But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.
True that.
Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there's a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.
The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I'm not surprised that they don't learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)
And, even when it comes to the empire, they're busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.
At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the "classical languages" weren't just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly "varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities". (Personally I'd also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that's just me.)
Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of "classic" not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge'ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.
It's a great analogy though - Linux users aren't deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.
*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.
The backlash to this is going to be fun.
In some cases it's already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.
It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.
It is not completely useless but it's oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a "trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!" A bike is still useful, even if they're building a scam around it.
Here's three practical examples:
- I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can't use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
- I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a "must check" pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I'd probably have missed them.
- [Note: reported use.] I've seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).
None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don't require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It's either things that you wouldn't use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say "yup, that's bullshit" (#1, #3).
I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.
Amen.
Indie games might not be flashy, but they're often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.
It's interesting how interconnected those points are.
Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.
Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on "our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it" and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.
Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?
I'm predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.
I don't see this as an unpopular opinion, but I do agree with it - at least here (Brazil) Twitter was evolving into a containment cage for nutjobs and morons, until it was blocked. (And it's damn easy to find who's who in the Bluesky diaspora, as the nutjobs/morons miss Twitter while the saner people are glad to see it locally gone.)
Kansas: if they doubled down on it then it's hard to claim that it was unintended. Now I agree with you, the humiliation becomes part of the policy - be it due to negligence or actively pursuing it.
And perhaps a better framework to decide if something is fascist or not could be to ditch the concepts of "intention" and "thought" (as blackbox concepts) and focus instead on:
- the action itself - preventing people from exerting their own agency needlessly
- the effect - humiliation
- the responsibility of the one taking action - an able-minded person in power can't evade it (unlike, say, the 2yo punching you)
This is also useful to judge what the mod is doing - if it's just a bad week it's kind of understandable, but if she's consistently doing it the actions do lean into fascism, because they stop being simply erratic "people are people, they do stupid shit" and become a policy.
I do not understand this at all.
From the fascists' PoV it's all about a glorious past that was "stolen" from them. Mussolini for example would babble a lot about Roman Empire times, i.e. times when Italy was the centre of Europe+MENA.
Sometimes this "past" is outright invented though. It doesn't need to be factual, from the fascists' PoV, as long as people believe it.
[Sorry for the late reply! Kind of off-topic, but finally I can actually read texts in a decent computer screen. I had some computer problems through those two weeks.]
This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.
From a conlanger perspective I feel like the time reference could be split into four, to account time travel. For example: let's say that both of us travelled to 3100, I remained there and you came back to 2024. Then you write me a letter, that I'm going to read as soon as we arrive in 3100, telling me about your experiences. You could use:
- your current date as reference - 3100 comes after 2024, so it's future
- your personal experiences - you already experienced it, so it's past
- my current date as reference - as I'm in 3100, it's present
- my personal experiences - as I'm watching you experience it, it's present
Any given language could pick any of those references to model their tense around, or many of them, or even none (plenty languages IRL lack grammatical tense). If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).
It is - the carb in it is typically fried yucca meal or maize meal*, but I've seen people doing it with breadcrumbs and even rolled oats. There's a lot of freedom for the fillings too, although farofas made as side dish for meats tend to be simpler than the ones intended a as full meal.
Just as an example here's my breakfast farofa. It's enough for two people.
- a hard sausage, diced small
- 3 eggs, whisked with some salt and black pepper
- half onion, diced small
- a handful of maize meal (the amount is eyeballed)
- hot pepper sauce, veg oil, salt
- Brown the sausage on a non-stick large pan or wok, using a bit of veg oil. Reserve some if you want.
- Add onion, turn the fire to low, and let them cook until transparent.
- Add whisked eggs. Scramble them with a silicone spatula; they'll stick to the other fillings but that's OK.
- Add maize meal, salt, hot pepper sauce, and a bit more of veg oil if necessary. Mix it constantly. When the meal darkens just a bit, turn the fire off but keep mixing it (as the pan heat might otherwise burn it). Transfer to two bowls and, if you reserved some sausage, add it as "garnish".
Now thinking, the salt here is also a nice example of using the same ingredient twice. You need to season the eggs and the meal separately.
*I'll provide a pic because I don't know how to call this type of cornmeal in English. It isn't the same as polenta:
Adding the same ingredient twice, for two different roles. A few examples:
- Tomato sauce: a single tomato, diced small, to add near the end, to improve the texture.
- Curry: half of the onion gets grated and goes in the roux, with a bit of baking soda (so it melts down). The other half is diced larger, and gets added near the end as a plain veg. As a result I get a thicker and tastier curry.
- Farofa: whatever filling I'm adding (pork rinds, bacon, banana, scrambled eggs...), I reserve some bits to add near the end as garnish. It's both more pleasing to look and it allows people to pick a bit more of the filling if they so desire.
- Breaded anything: seasoning goes both in the marinade and the flour / breadcrumbs.
I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint's main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.
About Kansas: I'm not sure but I feel like the humiliation is accidental, and yet the motivation resembles fascism in its own way - preventing the individual from choosing under the assumption that they'll cause themself harm. As in, "if we let them buy steak they'll wreck their budgets" style.
(It's a discourse associated with authoritarianism, but authoritarianism is one of fascism's "legs" anyway.)
In the case of the vegan mod: I'm really not sure if her bot complaining about "jerks" fits well with fascism. The humiliation that fascists complain about is not just about "wah, you were mean to me, I feel humiliated"; it's more like "you're humiliating me to drag me down from my rightful position". To make it fascist she'd need to insert that into a context, like "if vegans weren't so humiliated they'd be ruling the world/Lemmy!" or something like this.
And even irl regimes don’t always meet all the criteria - with only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy having done so. “
Note that the criteria work more like a ladder than like a checklist. As in, to fulfill a criterion you need to fulfill the preceding ones. At most we could claim that she reached the third step (arrival to power), but her ability to exercise it is clearly handicapped (as in, the vegan community is clearly not buying her shit).
you definitely have read far deeper than I on this topic:-).
To be honest I didn't. I'm actually defending my view but I'm aware that it might be completely wrong. I like discussing this stuff with you though.
Not really - it's no fixed expression for those; the only word there that can refer to mafia is "chefe" (boss, chief; "chefão" is its augmentative). But even then, "chefe" can be also used for company bosses, video game bosses, restaurant chefs etc., it doesn't evoke mafia imagery at all unless you specify "chefe da máfia" (mafia boss) or similar.
I've seen a few people using "capo" (an Italianism) for that, but I don't know how widespread this is.
Embrace the paradox: «è un schifo ale lubię to».
There was a time that people prefixed my nickname with "Wiki-", because apparently I stand out for knowing a bit about everything. I don't quite agree with it but hey, at least it's something nice.
My accent (when speaking Portuguese) also stands out, apparently. Outside my city people are quick to identify where I'm from; and yet in my own city people often ask me where I'm from.
I got the joke with "se beber não dirija", but it sounds shallow IMO.
In the case of The Godfather I get why they changed it - as "padrinho" won't deliver the same reference to the Italian-American mafia as "godfather" does. However "poderoso chefão" doesn't do it either, you need a very specific context to interpret "chefe" as "chefe da máfia", and the augmentative even hides it further.
They had better choices - like calling it "Don Corleone". Just the "don" plus the promotional images are enough to convey "this is a mafia boss, you simply don't fuck with him".
But by far among those four the one that I hate the most is A Noviça Rebelde. Because the literal translation of the original (O Som da Música) sound more aesthetic IMO than it. And it changes the focus from Maria's connection with music to her rebelliousness.
[Idea] If you don't want to see huge flags taking space over actual drawings in the Canvas, pick the biggest flag that you can find to deface.
As long as a lot of people are doing that, the ones templating larger flags will be forced to reduce their layouts and give more room for actual drawings.
__________________
[Reasoning] When it comes to country flags, I think that the immense majority of the users can be split into four groups:
- The ones who don't want to see country flags at all.
- The ones who are OK with smaller flags, but don't want to see larger ones.
- The ones who want to see a specific large flag taking a huge chunk of space.
- The ones who want to see the whole canvas burning, like the void.
I'm myself firmly rooted into #1, but this idea is a compromise between #1, #2 and #4.
Typically #3 uses numbers (and/or bots) to seize a huge chunk of the canvas to their flags. Well, let's use numbers against it then. As long as #1, #2 and #4 are trying to wreck the same flag, we win.
___________
[inb4]
>But what about identity flags?
Not a problem. They're typically bands instead of thick squares, and people drawing them are fairly accommodating.
>But what about [insert another thing]
Even if [thing] is a problem, it's probably minor in comparison with huge country flags.
>What should be the template?
None. We don't need one, as long as everyone is working against the same large flag.
Just draw something of your choice over the flag, preferably over its iconic features.
>But I'm not creative enough for that!
No matter how shitty your drawing is, it's probably still way more original than a country flag. So don't feel discouraged.
That said, you can always help someone else with their drawing. Or plop in some text. Or just void.
>Why are you posting this now, you bloody Slowpoke?
I wish that I thought about this before Canvas 2024. But better later than never. (And better early by a year for Canvas 2025.)
____________________
EDIT: addressing on general grounds some whining from group #3 (the ones who want to see a specific large flag taking a huge chunk of the canvas space).
You do realise that this sort of "war against the largest flag" should benefit even you, as long as the biggest flag is not the one you're working with, right? Even for you, this makes the canvas a more even level field. Let us not forget that you love to cover other flags with your own.
Archaeologists discovered the stone tablet at a Tartessian site in southwestern Spain.
I'm sharing this here mostly due to the alphabet. The relevant region (Tartessos) would be roughly what's today the western parts of Andalucia, plus the Algarve.
Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested.
The number of letters is specially relevant for me - 32 letters. The writing system is a redundant alphabet, where you use different graphemes for the stops, depending on the next vowel; and it was likely made for a language with five vowels, so you had five letters for /p/, five for /t/, five for /k/. Counting the "bare" vowels this yields 20 letters; /m n s r l/ fit well with that phonology, but what about the other seven?
This recipe is great to repurpose lunch leftovers for dinner. It's also relatively mess-free. Loosely based on egg-fried rice.
Amounts listed for two servings, but they're eyeballed so use your judgment.
Ingredients:
- Cooked leftover rice. 200~300g (cooked) is probably good enough. It's fine to use pilaf, just make sure that the rice is cold, a bit dry, and that the grains are easy to separate.
- Two eggs. Cracked into a small bowl and whisked with salt, pepper, and MSG. Or the seasoning of your choice.
- Veg oil. For browning.
- Water. Or broth if you want, it's just a bit.
- [OPTIONAL] Meats. Leftover beef, pork, or chicken work well. Supplement it with ham, firmer sausages, and/or bacon; 1/2 cup should be enough for two. Dice them small.
- [OPTIONAL] Vegs. I'd add at least half raw onion; but feel free to use leftover cooked cabbages, peas, bell peppers, etc. Or even raw ones. Also diced small.
- [OPTIONAL] Chives. Mostly as a finishing touch. Sliced thinly.
Preparation:
- Add a spoonful of veg oil to a wok or similar. Let it heat a bit.
- If using raw meats: add them to the wok, and let them brown on high fire, stirring constantly. Else, skip this step.
- If using raw vegs: add them to the wok, and let them it cook on mid-low fire. Else, skip this step.
- Add the already cooked ingredients (rice, meats, vegs). Medium fire, stirring gentle but constantly; you want to heat them up, not to cook them further. Adjust seasoning if desired.
- Spread the whisked egg over your heated rice mix, while stirring and folding the rice frenetically. You want the egg to coat the rice grains, but they should be still separated when done. If some whisked egg is sticking to the wok and/or the rice is too dry, drip some water/broth and scrap the bottom of the wok; just don't overdo it (you don't want soggy rice). Anyway, when the egg is cooked this step is done, it'll give the rice grains a nice yellow colour and lots of flavour.
- If using chives, add them after your turned off the fire (they get sad if cooked). Enjoy your meal.
I was going to share a picture of the final result, but I may or may not have eaten it before thinking about sharing the recipe. Sorry. :#
I got a weird problem involving both of my cats (Siegfrieda, to the left; Kika, to the right).
Kika is rather particular about having her own litterbox(es), and refuses to use a litterbox shared by another cat. Frieda on the other hand is adept to the "if I fits, I sits, I shits" philosophy, and is totally OK sharing litterboxes.
That creates a problem: no matter if properly and regularly cleaned, the only one using litterboxes here is Frieda. We had, like, five of them at once; and Kika would still rather do her business on the patio.
How do I either teach Kika "it's fine to share a litterbox", or teach Siegfrieda "that's Kika's litterbox, leave it alone"?
Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, has used her pioneering work in the field of language history to learn more about language development in North America. She has found that it can be traced back to two language groups that originated in Siberia. Her paper is pub...
Context: my mum got some keikis of this orchid from a neighbour. She managed to grow them into a full plant, it even flowered (as per pic), but she has no idea on which species of orchid it is.
I am not sure if it's a native species here (I'm in the subtropical parts of South America), but it seems to be growing just fine indoors in a Cfb climate.
Disregard the vase saying "phal azul" (blue phal), it used to belong to another orchid; it doesn't seem to be a Phalaenopsis.
If necessary I can provide further pics, but note that it has lost the flowers already.
Any idea?
_____________
EDIT: thanks to @jerry@fedia.io's comment, we could find it - it's a Miltoniopsis. Likely from Colombia or Ecuador, not from my area.
I feel slightly offended. Because it's true.
(Alt text: "Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.")
Link to the community: !isekai@ani.social
Feel free to join and talk about your favourite series. The rules are rather simple, and they're there to ensure smooth discussion.
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I'm sharing this mostly as a historical curiosity; Schleicher was genial, but the book is a century and half old, science marches on, so it isn't exactly good source material. Still an enjoyable read if you like Historical Linguistics, as it was one of the first successful attempts to reconstruct a language based on indirect output from its child languages.
A class of speech sounds that is now present in nearly half of the world’s languages -- labiodentals, produced by positioning the lower lip against the upper teeth, such as in ‘f’ or ‘v’ -- are a relatively recent development, one brought about by post-Neolithic diet-induced changes in the human bit...
Link for the Science research article. The observation that societies without access to softer food kind of avoided labiodentals is old, from 1985, but the research is recent-ish (2019).
While AI now allows us to erase accents, is this really a good idea? Besides, who doesn’t have an accent?
Même texte en français ici. I'll copypaste the English version here in case of paywall.
Accents are one of the cherished hallmarks of cultural diversity.
Why AI software ‘softening’ accents is problematic
Published 2024/Jan/11\ by Grégory Miras, Professeur des Universités en didactique des langues, Université de Lorraine
“Why isn’t it a beautiful thing?” a puzzled Sharath Keshava Narayana asked of his AI device masking accents.
Produced by his company, Sanas, the recent technology seeks to “soften” the accents of call centre workers in real-time to allegedly shield them from bias and discrimination. It has sparked widespread interest both in the English-speaking and French-speaking world since it was launched in September 2022.
Far from everyone is convinced of the software’s anti-racist credentials, however. Rather, critics contend it plunges us into a contemporary dystopia where technology is used to erase individuals’ differences, identity markers and cultures.
To understand them, we could do worse than reviewing what constitutes an accent in the first place. How can they be suppressed? And in what ways does ironing them out bends far more than sound waves?
How artificial intelligence can silence an accent
“Accents” can be defined, among others, as a set of oral clues (vowels, consonants, intonation, etc.) that contribute to the more or less conscious elaboration of hypotheses on the identity of individuals (e.g. geographically or socially). An accent can be described as regional or foreign according to different narratives.
With start-up technologies typically akin to black boxes, we have little information about the tools deployed by Sanas to standardise our way of speaking. However, we know most methods aim to at least partially transform the structure of the sound wave in order to bring certain acoustic cues closer to a perceptive criteria. The technology tweaks vowels, consonants along with parameters such as rhythm, intonation or accentuation. At the same time, the technology will be looking to safeguard as many vocal cues as possible to allow for the recognition of the original speaker’s voice, such as with voice cloning, a process that can result in deepfake vocal scams. These technologies make it possible to dissociate what is speech-related from what is voice-related.
The automatic and real-time processing of speech poses technological difficulties, the main one being the quality of the sound signal to be processed. Software developers have succeeded in overcoming them by basing themselves on deep learning, neural networks, as well as large data bases of speech audio files, which make it possible to better manage the uncertainties in the signal.
In the case of foreign languages, Sylvain Detey, Lionel Fontan and Thomas Pellegrini identify some of the issues inherent in the development of these technologies, including that of which standard to use for comparison, or the role that speech audio files can have in determining them.
The myth of the neutral accent
But accent identification is not limited to acoustics alone. Donald L. Rubin has shown that listeners can recreate the impression of a perceived accent simply by associating faces of supposedly different origins with speech. In fact, absent these other cues, speakers are not so good at recognising accents that they do not regularly hear or that they might stereotypically picture, such as German, which many associate with “aggressive” consonants.
The wishful desire to iron out accents to combat prejudice raises the question of what a “neutral” accent is. Rosina Lippi-Green points out that the ideology of the standard language - the idea that there is a way of expressing oneself that is not marked - holds sway over much of society but has no basis in fact. Vijay Ramjattan further links recent collossal efforts to develop accent “reduction” and “suppression” tools with the neoliberal model, under which people are assigned skills and attributes on which they depend. Recent capitalism perceives language as a skill, and therefore the “wrong accent” is said to lead to reduced opportunities.
Intelligibility thus becomes a pretext for blaming individuals for their lack of skills in tasks requiring oral communication according to Janin Roessel. Rather than forcing individuals with “an accent to reduce it”, researchers such as Munro and Derwing have shown that it is possible to train individuals to adapt their aural abilities to phonological variation. What’s more, it’s not up to individuals to change, but for public policies to better protect those who are discriminated against on the basis of their accent - accentism.
Delete or keep, the chicken or the egg?
In the field of sociology, Wayne Brekhus calls on us to pay specific attention to the invisible, weighing up what isn’t marked as much as what is, the “lack of accent” as well as its reverse. This leads us to reconsider the power relations that exist between individuals and the way in which we homogenise the marked: the one who has (according to others) an accent.
So we are led to Catherine Pascal’s question of how emerging technologies can hone our roles as “citizens” rather than “machines”. To “remove an accent” is to value a dominant type of “accent” while neglecting the fact that other co-factors will participate in the perception of this accent as well as the emergence of discrimination. “Removing the accent” does not remove discrimination. On the contrary, the accent gives voice to identity, thus participating in the phenomena of humanisation, group membership and even empathy: the accent is a channel for otherness.
If technologies such AI and deep learning offers us untapped possibilities, they can also lead to a dystopia where dehumanisation overshadows priorities such as the common good or diversity, as spelt out in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Rather than hiding them, it seems necessary to make recruiters aware of how accents can contribute to customer satisfaction and for politicians to take up this issue.
Research projects such as PROSOPHON at the University of Lorraine (France), which bring together researchers in applied linguistics and work psychology, are aimed at making recruiters more aware of their responsibilities in terms of biais awareness, but also at empowering job applicants “with an accent”. By asking the question “Why isn’t this a beautiful thing?”, companies like SANAS remind us why technologies based on internalized oppressions don’t make people happy at work.
Alt-text: «God was like, "Let there be light," and there was light.»
Cockney and received pronunciation (Queen's English) were once spoken by people of all ages, but they are no longer commonly spoken among young people in the south-east of England.
Small bit of info: Charles III still speaks RP, but the prince William (heir to the throne) already shifted to SSBE. Geoffrey Lindsey has a rather good video on that.
Links to the community:
- /c/linguistics@mander.xyz
- !linguistics@mander.xyz
The community is open for everyone regardless of previous knowledge on the field. Feel free to ask or share stuff about languages and dialects, how they work (grammar, phonology, etc.), where they're from, how people use them, or more general stuff about human linguistic communication.
And the rules are fairly simple. They boil down to 1) stay on-topic, 2) source it when reasonable, 3) avoid pseudoscience.
Have fun!
This is a rather long study, from the Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Its general content should be clear by the title, and it focuses on three "chunks" of the former Roman empire: Maghreb and Iberia, Gallia and Germania, and the British Isles.
I've recreated a Linguistics community here in mander.xyz. As the sidebar says, it's for everyone, regardless of previous knowledge over the field, so even if you're a layperson feel free to drop by.
Here's the link: !linguistics@mander.xyz
In case that you're in a Kbin/Mbin instance and the above doesn't work, try /m/linguistics@mander.xyz instead.
Reading stories regularly strengthens social-cognitive skills—such as empathy—in both children and adults. And this, in turn, ensures that we can empathize with characters more effectively and more quickly when we are reading. This is the subject of linguist Lynn Eekhof's Ph.D., which she will recei...
Further info: the linguist in question is Lynn S. Eekhof, and she has quite a few publications about the topic, worth IMO reading.