I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to forge itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

Here’s how I see it working.

Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

The multi owner can:

1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
2. make the multi public or private
3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.

Is it? [coherent]

Yes when it comes to the relevant info. The anaphoric references are all over the place; he, her, she, man*, they all refer to the same fossil.

*not quite an anaphoric reference, I know. I’m still treating it as one.

I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here.

It’s clearly one. Dated to be six years old, of unknown sex, nicknamed “Tina”.

Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

This does not show lack of coherence. Instead it shows the same as the “is it?” from your comment: assuming that a piece of info is clear by context, when it isn’t. [This happens all the time.]

That said, my guess (I’ll repeat for emphasis: this is a guess): I think that this shows that they cared for the mother because, without doing so, the child would’ve died way, way earlier.

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

I genuinely don’t think so.

Modern LLMs typically don’t leave sentence fragments like “on the territory of modern Spain. Years ago.” They’re consistent with anaphoric references, even when they don’t make sense in the real world. And they don’t screw up with prepositions, like switching “in” with “on”. All those errors are typically human.

On the other hand, LLMs fail hard on a discursive level. They don’t know the topic (in this case, the fossil). At least this error is not present here.

Based on that I think that a better explanation for why this text is so poorly written is “CBA”. The author couldn’t be arsed to review it. Myself wrote a lot of shit like this when drunk, sleepy, or in a rush.

I’ll go a step further and say that the author likely speaks more than one language, and they were copying this stuff from some site in another language that has grammatical gender. I’m saying this because it explains why the anaphoric references are all over the place.

The article is coherent (it conveys the relevant info without contradicting itself) albeit poorly written. Most likely the result of someone getting really sloppy while writing it, perhaps sleep-deprived. But it doesn’t read like AI stuff, nor a translation - cue to “Cova Negra cave” (lit. “Black Cave cave”).

If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I’d probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it’s too slow.

The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an “I know all 386!” to “…it’s a Tentaquil”.

Chrono Trigger went from “it’s okay, it’s fun” to “…I spent my whole life underrating it, didn’t I?” So did Final Fantasy VI.

Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.

Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.

I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.

I can’t stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.

To be honest I was never too much into movies. There’s one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it’s mostly unchanged.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

could you say that town is homelessnessless?

Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:

• That town has homelessnessless.
• That homelessnessless town is nice.

You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example “homeless” is an adjective too, but people can say “the homeless are hungry”, as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don’t know why.

Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?

A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.

English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.

All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

• compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
• affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.

My orc did get hungry a few times, but on a lighter side the range of available food is larger than the other races. Kobolds? Poison resist! Tripe? Nom nom nom. That dead pet? Waste not, want not. Goblin? What’s up with cannibalism, meat is meat!

Probably ascending in Nethack. With a wizard orc! (Not a good combo, but I’m stubborn.) I even #chatted with Famine for shits and giggles.

They’re mostly safe. Don’t taunt them, don’t get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they’ll see you as “safe to ignore”.

By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.

I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.

In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.

And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.

Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.

He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.

• [Iulius] Num lupam similat?
• [Brito] Quid?
• [Iulius] LVPAMNE ILLE TIBI SIMILAT???
• [Brito] Nullo modo!
• [Iulius] Quare sicut lupam illum igitur futuere uis, Brito?
• [Brito] Nolo!
• [Iulius] Per hercle Brito, futuisti! Sic! Tu Marcellum futuere conatus es!
• [Brito] Non, non…
• [Iulius] Sed Marcellus Alienis fututum esse non amat. Nisi a Dominā Alienis.

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

I hope so. This means that my mum will live to her 100s then. She’s crazy for this stuff. Story time:

>going to the market with my mum
>mum puts a few trays of Brand A garlic bread into the cart
>we walk a bit and grab a few other items
>couple sales representatives of Brand B see the cart
>roughly my age, 30~40yo, also men
>they get mildly curious, ask me about it
>trying to genuinely understand customer preferences
>they also noticed that I didn’t buy barbecue stuff
>I point to mum and say “the garlic bread is hers”
>mum spends 15min talking with one of representatives
>about her breakfast garlic bread
>why she prefers that brand
>how they could improve their own brand
>the other representative annotates stuff nonstop
>months later Brand B releases a line of garlic bread with hot pepper

Moral of story: if you see a cart full of extra spicy garlic bread being pushed by an almost-40yo with a beer belly, don’t assume that it’s for barbecue. Sometimes it’s for the breakfast of some granny alongside him.

The alt text is nice, too: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it’s nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.

The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:

semantic map

As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.

So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:

You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.

It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.

flashcards

Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:

• a Korean word
• a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
• small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
• some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
• a simple example sentence using that word
• [optional] some simple drawing

Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.

The video isn’t trying to imitate a German speaker with poor English; it’s simply German syntax with English vocabulary.