Chat @beehaw.org

2y ago

What petty hill will you die on?

For me I say that a truck with a cab longer than its bed is not a truck, but an SUV with an overgrown bumper.

436 comments

I loathe tomatoes on burgers and will throw it in your face if you serve it to me.
Absolutely pointless taste wise and all that water is what makes the bread and patty move around with no respect for each other.
- Ooooh them's fighting words. Have you tried a burger with a homegrown tomato? Pretty night and day, might just change your mind.
  
  [Image description: a plate with a burger and sides. The burger is open and ready to be assembled, one bun has sauce and a slice of an heirloom tomato, the other has the patty, cheese, pickles and bacon.]
  
  That’s the ugliest tomato I’ve ever seen on a burger!
  
  See reply here: https://beehaw.org/comment/476775
  However, I bet that tomato can be removed and you wouldn't even notice if no one told you
  
  That is exactly why I avoid getting tomatoes on my burgers in restaurants except for when I cook my own, the homegrown tomato has to be there. I am still shocked at how different the taste is.
  
  @thrawn21
  @madkarlsson
  Does it not taste or feel like you’re eating a tomato? Because those are the parts of eating tomatoes that I don’t like.
- I disagree completely but I appreciate your candor and, frankly, accurate analysis.
- Not telling you how to live your life but if I may offer a different perspective: tomatoes can be very flavourful but the ones you buy at supermarkets won't be. Your stance might simply be due to not having had good tomatoes? (which is fine in its own right but I will not stand for tomato slander)
  
  They can be, sure. I enjoy tomatoes otherwise. I can enjoy eating them like an apple or those cute cherry ones as snacks. But generally there are other ingredients on a burger (dressing, cheeses, bacon, whatever) that makes the tomato disappear completely and just become a watery slice of nothing but annoyance.
  Tomatoes are fine, just keep them of my burgers.
- You gotta try heirloom tomatoes. Completely different food compared to the waterfilled Beefsteak and Roma varieties you find in the supermarket.
  
  Man a good tomato could just be eaten on its own with a little salt. Delicious, can't wait for ours to come in, about a dozen different varieties each more delicious and beautiful than the last. 😋
- Hence ketchup
  
  No, ketchup is wrong. I don't mean on burgers specifically, I mean in general
- Whether it causes it to move around depends entirely on the order you fill it
- I deem this opinion absolute fact. Unless you're at Louis' Lunch in New Haven, CT, you have no need for a tomato on burger.

Microsoft Word is a bad piece of software that is poorly designed, laughably unoptimized, and mostly dysfunctional. It's like a passenger car with seven wheels arranged in an irregular septagon, a 1 gallon gas tank, and a kitchen stool for a seat.
Also hype clothes are a tremendous waste and reveal the hollowness and meaninglessness that underlies most fashion
- Microsoft Word...
  That's neither an opinion nor petty; those are just straight facts.
- I hate Microsoft Word. It's so inefficient. When the template breaks and you spend an hour trying to fix some formatting. Just give me a latex template and let me focus on the actual content please.
  
  I am trying to write more on latex as I am trying to switch away from
- Microsoft everything
- Just update word 04 with some security and bug fixes and be done with it. It still does literally everything anyone ever did with word.
- Microsoft Word is a bad piece of software
  and it's constantly begging you to buy into it or register.
  nope
  installs and cues up Libre office
- Microsoft Word works fine the few times that I do use it, but I mostly use L^AT_EX and maybe some markdown.
- Do you have a suggestion for a replacement? I've been looking for something to write in and didn't want to buy MS office.
  
  @GraceGH @Nanokindled LibreOffice. Great software, works as you would expect.
  The UI/UX leaves a lot to be desired though.
- I had to look up Hype clothing. So it's just branded super expensive basic clothes? Is this popular for some reason.
  
  Yeah. Supreme is the ultimate example, but also stuff like yeezees. And far be it from me to judge those more fashionable than myself. But most streetwear / hype stuff is just normal stuff but really shit quality and with the price upped by an order of magnitude b/c of intense social media FOMO. So, so dumb

Artificial sweeteners is one of the reasons I'm not obese. You can quote me all the studies you want, diet coke is not a gateway drink to regular coke, and splenda on my black coffee doesn't make me crave a caramel macchiato.
- I don't care about the calories. Artificial sweeteners taste like plastic cancer, so it's normal coke for me.
  
  I'm kind on the same hill. I find that artificial sweetener leave a terrible taste in the mouth.
  The worst is that some regular drinks are using sugar plus sweetener. I got this bad surprise now than once after taking the first sip.
  
  Aspartame gave me terrible headaches. Then I became diabetic. Turns out by that time sucralose was more popular. It doesn't give me headaches and it tastes fine. After so long of having sucralose, I can now tolerate aspartame. Still gross though.
- Artificial sweeteners are also one of the reasons I'm alive. Shout outs type 1 diabetes gang.
  
  If only they could start having more than fucking diet coke at restaurants when it comes to pop
- I get the bitterness flavor from artificial sweeteners, but I just want a my Dr pepper to be less sweet.
- Yeah. I don't get it either. Artificial sweetners are way more effective at stimulating your tastebuds than sugar for the calories.
  Why would anyone switch to an inferior product which ruins your health if they have the option not to??
  
  I can taste all of the artificial sweeteners. My spouse uses them constantly and they taste sideways to me. My partner doesn't taste much of a difference so If we ever get drinks mixed up I'm the poison tester.
  The only way to get them to taste fine enough is by using a mixture of a few different ones. I'm sure my experience is similar to people who have the cilantro soap thing.
- Personally I find the artificial sweeteners are more addictive than regular sugar because they're so much sweeter. Plus if I'm going to have a cookie, I'd rather it be homemade rather than some processed crap.
- Yeah. Actually, regular coke was my gateway drink to a coke zero lol, in my case. Like.. if I consume too much sugar, I will feel anxious, hyper, and just.. meh.
  But Coca Cola Zero? I will mostly feel fine. And even more so, I found.. the Zero to taste better than standard Coke? So, its a win-win for me :D
- They're also one of the most heavily studied food additives and if it was going to poison you big-sugar would let us know.
  
  Aspartame is the only artificial food additive I feel has been studied so much that's it's all but guaranteed to be safe for human consumption (unless you lack the ability to process certain proteins, but you know that if that's you)
  Sucralose and other more novel alcohol sugars (ethyritol/monkfruit) are slightly more questionable to me, but should still be fine in moderation.
- WHO says sugar alternatives not effective for weight loss. I think this would also generally imply that they do not prevent weight gain. I think you likely just don't gain weight regardless of sweetener; like how I and most of my family don't gain weight regardless of what we eat. That is to say our habits and decisions don't allow for weight gain regardless of sweetener, not that we have some genetic thing processes sugar differently or anything so unlikely.
  Though yes, I also disagree with that strawman argument, diet coke being a gateway pop or artificial sweeteners being gateway sugar seems a bit rediculous.
  https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/15/health/who-sweeteners-weigh-loss-guideline-wellness/index.html
  
  I think it's important to note that this was strictly an observational study that they explicitly describe as "conditional". They don't go into the how or why of it. It could be that it's a negligible change or that participants overindulge elsewhere because they cut it out of sweeteners or that the most at-risk use sugar alternatives or that they lose weight in the short term (mentioned in the article) before reaching their new maintained weight.
  Honestly, I think the last part is very likely, or a mix of many of those. They say it doesn't have a long-term effect, although it can have a short-term effect. So if you decrease your calorie intake a little, you'll lose weight until your calorie output matches (less weight mean less effort to move).
  So, it's not an end-all solution.

Vanilla is NOT a boring flavour. It is the best flavour and most versatile flavour!!!!!! Describing things as vanilla should not be synonymous with boring and I'll fight anyone who argues otherwise
- I always considered Vanilla to mean default and not "boring". I feel like only a minority of people interpret it that way and even fewer use it that way.
- I feel you friend! Vanilla is the baseline flavour because it's good and versatile, not boring!
- And french vanilla is a top #3 ice cream flavour
- Good vanilla, properly used, is excellent.
  If fisticuffs are called for, I’ve got your back.

If you throw cigarette butts on the ground you're probably shittier than average person in many other ways too
- Yep, strongly shares that sentiment too for those who refuse to put shopping cart back.
- I feel that way about any type of trash, regardless of size or composition. With the possible exception of apples cores, and then only if thrown into like a hedge or something similar; let those seeds grow!
- Used to be a smoke (now I just vape) and holy shit this was annoying. Fine a freaking trash bin or don't smoke.
- I feel that way about any type of trash, regardless of size or composition. With the possible exception of apples cores, and then only if thrown into like a hedge or something similar; let those seeds grow!
  
  Will they grow, now that you've eaten the rest of the apple?
- Yeah these type of people fall under the shopping cart theory for me.

Monday is the first day of the week.
- Do people actually think otherwise?
  
  American here: I fully accept that Monday as first day of the week makes more logical sense, but my brain can’t reverse years of programming. I get very confused and make mistakes if I look at a calendar that starts on Monday.

Punctuation that denotes pauses like , ; : should be placed based on where the writer wants a pause and how long the pause should be, or when needed to avoid ambiguity, NOT on the bullshit arbitrary grammar "rules" that got made up to sell grammar books and enforce the class divide.
It's very easy to find classics full of "bad" grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it's in fact not bad.
- Nice to see another fan of the Shatner Comma on the fediverse.
  
  I've never heard it called the "Shatner Comma" until today, and I will never, call it anything else.
  
  Holy shit, another person who calls it that! I found it on accident years ago and I love to use that term.
- This is how I do it, and I'm not sorry.
- Wholeheartedly agree, it's not like the best authors ever follow those rules in that way, grammar should be used to enhance readability, pacing, and tone when you have a good idea how it may be read.
- It's very easy to find classics full of "bad" grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it's in fact not bad.
  This is wrong for at least four reasons:
  Incidents of "incorrect" punctuation in classics is due in large part to the role of various punctuation marks changing over time. For example, the semicolon was once used at the end of questions like a question mark. The em-dash was used in earlier modern English for long pauses, but is no longer.
  "Classics" is a broad category, and they were written for many different purposes and audiences: they should not necessarily be held as paragons of style. If you're trying to write intentionally, and for a large audience, the grammatical use of punctuation is helpful. For example, Emily Dickinson's poems were primarily written for herself, and were highly stylistic. Not a style you'd want to replicate when writing, for example, a newspaper article.
  There is a punctuation which explicitly denotes a pause: the en-dash. Why use punctuation which has a specific purpose to do the exact same thing?
  Different dialects use pause in different ways. Just as purely phonetic spelling would be terrible for internationally audiences, purely phonetic spelling would make texts more difficult to understand. You say punctuation rules enforce a class divide. I say they help bridge class divides by giving a common set of rules not based on and particular English.
- But the purpose of those punctuation marks is not to denote a pause. They each have their own individual purpose.
- Writer here. Don't blindly follow dumb style rules. I write how I speak; and when you write how you speak, you end up using a lot of semicolons and em dashes (if you're competent). Each "pausing-type" punctuation means something specific, and they are all vital for clarity and natural flow. And informal or spliced sentences are good. Style rules are too formal, and sometimes as antiquated as "'ain't aint' a word". So instead do what works— what makes things natural and easy to read.

This is more of a meta thing, but relevant to a lot of comments I'm seeing here. Having an opinion about pineapple on pizza is the most uninteresting cultural phenomenon. I've spent the last 4 years on dating apps, and at least 1 in 3 people write in their bio about this "issue". It's not something that people truly have strong feelings about, it's like straight men saying Ryan Reynolds is attractive, or people arguing over the definition of a sandwich. It's an opinion that people hold as a proxy for being somebody with strong opinions.
- Pineapple on pizza is kinda like a lot of people suddenly having issues with the existence of trans people.
  There's just no need to have such strong, negative opinions about something that doesn't actually affect them in any realistic way.
- How about "pizza is quiche"
  
  Pizza is cake. Quiche is cake.

There are three drinks you can call a martini:
A martini is gin and vermouth, maybe with some bitters if you like
A vodka martini is vodka and vermouth, bitters again optional
A vesper martini is gin, vodka, and lillet blanc
Any of the above can be made "dirty" with olive brine if you want
Anything else is a cocktail in a martini glass. No shade if you like apple schnapps, lemon juice, and vodka, drink what you like, but it's not a martini.
- Knowledge is ordering a martini because you want gin. Wisdom is specifying a "gin martini" to the bartender.
- Ah, as a fan of martinis this is a hill I could also die on
- TIL that a standard Martini is made with gin. I always thought vodka was the default so whenever I've ordered a Martini I've specified gin because I fucking love gin.

The Oxford comma is an absolute requirement unless you prefer to be intentionally vague.
- Fuck yes. Only people who argue otherwise are illogical traditionalists.

Microtransactions are not acceptable in full retail single player games. I don't care if it's only cosmetics. If i pay 60 bucks for it, i better get the whole damn thing. Looking at you, Diablo 4.
- Related: If it's more than 99¢, it's not a "microtransaction". There's nothing "micro" about $99.99. That's an "in-app purchase".
  
  Absolutely. But you can see it the other way, the "micro" now refers to what you are getting and *not *what you are paying.
  
  @HalJor @Souvlaki Microtransactions? More like Pettytransactions, amiright? :ablobcatbongo:
- Further, I'm convinced the term "microtransaction" was introduced by corporations cynically and insidiously knowing full well they would ramp the price up over time deluding the meaning of the term.
- Agree 100%. I'd honestly argue there shouldn't be microtransactions in any single-player game, unless it is free.
  I miss the days when you unlocked cosmetics, etc. by actually playing the game and doing achievements rather than needing to buy them through "micro"transactions.

Subscription services are not worth it, period. Phone and internet bills are all you need to get everything you want at the best possible qualities in the best possible formats. Subscription services are only convenient for the lazy who don't know how to use the internet.
- I hate it when mobile apps are advertised as free only to reveal that you need a subscription to use them. Not everything needs to be subscription based. I miss actually owning software.
  
  Free to install - Sub to use
- Are you essentially saying you pirate movies, games, and tv shows?
  
  There's plenty of games you can just buy and not pay a subscription to. Hell, any game with a subscription is usually impossible to pirate, due to being server based.
  Movies and TV shows almost invariably do require a subscription these days, though, unless you take to the seven seas.
- Though this may be true for movies and shows, for games there's basically only one Denuvo cracker in the scene now, which means releases are slow and by (paid) request.
- I subscribe to a VPN though
- I agree 100%. Subscription services have ruined plenty of good software, among other things. I don't know how people can stand the feeling of not owning anything, just basically renting them and being at the mercy of the corporation that owns them.

A Chihuahua is not a legitimate dog, it's a rat with delusions of grandeur.
- That's a disservice to rats, their domestic variety are smarter and better behaved. Least that I've seen
- Iirc Chihuahuas share the most DNA with pre Columbian wild dogs of the Americas. Clocking in at a whopping 2%.
- I don't think they have delusions of grandeur. They legit are afraid of everything, and they pee CONSTANTLY (more like large dribbles, but pee regardless). Oh you're home? Pee. You startled me? Pee. Oh you said something? Pee. You gave me pets? Pee, sometimes while on my back blasting it everywhere. They shake for no good reason. They yap ALL THE TIME. And it's not a noise you can ignore easily. It's high pitched, and surprisingly loud. I hate Chihuahuas so much.
  
  A year or so ago I mostly would have agreed with this but there are exceptions. I had a foster dog who was the opposite of everything I ever imagined about a chihuahua. She was curious about everything instead of afraid, only peed outside or on the piddle pads during training, didn’t shake unless it was actually cold, and didn’t really bark, even when we kept her separate from the rest of the house during the introduction process. She was friendly to any people she met and loved other dogs and cats. She was a quick learner with tricks and desperate to please. She was all-around super chill and honestly I should have kept her and immediately regretted letting them adopt her out. What prevented me from doing so was… my prejudice against chihuahuas and being seen as someone who owned a chihuahua. It was dumb and I regret it and miss her all the time. I hope she is living her best life out there in the world. So hashtag notallchihuahuas! (My neighbors also have some pretty chill chis, but foster Pixie was the shit. Great little dog.)
- In the words of Ron Swanson, any dog under 50 lbs is a cat and cats are pointless
- ( ͡º ꒳ ͡º)
- 💯
- @Xariphon
  @thrawn21
  I told my chihuahua and now he’s asking where you live.
  
  I'd tell him but he'd never be able to see the street signs from down there.

Phones are for talking, navigating, and casual content consumption. Desktops (and laptops) are for actually getting things done. Both are useful, but the former is not a substitute for the latter.
Tablets are oversized phones that can't even phone. I don't see any use for them that isn't better served by something else. They'd actually be useful if they ran a desktop operating system, and some early ones did, but modern ones don't.
- Tablets do have a singular purpose, being drawing.
  Of course, most tablets that aren't specially built for it (or are from Apple) are terrible at it, but I definitely wouldn't want to draw on a phone or with a mouse.
  
  I seem to recall there being purpose-built drawing tablets that are only drawing tablets, and act as a peripheral to a computer rather than a computer unto themselves. That sounds good on paper, since then you can still use the keyboard and mouse for everything other than drawing, but I've never used one, so I wouldn't know.
  Also, there are laptops with touchscreens and full-range hinges. With that, you could do your drawing on an actual, fully-functional laptop. I haven't used one of those, either, though. I do have a laptop with a touchscreen, which could in theory be used for drawing, but it has a normal laptop hinge and can't be held like a tablet or paper notebook, so actually drawing on it is cumbersome at best.
- My dermatologist uses a tablet. Seems way more useful than a phone (larger screen) or laptop (handheld, more portable). I use mine mainly for reading, mainly graphic novels, but also for Slack, Zoom calls, and general one-off productivity away from my office where my laptop lives.
  
  Tablets are good for reading comics as well as PDFs that don't fit very well on an e-reader's screen.
- What about when I want a larger screen than what my phone offers without the added bulk of a physical keyboard? What should I use then?
  
  Funny you should say that. I would very much like a phone that has a physical keyboard, like my old Droid 3 had.

Former linguistics grad student here: The meaning of "literal" is changing, and sentences like "That guy is literally 500 years old" are correct.
- Yes. Ling PhD here -- after teaching for 10+ years, the thing most people consistently do not understand about language is: the dictionary does not define what words mean. Dictionaries at best are a representation of what words meant at one time, and those meanings change quickly and pervasively enough that there is constantly a non-zero* number of words for which the dictionary is already wrong.
  *in actuality it's probably significantly higher than what is connotated by "non-zero"
  
  Yes, this is the excuse I use too when I mess up the pronunciation of a word and people have an issue with it. They understood the meaning so the communication was successful which is the point.
- [Waves from the other hill] I will never accept that usage of "literal" as correct.
  
  Sees you from a few hills away: Oh my gosh we’re literally right next to each other! 😜
- As a fellow linguistics student here, completely agree. I randomly get those 'grammar nazis' like "doesnt that sort of stuff upset you?" like nahh man that stuff is fascinating! Don't lump me in with you, pleaseee.
- I agree and will take it further. We don't even need to posit a change in the meaning of the word, we need only assume that when people use the word literally, they do not mean the word "literally" literally, they mean it figuratively.
  Who says you have to use the word "literally" literally? You don't have to say the word "loudly" loudly!
- So, what's the new word for what “literal” used to mean?
  
  Deadass
  
  Honestly, it’s also “literally”. Humans are complex lol.
- @KidDogDad
  @thrawn21
  How, then, would somebody be able to convey that somebody is literally 500 years old?
- This makes me irrationally mildly upset.
- Do people actually use it that way anymore though? I haven't heard anybody do it in a long time.
  
  Haha good point. Come to think of it I haven’t heard it in a while, but I’m also not exactly running in circles where it would be used frequently.
  
  I hear it all the time in my circles.
  
  Yeah, I haven't heard anyone say it like that in literally, like, 500 years!

A grilled cheese is only a grilled cheese if the most singificant portion of the ingredients between the bread is cheese. Otherwise, it is a grilled X with cheese.
- I agree. I'm not one of the silly purists that populate r/grilledcheese, other ingredients can go great in a grilled cheese, as long as the cheese is still the star of the show.
  
  Am purist. Grilled cheese doesn't have meat, otherwise it's a grilled x with cheese or grilled cheese with x. Maybe if like, there's a shit-ton of cheese and a sprinkling of meat crumble it could maybe still be a grilled cheese?, but calling a grilled meat sandwich a grilled cheese is like calling a salad with rasins, soy dressing, and grilled chicken a cesear salad just because it has ceasear dressing. You can call it cesear WITH chicken, but the minute it departs from what a specific and narrowly defined sub-item in a category of things is, you need to clarify that.
  Like maybe if you radically improve the original so much that it becomes the standard? Then you can use the name? Like how modern Caesar salads explicitly use anchovy paste rather than Worcestershire sauce, which is where the anchovy flavor came from originally. I'm okay with that being called a Caesar salad because it is really good and close enough that the distinction doesn't need to be made unless it's the topic of the conversation, but you still can't just say it's the original recipe.
  Tldr: A grilled cheese sandwich is specifically a cheese-only filling sandwich.
- Exactly. You can put whatever seasoning you want on it, but the primary filling must be cheese.
  Otherwise it's just a regular grilled sandwich with cheese.
- Same opinion. And I like both!
- The thing that really bothers me about grilled cheese is that they aren't actually cooked on a grill (most of the time).

Large Language Models and other affiliated algorithms are not AI and no amount of marketing will convince me otherwise. As a result I refuse to call them AI when talking to people about them.
- They are AI though. They're just not Artificial General Intelligence.
  
  My definition of AI is coming from books and media, unless it exhibits actual intelligence it is not an AI. Building a sensible sentence from large amounts of data while not understanding what it is actually saying or whether it's actually correct or consistent does not make an intelligence.
- Will you differentiate your understanding of what AI is from LLMs?
  
  Something with a mind. The term floating around now is "general artificial intelligence." My primary objection is that a giant pile of poorly understood machine learning trained on garbage scraped from social media bears no resemblance to a thinking mind and calling it "AI" makes the term practically useless. Where do we draw the line between a complex algo and mind?
- As someone with published papers about machine learning, LLMs are artificially intelligent systems. At least according to the agreed-upon industry and academic definitions. I don't really care about your head canon definition. I just want to be clear for anyone else who comes across this comment and doesn't know otherwise.
- Thanks, been arguing this for ages.
- I recently saw another lemming call LLMs “spicy autocomplete” instead of AI which seemed appropriate given that calling it AI, while technically correct, I think leads some people to think that the LLM is intelligent. I plan to use that terminology.
- What do you say about LLM's being better at diagnosing diseases than real doctors? It may not be intelligence, but it's more than simply regurgitating information.
  
  You should know that the article that headline is from glosses over the multiple choice nature of the data.
  Chat gpt didn’t do an examination and get it right, it answered multiple choice questions correctly more often than mds.

I will return anything sent to me in an Amazon package.
I went directly to your site for a reason, which is to avoid Amazon. If you secretly fulfill from Amazon or Amazon Warehouses, I will return the item and shop elsewhere.
- But... a lot of people and businesses reuse boxes.
- I will return anything sent to me in an Amazon package.
  Ooh, that’s a good one. I might need to adopt this policy.
- I applaud your anti-Amazon principles, but with all due respect, I’m not sure this is the most effective approach.

Those big SUV like Ford f150 should be illegal, for real. They are super long and tall, the driver can barely see what's right in front, it's dangerous for everyone not in the car. Cars should have stricter limits on size, if it's bigger, you need a special license.

Pugs are not "so cute" because they're ugly. They are deformed from countless generations of in-breeding and genetic manipulation by horrible horrible humans and are in constant pain, cannot breathe, and have countless other physical ailments. They should not exist in their current form and it makes me sad for the animal whenever I see one, and immediately lose all respect for the owner for furthering such a travesty.
- I would own a pug or any other dog from a shelter that I click with when Im in a position to have a dog. The dog did not choose to be born but it was and needs a home now.
  
  This is an important distinction. I loathe the idea of people continuing to breed/buy them, allowing this cycle of suffering to continue, but the ones already born by irresponsible people deserve a home as much as any other dog
- The only way that it'll become better is if the standard for the pug changes. The UK kennel club has updated it's standard to include a healthier head and muzzle shape. Unfortunately the American Kennel Club has not yet done so. The pugs that are presented at Westminster are sickening.
  I also take beef with the awful roached back of the German Shepherd show standard.
  
  The German shepherd thing is absolutely insane to me.
  It's a working dog and it's not like other breeds where there aren't examples out there.
  IRC there's a working line and the east german line with far less issues. They simply refuse to interbreed dogs with them.
  
  Yes, there was uproar over a prize-winning GSD at Crufts one year, it looked crippled.
- Honestly, I don't even think this a petty hill to die on. It's importanr, if bitter, truth.
  Flat-face pugs don't deserve the existence they got given. Continuing to breed them is not just unethical, but borderline abusive given the range of physical ailments they're born with (ironic considering many can't even give birth naturally).
  Whenever I see them, or hear them wheezing, it makes me feel angry knowing what that poor animal is being put through just to exist. We made them like this, and it's our collective duty to stop bloody letting this happen.
- Humans aren't horrible for creating them nor is anyone for owning one. However, now that we know better, I think we should ban the breeding of them, including mandatory sterilization of all pugs. Kinda funny how much worse that sounds on the surface.
- OP said petty things.

Sarcasm and irony are not the same thing dammit! A limp, unfunny imitation is not a "parody"! I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS, INTERNET!!!
- yea but parody clauses in copyright infringement issues...

"times less" is not an intuitive, easy to understand way of referring to a decrease in some amount or percentage.
- Right? If something has "100x less" something, does that mean it has 1%? 0.99%? Some other random figure?? What are you even trying to convey???
  
  I usually hear numbers less than 10 used with times less. Do you have an example for 100 times less? I'm curious to see this figurative trainwreck.

There is no space between the last letter of a sentence and punctuation.
Please , please , make it stop !
- Fun fact: this applies for pretty much every language, except for 50% of French punctuation.
  
  Merci !
  
  This is simply evidence that the English were right.
  
  Wait, what?
- Related, we have modern word processors with kerning. Only one space at the end of a sentence! I always find+replace when folks send me documents to publish with double-spaces.
  
  Don't get me started. I write really long documents for a living. While I don't see this issue at work, when I encounter it in the wild, the vein on the side of my neck starts throbbing uncontrollably. Unfortunately, I'm married to a person who thinks the double space at the end of a sentence is a good thing.
  Alimony is too expensive, is it?
- why no space after the commas ! ! !
- There is also a space after an ellipsis... like this.
  Not...like this.
  I don't care if everyone does it wrong, it's both harder to read (less functional) and it flies against normal punctuation conventions.
  Also, don't get your punctuation inspiration from Japanese games. An ellipsis is three periods, no more. Exclamation mark always goes after question mark. ("?!" = correct) Japan adopted our punctuation marks and did it their way. If you're writing in English, do it the English-language way.

Eating fried chicken sandwich for breakfast is completely normal and an awesome way to start a day.
- I'll form an opinion to your comment after you tell me your BMI.
- saywhanow? Expand on this fried chicken breakfast sandwich..
- I'm of the opinion that whatever you feel like eating in the morning is perfectly acceptable breakfast food. Who and/or what decides which food is acceptable to break your fast anyway (hence the word "breakfast")? I'll have leftover cold pizza and not feel a tinge of guilt about it. Suck it, Big Cereal.

As a science enthusiast, until the US stops using the "Alu-min-um" pronunciation, I refuse to spell Sulphur as "Sulfur", even if it is part of IUPAC.
- But there's not another vowel between the 'n' and the 'u', why would you pronounce it "AL-yoo-MINI-um"!?
  It's similar to people who pronounce nuclear "nuke-yoo-lar", those extra letters just aren't in the word!
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium
  Except it does have those letters ;)
- As an American, I would just like to say that "aluminium" is better than "aluminum" because it matches the -ium suffix of most other elements.
  But I am gonna have to disagree with you on the sulfur/sulphur debate. We already got shit like naphthalene and phenolphthalein to worry about spelling, i don't need any more spurrious "ph"s when a nice simple "f" will do just fine.
  
  Oh I do think it's simpler, I just disagree on the principle of conceding our cooler spelling of Sulphur to the US version when the US still refuses to use the proper Aluminium pronunciation.
  Can't have the cake and eat it too afterall.
- Aluminum came before aluminium.

It's "I could not care less" not "I could care less". If you could care less, then that means you care. If you can't care less, then that means you are all out of fucks to give.
- I've read somewhere that English teachers and grammarians agree that "I couldn't care less" is the correct one, and it makes more sense to me too.
  Although, I can see how "I could care less" could mean that: you care so little that if you wanted you could care even less, but you don't care enough to do that.
  
  Yeah, I’ve always thought it could be a good retort when someone is dissatisfied with the amount of resources you’ve already put towards some thing.
  “Wow, thanks for getting me only 20 bucks in my birthday card”
  “you’re only volunteering for a day? They are volunteering for at least three”
  “Gross, you’re got me a used laptop?”
- I could care less but barely.
- Relevant Weird Al.

Unless it's boiled before they bake it, it's not a fucking bagel, it's doughnut-shaped bread. Bagels also do not contain blueberries, and any suggestion to the contrary should be met with a swift ass whooping.
- Blueberry bagels are my second favorite. Spank me daddy
  
  Well that escalated quickly
  
  Heathen. Destroyer of all that is good. What is your first favorite?
- Bagels also do not contain blueberries
  This made me think, "Everything" bagels don't actually include blueberries, but it's literally supposed to contain everything! Irrefutable proof that blueberries can't be in bagels

"Quilted" toilet paper is just scam to get you to buy less toilet paper for the same money.
It's not stronger.
It's not softer.
It weighs half as much as regular toilet paper and lasts half as long for the same price.
You are paying for air.

My version of the "could care less" pet peeve (which is annoying but tolerable) is when people reverse the order of the cases in a "let alone" phrase. The entire point of "let alone" is that you fail to meet the general case, so of course you don't satisfy the specific case.
For example, if I asked someone "Have you ever been to Germany?" they might answer "I've never been to Germany, let alone Europe!" As is, this is nonsensical, but if you reverse the order, all is well. Most examples in the wild aren't this obvious, but they're commonplace once you start looking for them.

The ability to spell well has nothing, or very little, to do with intelligence.

@thrawn21 Phones are too big, too heavy and too complicated. A few years ago my now "regular" sized phone would be called a tablet.

There are no dragons in Skyrim and many other games because wyverns are NOT dragons. and don’t use the “well the overarching category is dragon so it still counts” argument on me, because I will dismiss it out of hand!
- Wyverns aren't dragons? I thought the words were synonyms / interchangable ... (Note: I have never played Skyrim)
  
  This picture illustrates the difference between the different dragon and dragon-adjacent creatures! My partner is also pretty adamant about this subject, so I've wound up developing the same pedantry.
  
  They are synonymous. Throughout most of history, the word "dragon" hasn't been used to refer to a specific form of big reptile. Medieval sources aren't specific, and artwork is all over the place on what they look like: how many legs, how many wings (if any), etc. It's only through the relatively recent phenomenon of trying to classify and systematize things that people have adopted this rigid view of the word. My guess is that a big part of it is games like Dungeons & Dragons becoming more popular.

If someone uses the phrase “assless chaps” I will not rest until they admit that if chaps had an ass, they would be pants.
Fight me.

Cats are an environmental disaster and if you let your cat roam outside or feed wild cats, you're just a bad person and directly responsible for hundreds of bird deaths.

Tabs make more sense than spaces.
- Aren't tabs also more accessible? As in, you can adjust how much spaces it should equal to depending on your own eyesight & preference.
  And with everyone just using the tab key anyway (except me because the entire leftmost row of my keyboard is broken), what purpose does spaces have beyond being a weird implementation detail on some style guides someone decided to throw together?
- Am I not getting a joke? I'm confused.
  
  In programming you can indent your code with tabs or spaces, which some people are very passionate about, but ultimately is a stylistic choice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsoOG6ZeyUI

Similar to yours, an SUV or CUV is just a lifted hatchback on steroids, and they have 0 upsides and a lot of downsides (higher fuel consumption, rollover risk and pedestrian and cyclist safety).

Pizza is not made on a grill or with cornmeal on the bottom, it's made on a hot stone, with flour on the bottom of the dough to keep it from sticking. It also does not ever touch pineapples or ranch dipping sauce. What in the actual fuck is wrong with people?
- I won't question the cooking on stone part, but as far as toppings on pizza go I honestly don't care. Everyone has different tastes and if someone wants to put whatever abomination on their pizza so be it.
  Also I actually like pineapple on pizza, but it's not my favorite. I don't know why people get so offended by it
  
  What about orange juice on cereal? I was skeptical, but a bit of web searching turns up some small percentage of the population actually chooses that life.
- That is all true with authentic pizza but as long as I know what I'm getting all of those things (except the ranch are fine with me. If I'm going to a high end pizza restraunt I expect it to be made with flour instead of cornmeal and preferably wood fired but for a home cooked meal I love the cornmeal on shitty store bought dough. Maybe that's just me though, I had it my whole childhood that way.
- Why would you gatekeep what's on a pizza? There's a whole range of textures and flavors that work, that you're telling people they can't experience because you're a hardcore traditionalist? Let good food be good food.
- I was first introduced to the ranch thing by someone who was allergic to cheese. It's pretty good on a red pizza.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_di_Pasqua

It's "different from".
"Similar to"; "different from"; "less/greater than". "Different than" doesn't make sense.

I know it has a long history of not being used literally, but I think literally should only be used to mean literally.

The Oxford comma is bad. The "and" conveys the end of the list just fine.
Gaming laptops are good and have been for decades.
Soup is not food. If you spill your drink over my plate of pasta I call that a ruined plate of pasta.
- The Oxford comma is bad. The “and” conveys the end of the list just fine.
  "We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.": a guest list with three items.
  "We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.": JFK and Stalin are the strippers.
  
  Great example 😆
  
  I like commas. It conveys the need for a pause in the mental narration taking place as I read and write.
  
  Thank you for defending the Oxford comma. Please take this fake gold award:
  
  I posted this above as well, but it's very relevant to your comment.
  
  Ah, the classic pedantry.
  Which is to point out that there is ambiguity in language as if this was relevant when saying the same sentence is just as ambiguous and nobody expects you to hiccup in order to signal the perfectly obvious thing that you're saying.
  If you're going to mess up the structure of the list with an extraneous comma at least don't be a coward and remove the "and". How the English language allows this but frowns upon perfectly normal double negatives is beyond me.
  
  Amazing example
- Hahaha the Oxford comma is also one my my hills...in the other direction. The "and" only removes ambiguity if the list items themselves are single, discrete items without conjunctions, sub-lists, or other complications. That's why the only major style guide that recommends against the OC is AP, which is intended for print journalism, where the speed-of-reading increase is worth the loss of clarity...because print journalism is written for a 3rd-7th grade reading level and you just don't need that clarity.
  As soon as you get into complex, technical, or even just grammatically interesting prose, it's helpful to maintain more rigorous punctuation (esp. comma and semicolon) usage to disambiguate the kinds of series that you're going to need.
  IMO. Hahaha
  
  I'll stand with you!
  
  I am technical writer and was doing some writing where the standard was to NOT use the Oxford comma and it drove me insane. It took like 6 months to unlearn using it.
  
  100% agree! I think this is a good visual that helps explain why it's important.
- I respectfully disagree with the first two of your hot takes.
  Oxford Commas are the best, least confusing way of defining the end of a list in a sentence. Sure, most of the time you can just figure it out from context, but not always. Very real lawsuits have occurred due to ambiguous lists, and Oxford commas prevent that.
  Gaming laptops are fine, but as someone who's had one as a student, unless you're constantly travelling or have a specific need for a portable powerhouse, then you're absolutely better off just buying a cheap laptop and putting your money into a desktop. Your money goes further performance-wise, and you don't have to lug around a multi-Kg laptop in your bag to take notes/do light work on.
  I totally agree about soup though. I wouldn't necessarily call it a drink, but it's closer to that than conventional food.
  
  Oxford comma users unite 🤝
- Speaking of commas & "and", I hate that people refuse to use the word "and" in news headlines, they replace it with commas instead and it's just a worse reading experience, I really don't understand why this is a thing.
  
  At a guess: holdover in style from newspapers, where you needed the space.
  
  Because every character used to cost, both in page real estate and ink on page. Today, it still does in page real estate even if the bits that make up the page are basically free.
- Desktops are better in almost every aspect by a longshot. They're fully upgradable, can adequately cool the components, and deliver like twice as much power to the processors.
  
  Gaming laptops are perfectly usable but they don't tend to last nearly as long as a good desktop.
  
  Oh, they can deliver plenty of power, for sure.
  As much power as a microwave oven, as it turns out. In the form factor of a microwave oven, in fact. Even though gaming laptops will give you most of the performance for a fraction of the wattage.
  Fully upgradeable is nice in theory, but in practice I've had just as many upgrade cycles where it turned out one component or another had updated their standards causing a chain reaction of buying an entire new computer. Oh, your CPU socket changed? Well, I guess it's time to update your motherboard as well. What do you mean, you need a 1000w GPU with a different cable to go with that GPU? Oh, that new RAM standard? Yeah, physically different. So about that new motherboard...
- I will die on the hill with the Oxford comma. Looks untidy without it
- Ever since Pascal, Gaming laptops have been acceptable. Before that mobile GPUs were abominations that performed horribly and got insanely hot. It's still a bummer that the CPU/GPU are soldered down.
- I don't know what you mean by Gamings laptops are good. Compared to what? Has there been a rumor that they were bad? I might be missing context. I mean they're obviously not as good as desktops, but they're good considering the size and mobility
  
  Gaming laptops have historically had a reputation for being bad for a number of reasons:
  Poor build quality compared to flagships in comparable price range
  Poor battery life
  Poor cooling implementation
  Poor relative performance due to above points
  Large and bulky, offsetting the value of portability
  Cut corners in other ways, like poor color depth, having a good graphics card but a CPU bottlenecking the games that would utilize it, lower RAM than it probably should have for gaming, etc.
  And then not to mention some people just don't like the neon green and red "gamer" look many of them have. There's the distinction here between "gaming" laptops and gaming-capable laptops.
- I'd like to thank my mum and dad, god and satan
  
  So how do you handle the ambiguity when saying that out loud? Have you considered structuring your sentences properly so they're clear? I hear it works a treat.
  Joking aside, I caught a glimpse of my reputation score when I logged in today and it has absolutely tanked. I was confused for a while, so I checked my post list... and it's the stupid Oxford comma hot take.
  That is hilarious, but also... you absolute, complete dorks. Never change.
  Except by not using a superfluous comma to end lists.

This thread has been fun to read.
I confess my first thought when reading the question though was: "none." I used to be quite comfortable drawing the line in the sand and picking such stands (totally love the "could care less" example, lol) but as I have gotten older, I have often been far more amused by people's unwillingness to see reason than annoyed by it, so I just sort of move off those hills now and just watch the fireworks from other people fly instead. 💥😂

A lot of video games released today are not bad because they're bad. They're overhyped and underdelivered.
I played Mighty Number 9 from start to finish and had fun, aside from some cheap spike traps.
And you know what else has cheap spike traps? Pretty much every Megaman X game after X1. Most of Megaman Zero (screen crunch), Definitely Megaman ZX. Megaman and Bass is probably even cheaper than Mighty Number 9.
Poorly advertised? Definitely
Underdelivered? Graphics are cheap and switch port was bad
Bad game? If you like megaman style games it's fine
People need to be more patient and stop eating up hype engines. They're just setting themselves up for disappointment, and blaming salespeople whose literal job has always been to just sell the damn product.

I will never switch to wireless headphones until the quality is as good as wired.
- Fuck the quality, who thinks a headphone string is a bug not a feature?
  You know what's nice? Having all the bits of your headphones attached to each other. And not relying on a Bluetooth connection.
- Will never buy another phone without a headphone jack for this reason.
  Nothing against Bluetooth audio, either (it's very nice to have as an extra option). The expectation should be support for both wired and wireless.
  
  I do have something against bluetooth audio. The fact that it's 2023 and they still haven't figured out how to remove the atrocious lag from it. I get that it's meant for music, but people sometimes watch movies or play games on things that make noise, and it's better when the noise is at least vaguely timed to the action on the screen.
- I thought the same thing. The convenience is just too great.

We shouldn't colonize mars, or any other planet, ever. We should just swim in our own filth for the rest of eternity. I mean, this planet had everything we could ask for and look what we did to it, if we start doing this on other planets as well we're eventually just gonna turn into fucking galactus.
- The only other planets we can reach are lifeless balls of rock with no ecosystem to destroy and very little in the way of valuable resources. We'd be better served by mining asteroids and planetary rings, which do have valuable resources.
  If we discover a way to move things faster than light, however, then we can become Galactus.
- I'm a huge sci-fi nerd, and I love the idea of exploring the solar system and galaxy. However, everyone I meet who actually talks about it is also so credulous about terraforming and mining and colonizing. It's an outrageously stupid waste of resources and mental energy and I have such little respect for these people.
  
  Talking about terraforming in our day and age is like Romans talking about steam turbines. Yes they did have one toy example so the idea clearly existed but it was absolutely no good to them whatsoever. The technological leap from the Romans to us must be far smaller than the leap from us to being able to terraform a planet.
  
  I love thinking about and talking about some potential future like that but yeah it's currently in the camp of hard scifi rather than legitimate futurism.

It's not a biscuit, it's a scone. Biscuits are cooked twice (it's in the name), you bake them then dry them.

Reverse Osmosis water tastes better than filtered water.
- am I crazy for thinking that they're basically the same thing?

I can't imagine there is a good business, that communicates effectively, that is room in Microsoft Outlook.
I never appreciated Google's productivity software until I was forced to use Microsoft's at a large company. People just openly accept this broken system and the fact that they'll miss important communications and spend far too much time accounting for the SW's shortcomings.
FUCK Microsoft Outlook. The executives making decisions for the team's designing and maintaining that product are committing crimes against humanity.

The original 151 Pokemon had just as many bland, poor, and lazy designs as any generation since (and legitimately good designs, dont get me wrong) and anyone claiming the ice cream cone is automatically worse than 'pile of goo that becomes bigger pile of goo' is just talking through nostalgia
- I think "pile of goo that becomes a bigger pile of goo" does seem a lot more plausible than a literal ice cream cone. I'd take more issue with the self-destructing pokeball pokemon, Voltorb. What kind of evolutionary mechanism brought that on?
  
  Taking one for the whole of the species. Say everyone is getting tamed by humans. But if some member explodes themselves, then humans may stop trying to catch the rest. It's like a monarch butterfly having a horrible taste. A bird eats one, and ignores the rest because of the bad experience.

There's Vanilla ice cream, and also "vanilla" ice cream
Burger and sandwich places should offer cooked vegetable options to add to the burger/sandwich for people who cannot eat or simply don't like raw vegetables

Petty hill? If you put ads on your game after every level, I will uninstall it.
Also, the phrase 'you people' is the worst combination of words in any language ever and should never be used in any way. I will dislike you instantly and judge you harshly from then on.
Also also, pineapple on pizza is fine, but its not canadian bacon, its ham! Call it what it is!

Linux is far from perfect and is not ready to replace Windows for regular users. Being a mainly Linux user for a bit more than 3 years I still feel frustrated at times.

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