my favorite thing about modern software is that it's just as easy as always to hack it to work properly, except now it'll auto-update in a week and overwrite your hacks

somehow firefox has updated to un-fix my dictionary

so it seems my "hack the firefox dictionary" fix is going to un-hack itself every time firefox updates the en-US dictionary.

ugh.

computers were a mistake, networked computers doubly so

I wonder if I can just mark the dictionary read-only and keep firefox from updating it, or if that'll fail because it does the tempfile-rename trick

I have four complaints about firefox and two of them are the fucking autoupdates

oh I can disable updating the dictionary. that may be the simple solution I'm looking for.

a better solution would be to have my XPI rebuilt every time the upstream updates, since I don't want to be stuck in a March 2026 dictionary forever. it won't even have "foob"!

okay my new dictionary is in place and working again.

I think part of the problem is that it's replacing en-US instead of supplementing it, which I wasn't sure was possible without confusing all my websites into thinking I'm speaking something besides english.

which I am, I'm just speaking Late IRC English, which doesn't have the same capitalization rules as proper english

maybe I should just define it as en-IRC and let websites choke on my weird language code

Late IRC English uses capitalization for:
* Importance (and mock importance), not proper nouns. it's "california", but if you're talking about a new rule at your workplace, it might be "The Policy".
* acronyms, although this one is inconsistent.
* names, but only when that user capitalizes their name. so the user SuPaMaN is capitalized that way, always. To not match their capitalization (including internal capitalization) is a terrible insult in Late IRC English

you don't need to capitalize the first letter of a sentence for the same reason you don't use punctuation at the end of your sentence: we have lines here, the end-of-sentence is implied

you only need to use punctuation at the end of sentences if you're going to end with ? or ! (or both!?) or if you are doing two or more sentences per line. periods separate sentences, they don't end them

although another feature of Late IRC English is the question-without-a-questionmark. usually in the case of the flat-what, where it's implied

fun fact: in one of my story serieses (The Dimensional Nexus), this has evolved into the dominant form of english, and it's gone a little farther: they've stopped using apostrophes entirely, and dropped the distinction between cardinals and ordinals.

so they'd say "in the 20 century the beatles released a song called dont ever change"

another Late IRC English thing is preferring emoticons to emoji, but that mainly is just because support used to be abysmal.

anyway I never explained what this modified dictionary does: it lowercases the whole thing.

this way "alaska" or "california" won't flag is misspelled, which I prefer because THEY'RE NOT. They're mis-capitalized, which is a grammar problem I'd argue about, not a spelling problem.

i'm dyslexic and I have capital-O Opinions about capitalization, so having a spellchecker that tells me I misspelled a proper noun is just a false positive for me, because I didn't. "california" is correctly spelled, I'm not wrong about this.

I want my spellchecker to tell me the difference between "conneticut" and "connecticut", not flag it as misspelled just because I didn't give proper deference to a state