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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am

    Recommend genki if you’re good with a book

    If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.

    That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong

    In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently

    It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that (bolding wa/は)

    それらわたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?

    Should be

    それらわたしのあかいコートですか

    (sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool

    But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above

    Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko

    But again when you get this wrong duolingo will just say “you got it wrong, here’s what it should have been.” To be fair a book has the same limitation, it’s just with an app, especially a mature well funded app like duolingo they have the opportunity to easily be like you got it wrong and here’s why! And that would accelerate learning by quite a bit, at least theoretically

    Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb



  • I never know what to tell people like you. DeepL is the best one at translating Japanese and it still is mixed

    Japanese is a contextual language. It is difficult for machines to translate because it is not a language where a word simply means this or that.

    Take a very short sentence:

    がくせいです - gakusei desu

    Gakusei is “student”

    A literal translation of this would be “am student” or “is student”

    But if I say this to you you will infer things based on context and です/desu takes on a different role. If I am clearly referring to myself then gakusei desu in this context becomes “I’m a student” (though to be fair I would probably have said it with a first person pronoun and particle like わたしはわ (watashi wa)

    But if I’m referring to another singular person in the room this would be inferred through context, eg “he’s a student.” But this is where it starts getting confusing, the copula (desu) doesn’t differentiate singular or plural, so context is also used to derive plural forms, eg “they are students”.

    This copula also applies to other situations outside of he/she like “it” eg コンビニです, konbini desu, konbini being “convenience store”, “its a convenience store”

    This is a very very basic idea of why. It gets more complex obviously once you move past these extremely basic examples but honestly someone more knowledgeable at Japanese should explain at that point, I’m self taught and mediocre (thus my use of 0 kanji, I’m pretty sure at a minimum there’s kanji for gakusei and watashi but I suuuuck at kanji. I at least know meat. 肉肉肉 although that’s mostly thanks to anime and the local Asian grocer lmao).

    I think AI can probably do it eventually but it will need to be able to do much better job of understanding what the source material is actually talking about and that’s the challenge to overcome. And that’s why it will probably never be able to really accurately translate a paragraph copy pasted into it

    As to the sanitation that’s a separate issue about corporate control of AI. If they don’t want their translation services to sound “vulgar” that’s their prerogative I suppose but it also means they sound less human and realistic because people are gross and ugly when they speak. Vernacular is ugly and lexicon adapts quickly in ways that people don’t always love. But to be clear I don’t mean it’s just about slurs and bad words, I mean it’s about slang in general. Words that are generally inoffensive but not considered proper. English equivalents would be what we consider zoomer speak, hella sus yeah bruh type shit (I’m not good at this part)



  • I don’t even care about flirting with women I just want a free app where I can practice speaking my second language with actual people and not some sanitized AI that doesn’t understand context or slang instead of watching cringe youtubers

    Like Duolingo/genki or google translate doesn’t really capture おっす. Duolingo probably doesn’t bother with that kind of informal speech. Google just translates it as “hey”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even deepl just translates it as yo!, which is much closer but still kind of not really it. It’s more like a sup brah kind of thing. Like a really masculine youthful colloquial greeting I guess is the best way to explain it.

    But not discord, fuck discord



  • These actually had distinction:

    Defectives was generally the term prior to like 1845, which is when Howe published “on the causes of idiocy”. That led to more classification

    Idiot was what we could call severe intellectual disability. Requiring 24 hour care but some muscular control, cognitive, and speech capabilities. Use was phased out in the late 19th century because it had become pejorative

    Fool was a subcategory of idiot with more significant impairment of reasoning and speech skills. This became pejorative and was phased out.

    Simpleton was moderate intellectual disability. Some degree of functioning, capacity for speech, motor and reasoning skills, but required assistance with tasks. This also become pejorative and was phased out (see a pattern). This was replaced with several terms, including feeble minded, imbecile, and moron, which were also in turn phased out.

    at one point in the 19th century there was a distinction when symptoms of dementia set in. If you got what we would now call early onset dementia, it was called “amentia”. By the early 20th century “ament” was kind of a catch all for “idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded”

    There was also “cretin” which was originally supposed to be a kindness for all intellectually disabled people as it means “Christian” in French or something, but it also became pejorative

    Another super racist one was mongoloid/mongolism which was specifically for Down’s syndrome. This is because, no joke, John Down thought people with down syndrome looked like Mongolians. His reward for his racism was the condition bears his name forever, apparently. This was only changed because Mongolia had to petition the WHO to change it because it was offensive

    Imo instead of policing language we should maybe recognize that the intentionality behind the use of these terms is what the problem is.

    Saying the word “retarded” does not have to be inherently offensive. Describing something that is slowed or hindered as retarded is accurate. Using retarded as a pejorative term makes you a dick, sure. But if I go through all the effort to change “retarded” to “intellectually disabled” guess what happens? The same thing that has happened for the past 175+ years. The people who have used the terms in the pejorative sense will quickly adapt, making your efforts to police language pointless unless you intended to enrich their lexicon.

    If you consider actions that could actually be meaningful for the individual it would be something that would address the harm caused by pejorative use. That’s a challenging road to go down (imagine criminal penalties: middle schools would be ghost towns!). we want to feel like we do something though so we instead do this, which is pointless.

    That said if the disorder was named by an old racist based on his racism then by all means change it up but maybe don’t memorialize him when you do it. That doesn’t come up as much anymore, thankfully


  • quixotic120@lemmy.worldtoGreentext@sh.itjust.worksAnon is in trouble
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    6 months ago

    This honestly makes so much more sense from an environmental standpoint. Why waste so much in terms of resources shipping hundreds of millions of pounds of sugar water every month so picky babies that refuse to drink water will pump more money into the coca cola empire so they can get type 2 diabetes as fast as possible. Instead just ship this little cup thing at 1/18th the weight and save so much gasoline, road wear and tear, etc.

    Who am I kidding, they’ll just put this into plastic bottled water that’s been shipped from 3 states over



  • Dependent on hardware that allows for such things. I think/hope you are right and that demand for such things will continue to enable their presence for at least some time but I fear the eventual end of things is hardware that is completely unable to be customized, repaired, or modified in any meaningful way. iphones for everyone.

    The tech moguls are cozying to trump hard and that’s not for nothing. They’re going to get something in return.

    I hope you’re right though


  • Except using developer mode means you trade away support. Why pay all that money for a bambu if you’re not going to get support? Might as well build your own printer at that point if you’re going to have to problem solve all the issues yourself anyway

    Also “This is beta testing, not a forced update”

    Beta implies that at some point this will no longer be beta and will a mandatory update.

    They’re testing the waters, thankfully the pushback may have them reconsidering. It probably just has them reconsidering the rollout/timing though. they may do something like Philips did with hue: announce the cloud integration into a product that did not require an internet connection or cloud integration for over a decade, get a bunch of backlash, then not implement the cloud part while the heat dies off while still fully intending to do so. The hue cloud was announced as a mandatory change in September of 2023 and still hasn’t been implemented but there is a reminder with each app update reminding you it’s eventually going to be necessary if you have not done it yet.






  • Saw this from the moment they did the rfid nonsense, doubled down on my beliefs when they started burning cash on advertising like crazy. Tons of youtubers and such shill this shit

    They had a series b round in 2023 of an undisclosed amount with several chinese vc companies and they’ve had investments in 2021 and 2022 as well. I don’t know how chinese vc works but I assume it’s similar to american vc where there is a strong demand from the backer(s) to monetize in this fashion

    Why do you think reddit went to shit? Series b in 2014. Those people drop serious cash. Reddits seed round in 2005 at y combinator was for 100k. That’s serious money to you and me, but to vc people that’s not worth getting out of bed. Reddits 2014 series b was fifty million. They suddenly had a gigantic influx of cash to grow infrastructure and compete with the big dogs like meta and twitter. They were fairly successful with this. They then raised 1.2 billion over 4 rounds from 2017-2021. That’s why they had a relatively quick turn to shit; that money was to try to make the site bland and profitable in preparation for ipo. It worked out because the stock made investors a ton of cash at the expense of making the site dogshit

    Bambu will have a similar trajectory. Investors will give them an amount of money that is frankly obscene, they will use that money to develop (and probably to party, ridiculous salaries and/or fluff jobs, and have really fancy offices), then they will actively make the product worse. 5 years from now they will have used that money to entrench themselves in the market space. Don’t be surprised if the average person thinks “bambu” when they think “3d printer” because they pissed away 10s of millions on advertising. But their printers will have more consumer hostile bullshit (finally fully locking out 3rd part filament instead of just requiring you to do a pain in the ass respooling seems inevitable) like this and it would not be surprising to see the build quality suffer too.



  • Yeah absolutely, and any bugs that are found are permanently gonna be there, stuff like that. It sucks. Thus the “I probably wouldn’t bother either”. But if you’re really passionate about it I say go for it, just cover your tracks really well, only work with people you trust implicitly, and don’t popularize the project until you’re ready to be done with it. The moment it gets hyped and picked up by ign/kotaku/etc you’re done.

    I think you can still get the word out to get other modders though. These things don’t seem to get squashed at the planning stage, otherwise publishers would be spending tons of resources going after people who have maybe done no actual work. It seems like what happened with this mod, when they make socials and release ongoing updates, screenshots, videos, etc, of their work, that’s what gets people hyped and all the attention (and eventual hammer) on them

    Of course this means you get no credit for your work, which sucks. If you’re undertaking such a massive effort and getting 0 credit I could understand why you wouldn’t bother (although it’s kind of badass to do it for no clout)