lvxferre

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 force 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.

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!

Here's some further info on what he mentions in 4:20 and 5:00, about ōs vs. ŏs and the asymmetrical vowels system.

Latin had two sets of vowels: long /ā ē ī ō ū/ and short /ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ/. And all Romance languages got rid of that length distinction (some redeveloped it like Lombard, but the "old" system was gone). However, how they did it was different, following mostly three different patterns:

So the outcome of long vowels and short /ă/ was mostly the same in all of them (in the short term). But focus on the last two columns: Western Romance is lowering all non-low vowels, Eastern Romance only the front ones, and Sardinian... simply kept them where they were?

Accordingly to this video, Western African Romance varieties followed the same pattern as the ones in Eastern Europe, and the ones spoken closer to Italy (what's today Tunis) followed the same pattern as Sardinian.

This might sound odd - like, between Morocco and Romania there's a whole Mediterranean, why the hell are they undergoing the exact same sound changes? But it actually makes sense when you remember that sound changes don't spread instantaneously. And that those vowel systems are not the result of one, but three sound changes:

1. Front vowels get slightly centralised; so /ĕ ĭ/ go from [e i] to [ɛ ɪ]. Eventually they settle down as /ɛ e/.
2. Other vowels get slightly centralised; so /ă ŏ ŭ/ go from [ä o u] to [ɐ ɔ o]. Eventually they settle down as /a ɔ o/ (with /ă/ merging back with /ā/).
3. Long vowels get shortened; so /ā ē ī ō ū/ go from [ä: e: i: o: u:] to [ä e i o u], merging with the short vowels.

Change #1 was likely a pre-requisite for change #2: unless a dialect centralised the front vowels, it wouldn't centralise the back vowels. Change #3 was independent of the other two, but once it happened it blocked the centralisation.

Now, let's say that changes #1 and #2 happened in the Italian peninsula. And that #3 would happen way to the south, like Sardinia or [what's today] Tunis. Then those changes start spreading out.

Once #3 reaches the Western European dialects, #1 and #2 already happened; so they centralised all the short vowels. However, neither #1 nor #2 had any chance to develop in Sardinia or Tunis, as #3 happened rather early in those places.

But what about places far away from both Tunis and Italy? #3 would eventually reach the Latin spoken in those regions; late enough so #1 happened, but early enough to prevent #2. That's why Mauritanian Romance, Balkans Romance, and potentially Mozarabic* ended with an asymmetrical vowel system.

*"Mozarabic" aka Andalusi Romance is a catch-all for the indigenous Romance varieties from Southern Iberia. Eventually replaced by the varieties spoken up north in Reconquista times.

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.

Ah, got it.

The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from "any speaker of a foreign language" to "Latin/Romance speaker".)

Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman "barbarus".

He's talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.