mastodon 4.5.10Conlanging/Linguistics/Polyglotism/Linux/Sometimes music
Dual US/FI citizen who doesn't really do gender. Trans as in transhumanist, transatlantic and transfluvial.
I'm "kechpaja" pretty much anywhere you see that username.
Personal (but public!) account; for Finnish politics see @puujalkavihrea@mstdn.social.
Just don't try to validate names.
There's no way it can end well.
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?
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" would be entirely grammatical and much less unusably long.
Is it really just that cis people can't go 30 seconds without having their genders affirmed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 details you may not have thought to look for.
But with natural-language search, your only option is to frame your search as a question, to which you will receive an answer. Even if the answer is correct, it doesn't contain "the rest of the article" in the way an actual article would — and on top of that, it is sufficiently ephemeral that you will have to read and parse the whole answer every time you ask the question if you have to come back to something.
Books and their digital equivalents are structured the way they are for a reason, and that reason isn't _just_ information retrieval.
How many AI spambots can dance on the head of a single social media post?
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
爱 > AI
Okay, I just almost ended a Desktop Signal message with :wq. That's enough #Vim for the night.
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.)
SFF isn't a religion. You don't have to know "the canon" to do it right.
This Easter, if you find yourself using embryonic galliformic keys in an associative array, remember that there is no way to determine if an individual object will be equivalent to another until the shell has cracked, the chick has fully emerged, and the appropriate ffunction has been run to determine the object's slot in the underlying array. This can have significant implications for the ultimate size of the map.
Or, in other words: don't count your chickens before they hash.
I think this year my April Fool's Day boundary is this: _jokes_ are funny, as long as they are clearly recognizable as jokes, but actively trying to _mislead_ me is not, even if you're planning to tell me later.
#Trans #Linguistics question: how best can one utilize their linguistics training to train their voice to match their desired gender presentation?
And same question for #musicians #music people too I guess.
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.
It's genuinely amazing how inaccessible many parts of a modern city often are. Even parts that seem _less_ bad to the untrained eye.
Accessibility should be built in to UI frameworks, so that developers get it automatically: https://kechpaja.com/blog/2026/04/07-accessibility-should-be-built-in.html
Rejecting AI does not mean falling prey to "not invented here" syndrome: https://kechpaja.com/blog/2026/04/03-on-not-invented-here-syndrome-as-an-anti-ai-developer.html
The difference between a reading light and light reading
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.
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.
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
TIL that Ursula von der Leyen is German.
FOr some reason I had always assumed she was Belgian or Dutch.
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.
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.
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.)
Olisiko 'biologia' suomeksi _elämä(n)tiede_ tai _elo(n)tiede_?
Kieleni kallistuu _elontiede_-sanan suuntaan _elonkirjo_:n mallin mukaan, mutten ole myöskään äidinkielinen puhuja.
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.
Do you cook bark bread in a woof pan?
Musikaali on semmonen vihannes, joka on vähän kuin parsakaali, eikö niin?
Question for other #Mastodon selfhosters (and others running an instance):
Lately, the
`tootctl media remove --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 manually deleting media attachments from the cache every few days.
The issue appears to also affect whatever deletion logic is run automatically when you set your server to delete media after N days through the ordinary Administrator interface. I have not investigated whether both pieces of functionality call the same code, although I would assume they would.
Is this a known issue, and is there anything I can do about it that requires less work than setting up a cron job to call `rm` on files older than N days?
