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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 22nd, 2024

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  • If you collect and learn all languages that ever existed, then perhaps you would gain a better understanding of the world. I’m not a linguist, but I am fascinated with the fact that languages each have their own unique quirks and words untranslatable to another language. These quirks and words which are only unique to a language reflects the value of the culture speaking that language. For example, Austronesian languages are gender neutral. There is no “he” or “she” pronouns. That reflects the largely gender egalitarian value of Austronesians. The Japanese have another word for a shade of blue, which most other people won’t easily recognise except the Japanese. Some African greetings say “I see you”, which is not only a salutation, but is recognising the person being greeted as an individual.







  • Yup. Mamdani is teaching the modern left how to spread the message. There is a lot of disdain from the left on social media. A lot of us are smart enough to recognise that socmed is vapid and shallow. But we’re not too bright to recognise that that is where people are at these days, no matter how dumb socmed is. That’s why the often criticism of the left is the poor messaging. Now I understand what that criticism mean.

    Social media is the new plaza, like how radio, cinema and TV were during FDR’s time. As a matter of fact, the Nazis also recognised the potential power of radio. One of their early policies is to buy everyone a radio; so that the Nazis could control information. This is not different from today in which oligarchs and the far right also recognised the potential of socmed as a tool for control.





  • Whether intentional or not, or just progressive improvement on algorithms, youtube thrives by providing a need, and then providing it poorly so you keep your watch time going forever.

    It depends. I’m a huge nerd and my YouTube browsing habits are relating to educational videos and long form essays. My news sources on YouTube are also less sensationalist.

    On algorithm, I kinda minimise its bs by turning off my watch history. I bookmark my YouTube page to my watch later playlist, so I could chip away at my nearly twenty years of backlog of videos to watch.