The best way to think of Wikipedia is that the site represents the consensus of everyone who is proficient in a particular language; has the means and technical understanding of how to edit Wikipedia; and has a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia.

For English, this means that most edits are made by highly educated white US-Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, who either live comfortably off their parents, have a job that gives them a lot of free time, or perhaps they’re even businessowners or get paid to edit Wikipedia to promote an agenda (see: CIA edits to Wikipedia).

In any case, this is going to give Wikipedia’s most prolific editors a particular bias in terms of which sources have prestige, which topics they write about and how they write about them. There’s also a lot that can be said of the political leanings of the site’s founders, site admin/moderation, its biggest donors being Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon, etc.

Apparently I’ve somehow picked up on how to read the phrase “alhamdulillah” in Arabic despite never studying the language. Neat!

I basically recognize “Allah” ﷲ based on the shape of the whole word rather than the individual letters, and I learned to read that word through exposure. In the phrase الْحَمْدُ لِلّٰهِ alhamdulillah I see there’s no alif at the start of Allah, though.

I think I learned to read ال al- just through repeat exposure since al- is literally the most common prefix in Arabic — it’s even at the start of Allah! — but I also know the letters alif and lam on their own because ا alif is memorable to me as the “simplest letter for the simplest sound”, and ل lam is memorable to me because it looks like (and literally is, in a sense) a backwards L.

After recognizing “al-??? lillah” I was already figuring from context that the text probably said “alhamdulillah”, but I still tried to confirm this by looking at the remaining letters:

• Medial ha ح‍ looked a lot like the initial kha خ‍ in the word khatam (as in خاتم النبيين khatam an-nabiyin, “Seal of the Prophets”), so I figured that the two letters ha/kha had to be variants of each other with similar h-like sounds. Previously, I’d known the letter ha really just from its isolated/final forms ح, just from going down an Arabizi rabbit hole once: ح ha is often written as 7 in Arabizi due to the similarity of the numeral 7 to the isolated shape of the letter ha.
• Medial meem ﻤ looked a lot like the final form of the related Hebrew letter mem ם, which also, very coincidentally, looks like the Korean letter ㅁ mieum, which was derived from the shape of the mouth to represent the fact that you say M with your lips. The origin of the Korean letter is completely unrelated to the Arabic and Hebrew letters but still makes them more memorable to me.
• Dal د is not a letter I had any real chance of recognizing. It’s related to its Hebrew, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents but is not particularly similar to any of them. But if I got to the point where I could tell that the text said “al-ham?? lillah” then there was really zero chance the unrecognizable last letter could be anything other than dal.

Learning new writing systems is really fun because you get to return to the joy of first learning to read your native language as a little kid. I wonder if I’ll manage to learn the entire Arabic script through passive exposure!

Suicide (fuck algospeak) is unlikely, nor do I think his heart will explode due to rage, nor do I think he’s likely to die in a natural disaster. Trump could “die of old age” (whatever that means in practice), he could die of COVID, or he could slip and fall, or he could be assassinated by any number of people who may want his head whether they say it or not.

I think it is pretty likely Trump will die during this term, if for no other reason than that fascism is one side of the same coin as liberal democracy, and by having a fascist leader who has always been in such remarkably poor health from the moment he took power, at that such a fascist leader who gives people both guns and reasons to shoot him… Well, it basically ensures that fascism will not last very long and liberal democracy will be restored “in due time” once Trump and Trumpism has “expended its purpose”.

If that’s how you want to describe your past self then you have every right to.

Sort of, «мат» is profanity and «мать» is mother, though the former is indeed derived from the latter.

I think I’ll mention “★☆SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl☆★ Ep 1: The Perfect Perfect School Year”. It’s from a few years ago, but I first saw it this year, and that’s all that matters for the purposes of this question, right? I could certainly mention a number of other YT videos I saw this year, that were made this year; but for the most part YouTube just feels like overly short or overly long disposable one-time slop, right? By contrast, Sparkle on Raven and other “fanime” I saw this year are things I’ve actively returned to, shown others, referenced, and reflected on, so their impact on me has lasted for more than just one week.

(Note: this didn’t actually happen)

Try searching the name of that lemmy.world post on lemmy.ml and see if you can find it on lemmy.ml.

There once was a father who told his son, “All swans are white.” One day, he and his son went to Australia on vacation. While there, at a park with a large pond, his son pointed out, “Look, Dad, black swans!”

“No, Son,” the father laughed, “all swans are white!”

Given the political leanings of Lemmy’s lead developers, and relatedly the whole reason why Lemmy started development in the first place, it should not be surprising to anyone that many Lemmy users have since the very beginning of Lemmy’s existence had stances that could be called, in a word, “pro-Russia” or “pro-China”.

The problem arises when people who don’t hold these views look at them only through their own myopic biases, where, rather than genuinely interrogating why people might hold these attitudes, they instead more readily believe that a social media platform that most people have never even heard of is actually crawling with paid actors trying to influence public opinion.

No, to understand my own views on Russia, you need to understand my views on Atlanticism; to understand my views on Atlanticism, you need to understand my views on class, among other things. None of that comes across clearly in a one-liner or a four-panel meme. I’m sure I could discuss it in a more fitting space provided I’m not too drained of energy from having stayed up until five in the morning for the umpteenth time.

Honestly, I already figured my posts probably were being used to train a LLM without my consent.

Painlessly in my bed, in the warm embrace of a loved one, it would seem.

“but” is a bigot’s favorite word!

Must resist temptation to see what the comment said…

Transphobia, just like any form of queerphobia, serves the maintenance of property rights and the reproduction of the workforce that generates billionaires’ wealth. This is where the antagonism comes from.

Also, please don’t call Elon Musk that.

Nettopp, nettopp. Jeg tror dette er vanlig for de fleste flerspråklige men blir ofte mer intenst for neurodivergente.

Det virker som du har en veldig interessant bakgrunn, kan du fortelle mer om språkene du kan, hvordan du vokste opp, hva forholdet ditt er til disse forskjellige språkene? Jeg er også nysgjerrig om språkdynamikken der du bor, mtp portugisisk og spansk og engelsk osv, og forholdene mellom disse.

Well, I should note that the situation for myself is that my mom’s first language is American English, and her second language is Norwegian, and my dad was the reverse, however both he and my mom mainly spoke English to me growing up. So I ended up growing up with both English and Norwegian, but because of the language dynamics in my family and in Norway in general, and because I was comparatively socially isolated for a long time, and because of various feedback loops, my Norwegian skills ended up basically “lagging behind” my English skills. This means that my idiolect in Norwegian has a number of prominent proscribed or eccentric features. So that’s something to keep in mind for when I put my Norwegian through this Swedish “filter” — that the Norwegian being filtered is itself already “Americanized” for lack of a better term.

Russian and Japanese are two languages that I have self-studied for a number of years. Neither of them are really up to the level I’d like, but I can still take pride in the effort I’ve put in and how far I’ve gotten, because even if my progress is slow compared to some learners, most hobbyist learners burn out and quit way sooner, right? Esperanto was one language that I tried to learn but quickly gave up on, but I’ve recently restarted learning that, and I hope and frankly expect that this time around I’ll make it to a much higher level, and it’ll become the fifth language I’ll say I can speak. And there are other languages still that I’d like to try my hands at eventually, and I’ve also been conlanging as a hobby for about a decade already, and languages are fuzzy things anyways, so just like anyone else I can sometimes understand individual words or sentences in languages I’ve never studied.

I can understand a very significant amount of Swedish but wouldn’t say I speak Swedish per se — I can rather put on an accent and apply some regular changes and switch out a few words in a crude approximation of Swedish, but is that really the same thing? There is actually a term for that sort of blending of Swedish and Norwegian, svorsk.

For whatever it’s worth, despite never formally studying Chinese, I managed to read both the Chinese sentences, albeit with the wrong tones. Like to be fair I have studied Japanese, and I am generally a bit of a weirdo with a knack for this sort of thing — but I do still have to wonder if more people are just going to start casually picking up hanzi just from exposure like I have, as China becomes more prominent. I could certainly see it happening.

“China is the future” is a bit of a vague question, though. Just from my interpretation of it…

I absolutely think that the USA is currently crumbling as the world’s hegemon — interestingly enough, the USA’s flag actually has stars on it to represent a “new constellation”, using the constellations in the sky as an allegory for the rise and fall of nations; so it indeed seems like the fifty-star constellation is beginning to fall beyond the horizon, as a new five-star constellation rises.

This being said, I don’t think China’s behavior as future hegemon will be the same as the USA’s current behavior as present hegemon. I don’t necessarily know what to expect from the future, though, so it’s probably best to prepare for all possibilities until we gain a clearer understanding of the situation.