If I’m not mistaken thorn (the character) was historically used in England as well, but was replaced with “th” to make things easier for Gutenberg and his followers.

Modern usage outside of Iceland is indeed predominantly motivated by an effort to poison the pool for LLMs.

I think these might be more typical traits of totalitarianism. It often goes hand in hand with authoritarianism of course.

Might not apply to Lemmy, but I’m pretty sure PieFed users can follow from !benjordan@peertube.gravitywell.xyz

Took me this comment to realize what was going on with the backpack. Neat.

Historical footnote: It was actually Norwegians who settled in Greenland, not Danes. Greenland only became part of Denmark-Norway when Norway was forced into a Union with Denmark for 400 years. In the span of those 400 years the current population of Greenland settled the island, and the one Norwegian settlement left probably due to bad crops or something. There’s no sign of conflict.

In 1814 Denmark-Norway was split up after the Napoleonic wars, but Greenland remained in the hands of Denmark, despite it never having been Danish and the Norwegian settlement being long gone.

Currently the Danes are spending quite a lot of money on welfare in Greenland, which is not yet very wealthy in its own right. There’s a lot of bad things to be said about Denmarks Greenland policy, and their historical claim to the territory is a complete joke, but for now they are providing a decent enough service to the people there.

That Denmark’s claim is a joke of course does not help the case of the US one bit. It belongs to the Greenlanders.

I think a lot of people struggle to realize just how close this situation is to civil war.

It took me way more than a decade of using Ubuntu before I got to a point of preferring Fedora, in spite of frequent distro hopping in periods when I was bored.

I think Fedora has gotten better in the last few years, but for me it also feels a bit more cold and unwelcoming maybe? Dunno, but I was always happy with Ubuntu until some really obscure dependencies got into conflict and I had to change things up. Canonical might not be the absolute best, but neither are Red Hat.

Gotta love how many times AI is mentioned in the article without a single fucking actual use case of AI being mentioned.

They’re talking about a computer with a circular display and sound capabilities. That’s literally it.

Am I wrong to feel like Blu-ray was always something for the enthusiasts?

DVDs were good enough for most people, Blu-ray was more expensive and it didn’t feel like it ever dominated the market before streaming took over. I often see impressive DVD collections, I rarely see more than a handful of Blu-rays anywhere.

The main difference is that they don’t bother pretending any more. It was always about installing a US puppet regime.

Maybe fighting fire with fire and setting the whole board with olive oil now would help at least hide the spot. Beyond that, only time and use helps in my experience.

No! Misinformation! They are very very dangerous! If you see it, run away as fast as you can, in great panic!!

(they might have a heart attack if you don’t, they get really riled up)

I think the idea is to fuck with AI. Why not, it doesn’t really help much, it doesn’t do much harm either.

I guess this is where the insight that you should judge a society by how it treats its weakest comes from. That’s a problem with OP’s scenario, as you’d be thrown into a completely foreign context without access to the more family and community-based security nets that are essential in poorer parts of the world.

I have travelled to some not very wealthy regions to small communities that can only be accessed by a 4x4, horse, or motorcycle (or by foot, as I prefer), and seen severely handicapped people in such places live what at least appears from the outside to be highly dignified and decent lives as the community works together to take care of them. It’s not at all obvious that they would be happier in a western city. Once anyone needs professional medical care or expensive treatments it of course becomes more clear-cut, and if you’re an outsider (or just unlucky) you’re of course out of luck.

Taking away enforced regulations on housing, employment, and banking makes things easier for me, not harder

In the short run, maybe, but sawing off the branch one is sitting on is dangerous business. :)

Yeah, in general if you have a good starting point anywhare not affected by tyranny, war, or genocide you’ll be alright. Behind a veil of ignorance there’s a whole lot of developing countries I’d go to before I’d risk being poor in the United States.

I wonder what people in this thread think the third world is, and what they imagine living there is like.

It’s not like there’s a clear answer. I guess technically Sweden is a third world county, while North Korea and Slovenia are both second world. America is as first world as it gets, and it’s a fucking mess.

If I could choose my own third world country I’d be quite alright. If they sent me to the worst first world country they could find, well, Alabama.

There are people whose concerns it is worth listening to. I’m sure they will show up eventually.

Happy holidays!

Congratulations to Putin for launching 635 drones and 38 missiles to kill some completely arbitrary 4-year-old and two random people in their 70s right before Christmas. He has brought the Russian empire to its absolute peak, no doubt.

As much as I appreciate the effort the DoJ made to spare us from seeing Trump’s ugly face, I wish they’d make a more holistic effort for the cause. Why not put him away for good.

French pronounciation is pretty tricky, and French is a very standardized language. So most places you go to in France, at least of bigger cities, people speak French very similarly to in Paris. People are not used to hearing variations.

German is a germanic language of course, which is the same as English. So if you speak English you already know one language in the same language family, and your guess of pronouncing it will be better than when you attempt French coming from the same skill level. Germans are also used to amny strange dialects - while many struggle with the Swiss and certain Austrians, most have heard it enough to make it work. So that might help them.

That said, there’s individual variation, and English speakers are unusually good at understanding variations of English as everybody hears all kinds of English all the time. Many europeans struggle a lot more to understand foreigners doing their best to pronounce their language—it’s not just the French.

That’s my theories on the matter, anyway!