this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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They *think they dominate the internet because they only speak one language
Yeah, maybe!
But we're still doing this thread in English, and I'll bet the reason why isn't Britain's impact on the internet.
Fantastic name by the way
It is incredible how poor you guys are at understanding the concept of languages. Your comments are completely unrelated to the fact that Americans are not a majority on the internet, even though Americans always assume so.
如果我開始用中文/廣東話咁你點算？
I would use the translator on my phone to understand 👍
The fun thing is that, the Internet lacks Cantonese support.
Strange, a lot of people speak that, why don't they have enough impact on the Internet to force that support?
The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it's makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there's some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.
Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it's the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn't overtly obvious, or even intentional.
The "Internet" and many foundations of networking originated in the US, but the Web, which is what I'd wager many think of when you say "the Internet", was invented in Switzerland by a British man.
I wager you'd be right, but most people are wrong.
I'm saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees's creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it's clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.
I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.