Erika2rsis

LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don’t know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It’s by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.

I’m kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a “terk er jerbs” thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a “procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend” hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.

Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to “dub” shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.

There’s also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven’t had much success with this, personally.

She neon my genesis till i evangelion my hand

I mean, if your measure of modernity is just how good home computers were back then, rather than that any substantial number of people had home computers at all, then of course 1994 is going to seem non-modern.

I guess I have a skewed perception of how long ago 1994 was, though, because 1995 was when my parents first came into contact with each other from opposite sides of the globe, through the ol’ information superhighway. For me that makes 1994 seem incredibly recent, even if it was nearly 30 years ago and a lot has changed since then. The '90s were this whole decade of pop culture, technology, and political and social change whose shadow I grew up in, basically the beginning of what I would consider in most contexts to be the “modern day”. But if I had actually been alive and conscious at the time, then maybe I would be more practically aware of the differences between then and now, and hesitate to call it “modern”.

But modernity always is relative. If I were talking specifically about computers, then obviously even a computer from as recently as 2008 would really be stretching the definition of “modern”. But then in another context I might even say that something that happened in 1898 would’ve been “recent”, though I wouldn’t necessarily refer to that as “modern” per se.

Put another way, an apparent slim majority of the world’s population (but not of South Africa’s population) was alive when Nelson Mandela took office. Probably a lot of them were infants or small children at the time, but still: even for the people who weren’t alive at that time, or who were too young to really remember it personally, there are so many people who were very alive and very conscious at the time, that everyone’s bound to know a good few. My mom attended anti-apartheid protests when she was in college, for instance. Mandela himself was president until 1999, and only died in 2013, which it’s hard to believe was already ten years ago.

Calling Israel’s apartheid “modern” to me kind of implies that South Africa’s apartheid, whose transitional period ended in 1994, was somehow “ancient” or “old-fashioned”… Yeah, you can rest assured that apartheid/segregation always has been far too modern.

Frankly, I’m not seeing any negative replies or downvotes.

I’m a US citizen myself, though I live in and am also a born citizen of Norway. So being in basically a quantum superposition between being and not being a US-American, you could imagine that I’d have a bit of a specific perspective about the country, that would draw me to using words like “Seppo”.

NZ and UK use it too. I think I first learned it from a Brit.

The word I use most often aside from American is Seppo, which is derogatory rhyming slang (sep + -o, from septic tank → Yank → Yankee)

“See, the problem is that you see everything as black and white.”

“SOMETIMES THAT’S HOW THINGS ARE!”

Thank you for your contributions.

That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it’s silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app – no need to know why it works, just that it does.

People find love through dating apps

That is part of the business model, actually: if these apps absolutely never work, then there will be no word of mouth, no success stories to use in promotional material, and users would pretty quickly figure out that it isn’t entirely their own fault that they haven’t made the progress that they’re expecting.

Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you’d eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can’t harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you’re making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.

This isn’t to say that these apps don’t have a place in the language learning process, but rather I’m saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you’re aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.

Anyone looking to remember the difference: “id est” (that is) vs “exemplī grātiā” (for the sake of an example). You use the first to clarify meaning, and the second to begin a non-exhaustive list of examples.

What matters is ultimately if you can convey your ideas, so using the wrong term is fine when people can still figure out what you meant. But it’s still a good idea to learn the difference, because there will be times when mixing up “i.e.” and “e.g.” will create ambiguity or misunderstanding.

The best idea is maybe to use “for example” or “that is to say”. The former could be abbreviated to “f.ex.” like in Norwegian, and the latter could be abbreviated “t.i.t.s.”

…Alright, on second thought maybe don’t abbreviate that one.

In any case, the Wikipedia Manual of Style recommends avoiding use of “e.g.” and “i.e.” in regular running text altogether, saying that these abbreviations are better fit for parentheticals, quotations, citations, tables, and lists. This is because there is no word or character limit on Wikipedia, nor is there on Tumblr, and so the language is more clear when abbreviations are avoided. Even when someone is using “i.e.” and “e.g.” in the prescribed way, that doesn’t guarantee that the reader knows the distinction.

Kind of funny how you say that in Dutch people are using hen, because hen has ended up being the Norwegian gender-neutral pronoun as well, but for completely different reasons. We imported hen from the Swedes I think in the early 2000s, but I only first heard about hen I think earlier this decade; the Swedes, in turn, imported hen from the Finns in the 1960s, although I think it was only in the 1990s when the use of hen in Swedish really started taking off.

The reason why hen became so successful in Norwegian is because “he” translates as han and “she” translates as hun, so a gender-neutral pronoun having the same consonants but a different vowel from the gendered pronouns is a no-brainer, right?

The Finnish pronoun hän, which refers to a singular human being regardless of gender, originated as an alteration of Proto-Finno-Ugric *sän, so you can see that hän is a close relative of the Northern Sámi pronoun son, which is used as a general third-person singular pronoun. And this relationship between hän and son is funny to me, because when I was a teenager, I proposed making Northern Sámi part of the mandatory school curriculum in Norway. The reason why I proposed this was, among other things, so that we could more easily import a gender-neutral pronoun from Northern Sámi — and end the whole gender-neutrality debate feeling a bit foolish about how we’ve lived our lives so unaware of our northern indigenous friends that we didn’t even notice that they’d had all this stuff sorted out since forever!

So while my teenage plan didn’t end up happening, Norwegians instead borrowed a close relative of the pronoun I proposed, from a close relative of that language. So I was this close to getting it right!

Some Norwegians instead prefer using singular de instead of hen, essentially as a loan translation of the English singular they. This is kind of funny to me, given the Norse history of they in English, and given the historical use of De as a second-person formal pronoun in Norwegian.

In any case, I like what you say about how “the pushback from assholes will be the same anyway”. I think that with these sorts of things, there will always be a lot of awkward-sounding proposals at first, until the speech community ends up honing in on one of the proposals through simple evolution, when there is enough of a need for standardization for that sort of honing to happen. And once that honing happens, what might’ve initially sounded awkward to your ears starts to just sound normal, because that’s just how the language is now.

With Chinese the situation is well that in spoken language, the pronouns aren’t gendered, but in written language, they are. This was as a European influence, I believe.

All of these are third-person pronouns read as “tā” in Standard Chinese:

• 他 - masculine, originally/occasionally gender-neutral human; human radical
• 她 - feminine; woman radical
• 牠 - animate non-human, Traditional usage; cow radical
• 它 - inanimate; animate non-human in Simplified usage; historically general
• 祂 - divine, primarily Abrahamic usage; spirit radical
• TA - gender-neutral, also used in other letter case forms
• X也 - gender-neutral, handwritten form has no Unicode support

“Oh, no, I just got this flag from my cousin, Chucky Arlaw.”

What if I hyphenate it and put it before the noun instead of after it?

Here’s a six-minute YouTube video explaining how to use it

TL;DW: Click on the extension icon, use the drop-down lists to find a browser and OS, select a pre-configured user-agent string from the list, and click “apply (container)” or “apply (all windows)”. Having your user-agent string change randomly with each request is possible but requires writing a bit of JSON in the options.

From what I remember, that image was hosted on hexbear.net, so I don’t think so.

I would say a user agent spoofer would be more useful for this particular image. The Mozilla team recommends User-Agent Switcher and Manager for Firefox users.