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Post by dabbler on Sept 11, 2023 16:17:09 GMT -5
I didn't think Æ was an official letter in any language, because it is just a ligature of AE and these don't normally become standard letters* as they are just movable-type printing-press shortcuts. It is functionally identical to AE unless you want to save time when printing a page by using a single combined Æ typepiece. However, it turns out most Scandinavian languages and Old English include Æ as a distinct vowel. So theoretically there are some Icelandic names you couldn't legally use. *ß being a notable exception. Can I introduce you to my friend, Å? You'll need to use "aa" for all those foreign computer systems that don't recognise the å button, at least in my experience. Poor å |
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Post by pacific on Sept 12, 2023 5:39:19 GMT -5
Yes I've just had a great deal of fun with an antiquated system that can't even handle the humble apostrophe.. a sudden influx of Irish staff did not go well!
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Post by Haighus on Sept 12, 2023 5:46:40 GMT -5
Can I introduce you to my friend, Å? Latin characters with diacritics are (sorta) fine in most Anglophone countries' registrars, I think - because they'll just refuse to use them. My wife's name is Yagmur on all UK documents for instance, rather than the correct Yağmur. My friend Synnøve is similarly always rendered Synnove. I don't think you can even get an umlaut. My son specifically has a Turkish name with no diacritics for this reason. Not being able to do an umlaut is particularly sad, as it marks the obsolescence of the one diacritic in modern English, the visually identical diaeresis. Doesn't affect most people, but I reckon it was probably very helpful for those learning certain words in the past, like coöperate. |
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Post by adurot on Sept 13, 2023 16:36:27 GMT -5
Oh no. Elmu has called his latest kid Tau Techno Mechanicus.  |
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Post by herzlos on Sept 18, 2023 3:37:52 GMT -5
Since this seems to be the general downfall of Musk thread.
It seems his latest example of having no idea of what he's doing, he's insisted that because people can drive using just their eyes* then cars should be able to do the same. The result is that all of the other tech has been removed from the latest versions and it nearly killed him on a live stream he couldn't hide. He hasn't backed down and has been screaming at people to make it work.
In the mean time, real car companies who listen to engineers are still using LiDAR, RADAR, etc and have approval for self driving cars whilst Tesla doesn't.
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Post by A Town Called Malus on Sept 18, 2023 8:04:59 GMT -5
It's such an idiotic stance as well.
Apply it to any other kind of technology and it reveals its flaw.
A soldier can aim a rocket launcher using only their eyes so we shouldn't make radar guided or heat seeking missiles, for example.
Or, we can see only using the visible spectrum, so we shouldn't have infrared cameras, or x-ray cameras.
The whole point of technology is to allow us to do things which our physical bodies cannot, to make things which exceed our biological limitations.
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Post by Haighus on Sept 18, 2023 9:34:28 GMT -5
Why even bother with a car? We can do that with our legs.
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Post by redchimera on Sept 19, 2023 4:15:28 GMT -5
How do you announce the final death of Twitter without announcing the final death of Twitter? Pay up suckers! |
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Post by Haighus on Sept 19, 2023 5:05:04 GMT -5
How do you announce the final death of Twitter without announcing the final death of Twitter? Pay up suckers!Well: Citation needed. I think this will reduce overall numbers of bots, but certainly won't eliminate them. I suspect it would shift the balance, with less bots being used by private companies for profit motives, and a greater proportion being bots produced by state actors for geopolitical reasons. States have deeper coffers and are expecting a non-financial return like election outcomes. However, the real userbase will undoubtedly shrink too, so the proportion of bots to humans may actually stay similar. I think this is unlikely to be significantly effective in reducing the impact of bots but is likely to cause a positive feedback loop of declining userbase with subsequent membership price-hikes to maintain revenue. All marking an increasing irrelevancy for platform X. |
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Post by herzlos on Sept 19, 2023 5:17:20 GMT -5
Introducing a paywall will slow down bots a bit depending on how it's done. If you only allow about 5 accounts for a particular credit card to account for families, then it means bot farms would need to acquire a working credit card for every 5 bots instead of just being able to generate thousands of email addresses. It also means you could ban credit card numbers to prevent repeated bots.
There are of course a few major flaws with that plan.
1. It doesn't account for hacked accounts which are/were valid users.
2. Working credit cards can be bought for peanuts on the internet. Either legally via prepaid mechanisms or illegally via dark web.
3. Something like 95% of users aren't going to pay for Twitter even if it's $0.01/year, so sticking up a pay wall will destroy Twitters ad revenue and remaining value.
3b. That will at least solve the bot problem - noone running a bot farm is going to waste time on a platform with no users.
4. There are much better mechanisms for dealing with bots, but they all run counter to the reduction of staffing and spending at Twitter. Algorithms can catch a lot of bot behaviour but that requires (software & system engineers to run it, and a lot of manual verification/overrides). Most bot activity is really transparent since it uses a predictable formula, and you could flag up any text which appears in more than 1% of comments on any particular post as being either spam or irrelevant.
He's obviously doing it to try and get Twitter to stop hemorrhaging money, but he's still got no clue how businesses or humans work.
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Post by adurot on Sept 19, 2023 7:41:15 GMT -5
He’s been talking about that forever though. I want to say I can’t see him actually go thru with it.
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mdgv2
Ye Olde King of OT
Posts: 958
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Post by mdgv2 on Sept 19, 2023 7:41:56 GMT -5
Well, it’s an objectively Fucking Terrible Idea, so it’s almost certainly one of his, and he does tend to get his way.
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Post by Least censored on the planet! on Sept 19, 2023 11:06:51 GMT -5
I see Musk is after RiTides's money!
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Post by pacific on Sept 20, 2023 4:51:12 GMT -5
On a separate Twitter note, does anyone know of any culture-wars bullshit surrounding Chris Packham? (environmentalist & longstanding nature TV presenter for anyone outside of the UK). I've blocked 3-4 'news' feeds that have come up as adds about him, with various negative stories about him of one sort or another - so assume it is bot-created, but most likely some sort of evil 'thinktank' that has him in its sights?
PS - monthly charge will absolutely kill off Twitter, if that is the objective.
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mdgv2
Ye Olde King of OT
Posts: 958
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Post by mdgv2 on Sept 20, 2023 5:17:23 GMT -5
He’s anti-hunting, and openly so.
Between April 2020 and November 2021, the website Country Squire Magazine published several articles, videos and tweets attacking Packham. He sued for defamation in the High Court, and in May 2023 Pushpinder Saini ruled that all the allegations were false and defamatory, and awarded him damages of £90,000 plus costs.[95][96][97]
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