I think he’s a bit over-hopeful at the fediverse’s prospects, sadly. People will give up so much (like all of their privacy!) for a small amount of convenience.

It’s not Twitter that Mastodon has to seize the moment from. It’s all the other commercial offerings that will inevitably pop up in its place as Twitter crashes and burns.

“This web site uses cookies. Accept them all or fuck off.”

I fuck off.

Pattern-matching.

When you talk like a right-wing ignoramus (RWI), using almost exactly the same words as they do, you pattern-match as an RWI and are dismissed accordingly. This is horribly unfair, I know, I’m sorry, but I have way too little time in my day to go into your entire network history to see if you’re in the hypothetical 0.56% of people who use the phrase you did without being an RWI.

The existence of the 99.44% who are RWIs just too overwhelming a volume for me to concern myself with the (as yet hypothetical) 0.56%.

Literally every person I’ve heard make this statement are also the first to dogpile on social media any perceived Chinese person holding them personally responsible for the actions of a government they have little say in. (Bonus points if they—as is almost invariably the case—can be found disclaiming any responsibility for actions of their own government which they do have an actual say in!)

So, apologies if this offends, but I simply don’t believe your hogwash. You check off too many boxes for me to take your position seriously.

(And all this is aside from the fact that I’m not talking about specifically “the Chinese people” here, but rather the diversionary tactic of pointing at others that crooked shitheads use to distract people from their shitfuckery.)

LOOK AT THOSE PEOPLE OVER THERE! DO NOT LOOK AT WHAT WE ARE DOING! THOSE PEOPLE OVER THERE ARE THE PROBLEM!

sigh

Posted: Sep 08, 2022 1:33 PM EDT

Right on top of the news cycle, I see.

Is there a version that’s not behind a paywall?

Anything he’s gotten behind has succeeded.

Like Twitter.

This is nonsense.

I’ve seen more young’uns whining that it’s “too hard” to choose an instance. It’s the young’uns that are used to things being all in one place: one Facebook, one Twitter, one Instagram, etc. The elder Gen-X/younger-Boomer crowd are all very familiar with having to make choices in service providers (because we had choices!). We had to choose telephone service providers, Internet service providers (who weren’t our telephone guys for AGES!), email service providers (often our ISPs, but not always: also our work environments, and third-party suppliers once we’d gone through the change-the-ISP-email dance often enough), etc. etc. etc.

The young’uns are the ones that flock to wherever their friends are flocking this week and have ISP choices they can count on one hand, even after a bizarre gardening accident sheared off a few fingers. Choice has been systematically removed from people in the tech sphere since I was in my teens. Fewer choices in phone configurations, fewer choices in ISPs, fewer choices in email providers, fewer choices in chat systems, fewer choices in …

… until we have the situation where people think of social media sites instead of social media platforms.

Bitcoin and its alternatives could never have been a currency. It’s eminently unsuited to that role. (It’s great for Ponzi schemes, extortion schemes, and other criminal enterprises mind.) And how does “using more energy than a medium-sized nation while doing three orders of magnitude fewer transactions than even ONE payment processor” translate to “energy reform”?

Please, dude, stop being a cryptobro. It’s a really bad look.

US companies not obeying laws in other countries, even when operating there, is by now just a sad cliche.

Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it’s up to you to hold that conversation privately.

Please let me know where you live and which cafe you frequent. I’ll just stand there while you have a quiet conversation with your SO, my phone recording everything you say. You won’t object, naturally, because it’s a public space and if you didn’t want your romantic conversation broadcast live on Twitch you’d have had it elsewhere, right?

Scraping public text, which is something that’s been widely accepted on the web for two decades …

Saying that “she asked for it; she was dressed like a slut” was widely accepted in the world at large for THOUSANDS of years (and still is in some places!). Until it suddenly wasn’t. In some parts of the world.

Hell, pounding the shit out of someone for being “rude” was (and is) widely accepted for thousands of years. Not all that long ago, in human historical terms, killing someone for talking back to you was not only acceptable, it was required to preserve your “honour” (or whatever other term was used in that space).

Maybe—and just hear me out here—maybe things that are “widely accepted” have turned out to be shitty things, not things to be emulated and amplified.

(Please wait until I’m in your cafe and recording before you respond, though. I want to make sure that thousands of people are listening in.)

If the author is telling the full story…

Key word is the first word there. Everybody who has ever been banned from a site or server in all of the Internet’s history was innocent when they tell the tale.

Spotted the Russian op.

Oh God I hope not!

This one line says it all for me:

With the official release of Python 3.11 this October, hundreds of millions of users will now enjoy sorting getting ever so slightly faster.

So “improved” in this context is “made faster”. Got it.

We will see. When “Quote Toots” come to Mastodon, let’s watch and see if Mastodon turns into a toxic dogpile site. My prediction is that it will (though it will be more left-flavoured than right-flavoured like the Birdsite). Yours is that it won’t.

We’ll let history decide which of us was right. (And if I was right, I’ll drop Mastodon and the Fediverse like I dropped the Hellsite and the Birdsite.)

If they come to Mastodon with the Twitter approach (can’t turn them off, get shoved into my notices) then I drop Mastodon. It’s that simple. Like I dropped Facebook and Twitter before (for much the same reason).

I’ve seen way too many QT dog-pile calls to tolerate them for even an instant in my Fediverse experience. If they come to the Fediverse, I drop the Fediverse. End of story.

No. It really isn’t. This desire to use the language of sociopaths is itself dangerous. Call it what it is: new. And interesting.

Sociopaths disrupting sociopaths? Where I come from that’s called two things:

1. Poetic justice.
2. A shit-show best kept faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar away from.

How’s about this as a notion, though: stop worshipping techbrodudes and other sociopaths and instead start getting the kindling built up under the stakes for them?

And can only really be used by other users of the seriously fringe set, yes.

And they don’t interfere with my experience, unlike the Twitter retweets.

I’m fine with the fringe of the already fringe (Fediverse) have access to circle jerking tools that don’t pollute my space. Twitter’s circle jerking tools spewed all over me. Fuck 'em.

Do QTs increase Twitter pile-ons or swarms?

None of the studies could answer this question or estimate how often this happens.

So the actual issue at hand is the one they couldn’t answer.

I’ll stick with ‘no quote toots, please’.

It depends.

If it’s being used by the techbrodude community, let’s just call it what it is: sociopathic.

If it’s being used by actual human beings, perhaps “new and interesting”.

I’m honestly kind of tired of that word “disruptive” being used as if it’s a good thing. “Disruption” as an end gave us the utter dirtbags of Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Amazon, and a whole host of other scummy tech outfits. It’s time to retire that term into the pile of “words used only by assholes”.

It’s never a good thing when “Web 3” is spoken anywhere near anything you value.

I love reading reports like this and counting the egregious errors of fact. It gives me warm fuzzy feelings about the value of the press in society.

Apparently “ethics” is now “staying in a cesspool because other people prefer it”.

Fuck that noise. If that’s the new definition of “ethics” I’ll be the most unethical motherfucker alive.

The “CCP” gaffe in particular is comically incompetent.

Not in my lifetime.

Any second language used only for programming purposes is going to be doomed from the outset anyway. I work in a Chinese engineering firm. They work with Chinese people (and me). They sell their products to Chinese firms. What possible incentive could they have to make all their engineers use a different language than Mandarin to communicate in? If they grow to the point that international markets are a concern, they’ll have to i18n their products anyway (because their customers won’t be speaking some conlang!) and given the costs of that, updating the design documents in another language is a minor cost.

Conlang IALs are a solution in search of a problem for an overwhelming number of professionals. They present a high-cost initial barrier of entry (the time it takes to learn the conlang to fluency) with a very low payout in the short- and medium-term for almost all involved people. And even if the engineers in question did learn the conlang do you genuinely believe they’ll use it when doing work among other speakers of their own language? Do you genuinely believe the conlang will be the primary communication tool?

Idealism is a good thing. A great thing. Provided that it is, in some fashion, compatible with reality. A conlang IAL for programming is not compatible with reality.

I have found myself thinking this more and more as well, with the rising number of projects which are being developed primarily by/for speakers of other languages, sometimes with terrible to non-existent english support.

I love how this is always framed: “…terrible to non-existent English support…”

There’s about 400 million native English speakers in the world. There’s about a billion native Mandarin speakers in the world. Why is it never framed “…terrible to non-existent Mandarin support…”? There’s about 475 million native Spanish speakers in the world. Why is it never framed “…terrible to non-existent Spanish support…”?

Even the way internationalists frame things is very telling.

I’m referring to 16 years of experience teaching language and seeing where the pain points were in acquiring English from Mandarin speakers. The irregularity of English grammar was never a particularly difficult point. The Chinese just sat and memorized, something they’re good at from just their own orthography, given that it’s almost, but not quite, entirely devoid of system.

What were pain points were conceptual pain points. Most people couldn’t grasp articles and when they should or should not be used. (Esperanto has an article whose use case is bizarre.) Most people had a hazy grasp on verb conjugation, freely using whichever conjugation first passed their lips without subject/verb agreement. Declining for number was a pain point. Even the mildest amount of gendered language caused problems (“he” and “she” tend to get used interchangeably and fluidly, often switching between them in the same sentence). Verb tenses. Verb aspects. Both of these caused tremendous difficulty.

And Esperanto has all of them and more.

Would Esperanto be easier than English to learn? Of course! It’s far more regular than English. But the point here is that while easier than English, it’s not much easier than English because as a language at a conceptual level it is not that different from English. And then on top of that the consonant clusters (thank you Polish!) would render it nigh-impossible to pronounce. We’re talking about people for whom the word “lonely” is a tongue-twister because of the switch between ‘l’ and ‘n’. For whom the “str” in “string” is a pain point. And I’ve spotted Esperanto words with five-consonant clusters, four of them hard.

There is not much difference in terms of difficulty between learning English for Mandarin speakers and learning Esperanto because the difficulties come from conceptual levels, not practical. There are alien ideas in Esperanto (shared with English), and that’s where the hard part comes. So the choice of a Chinese speaker is to learn Esperanto and get (generously) a million people (of eight billion) to speak with, or get (equally generously) 1.5 billion people (of, remember, eight billion) to speak with.

When that stark calculus is presented, the choice is clear: spend the little bit of extra work it takes to learn English and ignore Esperanto.

I’d be very interested in seeing your mentioned studies, incidentally. Specifically seeing who performed them (and what their methodology was). My guess is that they weren’t professional linguists, and nor were they particularly rigorous (using things like self-selected subjects, etc.).

You said a whole lot more than that, Sparky. Goodbye.

It’s rather obvious you don’t see what I’m talking about. Even when you QUOTE IT.

English, to take a horrifically terrible language at random, is not much harder to learn for, say, a Chinese speaker

That is a sweeping generalization you made. How would Esperanto be harder for a Chinese person than English?

See that there, Sparky? That’s you claiming I said the precise opposite of what I said.

(Note, also, that I very clearly called English a “horrifically terrible language” yet the rest of your response to that was acting as if I said English were a good language. Another sign of not reading for comprehension, but rather reading to find some excuse to react even if you have to make up that excuse.)

So go back and re-read everything … EVERYTHING … I said for comprehension before you waste any more of my time. I’m tired of intellectually dishonest Esperantists.

I did. Why do you think I quoted your text?

You quoted text that said the exact opposite of what you then argued against. Read for comprehension this time.

Dude, I said English was harder. Seriously, try to keep up! I just said it’s not much harder and comes with the benefit of people actually speaking it so that learning it isn’t a waste of effort.

Further, Esperanto is ignored because it’s not much easier than natural languages to huge swathes of the world’s population, but at least has the benefit of being utterly useless to learn.

Learn a few languages from places that aren’t Indo-European ones. Learn how you can have grammars with little to no declension, for example: no verb tenses, aspects, voices, genders, cases … not even declining by count. Then consider:

1. Esperanto has almost all of these alien-to-many concepts; and,
2. While it is true that it is more regular in these than in natural Indo-European languages, the latter have the benefit of actually having speakers: the purpose of learning a foreign language is met: communication.

On top of this:

1. Esperanto has a consonant-heavy phonetic inventory, making its pronunciation hard for a lot of speakers of other languages. (It is painfully obvious that Zamenhoff was Polish, let’s put it this way.) Too it is very bizarrely irregular (though it’s not so bizarre once you check out Zamenhoff’s native dialect and its consonantal inventory…). Lest you think this isn’t a problem, most native languages in the world rarely present more than “consonant+vowel” structures, so strings of consonants are absolutely horrendously difficult for them. (Even saying “string” is hard, and that’s mild compared to some of the atrocities of PolishEsperanto.
2. Esperanto uses a system of affixes (pre- and suf-) to words to modify word forms and attach meanings. This is a difficult concept for speakers of languages like Mandarin, say, to comprehend (where word forms are notoriously vague and grammatical particles are used in place of affixes to accomplish many of the same things). Further, Esperanto assumes that a) word forms are universal, b) that the categories in those languages that have them are the same, and c) that even when the categories are the same individual words are categorized similarly across languages. Yet in English “angry” is an adjective. In other languages it is a verb. Fancy that!
3. Esperanto has the single most useless feature of any language: gendered declensions. (And, naturally, just to add icing to this cake, the default is masculine.) Zamenhoff had the chance to remove the single most useless feature of a language from his grammar … and didn’t. Flipping FARSI managed to do this, a natural language in the Indo-European family, but a constructed language had to keep this vestigial nonsense?! Again, gendered grammar is not even slightly universal and makes the language difficult to learn for people coming from sane languages.
4. Esperanto’s lexical inventory is gloriously East European for the most part, with random slathering of Romance-language vocabulary generously applied. So, you know, using as a basis words from a small geographical region instead of words from around the world. Where are the Chinese roots? The Arabic ones? The roots from various African languages? There aren’t any. Thus it is pretty much equally difficult for a Chinese(or Arabic(or, say, Swahili))-speaking student to learn the lexicon of an actual language spoken by actual people instead of a toy language spoken by basically nobody.
5. What is a subjunctive? What is an infinitive? What is a participle? These are concepts that are very much Indo-European. Speakers of languages outside that family (which is checks notes most people) have no idea what one or more of these are. So that’s three alien grammatical concepts right off the top of my head in Esperanto’s grammar, and while sure it’s more regular (FSVO “regular”) than in natural languages, it’s the conceptual barrier that is hard to breach, not the rote memory work to learn them once you’ve grokked the idea. So again, slightly more difficult to learn a natural language, but even a natural language with as low a speaker count as Basque will give you about as many people to talk to as does Esperanto while the Big Name™ languages will give you multiple of orders of magnitude more. Each.
6. Esperanto assumes that notions of “subject”, “object”, and “argument” are linguistic universals. They aren’t. This makes Esperanto’s twee case structure with its cute little suffixes actually fiendishly difficult to learn for speakers of languages that mix agents, experiencers, and patients in ways different from the Indo-European majority. (Don’t know what agents, experiencers, and patients are? Maybe you should crack open an inventory of linguistics before talking about how “easy” a language is to learn…)
7. Why are there plurals in Esperanto? Why decline for number at all? Plenty of languages don’t and it works just fine. OK, so for whatever reason you think plurals are necessary: WHY THE HELL DOES ESPERANTO ALSO HAVE COUNT/VERB AGREEMENT!? That’s just bizarre even in many languages that have retained the unnecessary concept of a plural!
8. Personal pronouns. Ugh. There’s first person singular and plural (but no way to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive in the latter case). There’s second person with no ability to distinguish singular and plural (because consistency is for whiners!). There’s gendered (🙄) singular third-person, but non-gendered (let’s be honest: default-masculine) third-person. And then there’s a weird one (oni) that means one. Or people. Because screw making sense! Why are there gendered pronouns at all!? They serve no useful purpose; many languages (including Farsi, the language of Iran(!)) eschew them completely, and others (e.g. Mandarin) only distinguish them in writing (and that itself is a very recent cultural import!).
9. Articles. WHY IS THERE AN ARTICLE IN ESPERANTO!? And why only one!? You’ve eliminated all the other articles, take that final step dammit! Join the majority of world languages which don’t bother with these vestigial adverbs!

And I’m out of steam already. There are a whole lot of hidden linguistic assumptions in Esperanto that are alien to language speakers from outside of the Indo-European milieu, or difficult for such speakers to actually perform. To someone in steeped an Indo-European linguistic environment these are invisible. They’re “natural” or even “logical”. But they are absolute tongue-twisters and conceptual mountains for those coming from outside of those environs. And if you’re going to climb those conceptual mountains and twist your tongue in service of these phonetic horrors, where do you think it’s best to expend your efforts:

1. On a fantasy football league language that has maybe a million speakers world-wide (and that’s being generous!); or,
2. On a natural language that’s a little bit more difficult but gives you access to ~1 billion native speakers and ~200 million secondary speakers (Mandarin), ~475/75 million (Spanish), ~400 million/~1 billion (English), 350/250 million (Hindi), or even 50/26 million (Hausa)?

If you’re sane and value your time, you pick literally almost any natural language in the world for better return on investment, even though it may, in the case of some of those (coughIndo-Europeancough) languages, be a little bit more difficult than Esperanto. (Yes. A little bit.)

Sparky, here’s a tip: read what I actually wrote instead of whatever words were flowing through your brain from the voices. Then come back and actually address what I actually said. It’s amazing how much you wrote in response to material you understood so little of.

I don’t mind vocals in my focus music. As long as they’re not in a language I understand. I listen to a lot of Chinese opera currently, as well as assorted brands of international metal.