BraveSirZaphod

BraveSirZaphod , 16 days ago

This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

BraveSirZaphod , 1 month ago

If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it's important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you're currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we're probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

BraveSirZaphod , 1 month ago

This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don't usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

BraveSirZaphod , 1 month ago

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you're going to criticize a thing, it's a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

Who is 'they'?

You're acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who've focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.

How do you know that these parents haven't also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

So Verizon gave you a phone for no upfront cost, and they're shitty for making you pay for it if you decide to dash away early?

Fascinating threshold for shitty behavior you have.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

I've personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don't really have any regrets there. I've seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I'd never have known about otherwise.

I can't imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.

It's a bit more complicated than this, and they'll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it's no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That's why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

If the cost of not voluntarily choosing to get myself into bad contracts is being a smug asshole, so be it.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

Well, on the plus side, now you know to actually read contracts before you choose to sign them.

In the meantime, enjoy your iPhone.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

In which case you essentially return to the status quo right now, where the Fediverse is a small group of somewhat-ideological tech enthusiasts.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

Meta will probably be pretty cautious and strict about what inbound content is allowed, since they have a global quagmire of laws and regulations to comply with and cannot just open up the firehose without significant legal risk. I'd imagine they'd only accept content from vetted instances that agree to some amount of common policy.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

The funny thing about Lemmygrad people is that you could tell me that this comment was an intentional caricature and it'd seem just as likely as it being genuine.

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

To compare forced labor camps where the alternative is being murdered to people making the active choice to volunteer to serve as moderators is a comparison so lacking in perspective that I'd expect to only find it on Reddit, but I guess Lemmy has managed to foster the same kind of behavior.

Are you going to compare Reddit killing the API to the Holocaust next?

BraveSirZaphod , 2 months ago

I'm gonna take a wild guess that most Lemmy people use Android, and the suggestion that someone might prefer an iPhone is triggering to someone whose sense of superiority comes from their choice of operating system for some reason.

BraveSirZaphod , 3 months ago

Violent revolution because of an operating system is genuinely one of the most terminally online ideas I think I've ever read in my life.

BraveSirZaphod , 3 months ago

Everybody said they’d cancel Netflix over it

What's probably more likely is that the "everybody" that you heard from was an incredibly unrepresentative sample of people from a bubble of nerdy tech enthusiasts.

BraveSirZaphod , 4 months ago

I think the entire point was actually that no single party can unilaterally make that decision. People who want to interact with Meta can, and those who don't can simply not.

If you don't wanna deal with them, be on a server that doesn't federate with them.

BraveSirZaphod , 5 months ago

The point is that it's portraying not blocking as an inherently negative thing, which isn't universally agreed upon at all. Plenty of people would say that they don't need any attention at all. It's not presenting objective in a neutral way, but rather labeling a group as bad.

Of course, it's probably fair to assume that the author has no intention of being neutral, but it's still valid grounds to criticize it as a data visualization.

BraveSirZaphod , 7 months ago

https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd

For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.

Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.

But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.

BraveSirZaphod , 7 months ago

ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.

I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.

That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.

BraveSirZaphod , 7 months ago

Okay let's do this.

• asses vs assess: 'asses' is the standard plural of 'ass', which has been around since Old English, and pluralization doesn't change word stress. As the plural marker -es follows the stress, the vowel is reduced to schwa. 'assess' comes from Middle French 'assesser', which had stress on the end syllable. That got adopted into Middle English as 'assessen', with the -en being an infinitive ending (as it still is in German and Dutch). Removing that ending, as it would be when conjugated, you get the stem 'assess-', with stress on the end. Because that vowel is stressed, it isn't reduced to schwa.
• these vs theses: 'these' goes back to Old English, and while the details aren't hugely important, suffice it to say that there were various processes that caused the /θ/ (<th>) and /s/ to become voiced as /δ/ and /z/. 'Theses' is from Ancient Greek (filtered through Latin), and is probably a relatively modern loan, vaguely from the Enlightenment if I had to guess. The Greek spelling is θέσεις (theseis). The Greek letter <θ> is strictly the voiceless 'th' sound (the sound in 'thing', NOT in 'this'). The first vowel is the 'bee' vowel /i/ because it's stressed, while the second one is also /i/ because that's how <ει> has been pronounced in Greek since vaguely the Roman era. English, like all European languages, has its own tradition of how to pronounce words from Greek and Latin that have diverged a fair bit from how they were originally pronounced, giving weirdness like this.
• trough vs through: -ough is notoriously terrible, but it wasn't always this way. Back in Old English, these words ended in either -g or -h. -h was the ending sound of Scottish 'Loch', while -g was basically the same sound, but voiced. As you know, these sounds do not exist in English today, and so they generally either became silent or shifted to the next closest thing, often /f/. This depended on the exact phonetic context and was generally a mess, though I'll do my best to untangle things. 'trough' was 'trog' or 'troh' in Old English, while 'through' was 'thurh'. If I had to guess, I'd say that it went silent in 'thurh' because it was preceded by an /r/, and so it could be dropped while still being recognizable as the same word (note how you can easily still recognize the word didn't even if you don't pronounce the /t/). This wasn't the case in 'trog', and so it became an /f/ as the next closest sounding consonant. The 'loch' sound /x/ and /f/ both produce some raspy rush of air, so it's not completely weird.
• though vs thought: this one is a bit messy. 'though' strictly speaking comes from Old English 'þēah', which we might expect to get an -f ending. However, it was conflated with Old Norse 'þó', which dropped the ending consonant and changed the vowel. A huge amount of Old Norse vocabulary entered English during the late Old English period and displaced quite a lot of native English vocabulary, including pronouns. 'them', for instance, isn't actually a native English word, but rather is from Old Norse. 'thought' comes from Old English 'þōht', where as before with 'thurh', the sound could be dropped without impeding word recognition. The evolution of the vowels is a whole hot mess due to English having one of the most complex vowel systems in the world, so I'm gonna just leave that as 'people talked and fucked the vowels up'.
• though vs thorough: I don't think there's that much weird about this one? 'thorough' is from a corruption of Old English 'thurh' (through) into 'thuruh', which came to be used as an adjective and gained initial word stress that caused the vowels to evolve differently. It's not that goofy, all things considered.

thank god, we're done with the <gh> disaster. The Scots really had it right when they decided to just keep it.

• stranger vs strangler: this is predictable. The <g> in 'stranger' is reduced to 'dʒ' (the consonant in "Joe") because it's followed by <e>, reflecting a stage of palatalization in Middle French where the word originates (originally Latin 'extraneus'). This isn't the case in 'strangler', so it behaves as normal. Oh, I guess the vowels are different; like I said, English vowels are a disaster. So, 'stranger' was borrowed from Anglo-Norman, a weird dialect of Old French originating from the Normans that conquered Britain. It was divergent from more standard Old French in a few ways, and in this case, 'stranger' comes from Anglo-Norman 'straungier'. This turned into a long /a/ in Middle English (the vowel of 'father'), which the Great Vowel Shift turned into vowel we have today. 'Strangle', on the other hand, comes from Old French 'estrangler' and entered English with a short vowel. So, 'strange' originally had a long /a/ while 'strangle' had a short /a/, and those both evolved into different sounds that are spelled with the same letter because English is insane.

BraveSirZaphod , 7 months ago

• gnome vs genome: 'gnome' isn't actually that old of a word. Some Swiss guy just made up the Latin word 'gnomus' in the 1500s. At that point, /gn/ either was already an invalid onset in English or was very soon to become so. 'Genome' was coined in the 1920s by a German guy, loosely based of a Greek word, so I would guess the stressed <e> was interpreted as if it were also Greek and thus pronounced /i/.
• desert vs dessert: 'dessert' comes from Middle French 'dessert', itself from 'des-servir', literally 'dis-serve', as in removing what has been served in order to give you a tasty treat at the end of the meal. Because that initial 'des-' is a prefix, it wouldn't be stressed, thus we have stress on the end of the word. The first vowel may have been reduced to a schwa under continuing influence from French. As for 'desert', that comes from Old French, and while I would expect the ending to be stressed in French, it's entirely possible it was loaned early enough into English that English's native rule of stressing the first syllable took over. The later introduction of 'dessert' would have reinforced this.
• moist vs maoist: Maoist is of course segmented as Mao-ist, and English doesn't have any way to clearly show that, so if Mo-ist was a real word, it would unfortunately also be spelled as 'moist'. Thankfully at least, 'ao' isn't a native English sequence, so that's a big clue, and 'aoi' is not a valid sequence for any single English sound. I think most languages would struggle with this sort of thing, since strong segmenting as happens with neologisms like this will happily defy standard phonological rules so long as speaker can recognize the segments and separate them accordingly.
• flaming vs flamingo: It's a somewhat similar story here, with 'flaming' obviously being the application of -ing to 'flame'. 'Flamingo' is a loan from Portuguese, and English tends to not adapt loanwords to native phonology very much, but that's hardly unusual. Hell, in German, you also have 'Der Flamingo'. Funnily enough though, 'flamingo' is actually related to 'flame'; both come from Latin 'flamma', which entered English via Old French.
• uniformed vs uninformed: Again, another segmentation issue, though it is a kinda fun one. Here, it's uni-formed and un-informed. Both do ultimately originate with Latin 'formare'. Here, the core thing is that 'inform' is a very common and easily recognized word, and we all know that the stress in on the ending. Adding another common prefix to it doesn't distract us from that, especially with the meanings being clearly related. 'Uniform', on the other hand, is much more liable to be analyzed as a single unit, since uni- is not a very common prefix and the connection in meaning to 'formed' isn't super transparent. So, we just treat is as a single largely independent word and that's that.
• laughter vs slaughter: God damn it, you really had to bring <gh> hell back at the end. So as before, we get /f/ at the end of 'laugh' due to there not being any other consonant around to compensate for totally dropping the <gh>. Now, the obvious question is, why doesn't this apply to 'slaughter' as well? That's because 'slaughter' isn't actually a native English word at all. Again, we can blame our friends the Vikings for bringing 'slaughter' and literal slaughter to England. The Old Norse form was 'slahtr'. That first element, 'slah', is actually the same word as English 'slay'. So basically, there never existed an English word 'slaugh' that had that pronounced <gh>, and so to whatever extent it was pronounced in the Old Norse word, it could easily fade away without causing problems. Whereas for 'laughter', this is easily analyzable as 'laugh-ter', and since 'laugh' developed an -f ending, 'laughter' kept it in order to maintain consistency.

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Truly, what a mess. Beyond sating some curiosity though, I hope this does go to show you that English really isn't total random chaos like it's often portrayed. Every apparent exception or weird spelling has a very real explanation behind it that tells a truly incredible story about an island that saw some Celts settle down, the arrival and then departure of the Romans, a violent conquest by the Anglo-Saxons, continued influence from Christianity, centuries of conflict with the Scandinavians, yet another conquest by the Normans, continuous cultural exchange with the rest of Europe, an explosion of Greek and Latin terms - many coined - during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and then the modern age of globalization (and colonialism) that's resulted in the importation of words from all across the world. Every word is a story; you only have to take the time to read it.

(the English vowel system is actually insane though; I really cannot defend it lmao)

BraveSirZaphod , 11 months ago

I'm not sure how much you know about networking or HTTP, but from the evidence posted, this very much is not the kind of thing that just accidentally happens.