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  Having separate code points for upper- and lowercase letters was a mistake. It has created so many headaches for both programmers and non-technical people alike. Treating capitalization as formatting would have made so many things so much easier. There, I said it.

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  Okay, I understand why "pregnant woman" became the default term in English. English doesn't make zero derivation of nouns from adjectives easy; you technically _can_ say "the pregnant" but it is implicitly plural and is the wrong register for a medical text. What I _don't_ understand, however, is why Finnish speakers ever began to say "raskaana oleva nainen" (heavy-ESS be-PART woman) when just "raskaana oleva&quo...

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  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot saying "why should I let you spend an hour writing something I could generate in 30 seconds?" to a human face — for ever. (This is a post about #ai.)

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  The word _secular_ refers to institutions not tied to a particular religion. Is there an equivalent term for institutions not tied to a particular nation, ethnicity, or similar sort of group? Words like "international" don't suffice, for the reason that _interfaith_ isn't equivalent to secular.

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  Gauging interest: if I offered intro-level Finnish lessons (over a video call), would there be takers for them? There would be a lot of room for flexibility in how to do things/whether it would be one-on-one or group/etc. I am a highly proficient second-language speaker, which IMO makes me better suited to teach the language to A and B -level learners than a native speaker. #finnish #suomi #language #polyglot

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  Alright! I am starting yet another blog, about differences between Finnish and American culture: https://kechpaja.com/usfi/2026/06/22-introduction.html. I make no promises about posting frequency vel sim, but will try to write things regularly. I certainly have a lot of relevant stories to tell. #finland #american #culture #blog

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  爱 > AI

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  Just don't try to validate names. There's no way it can end well.

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  Americans and Finns have very different concepts of what is an appropriate amount of sugar or salt: https://kechpaja.com/usfi/2026/06/30-sugar-and-salt.html #usa #finland #america #usfi #culture

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  How many AI spambots can dance on the head of a single social media post?

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  Does a vampire have to be invited into a house by someone who is formally _entitled_ to invite them in? Or is it enough to be invited by someone who is already in the house? What if they are in the house because they broke in and aren't supposed to be there?

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  Sometimes it's interesting to think back on the ancient world, and wonder whether someone like Julius Caesar might have been just as big of an idiot as Trump, and just had a better PR team.

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  Question for other #Mastodon selfhosters (and others running an instance): Lately, the `tootctl media remove --days <days>` command has stopped working on my instance. It will still run, report that it is going through a list of files, and then report how much space it should have freed up, but none of the files it should be deleting actually go away. I first discovered this because the disk on my VPS filled up, and for the last few days I have been keeping my server alive by m...

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  I had to log into my functional unused Instagram account today and my _god_ are Meta services slow. It's like they're calling `sleep(3)` after every button press. I truly don't know how anyone manages to use them.

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  The difference between a reading light and light reading

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  One of the things that I dislike the most about the idea of natural-language search is how it removes the _structure_ from information and forces you to replicate it yourself. Sources like Wikipedia have articles organized in a logical fashion. You can learn where certain things usually are (especially if you've read a lot of similar articles), and then find things easily. When you find the thing you were looking for, you also get to read the information around it, which often contains...

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  @filippo@abyssdomain.expert I hate living in a world where Cloudflare doing something like that is believable enough to fall for :(.

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  SFF isn't a religion. You don't have to know "the canon" to do it right.

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  TIL that Ursula von der Leyen is German. FOr some reason I had always assumed she was Belgian or Dutch.

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  Partially in light of the polysynthesis discussion, I've also decided to write up the test I apply when I encounter discussion of an "exotic" feature in a non-European language: to ask whether it is genuinely stranger than the verb _to rickroll_. Link: https://kechpaja.conlang.org/blog/2026/04/20-the-rickroll-test.html #conlang #linguistics #rickroll

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  Everyone makes mistakes in software development; the important thing is that you go back and fix them: https://kechpaja.com/blog/2026/04/21-fixing-mistakes.html. Our industry has been unreasonably lax about this for too long, and it is starting to show. #tech #MoveSlowAndFixThings

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  Tämän päivän huijaussähköpostista: "noitacifiton". Noita cifiton? Noita kihvitön? Mikä on _kihvi_, ja miksi noidalla olisi sellainen? (Ehkä conlangereita ei pitäisi päästää lukemaan huijaussähköposteja. Ei siksi, että tulisimme huijatuksi, vaan siksi, että teemme tällaista.)

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  Do you cook bark bread in a woof pan?

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  It's genuinely amazing how inaccessible many parts of a modern city often are. Even parts that seem _less_ bad to the untrained eye.

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  I wrote up a blog post on various strategies for naming Git branches in light of the push to move away from `master`: https://kechpaja.com/blog/2026/04/15-naming-git-branches.html. #git #programming

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  I've recently begun studying Greenlandic, and it has made me wonder just how useful "polysynthetic" actually is as a term: https://kechpaja.conlang.org/blog/2026/04/16-greenlandic-and-polysynthesis.html. #conlang #linguistics

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  Olisiko 'biologia' suomeksi _elämä(n)tiede_ tai _elo(n)tiede_? Kieleni kallistuu _elontiede_-sanan suuntaan _elonkirjo_:n mallin mukaan, mutten ole myöskään äidinkielinen puhuja. #kieli #suomeksi

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  The only take I'm interested in giving on _Project Hail Mary_ is that I'm increasingly uninterested in first contact stories where the aliens do most of the work of making communication happen.

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  Just deleted the last of my GitHub repos, except for the fork of Mastodon that still has a pull request open. I can't delete the account entirely yet, but hopefully in the near future.

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  Musikaali on semmonen vihannes, joka on vähän kuin parsakaali, eikö niin? #puujalka