I’m fairly sure the reason the tech bros’ cheerleaders [flagged] this link was not the paywall, but because they find deeply offensive when people doubt their “vizhuns” about “eh eye”.

Anyway. I couldn’t find a non-paywalled version. Here’s how I think it’ll burst:

• Vulture capital (Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Geode, and others) get impatient because GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) CEOs promised them mad profits, and they aren’t getting them.
• CEOs pressure their workers further to deliver it. Market team makes even more outrageous claims about how AI will even poop for you, product designers manage to put even more AI per squared kilobyte as before, etc.
• Popular attitude towards AI reaches a low. Not the low those CEOs want, “AI gonna replace our jobs!”, but more like “this shit is useless, and a waste of time and money”.
• The potential customers for AI — bosses who want to fire 9/10 of their employees and replace them with a bot — realise they’ll lose money if they do it. So they don’t buy AI.
• Vulture capital gets tired of waiting. They sell their GAFAM shares and buy shares for whatever - blue popcorn, labubu factories, potato trees. They also sell their Nvidia shares because they know the gold rush is over, so no reason to keep investing on the guy who sells shovels.
• Supply and demand. Stonks go down. The market enters in recession. GAFAM and Nvidia survive, but in dire straits; “Open”“A”“I” is absorbed by Microsoft; everyone else involved with AI goes bankrupt.
• A few years later, neural networks are mostly a subject of research. There are only a handful of vendors sticking to what LLMs are actually useful for, but they’ll market it as something else.

Still a better love story than Twilight.

Even the silver alone is valuable. 88kg * 1600 euros per kg = 140 000 euros.

ex nummis

…were you hidden in one of those, too?

[rant]
If you trust anything Google in '25 you’re a muppet. Or at least uninformed. Either way you’re part of the problem, and deserve to be treated as such.

I get it’s impossible for some to completely de-googlefy their lives. Myself still use YouTube, either directly or through Piped. But there’s always that bloody risk Google will fuck with you and your digital belongings, that you need to take into account.

So I don’t blame those two for publishing their videos in YouTube. I do blame them however for doing so exclusively. Just publish the same video across multiple platforms dammit — YouTube and PeerTube and Vimeo and Odysee and Dailymotion and everything else you find.

inb4 “AcKsHyUaLlY Rick Beato uploaded it to Instagram too!” — it doesn’t count because:

1. Meta is as trustable as Google; as in, may both die in a fire.
2. Instagram is mostly focused on photos and brainrot videos (akin to TikTok). Not really a good place to share anything with more depth than a puddle.
3. This is just a guess from my part, but odds are Rick Beato only shared the video there after realising something was off with the YouTube version of it.

So my point still remains - they’re still putting all their eggs into the same basket.

Someone might say “But that’s too hard! And the platforms have almost no user!”. Well… then don’t complain when Google goes like “A content creator is a user, not a human being. It’s fine to butcher its videos automatically, no need to ask its permission”. Just like it did.

“AcKsHyUaLlY Ritchie was talking about user trust over the creator” - the same point still stands. Once you have multiple copies online you can reliably say “no, my content is genuine, it’s YouSlop doing this shit. If you want a more faithful version of the video hop into [insert alternative]”.

Some days I really hate human short-sightedness.
[/rant]

HN comments are almost as bad as YouTube ones.

“Two plus two equals five!”
“No, it’s four.”
“WAAH, THIS IS CENSURRSHIP!”

It would be hilarious if not sad.

I am so bloody glad I upgraded my computer last year.

nyaa.si has a bunch. Just be careful to not download the manga instead. (Both are under the same section, “Literature”.)

I hate that sort of guest that visits you meal time, but instead of having the meal with you they want to do something else. It’s so… socially awkward, you know?

This happened to me twice this week. In both cases the same guest, visiting my mum, so they could crochet together. The first time I had placed piping hot food on the table, and then as the guest left my mum was complaining the food was cold. *sigh*

all the shitty languages like fr*nch

I know you that you are joking, and that the target is not a marginalised language. But please, linguistic prejudice is not healthy, not even for jokes.

With that out of the way… why not go the same way Sejong and Sequoyah went? Instead of adopting old scripts, creating new ones.

turkish could use the tibetan script

I feel like Turkish did a really good job “wrestling” the Latin alphabet, considering they aren’t even in the same family. It would be nice if it had a script better suited for languages with vowel harmony, though.

I think your mum identified a real cultural difference, but she’s blaming it incorrectly.

Your point #2 is spot on: as you grow older you’re expected to do more things your own way, than you did as a child. Take some risks, learn with mistakes, get other things right. That’s so biological that even chimps are like this too.

So at least some level of “let me cook!” is expected. Even if your family stayed in China, or if moved elsewhere than USA.

However, that does interact with culture. Because we humans want two things:

1. independence - the ability to act on our own
2. community - support from our own peers (family, friends, etc.)

Both are desirable, but mutually exclusive - you can’t have your cake and eat it too. But how much of each we give up for the sake of the other depends on culture. And based on a lot of things I think people in USA are expected to focus on #1 at expense of #2, while people in China focus on #2 at the expense of #1. (That’s a continuum, though. Nobody is giving up all their independence, or all their community.)

And that’s bound to interact with how adolescents are expected to behave. With your parents being raised to expect a lot less independence of you than you, being raised in USA, want.

So… do you think Americans (or Westerners in general) are “too rebellious”? Were you “too rebellious” growing up? If you have children, do you think they are “too rebellious”? Should kids be being “more obedient”?

My family wasn’t even remotely healthy so it’s poor grounds for comparison. But let’s say I learned rather quickly how to do my own thing while pretending to play along a screeching mother, who dumped her stress on her two children. (For reference I’m from Latin America, and almost 40.)

I don’t have children. The nearest of a “filial figure” I have is a nephew. If anything I think he’s a bit too obedient.

Instead of an “internation script” I wish people diversified scripts further. (And low-key wish English adopted the Shavian alphabet.)

For me the neatest aspect of Hangul is its block-building. Syllables are fully visible, as their own units, without masking the phonemes.

The intro of the video is a bit silly, but the info on Hangul’s historical background is really cool. Specially regarding the “lost letters”; further info here, for those who want.

Relevant to note a writing system doesn’t need to be flexible to “spread out”. The Latin alphabet for example wasn’t designed like Hangul*, but it was still pretty much tailored to a single language, Latin. That’s why for example you have so few letters for fricatives and vowels. It’s more of a matter of power - the Latin alphabet piggybacked on Republican Rome, then the Imperial Rome, then the Catholic church.

In an alternate timeline, where English used Hangul instead… people wouldn’t be screaming “why does ⟨island⟩ have a mute ⟨s⟩???”. They’d be screaming why

has a mute ⟨ㅅ⟩ instead, or similar**.

The youtuber probably knows it because it pops up specially often when talking about Korean, but do note what’s transcribed as /ʌ/ for English is actually closer to [ɐ]. So when she talks about ⟨ㆍ⟩, note the letter was probably for something like [ɐ] or [ə]; a different sound than ⟨ㅓ⟩ eo that is also transcribed as /ʌ/ (this one is actually [ʌ] though).

*with a major exception: the letter ⟨G⟩. Originally Latin spelled both /k/ and /g/ with ⟨C⟩. Then some guy called Ruga was not amused people kept mispronouncing his name. The Roman emperor Claudius also designed three letters, ⟨Ↄ Ⅎ Ⱶ⟩, but they were short lived.

** inb4: yes, I know, ⟨ㅣㅏ⟩ are supposed to represent /i a/, not /aɪ̯ ə/… in Korean; my point is that English would make the same mess with Hangul it does with Latin. Also, I had to cheese the cluster there.

1. Conjugation/declension tables. Way faster than checking Wiktionary. Specially if starting with something else than the dictionary form.
2. If I’m having a hard time smoothly translating a sentence, I might throw it into ChatGPT to see how it does it. Perhaps it outputs a synonym I didn’t consider.
3. Proofreading.

Sesame paste aka tahini proves 3/4 of those points objectively wrong!

…I know, I know, “objective” when it comes to tastes is an oxymoron. But seriously, tahini is awesome: flavourful, won’t get stuck in your teeth, and it makes a lot of dishes go from “meh” to “wow”. Still a bit messy, as it’s a paste.

Bonus points if it’s halawa (dunno the English name), a sweet made with tahini and honey. I seriously love that stuff.

Not a dealbreaker on its own, but extremely problematic.

The tech itself would be fine if it wasn’t built on the unpaid labour of countless artists, by megacorporations who’ll then taunt those very same artists that they’ve become “replaceable”.

And there’s a reason why people associate it with slop - often the output is shitty. If you’re just adding the output of the generators “as is” to the game, I’ll probably not want it.

That said I think it’s acceptable in a few situations, as long as fully disclosed to the public:

• Temp assets, that are going to be replaced with human-made assets later on. Better than programmer art.
• It’s something like an unimportant NPC talking with you, on things that won’t matter gameplay-wise. Just for immersion.

Goretantath also mentioned price - that’s a great point. I’m more OK with it being used in free (as “costless”) games than in things people expect me to pay for.

Swap Cantonese and Taishanese with Venetian, and that’s basically my mum. Although she speaks Portuguese (local language) natively, a good chunk of her family is colonials from Veneto, so she got bits of the language… including swear words.

Then she complains when I use those very swear words I could not have learnt from anyone but her. While using those words. *sigh*

For example. Last week, one of my cats vomited on the floor. And given my poor sight, I may or may not have stepped on it, with a bare foot. And the following conversation happened (Venetian words in italics):

• [Me] Ma que casso do caralho, quem que foi a porcona??? (Wha’ a dick from the dick, who was the swine who did this?)
• [Mum, to me] Ô seu tronso, cê se tá com o casso na boca? (Hey you shit, are you with the dick in the mouth?)

Yes, and that’s what I’m using. Or trying to - people flat out refuse ditching WA because everyone else is using it. That’s why I’m hoping the barrier won’t be lifted just for Europeans.

Further info on the compound. Wikipedia claims it to be as toxic as chlorine. That was also used in WW1, under the name “bertholite”.

Question: will this interoperability only apply to Europeans? As in, will WhatsApp keep some artificial barrier elsewhere?

I’m asking this because I’m in Brazil. And I desperately want to ditch WhatsApp, but here this would be social suicide, given almost everybody here assumes you have WhatsApp.

A few of those developments are well consistent with what people already knew; it’s only a matter of tidying it up into a new or updated framework, and that’s what the paper is trying to.

For example. Hockett puts some “hard” barrier between human language and non-human communication. Nowadays we know it’s more like a gradient; like, we can agree something like the song of a whale is not language yet, but closer to it than the whimper of a dog, right?

Multimodality (or: how human language uses multiple channels at the same time, not just audio) is also something a bit obvious. Specially for those from cultures where gestures are common; you can convey multiple meanings through the same voice sentence, depending on the gestures and expressions you use.

Challenges outdated textbook narratives that equate language with speech.

Speaking on that: it always makes me roll my eyes when people compare sign languages with dancing bees. That’s as silly as comparing voice languages with crickets, for roughly the same reasons.