Erika2rsis

I too am 83% female and between the ages of 18 and 24

The same thing we do every night, Pinky.

Ayy nice

Hogwarts Legacy? Wasn’t that the game with, like, the plot that was suspiciously similar to blood libel, especially considering how similar goblins are to certain stereotypes and caricatures to begin with? The game where early access players found a horn that looked suspiciously similar to a shofar being described as some sort of annoying goblin instrument? The game where, even setting Rowling aside, several of the staff behind it had some very gross political views? The one where they named the one transfem character “Sirona Ryan” and had her voiced by a cis woman with her voice pitched-down in post to sound more masculine?

I mean, I never played Hogwarts Legacy, so that could all be wrong, but that is nevertheless what I remember people talking about… People have a right to play games even if they have problematic content, sure, but I also have a right to hear “yeah I just had to play the Blood Libel Game because it’s just so nostalgic” and think “wtf”

LLM/AI tools can massively decrease the cost of dubbing media into smaller languages, including the cost of creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired. I don’t know the extent to which these uses are actually being implemented at the moment, but yeah. It’s by all means possible, and in my eyes pretty cool. These uses would not replace real people, would not require unethical practices, but would still reduce the workload.

I’m kind of disappointed by the ways in which AI is being presented as a “terk er jerbs” thing in fields where it has no rightful place, the ways in which AI is presented as a “procedurally generated Netflix and chill with my robot girlfriend” hyperreal horrorshow, the ways in which AI is being used for scams. AI absolutely has its places in society, and helping with accessibility and localization is one of them.

Edit: Yes, and also writing closed captions, and arguably even using deepfakes to “dub” shows and movies into sign languages could be potential uses.

There’s also how chatbots can be used as language study buddies for those without the ability to talk to actual native speakers, although I haven’t had much success with this, personally.

The jokester in me wants to say TARDIS → TARDES by analogy of penis → penes but the fact of the matter is that Time and Relative Dimensions in Space doesn’t really pluralize even when it isn’t abbreviated

This is basically just Skwerl but for “young people who are good with computers” slang

Based granddad

Of all the industries to profit from bored ape NFTs, I was not expecting white cane manufacturing to be one of them.

Frankly, I’m not seeing any negative replies or downvotes.

I’m a US citizen myself, though I live in and am also a born citizen of Norway. So being in basically a quantum superposition between being and not being a US-American, you could imagine that I’d have a bit of a specific perspective about the country, that would draw me to using words like “Seppo”.

NZ and UK use it too. I think I first learned it from a Brit.

The word I use most often aside from American is Seppo, which is derogatory rhyming slang (sep + -o, from septic tank → Yank → Yankee)

Thank you for your contributions.

That is how it works, yeah. Very good point. Nobody needs to be actively malicious or conspiratorial, and it’s silly to imagine people being that conniving: The most profitable matching algorithm on a dating app just happens to be ineffective for most people, and whoever happens to stumble on that algorithm first ends up making the most profitable dating app – no need to know why it works, just that it does.

People find love through dating apps

That is part of the business model, actually: if these apps absolutely never work, then there will be no word of mouth, no success stories to use in promotional material, and users would pretty quickly figure out that it isn’t entirely their own fault that they haven’t made the progress that they’re expecting.

Also, like, language learning apps suffer from the same problem as dating apps: if these apps could actually teach you a language, you’d eventually get proficient enough at the language to no longer need the app — and if you no longer need the app, then it can’t harvest your data or subscription money anymore, and line goes down. So the app always needs to give you the impression that you’re making progress, while actually sabotaging your learning at every step.

This isn’t to say that these apps don’t have a place in the language learning process, but rather I’m saying that you need to be incredibly wary not just of the privacy issues, but of how to actually use these apps effectively. If you’re aware of their tricks, then they become less effective.

(IANAD) A trans woman with neither estrogen nor testosterone in her system wouldn’t begin to masculinize, but she would experience menopause-like symptoms such as hot flashes or risk of osteoporosis. This is why generally even after orchiectomy or SRS, trans women will still take estrogen for their entire lives, even though they no longer need to take an antiandrogen to prevent masculinization.

If a trans woman does have testes, and stops taking both estrogen and the antiandrogen, then she will gradually begin to masculinize. My understanding is that trans women will sometimes stop taking hormone therapy for up to several months for things like banking sperm, so it’s not like forgetting to take your hormones for a few days is a major crisis. But going without hormones for extended periods of time is also not particularly fun.

That said, there are trans people who never take hormones, or who stop taking hormones, or who temporarily or permanently lose access to hormones, for any number of reasons, and their transitions aren’t any less transitions for it. For trans men with CAIS, for instance, taking testosterone would have no effect on their bodies, but this doesn’t make them any less men.

I’ve thought about this exact “solution” too, and even tried using it in writing sometimes (not for real people, though). Ultimately, although capitalized singular “They” does its job, and means that one needs to think marginally less about phrasing… It still just feels kind of weird, because of how capitalized pronouns in English are almost always honorific, and are associated particularly with the Abrahamic God. This includes capitalized “You”, for the record. So at the very least, capitalized singular “They” comes across as a bit overly formal; at the very most, it comes across as literally deifying non-binary people.

Rephrasing or clarifying really does solve most of the issues with unclear reference. People who complain about singular “they” being confusing are basically just using the pronoun as a proxy for not wanting to hear about non-binary people. What I think is that the more people use singular “they”, the more people will learn to use the pronoun in a clearer manner, and the more people will find disambiguating shorthands. The reason there’s no standardized way to distinguish singular and plural “you” outside the reflexive, after all, is because the ambiguity of “you” is not enough of a problem to warrant a single standardized solution. I think singular vs plural “they” is going to be the same way, although I’m not confident in this.

Some people probably will use capitalization as a shorthand for number, like you and I thought of independently. More people will use phrases like “they themself” to specify the singular, or “they all” or “some of them” or “both of them” to specify the plural, much like they already do with “you”. At the most extreme I could even imagine “theirsel(f/ves)” being used in place of the nominative or non-reflexive oblique, or people saying “theyse” à la “youse”.

If I may propose something else, though —

Reflexive possessives were once part of Old English and are still used in a lot of Indo-European languages to this day. Taking the Old English words and applying the sound and grammar changes that English went through gives us “sy” and “sine”. So, “She played with sy hair” (i.e. the hair belongs to the person playing with it) versus “She played with her hair” (i.e. the hair belongs to another person).

I think that this could disambiguate a lot of ambiguous pronoun usage in general, not just with singular vs plural they. I also like the sound of using “X sy/sine/s’n Y” as an alternative way of marking possession, in cases where -‘s or -s’ is ambiguous or just doesn’t look or sound right. I don’t use “sy” or “sine” for real people, but I’ve taken to using it for fictional or generic people.

This post and its comments go more in-depth about the Hexbears’ grievances: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1989401

The announcement from a Hexbear admin: https://hexbear.net/post/369410

The casus defoederationis that’s got me most concerned is that the 196 mod appears to endorse usage of the -tard suffix. When the Hexbears mention ableism, this is the specific objection they have.

Really bad form of OP to not include any links, and honestly it should be a Hexbear admin making this announcement, anyways.

That’s what I thought, thank you.