@[email protected] I think that was a large part of his point - he was writing in the 70s so that was reasonably radical and it's not like there aren't still a lot of misconceptions about 'giftedness' (such a terrible term, as you say). I've seen his work and the follow on work that built on it (Silverman etc) used to push back against the idea of the 'gifted genius', mature beyond their years, striding forwards with logical certainity because being intelligent obviously means 'being able to do more of the same thing overbody else can.'
I have an elderly neighbor; I always speak to her in Dutch (her native language, to be clear) and she always answers me in English.
I think she just noticed, after two years, that I can speak Dutch 😅
@[email protected] I love watching that happen! My mum once went through the whole process of ordering a meal in a kebab shop in the UK speaking Turkish (which is what the staff were using talking to each other). He not only replied in English, but then asked his co-worker why they'd complimented an English speaker on their Turkish...
i need more coffee so badly this morning as evidenced by the fact that i can’t find my coffee mug that i was drinking from not an hour ago #coffee
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
There seems to be a bit of a caffeine failure epidemic going around at the moment
bonfire.mavnn.eu/pub/objects...
I wonder if I should be concerned that I have a mental list of bad driven songs for when the caffeine fails mentally loaded up and ready to go at all times
@[email protected] In a variety of styles...
- Propellerheads - Spybreak!
- Bon Jovi - Keep the faith
- Gravity Kills - Guilty
- Paul Simon - You can call me Al
- KMFDM - Ultra
- Wing - Dopamine DnB remix
- Liquid Tension Experiment - pretty much anything?
Give me your best bass-driven, listen at 100% volume songs.
@[email protected] In a variety of styles...
- Propellerheads - Spybreak!
- Bon Jovi - Keep the faith
- Gravity Kills - Guilty
- Paul Simon - You can call me Al
- KMFDM - Ultra
mastodon.social/users/creati...
And now I feel old. Also, Creative Commons is great.
@[email protected] Have you come across Dabrowski? The over simplified version is that he postulates that high development potential ("giftedness") isn't comorbid with emotional over excitability, but is driven by it. Well, that, or you self implode (he refers to growth via positive and negative disintegration as the excitability refuses to allow statis). I'm enormously over simplifying to the point of being dangerous inaccurate, but it may be worth a look if you haven't seen it before. dabrowskicenter.org/developm...
mastodon.gamedev.place/users...
One thing deeply lacking in the UK school system is some study of philosophy. I'm actually really glad my son has had the opportunity to study some here in Italy even if he's aiming towards engineering as a degree (and so is he!). I can't help thinking that the world could do with more people thinking about why we do things just at the moment.
@mavnn @0xabad1dea @xaetacore
NW England, we would take a letter to the post office or put it in a postbox. It would be delivered by a postman/postwoman (postie), and put into your letter box. We might say "It will come by mail," or "Is there any mail?" but I would expect to hear "It will come by post," or "Is there any post?" much more often.
@[email protected] Makes sense, I'm from down south with a some years in the Midlands, so I obviously speak proper like and don't know how you northerners would mangle the language :). I think I tend to use post for the postie and as a verb, and mail as the noun ("The postie delivers the mail" "I'm going to post the letter") but I'm pretty sure I'm not consistent in using either.
Had a whole chat conversation with someone this morning in which I mentioned I was really struggling to get things done today.
Reader, did I check I had taken my #adhd meditation? No, of course not. I just carried on struggling all morning before seeing the medication after lunch when I took out the next dose.
I mean, I did also set up a new database, fix some backups, add health monitoring to a server, and find a new potential business partner. I just didn't actually mean to do any of that and the washing still isn't hung.
Had a whole chat conversation with someone this morning in which I mentioned I was really struggling to get things done today.
Reader, did I check I had taken my #adhd meditation? No, of course not. I just carried on struggling all morning before seeing the medication after lunch when I took out the next dose.
@xaetacore in American English, it's a mailbox if it's at your house and a postbox if it's at the post office. I assume this happened because "postbox" is specified in laws and regulations somewhere but over time The People drifted towards "mailbox"
@[email protected] @[email protected] English English would use mail or post interchangeably for 'is this thing physically being sent to me'. Here in Italy though, 'mail' is often used to refer to email in Italian so if you use mail speaking in English to an Italian they will often assume you mean email (and will often use mail to refer to email even in English)
@indivisibleteam Should we recognize the person in the bed? Or is it just an everyman character?
@[email protected] @[email protected] Now I'm trying to work out if that would be better or worse. Is it more arrogant to claim to be able to heal people in general, or claim responsibility for healing a specific individual?
@mavnn the Chinese word for computer is "electric brain" 😂
@[email protected] I recently discovered that here in Italy you can sell nude properties, which amused me no end. Literal translations are such an unending source of fun. (It refers to buying a property but granting the current resident leave to continue living in it, and is used in situations where a pensioner is running out of money but doesn't want to leave their house)
People are using « tokens used » as productivity metric ?! « Tokens used »?!?!? That’s like, the first time « lines of code created » gets beaten for the « worst metric of software engineering » 🫠
@[email protected] @[email protected] "I spent more money, give me a raise!"
Just a quick test as I've moved Bonfire to a new server. Nothing to see here, move along now.
No - wait - is that a ... nope. Really nothing to see here.
me, squinting at Chinese prose: she inserted a... soft... plate... into the computer? a what?
[it dawns on me that this book is from the 90s] 💾 
@[email protected] I wonder if you could get a good rendition of Azimov era scifi describing the modern world by deliberately translating back and forth from unrelated languages focussing on literal translations.
"The lightning carriage accelerated down the complimentary path with torque unmatched by the older confined burn machines..."
My week starts with a request: "I need a server to deploy to production, but the devs have no idea how to do it. They don't know how to use the terminal, they don’t know how to handle certificates, nothing. They need to be able to click a few buttons and deploy directly to production. They're Vibe Coding experts."
Welcome to 2026.
@[email protected] @[email protected] What could possibly go wrong?
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] That does sound positive, although I'm a little surprised because every time I've booked accommodation in Italy I've always been met by a real human and had my ID checked. I didn't even realize it was legal to self-checkin now.