nonserf

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The philosophy that it’s okay to force everyone to change their behaviour to appear less like baddies (bots/criminals/adversaries) (libretechni.ca)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by nonserf@libretechni.ca to c/humanrights@crazypeople.online
2 comments fedilink
 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/715575

There are many manifestations of this way of thinking that people must conform to behaviour, methods and styles that differ from that of bots and criminals. For example:

  • Countless websites falsely accuse me of being a robot based on whatever faulty logic is making poor assumptions. I cannot access publications of laws or my own credit history because Cloudflare benefits financially from crude and cheap access decisions.
  • The Tor community is collectively targetted for opaque adverse treatment despite a vast majority of Tor users being non-criminal.
  • Countless email servers falsely refuse my mail server on the crude basis of having a residential IP address - mandating that I conform by hiring a 3rd party relay service which then becomes an additional MitM.
  • A landlord’s email system accepted my email but then silently directed it to a spam quarantine that the landlord never reviews. When a dispute errupted, the landlord claimed it was my fault he did not get my msgs. My fault, as if I have control over his mail server (which signalled to me the msg was delivered).
  • Creditors refuse cash payments under the faulty premise that cash is used by criminals and thus non-criminals must change their lifestyle & give up using cash in order to support the faulty logic used in targetting criminals.
  • Public libraries have removed or disabled ethernet ports (or neglect to install them) based on the faulty logic that cybercriminals use ethernet and legit users only use Wi-Fi.
  • This nutter believes humans should not use emoji because he thinks bots use emoji and he would like his crude AI detector to work.
  • We cannot buy lye in enough bulk to make our own biodiesel and bar soap from waste oil because lye is also used by meth labs.
  • Asylum seekers cannot cross a national border because they are presumed criminal.
  • (update) Cannot send email directly from your dynamic IP address because lazy email admins use that as a flag for spam.

All these scenarios represent different manifestations of the same oppressive paradigm: that it is okay to control people’s innocuous behaviour in order to support the convenience of a simplified and unsophisticated distinction from nefarious actors.

From a human rights standpoint, the result is a form of oppression that violates:

  • autonomy
  • self-determinism
  • privacy
  • consumer protection
  • the right to a presumption of innocence

What do we call this?

  • “Collective punishment” is somewhat fitting because a whole demographic of people are punitively targetted. But unlike the traditional meaning, it’s not a response to a particular incident. It’s more like a preemtive strike.
  • “Collateral damage” is somewhat fitting because innocent people are damaged by the oppression. OTOH, collateral damage implies the victims are comrades aligned with the aggressors. But in reality the victims do not necessarily agree with the mission that causes the sloppy assault. I do not necessarily consider myself on the same team as the oppressors.

Neither are quite right. We need a term to express “pusher of forced lifestyle comformity to assist lazy baddy finders”.

1
The philosophy that it’s okay to force everyone to change their behaviour to appear less like baddies (bots/criminals/adversaries) (libretechni.ca)
 

There are many manifestations of this way of thinking that people must conform to behaviour, methods and styles that differ from that of bots and criminals. For example:

  • Countless websites falsely accuse me of being a robot based on whatever faulty logic is making poor assumptions. I cannot access publications of laws or my own credit history because Cloudflare benefits financially from crude and cheap access decisions.
  • The Tor community is collectively targetted for opaque adverse treatment despite a vast majority of Tor users being non-criminal.
  • Countless email servers falsely refuse my mail server on the crude basis of having a residential IP address - mandating that I conform by hiring a 3rd party relay service which then becomes an additional MitM.
  • A landlord’s email system accepted my email but then silently directed it to a spam quarantine that the landlord never reviews. When a dispute errupted, the landlord claimed it was my fault he did not get my msgs. My fault, as if I have control over his mail server (which signalled to me the msg was delivered).
  • Creditors refuse cash payments under the faulty premise that cash is used by criminals and thus non-criminals must change their lifestyle & give up using cash in order to support the faulty logic used in targetting criminals.
  • Public libraries have removed or disabled ethernet ports (or neglect to install them) based on the faulty logic that cybercriminals use ethernet and legit users only use Wi-Fi.
  • This nutter believes humans should not use emoji because he thinks bots use emoji and he would like his crude AI detector to work.
  • We cannot buy lye in enough bulk to make our own biodiesel and bar soap from waste oil because lye is also used by meth labs.
  • Asylum seekers cannot cross a national border because they are presumed criminal.

All these scenarios represent different manifestations of the same oppressive paradigm: that it is okay to control people’s innocuous behaviour in order to support the convenience of a simplified and unsophisticated distinction from nefarious actors.

From a human rights standpoint, the result is a form of oppression that violates:

  • autonomy
  • self-determinism
  • privacy
  • consumer protection
  • the right to a presumption of innocence

What do we call this?

  • “Collective punishment” is somewhat fitting because a whole demographic of people are punitively targetted. But unlike the traditional meaning, it’s not a response to a particular incident. It’s more like a preemtive strike.
  • “Collateral damage” is somewhat fitting because innocent people are damaged by the oppression. OTOH, collateral damage implies the victims are comrades aligned with the aggressors. But in reality the victims do not necessarily agree with the mission that causes the sloppy assault. I do not necessarily consider myself on the same team as the oppressors.

Neither are quite right. We need a term to express “pusher of forced lifestyle comformity to assist lazy baddy finders”.

Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays? in c/dabradio@feddit.uk
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 1 week ago

It should only need an SDR and a USB-OTG cable.

The SDR would be just software, so what would OTG cable lead to? Or if you mean it needs hardware to support the SDR, then that would defeat the purpose of recycling obsolete hardware. AFAICT, the only way to receive radio on a smartphone without buying hardware is if the phone comes with a radio from the factory. My phones have FM radio, which I think is a bit rare.

Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays? in c/dabradio@feddit.uk
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

If we throw away old smartphones and we also produce radios that will be wasted by consumers after realising their radio lacks some metadata like album art that can be upgraded with another radio purchase, there is an e-waste problem that SDR does not fully solve. You seem to imply that a typical smartphone that comes stock without radio hardware could run an SDR. Is that correct? Wouldn’t the phone at least need some hardware to use the headphone jack as antenna input? Looks like additional hardware is needed.

If a radioless smartphone can do the job without additional hardware, then it would mostly render my idea useless; but we’d have to neglect the fact that radios also have speakers that are better than that of a smartphone.

28
Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays? (libretechni.ca)
 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

12
Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays? (libretechni.ca)
 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/689223

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

5
Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays? (libretechni.ca)
 

Most DAB radios I find¹ have text-only displays. Some even have no display at all and you must tune in blindly with arrow buttons. Apparently color graphical LCDs increase the cost of the radio enough to omit them from the design.

And yet at the same time people are throwing away quite functional smartphones in mass quantity (thanks to capitalism and designed obsolscence).

Also note that (most?) DAB radios have a USB port for attaching a drive holding music.

Wouldn’t it be sensible to create a DAB radio with no display, but with the possibility to connect a smartphone which runs an app to show station metadata? (Would also be useful if it could connect to the LAN to feed metadata and even accept commands, but that’s another discussion)

I also suspect existing radios could be hacked. That is, radio flashed to decode the signal metadata and (for ease) write it to USB mass storage, which a smartphone can mimick while running an app to display the data that lands on the SD card. The problem would be phones refuse to simultaneously mount external storage that is externally mounted. Could a rooted phone read-only mount an SD partition that is externally mounted? Perhaps the mass storage hack is a broken idea, in which case we would need to invent a protocol for this. Or does a suitable protocol exist?

¹ I say this as a locally buying (usually 2nd-hand) type of consumer. Online consumers might have a different experience.

🥾 Microsoft boot lickers represent a majority of FOSS devs. FOSS principles solve many problems but not this one. 🌀 Debian gives some refuge. in c/foss@infosec.pub
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 0 points 3 weeks ago

You've critically misunderstood my post, and a few seconds looking over my previous posts and comments would make it abundantly clear that I speak/write English.

This is non-sequitur logic, thus baseless. My understanding your post is orthoganol to whether you can handle English.

Almost all of your posts, especially the titles and the display name of the community you made, use emojis in ways very similar to output from LLMs. In ways that I honestly have never seen an actual human do, unless they were doing something fucky like trying to game youtube video titles for higher views.

This explains your faulty conclusion. But it remains faulty nonetheless. Emoji is useful for searching and also for ESL readers. Speed-reading Debian fans would also likely miss thread without the Debian-like emoji.

  • They are very long winded

Bullshit.

"Mother tongue" is an immediately present one I can point to. It's not wrong, but quite less commonly used than "first language".

The inverse is true outside the US. Try learning a 2nd language or stepping outside the US sometime.

  • They match up with a pattern seen in other posters that used to spam up other free software communities on the fediverse using LLMs and machine translation.

This is a confirmation bias. You think you know what an LLM pattern is as it differs from your own, thus conclude other writing styles must be that of an LLM.

  • You have a ton of posts with very few comments, which also matches with spammers.

I’ve seen more spam as a comment than as a post. Perhaps you are confused with Mastodon. In any case, I’m offline and only pop into a cafe to post what I wrote offline. I don’t have time to sit in the cafe and read a lot of other posts. If an app were good enough to harvest posts for offline reading, it would be different. But no such app exists.

  • I'd suggest that the large amount of downvotes this post received, as well as the upvotes my comment received, indicate that I'm not the only one who had this assumption about your post.

That’s an absurd conclusion. I expected a lot of down votes. It supports my thesis that a majority FOSS devs are MS boot lickers. Of course that same majority is susceptible to being triggered by criticism leveled at them.

BTW, I only saw 7 upvotes because I am on a downvote-disabled instance. I have to visit another node to see downvotes.

I spoke of privacy because I assumed you had privacy concerns. This community is on the infosec.pub instance, and cybersecurity and digital privacy tend to be a focus of posters here.

The failure of your assumption is that I /only/ have privacy concerns. There are so many ethical problems with Microsoft it’s bizarre that you would only think of personal privacy.

Also, I didn't think that someone would refuse to use a bug tracker entirely as a boycott of the company hosting it. That's extreme. At that level of "acting purely on the principal of things" than you really should make peace with not being able to use or interact with projects hosted on github, instead of looking for some way to make an end-run around the dev's preferred bug tracking chanmel.

There are practical problems with MS Github; not just ethical. They not only demand a non-disposable email address but they also use it for 2FA for Tor users, making logins painfully inconvenient.

It’s not just an evil host, but an evil host that makes you dance for them. You’d be a pushover to an absurdity to be willing to bend over backwards to lick MS boots and ultimately support MS by feeding it data and engagement.

Those were for your benefit. I'm not the one who clearly refuses to use github and has strong opinions about it.

Workarounds to ultimately feed Microsoft misses the point. Why dance for Microsoft when Debian is both easier and non-evil?

I'm not surprised by the fact that devs have different priorities. And they're allowed to.

You missed “Of course devs rightfully get to choose the venue for their work.” The idea is for testers to find refuge away from devs shitty choices moreso than twisting dev’s arms.

whether it was a brain malfunction or technical.

That sort of attitude, as well as the one demonstrated up and down your comment, are a big part of why people find people who treat FOSS as a religion objectionable.

It’s not an “attitude”. It’s science. Knowing what motivates people who make detrimental decisions is paramount to addressing the problem. My research yielded some of both reasons:

  • Brain malfunction: some devs admit to choosing Github “because that’s where the people are”, as they make themselves part of the network effect problem (the social problem).
  • Technical: some devs choose Github for specific features that free world tools do not offer. These cases are more easily corrected. Writing code is easier than improving personalities.

That is not the “best” you can do. It’s the least you can do.

My point was that, as you seem to be aware through experience, you can't make other devs abide by your own principles.

That doesn’t follow. You are not /only/ in control of where you host a project. You are also in control of where you participate on projects controlled by others. You can post your bug reports to a distro bug tracker instead of pawning yourself to MS.

Go do it the right way yourself, demonstrate it works better. Keep doing that. The more projects doing things the right way, the more momentum will shift away from github being seen as the easy standard.

Testers write bug reports. They do not create projects of their own and write software, unless they also serve as a dev. But that’s in the developer capacity and limited to those who also write code. Telling testers to become devs and found projects is a futile plan for turning things around.

Anyway, especially with this response, it seems clear that you weren't posting looking for any options,

I was not looking for other ways to lick Microsoft’s boots. The 3rd question was not rhetorical. And you neglected to answer it.

you were posting to complain about other people "doing it wrong". You already know there's no way to force devs off Github, by your own admission.

That’s not exactly true. I’m done trying to inspire devs to move their project off MS Github. But that doesn’t mean GH devs would not step outside of GH to view bug reports elsewhere such as the corresponding Debian bug DB.

🥾 Microsoft boot lickers represent a majority of FOSS devs. FOSS principles solve many problems but not this one. 🌀 Debian gives some refuge. in c/foss@infosec.pub
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Using an LLM to slop out your post in a FOSS community is a bold choice.

Are you using an LLM to translate my English into your mother tongue?

Can you quote an example of what you’re struggling with?

I’m only aware of chatGPT, and boycott Microsoft and Google and the like so I’ve never tried it. I will only use Argos Translate, which is useless for generative AI. I wrote that post in my mother tongue.

Beyond that, there are plenty of ways to engage with github while protecting your personal privacy.

Bullshit.

And why are you talking about privacy? I said nothing about privacy. I suggest trying a different machine translator than whatever you used.

If you engage with MS Github, you are supporting Microsoft.

You can use a throwaway email address to make an issue on github asking them to migrate to a better alternative.

Did that for years on dozens of projects. It gets old. These people are not interested. But feel free to knock yourself out trying your own futile advice if that’s your thing. If you find a disposable address that MS accepts, you will quickly find out that these devs have priorities that they have placed above anything you can think of.

WTF are you thinking -- that you can say “hey MS is not good for privacy…” and they will move their project for you? Did a chatbot tell you this would work?

My own attempts were symbolic, experimental, and more than anything a mere survey to find out what malfunction brings them there; whether it was a brain malfunction or technical.

You could email them directly by grabbing their email from the merge logs (if I recall right, I haven’t worked with github in a while).

Sure, then after doing a possibly large fetch (a deep github clone of all historic objects) you have a huge pile of commits to pick through & try to work out which is most relevant, and where you then find countless addresses that go to MS or Google anyway. If that suits you, knock yourself out. Not worth my time.

You could contact them on other socials they list. Usually those also aren’t privacy respecting or FOSS, but it’s something.

Same problem. You cannot reach people on those shitty platforms without being there yourself. And if you are there, you’re part of the problem.

The best any of us can do is to not use github ourselves for our own projects.

That is not the “best” you can do. It’s the least you can do.

6
🪲🧾 Demoralisation of users/testers filing bug reports is a notable culprit for bad quality FOSS (libretechni.ca)
 

There is a widespread twisted perception that bug report filers are beneficiaries regarded as parasitic leeches looking for a hand-out; looking to be served. Developers sometimes treat them as such. They approach a bug report as if they are being summoned to do free labor for the bug submitter.

Bug subitters are project contributors, not beneficiaries

This really needs to be straightened out because the shitty attitude causes bugs to persist without proper treatment. Often I am about to report a bug but first search for existing reports and find that the same bug was already reported long ago and rejected or disregarded. Sometimes it’s because a developer or pkg maintainer has an ego or god complex that didn’t get sufficient stroking. Because of a personality conflict between the first people on the scene, everyone else loses.

Bugs are not owned by the submitter

If Bob submits a bug report, that is not “Bob’s” bug. It is a community bug report. The bug is not fixed for Bob. It is fixed to improve the software quality for everyone. In most cases, by the time the fix is in Bob has already moved on. He found a workaround. It is the future users to benefit from avoiding the time waste of the bug encounter.

Users and testers are not necessarily developers. Devs and others sometimes comment to the bug submitter: “when can we expect a patch from you?” WTF? The tester may have gone through a lot of thankless effort to gather logs and details about a bug, possibly going through hoops to register and use a shitty bug tracker, and they get this culturally fucked up slap in the face in return, demanding more labor of them. It’s labor that requires a very different skill than bug reporting. A tester may know some languages but not necessarily the one needed for a fix.

About labor

The Debian project has a very good principle that goes like this: no one is forced or expected to do work. FOSS contributors are self-directed volunteers who rightfully choose what to work on, if anything. That’s for everyone, not just devs. Volunteers are in control of their own triage of priorities and workload.

A bug report declares: here is a bug (and possibly a workaround). The bug report imposes no work on devs or on the submitter. Even if a dev decides not to work on it, the report still serves to inform other users.

It’s fair enough to say “this bug report needs more details”. It’s also fair enough for a tester to decide whether or not they have the time to dig deeper.

-5
🥾 Microsoft boot lickers represent a majority of FOSS devs. FOSS principles solve many problems but not this one. 🌀 Debian gives some refuge. (libretechni.ca)
 

Most FOSS projects are jailed in Microsoft Github’s access restricted walled garden. The 4 freedoms are very basic. Sure I can grab the code and do what I want with it, but then what? Rage fork because devs only pay attention to a bug tracker hosted by a corporate oppressor?

Of course devs rightfully get to choose the venue for their work. It’s astonishing how many are okay with licking MS’s boots.

The free world can do better. The current hack: if an app has official Debian support, we can report upstream bugs to the Debian bug tracker (or Launchpad for Ubuntu). Any others?

For non-Debian, it really gets shitty. You can stash a bug report here, where it gets seen by sideline hecklers, not devs or users, and only gets retained as long as sopuli.xyz has resources. If they one day need to free up disk space, they will erase old posts.

Select apps that exist in Debian when possible

Debian has a higher quality standard than most distros and it’s also mainstream. When an app becomes officially maintained in Debian, a right of passage of sorts has been demonstrated. It’s not a high bar but it’s relatively the best measure of quality and maturity there is. Many FOSS projects cannot manage to satisfy Debian’s standards.

So if you have a choice of apps, it’s a good idea to short-list those that appear in https://packages.debian.org/ even if you run a different distro than Debian. You can participate in bug discussion at https://bugs.debian.org/ without registration. And if you verify a bug exists in Debian you have a decent place to report it (yes, even if the bug originates upstream).

5
Bug reporting is a global shit-show. It needs federation. And a bug report aggregator with local data store. (libretechni.ca)
 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/617678

The shitshow is largely described here. That’s LaTeX-focused, but the whole FOSS infra is a disaster.

We need an app that can harvest bug reports from multiple sources and build a local database that aggregates all bug reports. That is, it harvests bug reports in github, gnu.org, Salsa, as well as distro-specific reports (e.g. Ubuntu bug reports from launchpad and Debian bug reports from debian.org).

Rationale

  • Dupe reports (due to lazy people)-- Some trigger-happy testers/users do not bother to lookup whether a bug is already reported. And most of the rest only check one db, not all.
  • Dupe reports (by design)-- The Debian guidance is to report bugs to the Debian bug tracker (to some extent, even if the bug is already reported upstream). If not upstream, it’s the maintainer’s job to mirror it upstream. It’s a good policy but diligent testers who check multiple trackers see some distracting redundancy.
  • Query limitations-- searching for bug reports is limited to the GUI search form for each DB, each of which is limited in different ways. Just let me fucking grep.
  • Offline users fucked-- Bug DBs are naturally online, so air-gapped/offline users have no access to the bug DB. A local DB that can be sync’d from bug trackers when the user is momentarily online.
  • Full searching-- a local copy of all bug tracker datasets enables testers to search all records with a single query.
0
Bug reporting is a global shit-show. It needs federation. And a bug report aggregator with local data store. (libretechni.ca)
 

The shitshow is largely described here. That’s LaTeX-focused, but the whole FOSS infra is a disaster.

We need an app that can harvest bug reports from multiple sources and build a local database that aggregates all bug reports. That is, it harvests bug reports in github, gnu.org, Salsa, as well as distro-specific reports (e.g. Ubuntu bug reports from launchpad and Debian bug reports from debian.org).

Rationale

  • Dupe reports (due to lazy people)-- Some trigger-happy testers/users do not bother to lookup whether a bug is already reported. And most of the rest only check one db, not all.
  • Dupe reports (by design)-- The Debian guidance is to report bugs to the Debian bug tracker (to some extent, even if the bug is already reported upstream). If not upstream, it’s the maintainer’s job to mirror it upstream. It’s a good policy but diligent testers who check multiple trackers see some distracting redundancy.
  • Query limitations-- searching for bug reports is limited to the GUI search form for each DB, each of which is limited in different ways. Just let me fucking grep.
  • Offline users fucked-- Bug DBs are naturally online, so air-gapped/offline users have no access to the bug DB. A local DB that can be sync’d from bug trackers when the user is momentarily online.
  • Full searching-- a local copy of all bug tracker datasets enables testers to search all records with a single query.
10
Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat (www.theregister.com)
🇫🇷↔🇬🇧↔🇳🇱 Language tool needed to find true friends - similar words that exist in 2 languages, and machine translation that expoits this in c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

Citation very much needed

No it’s not. Just take some language classes and take your own survey. It’s trivially verified.

It’s quite rare for a language class to use one language to learn another. Every single person I have surveyed believes (without evidence) that it’s better to learn a language without exploiting your mother tongue to learn a new language. Many language teachers are themselves instructed to avoid using the student’s mother tongue.

This guy’s full of shit. 6000 words is what, ~B1-B2 level of fluency?

zaphod answered this well but I should add that 6k words are my count (from a dictionary), not the person who gave the tip. No one claimed that 6000 nouns results in “fluency”. (I scare-quoted fluency because B1 is where I’m at in French and I am nowhere near fluent; and I doubt B2 would get me there).

IIRC, “this guy” is Thomas Michael, a brit who produced audio tapes that teach French to English speakers. So there’s your source if you want to chase it up.

Does anyone else think Thomas Michael is full of shit?

While it’s a neat idea, there are a lot of words in French that resemble English words but don’t mean exactly the same.

Of course the AI bot would have to work that out and avoid such cases.

How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread in c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There’s some kind of tech defect going on here. When I posted my comment, this thread and all others w/the same title had zero comments. Now I see many comments in here, some of which are older than my own. So in my view of this community, it appeared like a ghost town with a bot making a bunch of empty threads. Apparently posting in this thread triggered the node I am on to fetch the comments.

How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread in c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca -1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

I don’t get what’s going on with all these threads. You seem to be spamming your own community. All these threads with this same title do not link anywhere or have any content. It’s drowning out meaningful threads.

I spent 4 days making an Anki deck in c/languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 2 points 1 month ago

I was able to find an existing deck for the language I was learning. But then I still spent some time on additions and mods to add words from my textbook brought up.

10
🇫🇷↔🇬🇧↔🇳🇱 Language tool needed to find true friends - similar words that exist in 2 languages, and machine translation that expoits this (libretechni.ca)
 

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/559409

All words ending in “tion” or “ty” are both French and English. Apart from that, English gets many words from both Dutch and French that are similar. But there is no effort to exploit this because so many people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

I am firmly outside of that school of thought. When someone uttered the opening sentence of this post to me, I probably learnt ~6000+¹ words in French in 5 seconds. You cannot beat that. This would have taken years of playing charades using the popular immersion teaching style.

So the question is, are there any language learning tools whereby you specify two langauges and it produces a list or dictionary of true friends? The idea is that you can make a quick gain in vocabulary before progressing into unfamiliar/alienating words.

There are instances where I am writing a bilingual paper in English and French. The French column is a machine translation. Knowing some French (but not fluent), there are situations where the translation tool chooses a synonym for a true friend. If the machine had chosen a true friend, it would be easier for me to verify the quality of the translation and also easier for me to learn from. Considering my reader(s) are often native French and /possibly/ decent with English, there are also situations where I fail to choose an English word that would be easier for a francophone. So it would be useful as well if a translation tool would reverse the French back to English while trying to select true friends in English.

Furthermore, a reader of my French-English text may be a native Dutch speaker. So I would like an translation tool that adds some secondary gravity toward choosing English-Dutch friends when English-French falls short. Or another way to state this: I want a bilingual text that minimises the frequency of unique original words that are not borrowed by any of the relevant languages.

I realise gravitating toward true friends may cause a longer text in some cases, so I suppose I would also want to set a threshold of tolerance on additional words or syllables. In the end there would be some manual effort in the end anyway.

¹ $ grep -iE '(ty|tion)$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | wc -l

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🇫🇷↔🇬🇧↔🇳🇱 Language tool needed to find true friends - similar words that exist in 2 languages, and machine translation that expoits this (libretechni.ca)
 

All words ending in “tion” or “ty” are both French and English. Apart from that, English gets many words from both Dutch and French that are similar. But there is no effort to exploit this because so many people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

I am firmly outside of that school of thought. When someone uttered the opening sentence of this post to me, I probably learnt ~6000+¹ words in French in 5 seconds. You cannot beat that. This would have taken years of playing charades using the popular immersion teaching style.

So the question is, are there any language learning tools whereby you specify two langauges and it produces a list or dictionary of true friends? The idea is that you can make a quick gain in vocabulary before progressing into unfamiliar/alienating words.

There are instances where I am writing a bilingual paper in English and French. The French column is a machine translation. Knowing some French (but not fluent), there are situations where the translation tool chooses a synonym for a true friend. If the machine had chosen a true friend, it would be easier for me to verify the quality of the translation and also easier for me to learn from. Considering my reader(s) are often native French and /possibly/ decent with English, there are also situations where I fail to choose an English word that would be easier for a francophone. So it would be useful as well if a translation tool would reverse the French back to English while trying to select true friends in English.

Furthermore, a reader of my French-English text may be a native Dutch speaker. So I would like an translation tool that adds some secondary gravity toward choosing English-Dutch friends when English-French falls short. Or another way to state this: I want a bilingual text that minimises the frequency of unique original words that are not borrowed by any of the relevant languages.

I realise gravitating toward true friends may cause a longer text in some cases, so I suppose I would also want to set a threshold of tolerance on additional words or syllables. In the end there would be some manual effort in the end anyway.

¹ $ grep -iE '(ty|tion)$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-huge | wc -l

We need a MythRadio (MythTV DVR, but for radio) in c/dabradio@feddit.uk
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 1 points 3 months ago

Those are probably things I should look into. Considering those free-to-air networks are TV networks, MythTV would likely work for them. But then I have no idea the absence of video would cause any issues, considering a Satellite tuner device for a PC might just receive TV signals.

We need a MythRadio (MythTV DVR, but for radio) in c/dabradio@feddit.uk
[–] nonserf@libretechni.ca 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I have no Internet. I want to hear the local broadcasts when I am at home.

At home, I have ~75—100 local broadcast stations which cover local news and events. I also figure that of the thousands of Internet stations, very few would likely be specific to my region. I think only a small fraction of broadcast radio stations have an Internet stream.

(edit)

When I am in a cafe or library getting Internet, I use that opportunity to listen to distant stations.

Note as well that a strong DAB signal is better than any Internet signal. There are many more points of failure with Internet, such as network congestion.

You do give me an idea though. I have some shell accounts. I could perhaps setup a timed recording of something I want to hear from Internet radio. Then I could fetch it whenever I get online. But I guess a MythRadio would still be useful.. something to show me the schedules centrally. I think at the moment we are stuck with going to the website of each station and navigating their UI one station at a time. Fuck that.

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