Anthropic construit un "indice économique" en carton tentant de voir qui utilise de l'IA. Au milieu de l'article, un graphique montre que les développeurs sont ceux qui s'en servent le plus (jusqu'à 37% des développeurs), mais que dans toutes les autres professions, moins de 10% des gens s'en servent ... C'est clairement un succès, non ? https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-anthropic-economic-index #ia #sondage #analyse #usage

"Cyclic" and "cyclical" are both adjectives meaning moving or occuring in a cycle. "Cyclical" is more common, though "cyclic" was more often seen in the previous century. Dictionaries are likely to define "cyclical" as "cyclic." Usage guides seem to have never bothered weighing in on this one. Certain contexts might suggest one over the other, but they are pretty much interchangeable. #words #usage

#Help! #Gender #LGBTQ+ #etiquette question in regards to #AltText descriptions for #images on #Mastodon & #Fedi.

Others must be having this same issue.

Example: #photo appears to be of a mother, father, and twin daughters attending an Orthodox Jewish service. But maybe we don't actually know?

What is the best-practice Alt-Text #usage? How do we describe this image if we don't know if the girls (?) are the children of the woman (?) & man (?) Can this be looked up? Thank you. @KronoMoon

The Strunk cost fallacy

Myths have serious sticking power. This is true not just of the myths of antiquity but also of more modern and niche types, like the myths of English usage. It seems that nothing will ever stop people peeving pointlessly about split infinitives, double negatives, passive voice, singular they, &c.

One thing that makes usage myths sticky, and spready, is that when we’ve gone to the trouble of learning something, we’re often reluctant to unlearn it, even in the face of contradictory truth – especially when that knowledge gives us a pleasurable feeling of authority or expertise. Renouncing it means accepting that we’ve wasted our time, so instead we double down.

This makes it a form of sunk cost fallacy or sunk cost effect. The term is from economics but has spread to more general use. I’m about to spread it further, with a goofy twist: Doubling down on a bogus rule of language use because you’ve invested time or cognitive effort into learning it is hereby known as the Strunk cost fallacy (or Strunk cost effect).

Regrettably, there is no way to include E. B. White in the coinage without spoiling the pun, but both he and William Strunk Jr. bear some responsibility for promulgating a range of egregious misunderstandings about English grammar, usage, and ‘correctness’.

The dogmatic tone in those authors’ influential Elements of Style also fuels, among some of its devotees, intolerance of non-standardized dialects and informal varieties of English, because readers gain (or strengthen) the impression that in language use there can be only one right way. This is another fallacy, an insidious and socially toxic one.

If you find evidence that you have a mistaken belief about language use – it happens to us all – then my advice is to heed that evidence. Instead of allowing your defences to reject the possibility that you’ve wasted your time learning and maybe promoting a falsity, embrace the opportunity to revise your beliefs. Don’t fall for the Strunk cost fallacy.

In closing, here’s a related piece of snark:

Accidentally typed “Strunk and Why” and this sums up my feelings better than any tired rant I might muster

— Stan Carey (@stancarey.bsky.social) Oct 16, 2024 at 20:33

(I tried embedding an equivalent Mastodon post, but it didn’t work the way Bluesky’s did. I’m using both platforms for now.)

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A few other coinages you might like: Whom’s Law of Hypercorrection; Indo-European Jones; scary quotes; the apostrophantom; the Typographic Oath for editors.

#Development #Trends
PHP version stats (January 2025) · The current PHP versions used across the community https://ilo.im/161vtk

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#PhpCommunity #PHP #Usage #Statistics #OpenSource #WebDev #Backend

If something makes a 360-degree change, its ends up where it started. Making a 180-degree change is a reversal. #words #usage #amediting

I found the du(1) command, but on steroids!

**parallel-disk-usage**: Highly parallelized directory tree analyzer

Renders a graphical chart for disk usages of files and directories

Written in Rust!

GitHub: https://github.com/KSXGitHub/parallel-disk-usage

I guess it's time to throw in the towel on "active shooter” (“The worst kind,” Bill Walsh used to say). Favor a more precise description, but it’s become a (too) familiar term, and it does save us from the gendered “gunman.” Note that after the fact, the shooter is no longer “active.” #words #usage

Please, everyone, stop using the word "gaslighting" when what you really mean is just "spewing stupid bullshit".

People can be wrong, even completely deluded, about things, and insist on their delusions, but that's *very* different from "trying to manipulate your perceptions in order to make you doubt your sanity."

(I know it's too late to stop the complete destruction of any coherent meaning for this word. But I'm still fighting it anyway.)