You say you have mental illness. That might be so, I don’t know. But I will say that everybody, even people without mental illness, make mistakes like you described, especially at your age.

Everybody has dark and light inside of them. Being aware of this and being concerned when you make mistakes is usually a good sign that you’re not a bad person. Try not to compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to your past self. Keep improving and try to make fewer mistakes. But don’t punish yourself too severely for making mistakes. Just keep trying to do better.

I would also like an answer.

The only one I’ve thought of is to change to a constitutional monarchy like the UK and put me in charge. (Obviously, it would be me because I am the one waving the wand.) The king would have absolute power to resolve constitutional crises, and would otherwise just have a ceremonial role.

There’s a Wikipedia article about the proverb.

Speech is silver, silence is golden

Beyond what it says in the article, silence is a popular tactic in negotiations to this day. If you’re negotiating a price, it’s more difficult for the party who mentions a price first. Also, the need to speak during silence often puts the speaker at a disadvantage in negotiations.

“There’s nothing more expensive than a free gift.” - Michel de Montaigne

When asked about Musk and Huffman’s correspondence, Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini sent the following statement: “We take any report of Reddit policy violations seriously, whether on Reddit directly or through other public or private means. We will evaluate content reported to us and take action if violating.”

There was a famous reddit user called Unidan who I think was a scientist that studied animals. His account was eventually banned for Terms of Service violations due to his having an account that posted comments, and several other accounts that were just used for voting. He used the other accounts to give his comments an initial voting boost, which was a policy violation, and was therefore permanently banned.

Anyways, I occasionally noticed a strange voting pattern on Reddit. I’d have one comment that had not gotten any votes or replies for hours after I wrote it, and then all of a sudden, somebody would reply to argue, and their reply would more-or-less instantly have several upvotes, and simultaneously, my comment would have a similar number of downvotes.

This person was obviously using multiple accounts, violating the Terms of Service just like Unidan, so I went to report them, only to find out that there was literally no way for me to report them. The report button didn’t have any fitting option, nor was it guaranteed to go to a reddit admin who could actually look at who voted for what. Mods can’t see comment votes. There was a separate webpage you could go to to contact the admins, but again, there was no category for it, and no way to make a report that didn’t fit those categories.

From that experience, it didn’t feel like they would “take any report of Reddit policy violations seriously.” How could they take the report seriously when they wouldn’t even take the report in the first place? Now I see I was supposed to directly contact Reddit CEO Steve Huffman through private messaging.

Zero only has zero letters

I guess you could then infer my comment to mean that they were the type of person who wouldn’t be able to achieve such a goal, even with your conditions.

Certainly I wouldn’t be the sort to write such a comment!

BTW IIRC, the Death Note can only control people’s actions for a limited time. Something like 20 or 24 days.

For some unknowable reason, I am reminded of this exchange in an X-Files episode about a psychic who could supposedly predict people’s deaths.

Psychic: You know, there are worse ways to go, but I can’t think of a more undignified one than autoerotic asphyxiation.

Mulder: Why are you telling me that?

The Death Note doesn’t control the actions of anybody except the people named in the note, and if the condition cannot be fulfilled then they simply die of a heart attack.

So you’d have to be a truly terrible person to make that one happen.

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’m guessing you’re basing it off of this official legal correspondence, which I am including below for people who haven’t seen it:

Dear Mr. Cox:

Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.

Very truly yours,

CLEVELAND STADIUM CORP.

James N. Bailey, General Counsel

cc: Arthur B. Modell

It says they use publicly exposed or leaked IAM keys with RW permission to do this, in case anybody is interested in how they get in.

I used to live in Japan, and let me tell you, a lot of typical Japanese cooking is unexpectedly quite lightly seasoned. I don’t mean all food, but especially common things like rice and fish dishes.

It lets you taste the food itself more than the seasoning. If you start with good ingredients, you don’t need to dress it up as much.

I pronounce it the same as you, and by the way, that’s also the pronunciation listed on Wikipedia.

But I can’t remember how other people that I’ve worked with pronounce it. I’m sure it’s come up, but I just don’t recall.

I think the fact that its configuration file is called sudoers is fairly decisive that other pronunciations are wrong.

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.

What I have a hard time with is when they just call it “sequel server”. Obviously, I understand what they mean, but it seems so nonspecific.

Fortunately, although “rej-ecks” is common, so is the correct pronunciation.

As for “red-iss”, I think that may be a losing battle. Wikipedia even lists that as the correct pronunciation. I think the rules start to fall apart when it is a project name, and when it smooshes together multiple words.

Their story is more about the choice of words. In America, we typically call it a “line”. In England, it is typically called a “queue”.