Joined the Mayqueeze.

  • 4 Posts
  • 443 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • “Western” languages? There is no such thing. There are Turkic ones, Indo-European ones, Uralic ones, Afro-Asiatic ones. They and more are all west of wherever Chinese characters are used.

    You are picking a small number of Chinese characters that bear a distant resemblance to the meaning they carry to this day in languages that use them. Most of them have been abstracted to hell. Or simplified beyond recognition, I guess not just in the Chinese mainland. And that 火 means 🔥 was not obvious to me when I learned it. You need somebody to tell you to imagine a person with their arms on fire to see it. So the abstraction has progressed too far. Where you see a mountain I see a fork also. Therefore, I challenge your premise to the extent that this is obvious without being instructed.

    I can also teach you pyr(o) means fire and maniac is an obsessive crazy person. You can get to the meaning of pyromaniac from there too. That as a learning process is not too different from 火山 equals volcano.

    A lot of these images you presented strike me as linguistic retconning to aid children (and foreigners) learning the characters.

    The point of the Latin alphabet is not to tie meaning to the letters but to the sounds they represent in the language that uses it. So even if, hypothetically, you could trace back the letter O to a symbol representing a window in Egyptian hieroglyphics this has no bearing on how the letter is used today.

    It’s also noteworthy to me that any language using Chinese characters have invented a syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japan) or use the alphabet to an extent to teach the language (pinyin in the PRC, complete latinization in Vietnam). Korean adopted a syllabary that has a similar look and design but actually makes sense. There is a strong appeal to the utility of being able to read what’s on the page without having to think about anywhere from 1000 to 100000 abstracted characters.


  • Radio playlists are a science like marketing. Half the budget is wasted, you’re just never sure which half.

    Stations have a target audience. They will have focused grouped this. They know their favorite music, how long on average they listen, and how much they will expect to hear certain artists. The DJs are mere announcers, they have little to no choice in what they play, and they are grateful to have a job. So like anybody working in retail during Christmas, they can tune out the music in their heads.






  • How can you live anonymous? Off the grid maybe in a log hut in the woods. If you’re in a vehicle, you’ll need license plates. If you buy land there needs to be a name on the deed. You can obscure those maybe behind company names if you make the effort. But there will be a paper trail.

    If you buy land, you might as well invest into a more comfy tiny house with solars on the roof and dig a nice pit for the toilet. Keep chicken and grow veggies or something.









  • The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.

    Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.



  • I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can’t go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit’s complicated.)

    That being said I’m sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.