Sorry, I meant that for comedic effect; I understand that the English language isn’t an agent and that there was no singular instance where English went over, grabbed over 1/4 of its words from French, and came back. I know that “plundering” isn’t how language truly works. I do know about Old Norman’s influence on Middle English, I do know some about the Hundred Years’ War’s effect on its usage, I do roughly understand the Great Vowel Shift, and I have a fuzzy understanding thereafter. I guess I know that some political loanwords (like the 18th-century “bureaucracy”) and some cultural ones (like “boutique”) made their way into English, but I really don’t know much else.

Boy it’s a hard language. The English has a few quirks but it is an EASY language compared to most, including French

Man, as a native English speaker, I totally disagree with this. We are, as I emphasized in another comment, a fucking mess phonetically, and a lot of this is ironically because English plundered so much from French (among other languages). So much of English you just have to “know” on a nearly case-by-case basis, and I imagine the internal systems I use to subconsciously keep track of these inconsistencies are a terrifying web of spaghetti. The conjugation is fucked six ways from Sunday, there are idioms out the ass (see the ones I’m unintentionally using here), there’s sooooo much slang, and there’s practically a bottomless pit of words – so much so (in combination with how common it is as a second language) that Wikipedia maintains a simplified English version using a list of only the 1000 most common words.

I can’t say I’ve learned French, but even accounting for how much I already accidentally know of it (knowing more obscure English words aids a lot in translation to the point I can often read sentences with knowing just a handful of basic French connective words), I’d bet it’s a ton easier. The main thing I’d hate, like I do with Spanish, is gendered nouns (god, they’re so fucking superfluous), but I’d still say it beats the weird peculiarities of English.

Most non-native speakers, to my understanding, would consider English quite hard to learn, even when factoring in all the English media they’re surrounded by growing up.

Yeah, if there’s a new lingua franca in 25 years (which would be strange, because the proliferation of increasingly highly accurate LLM translation would seemingly add pressure in favor of whatever the status quo is), I would bargain on Mandarin. And that’s if, which I seriously doubt – even assuming the US completely fucks up the next 20 years as badly as the last 10 and China dominates the world economy by a vast margin. English is one of the hardest major languages to learn; ironically, the globalism that let it proliferate arguably isn’t helping a total beginner as English increasingly pulls in loanwords.

What’s a language that’s even harder to learn? Mandarin. English is a fucking mess phinetically, but at least it doesn’t have tens of thousands of characters and an extreme emphasis on particular intonation. Japanese has kanji, sure, but there’s a foundation in the form of kanas which are easy to learn and are phonetic. Especially with English entrenched as a secondary language, pivoting to teaching Mandarin would need an enormous incentive compared to China’s incentive to just, like, use an LLM to translate messages etc. bound to non-Madarin-speaking countries.

Are we just naming things dogs like now? (I guess poop also ironically fits.)

NASA’s Voyager engineers are like the final evolution of your uncle that keeps his 1974 Chevy C/K running at 400,000 miles. It’s the same autism across an ocean of resources.

They said, on Lemmy.

Yes, they said on Lemmy. I solidly understand what it is to be in many tiny, insulated ideological minorities from decades of experience, namely that my experience is often profoundly different from most peoples’. Corporations are obviously inducing demand for large AI models, but I do speak to many people outside my anti-LLM bubble and rub up against the reality that people fucking love to use LLMs to (as an example from the OP) summarize everything for them. So many people I speak to are so fucking brainrotted from using LLMs as a crutch that they’ll whine that like 300 words, for a thing they asked to have explained for them, is too long and needs a summary.

Chrome is literally worse than stock Firefox. You seem pretty out of touch with what we’re talking about rn.

Yeah, I’m not going to waste my time with this one.

Also non-generative translation has existed for years just fine, just saying lol.

I have no idea what the hell you mean by “non-generative”. Do you even know whay that word means? I see now that one was introduced in late 2023 and I was unaware of it. But what makes this one “generative” and that one “non-generative”? It’s all tokens to tokens, regardless of if it’s an LSTM (I don’t know if that’s what that one used) or a GPT (which I vaguely assume Firefox uses now, and is a generative pretrained transformer, but that’s not really the job it’s doing here; maybe a BERT? Maybe an LSTM still?)

I knew what you meant, to be clear. I was taking the piss.

driving people away from using stock firefox in the first place.

I cannot even express what a tiny, insulated minority that you’re in. A lack of these kinds of features is what would drive people away to Chrome. Like holy merciful hell, Firefox’s new LLM page translation is jank, but it’s something (this is the one feature I use; it’s local when you download the language pack, and my alternative would be using Argos locally – more accurate, but slow as hell and less convenient).

I cannot begin to tell you all the times I wished I had what Chrome had in the way of translation – just without the privacy concerns. I only didn’t switch because of a strong resolve; I read non-English articles all the time. It’s still not as good, but I’m so relieved to finally have a built-in, private translator. And I’m well on the “fuck the proliferation of LLMs” side of the spectrum.

And I can very well imagine those features I turn off because I don’t want them are to a lot of people what translation was to me.

lmao ok

I’m sorry the Block AI enhancements toggle is impossible for you to find. I hope you’ll find it easier once you sober up a bit.

This is something there’s an easy-to-find toggle for in the settings. A lot of people use LLM shit, and I’m in the minority – even, I’m sure, among Firefox users – so I’m not going to gripe that I have to switch it off to never be bugged about it again. (Most of these, by the way, are one-time prompts IIRC.)

“Where’s the money, Lebowski?!”

I know that stock image lady is supposed to be laughing, but her expression looks a bit more like she just lost a finger and is in traumatic shock.

Haha, whoops! That’s just a typo on my part. Thanks for pointing it out. I basically took “adopt, don’t shop” and negated it by mistake.

It’s not mob mentality. You’re posting from an artist who expresses support for a neo-Nazi, and that understandably makes users here feel unsafe. I got told the other day to “fuck myself with a chainsaw” because I haven’t banned Jago here yet (not really up to me), and I don’t even blame them for saying that. You gleefully and intentionally make people in minority groups here feel unsafe.

Yes, everyone hates them, they know everyone hates them (to the extent the community overwhelmingly supports banning the likely far-right artist they routinely post), they continue the behavior because it’s just in-bounds enough, and it single-handedly makes moderating here miserable. This is just one page of my reports across all communities:

What I said to them was unrelated to the contents of their comment; I just haven’t interacted with them before and am really sick and tired of seeing them. That’s not professional as a moderator, so I’m sorry for the outburst.

No, I don’t want them to censor themselves re: this comment, and I’m sorry if I implied that. I actually hastily changed it from “everyone here hates you” to “everyone here wants you banned” because of Rule 1 (I’m not really used to that strict level of politesse in communities). I even said they didn’t do anything ban-worthy; if I thought their comment was violating a rule, I could’ve just removed it (it was, in fact; Rule 1 for calling vegans cultists, but I didn’t want that to be seen as a conflict of interest). I’m just kind of pissy since basically everyone in this community does hate them and they work just enough within the rules that my hands are tied. Literally dozens of reports for Jago, who, after some independent digging (I’d never heard of them until moderating here), likely is a far-right bigot.

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Like they do with unwanted pets, they’d slaughter the lot of them.

This is oft-repeated anti-vegan propaganda, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. I’m sure I could have a prebaked, lengthy response for this if I wanted, but I’ll try to give you the bullet points (sources on request):

• PETA is entirely open about its euthanization at their Virginia shelter. (Note: Do not click on that link unless you want to see some serious shit.)
• The rate is so high because they take animals absolutely nobody else will. This especially includes so-called “unadoptable” animals that “no-kill” shelters can’t keep but don’t want to euthanize to preserve their squeeky-clean, bullshit, artificial “no-kill” status that makes them look good but doesn’t help the animals that need it. Unadoptable animals especially include the terminally ill as well as chronically, intractably, dangerously violent.
• They also provide free euthanization to pet owners, where most clinics would charge a fee that many pet owners cannot afford (and thus will simply let their pets suffer until they die “naturally”).
• Society creates this problem by adopting, not shopping shopping, not adopting (leading to excessive breeding), having extremely minimal protections for pets and requirements for pet ownership, failing to spay/neuter pets (a service PETA offers for free), treating pets as possessions (e.g. that you get somebody as a present), and so on in the ecosystem of an immensely profitable and deep-seated pet industry.
• However, they do legitimately try to adopt out the few animals that get brought to them who are able to be adopted.

TL;DR: PETA is not to blame for their rate of euthanization. Just because they take on the responsibility of the problem everyone around them created to ease the animals’ suffering doesn’t mean that they take on responsibility for creating the problem. The flak they get for this from animal agriculture propaganda is entirely created as a distraction to delegitimize vegans as evil, murderous monsters so omnivores don’t have to consider the unfathomable scale and depth of suffering they deliberately cause.

Welcome to today’s round of Vegan Bingo!

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Ruslan Kravchenko, identified the shooter as a 58-year-old man from the Russian capital, Moscow, and said he had used an automatic weapon to carry out the fatal shooting.

Interesting. If true, I wonder (read: speculate with absolutely no evidence; do not take this seriously) if he might’ve known somebody who died or was seriously wounded during Russia’s invasion. Could also just be fullthroated support of the invasion via outright terrorism.