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.

It’s going to take a million trouser legs to get some things back on track…

Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough

We probably wouldn’t consider them nearly as weird if they were more numerous than any other mammal species and lived all over the world. So their comparison to catholicism is weird.

In Croatia, we call(ed) it ‘snow’ (snijeg).

Ehhhh, if you have expertise in ANY field outside of like programming, you can easily test various models and see that they produce a lot of crap. That doesn’t require you to understand how LLMs work exactly.

This is the sort of based trad catholicism that online conservatives won’t tell you about 🔥🔥🔥

A lot of AI LLMs have been trained on reddit…

I do believe reddit pops up in my search results more frequently these days than it did a year ago, without any explicit prompting with ‘reddit’ keyword… (just based on my impression, though)

21 was your last milestone,

I’m not American, so not even that, actually. I guess 20 was sort of a milestone, but only symbolically, entering my third decade of life…

once you get into your 80s

Thank you for being so optimistic :)

I am somewhat forgettable in general, I guess. Or just disorganised. But I don’t think remembering such a thing is any sort of mental effort, surely people memorise it spontaneously?

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As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender (Croatian; I’ve also learned Russian and a bit of German)…

What exactly does gender achieve in a language?

In Slavic languages it serves as an additional syntactic “connector” between words. Masculine nouns are accompanied by masculine forms of adjectives, feminine by feminine, etc. (Other than adjectives, this also applies to pronouns, some numbers and verbs.) This isn’t necessary for successful communication, but it can somewhat reduce ambiguity and, along with other trickier parts of grammar such as cases, allows for quite a bit of freedom in how a sentence can be organised. English can be limited in that regard, with its stricter rules on word order, although its lack of grammatical gender is not the most significant factor.

Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?

It’s more of a name, true. There are prototypical words and situations where grammatical gender really is the same as biological sex (e.g. when referring to specific real people - just as you’d call a woman ‘she’ in English, so do you have to use feminine adjectives when referring to her), and that relationship is, for the sake of simplicity, projected onto the entirety of nouns in the language.

Who decides gender when a new noun is made?

In Slavic languages, it’s really simple because the noun endings usually correspond to gender. There are exceptions and, so to say, “subsystems” within the general system, and there can be changes in how that system works, but the point is that it’s based on a set of rules that speakers do know intuitively.

German doesn’t have such a clear system of genders that is visible within each word (the endings usually don’t tell you anything useful; if the noun ends on ‘e’ it’s relatively likely it’s feminine, but that’s about it, as far as I know). Yet, interestingly enough, there was an experiment where native Germans were provided with made-up words, and were asked to determine their gender. The majority of people agreed on their choices. So, clearly German does have some rules and procedures to determine gender, even if they’re opaque.

What about borrowed words from other languages?

Same as above. I can provide some illustrative examples if you want?

Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it

I tried to imagine some sentences of that sort in Croatian, with incorrect genders, and it doesn’t sound outright stupid, just odd. Some situations allow for some leeway in choice of gender too, and natives can make mistakes if they don’t think too clearly which word they intend to use, and none of that is especially bothersome to a native’s ear.

He reads ancient Roman poetry, that’s where he got this quote from.

If the book is not that easily available (old, rare), it’s much better to keep it intact.

By the time you finished making this snarky meme, you could’ve set up a program to OCR a book yourself.

AFAIK, lemmy.world only blocked !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com community, not the whole instance, and unblocked it a few months afterwards.

Jesus wants “cheese pizza”?

Uhmmm…

And yet that’s not even the weirdest part of the article…

In 1956, the first mandible and more than 1,000 teeth were found in Liucheng, and numerous more remains have since been found in at least 16 sites. Only teeth and four mandibles are known currently, and other skeletal elements were likely consumed by porcupines before they could fossilise.

Edit: Also, how are you supposed to pronounce the species name “blacki”? Is that Latin or English?