:(

At this point I doubt tankies should be much of a concern. What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base? I’d sooner worry about the indecisive ones who have seen the performances in the debate.

Is this how you get boipregnant??

Idk I just thought those goth wristbands look cool

I don’t think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.

BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.

This reminds me of the anti-wind-energy arguments about the turbines killing many birds…

Something of the sort has already been claimed for language/linguistics, i.e. that LLMs can be used to understand human language production. One linguist wrote a pretty good reply to such claims, which can be summed up as “this is like inventing an airplane and using it to figure out how birds fly”. I mean, who knows, maybe that even could work, but it should be admitted that the approach appears extremely roundabout and very well might be utterly fruitless.

Native speaker here, never had any issues with this or any other common homophone in English.

Ok? I didn’t say all natives make such mistakes, it’s just that they’re substantially more prone to make them, “by design”. Non-natives will make various spelling mistakes too, just of different sorts, rarely those based on homophones.

“Learning by ear” is just another excuse for laziness and/or ignorance

But that’s how every native language is learned, it’s not “laziness”. You listen to your parents and learn to speak years before you develop usable reading abilities. Writing is learned afterwards, and largely bases itself on your knowledge of the oral form of the language. This applies to any language written in an alphabet (i.e. disregarding Chinese and similar).

Pick up books, read extensively, and like anyone else not marinating in cultivated ignorance, you too can utilize the language effectively and correctly.

If this humble advice is directed at me - thanks a lot, but we’ve been talking about native English speakers, which I am not.

Non-native English speakers usually don’t make such mistakes. Natives write “by ear” (which is how you initially learn your first language), so they can mix up homophonic words, whereas non-natives usually learned to write at the same time as they learned to speak the language, and they also had the rules and words explained 100% explicitly from the start.

Uhh what? I’m pretty sure libraries in Europe can’t do that. Do you mean they can photocopy any book they own…?