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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • “Western” languages? There is no such thing. There are Turkic ones, Indo-European ones, Uralic ones, Afro-Asiatic ones. They and more are all west of wherever Chinese characters are used.

    You are picking a small number of Chinese characters that bear a distant resemblance to the meaning they carry to this day in languages that use them. Most of them have been abstracted to hell. Or simplified beyond recognition, I guess not just in the Chinese mainland. And that 火 means 🔥 was not obvious to me when I learned it. You need somebody to tell you to imagine a person with their arms on fire to see it. So the abstraction has progressed too far. Where you see a mountain I see a fork also. Therefore, I challenge your premise to the extent that this is obvious without being instructed.

    I can also teach you pyr(o) means fire and maniac is an obsessive crazy person. You can get to the meaning of pyromaniac from there too. That as a learning process is not too different from 火山 equals volcano.

    A lot of these images you presented strike me as linguistic retconning to aid children (and foreigners) learning the characters.

    The point of the Latin alphabet is not to tie meaning to the letters but to the sounds they represent in the language that uses it. So even if, hypothetically, you could trace back the letter O to a symbol representing a window in Egyptian hieroglyphics this has no bearing on how the letter is used today.

    It’s also noteworthy to me that any language using Chinese characters have invented a syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japan) or use the alphabet to an extent to teach the language (pinyin in the PRC, complete latinization in Vietnam). Korean adopted a syllabary that has a similar look and design but actually makes sense. There is a strong appeal to the utility of being able to read what’s on the page without having to think about anywhere from 1000 to 100000 abstracted characters.



  • Radio playlists are a science like marketing. Half the budget is wasted, you’re just never sure which half.

    Stations have a target audience. They will have focused grouped this. They know their favorite music, how long on average they listen, and how much they will expect to hear certain artists. The DJs are mere announcers, they have little to no choice in what they play, and they are grateful to have a job. So like anybody working in retail during Christmas, they can tune out the music in their heads.





  • How do you blackmail a person who feels no shame? Could only be about his money. And I don’t see any angle, say, the Russians or the Israeli government has there to make him worried. So even if they are sitting on solid evidence of him eating babies on the island that won’t be nearly enough to put pressure on him. Unless it’s scientific evidence that his hands are too small. And he’ll just fake-news-stonewall that until he’ll cover the Lincoln Memorial in gold or something, just to move the media cycle along.

    47 thinks he’s smart but he is at best NYC realtor smart. With a touch of the mob, maybe. He’s severely undereducated as a president. More so than W by a factor of 1000. But he Peter principled himself into positions where he is unimpeachable or people are afraid to tell him when he’s wrong. He shows a persistent pattern of parroting the opinion of the last man he spoke with. He is larping the Emperor’s New Clothes fairy tale with an ego that needs constant praise, his own in a pinch. You don’t need to blackmail a person like that. Praise him, flatter him, promise him money and good headlines and he happily will kill a minimum of two of his children.

    Netanyahu sent him down the garden path on Iran. And now he’ll get a deal that’s worse than the Obama one he derided. Which I’m sure he never read. Because he only absorbs about one page of content if it’s nicely spaced and contains pictures. Per week.


  • This sounds like an interesting conspiracy theory. I would just say there are plenty of reasons why people shouldn’t use Windows. The JE angle isn’t necessary.

    The man wasn’t so much into mass surveillance and hacking as ingratiating himself to other rich people. He did that by handling their finances and reducing their tax bills. Or by providing girls and young women to be abused. He did and collected favors. He amassed influence. He may have crossed paths with people responsible for Windows. But I don’t think the product is tainted by that. Microsoft didn’t need JE for that.





  • Hero isn’t a title for life. His willingness to fuck his own life up to reveal NSA secrets to the world was heroic. Him staying in Russia with everything they’ve done more recently is decidedly less so.

    We want to judge him by absolute categories like morals and convictions. And that’s unfair because nobody is that pristinely moral all the time. I get that after his 007-like escape to Hong Kong, he would choose the easier way out now. If that means tacitly approving of Russia’s illegal attack on their neighbor then so be it. I think his morals compelled him to release the surveillance secret to the world. And the experience has sufficiently dulled any moral urges. Combine that with a limited list of choices of where else to go. A true superhuman hero would not want to stay where he once sought asylum if that country was itself responsible for hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum elsewhere. As I said, hero isn’t a title for life.



  • So this was the regional court (Landgericht). The next one is the superior regional court (Oberlandesgericht) where Google will appeal now. Since I don’t see any issues of the Bavarian constitution relevant to this case, the next one up is probably the federal court of justice (Bundesgerichtshof). And there is a small chance that either Google or the courts along the way decide to throw this to the EU court of justice.

    Most decisions like this get suspended upon appeal, completely or partially, until people give up or there are no more courts to pester. But every appeal will be taken seriously and goes into review at the court whether there is merit to it. That takes time. And Google has the money for a frivolous tour through the courts. And then there is the danger of court ping-pong where the superior court sends this back with notes to the regional. Whose ruling may be appealed again, etc.



  • Google can challenge the court’s ruling. As of writing, Google hasn’t decided whether it will appeal the verdict.

    This article is out of date because Google has decided to appeal in the meantime.

    This verdict is not legally effective yet. And it may never be. On the high seas and in a German courtroom, the people say, you’re in God’s hand. The next higher court can send this back to the lower court or could overrule it all together. And if they don’t do any of that, Google can go to the next higher court. Every appeal will add anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to the timeline. By the time this gets a final ruling Skynet may have killed us all.

    A Canadian singer/songwriter could surely do something with an article talking shit about so-called AI having a so-called AI bullet point summary at the top. Don’t you think?