BraveSirZaphod

@BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The word "phonetic" is not spelled phonetically.⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It's the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called 'aspiration'.

  The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn't have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as "pi" and "phi". Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as 'Ph', 'Th' and 'Ch'.

  The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish "Loch". This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French 'phonétique' vs Spanish 'fonético'). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of 'ph' being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.

  So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even Korea is starting to prefer an iPhone over a Samsung⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are Instacart tipping reccomendations insane or am I being miserly?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You should know that on Instacart, workers can see your tip before accepting the order. It's functionally a bid, not a tip. I'm sure they have some algorithm for what value they recommend, but to some extent, this is the workers setting the price of their own labor. If you tip too low, you run the risk of the order not being accepted.

  The fundamental situation is that delivery work is not actually that cheap, and especially given that these are lower paid workers, they're also more sensitive to inflation and so you'd expect their cost to rise more steeply than other things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disney+ has started cracking down on password sharing in the US⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This coffee shop uses AI to measure the productivity of their employees and the time spent in the shop per customer. Welcome to capitalist innovation.⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is less an argument against quantifying performance in general and more just an example of choosing the right metrics and interpreting them intelligently.

  I have no doubt that more than a few moronic managers will try to make large decisions based on a trivial surface-level metric time per customer (which, at the very least, needs to be normalized against the complexity of the order), but still, I think the thing to be criticized is poor data analysis rather than the very concept itself. A smart manager would use this data to learn more about how their operations are going and have discussions with employees about what's going on and how various differences might be explained, while a stupid one would just fire the apparently slowest barista every few months, completely missing the fact that said barista has developed personal relationships with tons of customers and only performs slowly during off-peak hours when it makes no material difference at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads will allow you to follow Mastodon users by year-end, according to Meta meeting details⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads will allow you to follow Mastodon users by year-end, according to Meta meeting details⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They - and literally anyone else - can already do that. Mastodon data is totally public.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon lays off 500 Twitch employees, hundreds more at MGM and Prime Video⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know corporate America doesn't really deserve any meaningful amount of good faith, but for whatever truth is worth, "sustainable" in a business context has essentially always meant financials. A platform like Twitch is generally going to have really high operational costs between infrastructure, network traffic, engineers, and revenue sharing with streamers, and given that Amazon doesn't operate Twitch for charity any more than you do your job for free, they need to make sure that they actually have sufficient revenue to be able to make the finances sustainable. I won't pretend to know how profitable it is, if it even is yet, but cutting employees is obviously a pretty easy lever to pull to reduce costs if your operations can get away with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's very funny how effectively you can turn "a statistically average person" into some ominous sounding elite other by just dressing it up in class language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because nothing helps with the rising cost of living more than deliberately pissing away any chance of promotion and likely eventually being laid off and jobless.

  You do realize how much privilege one has to have in order to casually jeopardize your income without sweating over it, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'm not saying that the terms can't be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.

  But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don't get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don't actually apply to you. If you don't want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don't use them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Warning: You cannot delete posts or comments on Lemmy. It stays up forever, and is in direct violation of GDPR and other national privacy laws.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, yes?

  If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads is blocking servers on the Fediverse. Here's how we unblocked ourselves. | Soapbox⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, of course it has Neo-Nazis, because it has hundreds of millions of people and essentially every niche community has representation there. The doesn't mean it's remotely accurate to say that Instagram is "only Nazis and pedos".

  The most followed user is Kim Kardashian, if I remember right, and she's targeting the most normie women possible. Nazis and pedos aren't exactly good for advertising.

  This isn't to say that Instagram doesn't have moderation issues, but that isn't contradictory to the fact that Instagram is not solely composed of those kinds of users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads is blocking servers on the Fediverse. Here's how we unblocked ourselves. | Soapbox⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you gone on Instagram ever?

  It's normies and wine moms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'd throw some articles showing user counts, but you'd probably just call them fake.

  But if you are actually curious, I can gladly provide some. There was just recently a big influx of users with the EU launch, a tagging system was recently introduced, and more and more large creators have continued to migrate over.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Already there actually and have had a pretty good experience, though it doesn't scratch that same Reddit-style itch nor is it trying to. It's chilling at somewhere around 100 million users, so I'm not the only one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, a part of me wouldn't even hugely mind if these people do wind up leaving, because I've been increasingly getting a sense that I wouldn't hugely miss such great literature as "Suck on my balls Zuckerfuck"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I wonder how many of those instances are primarily enthusiasts self-hosting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨41% of fediverse instances have blocked threads so far!!!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If the Threads-blocking instances have this level of maturity, I don't think we'll be missing much. Being equally childish as Facebook comments is impressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That you're being strongly downvoted for properly analyzing an unpopular perspective is disappointing but not remotely surprising here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube will have fewer ad breaks on TV — but the ads are getting longer⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Again, for now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube will have fewer ad breaks on TV — but the ads are getting longer⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You can at least pay (quite a lot less than a cable subscription) to remove them. It beats paying $80 a month for the great privilege of spending 30% of the time watching ads.

  For now, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Facebook, and literally anyone else, can already get all your content.

  It would take all of a second to scrape your user page. Obviously that wouldn't grant your IP address or anything, but neither would federation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's publicly sitting on the internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Meta also doesn't need to federate in order to do that, since federation just accesses public data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I'd say that the more accurate version of that premise is that people will exert some limited amount of effort in order to avoid ads (or fees, for that matter), and the challenge for the service provider is to make blocking ads more annoying than simply paying the fee. The real question is how successful Google will actually be at that, and that is admittedly a bit of an open question. That said, we know that there is a limit to how much effort people will put in, because it's not that hard to pirate literally anything, but plenty of people don't bother with piracy because it's a hassle.

  It'll be interesting to see how things ultimately shake out. Google is in a bit of a privileged position though, given that they own the service and the browser most people are viewing YouTube. There's also more and more of a shift towards watching it on mobile devices and TVs, where they can control the client environment a lot more tightly. And at the end of the day, it is a solvable problem; beyond that, they don't have to even win the cat and mouse game. They just have to make playing it annoying enough that most people won't bother.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  "Logical conclusion" does not mean that you suddenly add in an unjustified premise of "all people will endure some amount of hassle to use an ad blocker".

  I think the best analogy is Netflix's password sharing, which not only didn't hurt them, but actually brought them a lot of subscribers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you're overestimating how many people care enough about this.

  Remember when killing password sharing was gonna be the death of Netflix, and then they saw a significant increase in subscriptions and profits?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You have no value to advertisers if they can't serve you ads. By not doing so, they'll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it's a double positive for them.