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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • There’s a ton of precedence for this.

    We have accepted that our clothes don’t fit, that our non-fitting shoes ruin our feet, that our furniture all looks the same and doesn’t fit into the spaces we have, that consulting by knowledgeable sales people was replaced by product listings that can’t even reliably tell you if a printer is monochrome or color.

    Enshittification is nothing new. It’s something that has been going on for at least the last 70 years.

    I mean, just compare the fabric of clothes from 20-30 years ago to new stuff. I still got some clothing from the early 2000s that holds up just fine, while the newer stuff just falls to pieces after a year or so. You can even see that in the marketing. If you look at clothes ads even of cheap brands from the 80s, they all advertise with long-lasting quality. Pretty much no brand does that anymore.

    So yes, AI will just make customer support, marketing and software quality way worse and we will just accept that like we have done for the last 70 years.


  • I’m not argueing that it isn’t the national language. I just said that you could grow up in Wales never learning Welsh, because English is just as much (if not more) the language used in every-day dealings.

    That said, the farthest north I have been was Merthyr Tydfil.

    At least in the areas I have been in and the time that I lived there, Welsh was a language you had to actively seek out and not a language that was necessary to know if you lived there.

    And that’s the point of the 3rd category: That’s the language you need to know to get around well in that country. If you go to the doctor’s, if you want to talk to your coworkers, if you want to make friends with the locals, which language do you need?

    I’m from Vienna and it’s a similar thing with the Viennese dialect. While there is a limited revival happening, it’s mostly a cultural relic more than a necessity in every-day life. 70 years ago, if you didn’t speak Viennese you’d be an outcast. Now it’s rare that someone speaks it.

    While I was in Wales I got myself Welsh language resources and actively sought out Welsh speakers to try to learn the language, but of all the people I met there, I only met two adults who could fluently speak Welsh. The kids learned it in school as a second language, but by and large the adults didn’t speak it.




  • I lived in Wales for a year and I managed to learn some very basic Welsh myself. It’s been about 15 years now, but at least back then it was mainly old and very young people who spoke Welsh. Most people aged 20-60 didn’t speak Welsh at all, with the younger ones learning it at school.

    But I guess with that generation being up to maybe 35 now, speaking Welsh is likely much more common than it was back then. So yeah, my chart above is likely outdated.



  • squaresinger@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldESL homework
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    23 hours ago

    Languages come in tiers. English is the global lingua franca. People use it to speak to anyone, no matter whether English native speaker or not. If someone from Norway wants to talk to someone from Japan, they’ll most likely use English since both of them likely speak it.

    Then there’s regional lingua francas, languages like Spanish, Russian or Mandarin. These languages are popular in specific parts of the world and often used to get around there. Someone from Ukraine can speak to someone from Belarus using Russian.

    Lastly, there’s local languages that are spoken only in a country (or even only a part of a country). People speak them because that’s what they were grown up with.

    So in general, there’s 4 “language slots” of languages people speak:

    • The global lingua franca
    • The regional lingua franca
    • The language of the country they live in
    • The language they grew up with

    One language can fill multiple slots.

    So for example, if you grew up in Ukraine and moved to Germany, you might speak the following languages, according to the slots above:

    • English
    • Russian
    • German
    • Ukranian

    If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:

    • English
    • English
    • English
    • Welsh

    If you spent your life in the US, it would be like this:

    • English
    • English
    • English
    • English

    This is the reason why people living in countries with lower-tier languages frequently speak 3-4 languages, while English native speakers really struggle to even learn the basics of one additional language. Because the former group has an actual use for more than one language, while the latter one don’t.




  • In newer Star Wars (especially stuff like Andor), I agree. In old Star Wars (especially episode IV-VI), no. These movies are 100% black and white.

    The most grey character that exists in there is Darth Vater who’s whole life of horrible atrocities was forgiven within 2 minutes because he betrayed space Hitler and was the Hero’s dad.



  • It is not a new problem and that has been the case for a long time. But it’s a good visualization of it.

    Everyone in a company has their own goals, from the lowly actual worker who just wants to pay the bills and spend as little effort on it as possible, to departments which want to justify their useless existence, to leadership who mainly wants to look good towards the investors to get a nice bonus.

    That some companies end up actually making products that ship and that people want to use is more of an unintended side effect than the intended purpose of anyone’s work.


  • When I approached the head of the team that constructed the tool after the meeting and shared the inaccuracies and my concerns, he told me that he’d rather have more data fluency through the ease of the tool and that inaccuracies were acceptable because of the convenience and widespread usage.

    “I prefer more data that’s completely made up over less data that is actually accurate.”

    This tells you everything you need to know about your company’s marketing and data analysis department and the whole corporate leadership.

    Potemkin leadership.