t moving conservative with nearly the same frequency. The fact that boomers did is a symptom of the easier time they had, but there’s nothing intrinsic about aging that should make one more conservative.




  • Apparently LUnix was originally designed for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128. I didn’t know such a thing existed for 6502-based systems.

    Sounds like it’s time for me to raid the closet. The Commodore 128 is a strange beast (considering the Z80 coprocessor that effectively does nothing, unless you boot CP/M) but playing with a tiny Unix-like OS on it seems like a fun project.




  • Super impressive since English is only 1,500 years old…

    I’m guessing you mean “Old English” since it’s sometimes said to be that old, but realistically that version of English has very little in common with English now (it was verb-second, for example, like German still is today). Even the post-Danelaw version of a couple hundred years later (with Norse borrowings like “husband” and even the pronouns “they/them”) resembles modern English a lot more. Middle English was largely due to the influx of Norman French (both morphological and syntactic changes), and the whole thing isn’t really recognizable as quasi Modern English until around 1500-1600.

    Point is: language is a continuum, and a lot of these oldest this/oldest that claims in language just have to do with where someone is arbitrarily drawing a line.

    Modern German for lox is “Lachs” (same pronunciation really, and spelling ultimately doesn’t matter in linguistics). This makes sense, because the English of 1500 years ago would have been relatively close to German varieties of the period. But doesn’t that mean “lox/Lachs/however you want to spell it” goes back further than that, perhaps to some earlier parent of both English and German? Yes, it likely does.

    Edit: and yes, as others have said, that means lox is not a borrowing (vs. e.g. “husband”). Lox existed before anyone was calling English English. But that’s also true of e.g. pronoun “he” and a lot of other stuff: by definition, any word that is reconstructed in Proto-Germanic and still exists in English today is “the oldest” (but there will be many of them and they’re all roughly considered to be the same age, since proto-languages are ultimately abstractions with no exact dating).