A lot of the underlying message is how language gives you a sense of belonging, of community. Being forbidden to speak Cree, those people got those things stolen from them; and now she’s trying to let people reclaim those for themselves.

“The rock, it’s a spiritual thing for us. It’s our messenger to the Creator, right? So we call it a living thing. Same thing with the trees. That’s a living thing as well.”

This sort of exception (or should I say, additional complexity) pops up quite a bit across languages. Specially when there’s some meaning behind it.

Another aspect of the Cree language is that there is no gender distinction. // “We wouldn’t be able to know if it’s a male or female that we’re talking about,” she said.

Small correction: the animate vs. inanimate distinction is a gender system. It’s just not the same type as in your stereotypical European language, male vs. female vs. neuter. But note how it’s still triggering agreement, like expected from gender:

• niwâpamâw picikwâs I see the apple (picikwâs/apple is animated)
• niwâpahten tehtapiwin I see the chair (tehtapiwin/chair is inanimated)

This result directly contradicts the Wiedemann-Franz law, a well-established principle that states heat and electrical conduction in metals should be proportional.

Man, graphene is weird. It’s like each atom of carbon was actually a sandwich of

• a non-metal using the sp² orbitals, forming a neat lattice with electrons also neatly arranged into σ bonds
• a metal using the p orbitals that refused to hybridise, creating a huge π network of delocalised electrons

My guess is that the violation of the law is caused by this dichotomy.

When turning left, the side close to you is all about rights.
When turning right, the side close to you is going sinister.

Aaaaaaaaand now I screwed with the screwdriver screwing screws thing. Sorry~

(I usually remember the opening/closing rotation by picturing myself opening a jar. Then my hand moves in the right direction.)

Happy how my seafood paella turned out yesterday. I’m always a bit anxious before trying a new recipe, specially if I need to adapt things: no paella pan (more work for the wok), no bomba rice (long grain was the bomb), no saffron (no suffering, used turmeric), and no bola pepper (smoked garden pepper kept it rolling).

Surprised to see my mum eating so much as she did. She’s now talking about me making the recipe in special occasions (like Easter; not for Good Friday though, that’s sardine barbecue day for her).

Of course. Of course the strait would be closed by a cat.

“If I fits, I sits”.

Yup. I don’t have anything intrinsically against the tech (in fact I love projects like the AI horde), but I think it’s foolish to pretend they’ll replace anyone in the near future.

I am not against opinionated autocorrect, I am against the idea that the dataset and the curators of a high quality dataset aren’t the truly valuable part.

Amen. And it’s kind of weird how things are going: devalue the trade while relying on it, and pretending the automated tools will “soon” reach the same level as professional translation. Machine translation has been a thing for years, and it has come a long way, but like you said it’s still pattern-matching, even in AI times.

I think what is so mysterious about translation of human language is that it is always fraught with grey areas and confounding choices, there is no escaping it to a clean, systematic view that can algorithmically map one word to another.

There’s even an Italian tongue-in-cheek about this: “traduttore, traditore”. Roughly “translator, traitor”, but in English it’s a self-demonstrating example — because that “traditore” isn’t just “traitor”, it’s also “cheater, unfaithful”. It’s like you love the original work, but you can’t not cheat on it, by adding or removing meaning.

And much in the line of the text (Mahadevan translating French “maman” not into the new metalanguage, English, but into Tamil), there’s often situations that cheating is good. Sure, you’re adding meaning not present in the “true” original, but your reader will still enjoy it. My go-to example of that is Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire — the original is good, but the Portuguese translation by Clarice Lispector makes it a literary wonder, because IMO she was better at representing Louis’ introspection than Rice.

We are going through a period where the art […]

Yup, fully agree.

I work as a translator; and at least at the start, I was willing to use some AI tools; mostly for ideas on how to translate specially problematic excerpts*. I stopped doing it because the AI translations are consistently tone deaf, no matter how much context you give it or if you ask it for a [polite, rude, bored, etc.] translation.

*never copypasting the output, mind you; I might not be a good translator but I still have my pride. Using a weird dictionary is fine, telling it to do your work is not.

People often take for granted, that literature should be either created in the native language of the place, or the lingua franca of the moment. But some works transcend space and time.

I’m being a bit cheeky with the above, but seriously: often this sort of work is a gem. Because the author doesn’t just bring the language into the work; they also bring bits of the culture associated with it. And often, because this sort of author has a wider view over the world, as they went out of their way to learn another language.

There’s some amazing info on crow communication here: part 1, part 2. Not actual language* yet, but it shows they’re doing far more than caw-ing at each other, and they do associate meaning with specific calls.

The first link even mentions crows raised by a human tend to repeat their names if they’re looking for the human; that’s really close to what the parrots do, it’s more like they have a name for the relationship than for themselves.

*so far the closest I’ve seen was cetaceans using some sort of phoneme equivalent, and chimps pairing vocalisations for subtler meaning (e.g. up+threat = flying predator).

Related: Alex the “genius” grey parrot. He already showed by himself parrots aren’t simply parroting (eh) words, they have a good sense that specific vocalisations refer to specific entities or even attributes. And it’s well known some other birds (like crows) have rather good cognition, except parrots have the vocal “apparatus” to do it in a way that resembles human speech.

Nuss, nem lembrava!

White on (3,14). Pi-rfect spot!

A bit frustrated, to be honest.

It’s always a bloody chore to extract meaningful pieces of info from my mum, and so far I had to do it this week multiple times: asking her if my sis is going to dine with us tomorrow or lunch with us Sunday, which bills she wants me to pay (she has a bit of a hard time with online payment), which dishes she wants me to prepare, stuff like this.

It could be worse, I guess. At least I didn’t need to ask her directions.

And speaking about old ladies, my 17yo cat has also been extra annoying. Kika decided to rummage my recyclables bin, as if it was a toybox. For the sake of an empty cigs pack. And then went “MEEERRRRWWWOOOON MEEEWWWWRRROOWWWN” = “I finds hunts!”, three o’clock of the morning, in one of the few days my sleep schedule was normal. Then the other day she decided to hop onto my bed, found Siegfrieda (the other cat) sleeping on my belly, and picked a fight with her. Over me.

I went at length on this topic in !ethology@mander.xyz (the comm about animal behaviour). Here’s a link. But, to keep it short:

As far as we know, cetacean communication is **proto-**linguistic. Not quite Language yet, but not too far from it. The article shows abstraction of smaller units, but it doesn’t show the recursion Language shows, of blocks building block-building blocks.

And that recursion is damn important. It’s what allows us to pick a finite number of elements, and create an effectively infinite number of utterances out of them.

That’s largely the premise of the series, to show the so-called “barbarians” are way more reasonable than the society insistently trying to invade them, and that fights against nature instead of embracing it.

Aaaand we get introduced to the Admirers of Miss Bertia! Joana looks way craftier and “more evil” than in the manga. But that’s fine, I think; if anything it’s good for contrast with other characters, even Prince Cecil with his silent malice.

In the meantime, Bertia herself is completely clueless. Anyone else would’ve noticed the heroine is also a reincarnator. Bertia, though? Nah.

Prince Cecil is not aware of his own feelings towards Bertia. (It’s basically the one you love sending you away, of course it hurts.)

So far I’ve been really liking this adaptation.

Acc. to my mum (she loves orchids) phalaenopsis orchids roots need to dry a bit before you water them again, so they really don’t like this sort of “always wet” system like semi-hydro. That’s why the bottom roots in your picture are all rotten, but the top ones (that likely get drier) are thriving.

She also said those rotten roots must be clipped out, otherwise the bacteria spread to the healthy ones.

Her suggestion is to simply use the traditional method, with an organic substratum: a mix of pine bark and charcoal, with just a wee bit of sphagnum (so you don’t need to water them constantly; but do wait until it’s dry to water them again). With LECA only at the bottom of the pot, for drainage.

Three hypotheses:

1. It’s easier to find news content than other stuff. And your typical forumverse user is more likely to share what they find, because they know this place needs more content.
2. News content gets more engagement than hobby content.
3. Feedback loop: more news content attracts people who are mostly interested on news content, and those people post more news content.

My all feed can empty pretty quickly when I turn on the politics/news filter, I just wish there were more chill posts.

That’s also my experience with manual subscription in Lemmy.

My comment doesn’t, but the OP does. Four downvotes in Beehaw is quite a lot, given the local users don’t downvote. Same thread is in the negatives in one of the cross-posts even if it’s on-topic.

And, like. I get why people would react negatively towards the product itself, but I don’t think it’s good tone to react like this towards the news being shared, you know?

People, please stop shooting the messenger. Please.

With that out of the way: I wish Mozilla didn’t waste so much money on chasing the latest trend of the season, and instead used it for its main products. Including Thunderbird. The one asking for donations.

Some years from now Thunderbolt will likely pop up in this list, of abandoned Mozilla products. Because it isn’t the result of Mozilla finding a niche to create an AI product to benefit users; it’s simply execs chasing the latest trend.

*Beehaw users are likely not seeing this, but this post has a bunch of downvotes.

Oh, that reminds me someone I banned some months ago. It went like this:

OP shared some on-topic but borderline NSFW content, in a comm I mod. I requested (not demanded; just requested) OP to use the NSFW tag, so people (incl. me) could go wild discussing it, without making others uncomfortable. OP did it just fine, no issue, I know that poster and they’re a fairly reasonable person.

Then a second user started stirring shit up about my request. Their complain was TL;DR “I assume you’re overly sensitive, grow a thick skin” and using an ableist slur as a slur, in a way that targets a marginalised group. I gave them a 3d ban. Just three days, as it was first offence… and because if you give this sort of user enough rope, they’ll quickly find a way to ban themselves.

Bingo. And as soon as I banned them, they started DM’ing me. Ban elevated to permaban, messages reported, and admins eventually banned them. :-)