Case in point.

“Does anyone else… (have trouble finishing video games/use their toenail clippings to add texture to a pot of chili/etc.)?”

An excellent choice.

Probably a-ha’s “Take On Me” if I’m being honest.

Other than family pictures, etc., I’ve been working on a collection of the episodes of a show from when I was a kid in the late 80s, “Long Ago and Far Away”, showing fairy tales from around the world in a variety of art styles and media, with James Earl Jones as host. I’ve found maybe 2/3 of the episodes so far. Every few years I do another sweep to try to find more.

Starts typing gibberish in Microsoft Word because the magic hand still hasn’t told me how to get started coding.

Thanks!

How do I turn off Yuzu’s auto-update? I don’t want my computer to connect to a website that Nintendo now owns every time I boot up the emulator.

Is there any way to turn off Yuzu auto-update? I don’t want my computer connecting to a website that Nintendo now owns every time I boot up Yuzu.

It’s only permanent until they decide that it isn’t.

“Permanently”

Copied from my comment down below:

I chose lemm.ee because of how rarely it defederates. Blahaj is still federated, as is hexbear, lemmygrad, and beehaw, as well as stuff like lemmynsfw. For those who want to curate their own instance experience, I’m not currently aware of a better home (though if anyone knows of one, definitely let me know, of course!).

The server was upgraded this past week actually, and I haven’t had any problems since.

?? I was suggesting it for the user above, who specifically mentioned wanting instances that weren’t quick to defederate.

I chose lemm.ee because of how rarely it defederates, and I’m not aware of any major controversy with it. Blahaj is still federated, as is hexbear, lemmygrad, and beehaw. For those who want to curate their own instance experience, I’m not currently aware of a better home (though if anyone knows of one, definitely let me know, of course!).

That user is a hexbear - their handle here is an alt. Which isn’t surprising given the nature of their engagement in this thread.

Right? The admin here sees hexbears engaging in their typical bad faith spam-bullying tactics against someone who, unless there’s something really bad in that deleted comment, doesn’t seem to actually be a transphobe, for the crime of enjoying a popular mainstream video game, and the admin decides to defederate the victim of the bullying.

Spoken language is acquired, not learned. This is a formal distinction in the literature, used (in general) to distinguish unconscious behaviors from conscious ones.

Learning involves something you have conscious knowledge about - you can learn how to build a birdhouse, and then you can teach me how to build one as well, because you’ve consciously learned the rules for doing so.

Acquisition is involuntary, and unconscious. Children don’t try to learn languages - any human infant given language input from any human language will acquire that language over time, seemingly without effort.

Also, the knowledge we gain from language acquisition is unconscious knowledge - as an English speaker, you can’t tell me why “John hit the ball” is a sentence of English and “John ball the hit” is not, other than to give an explanation that will eventually boil down to “because it just isn’t”. You don’t know why your language is the way it is - you just implicitly know exactly how it is, and how it isn’t.

So, acquisition being distinct from learning requires no magic - just an understanding of the differences between these two processes, in the same way as we can also understand the differences between writing and language, one of which is that language is an unconscious, acquired behavior, and that writing is a conscious, learned behavior.

Writing isn’t language at all, for reasons discussed in my comments below.

Which is part of what makes linguistics work on ancient languages so difficult - we’re having to use these imperfect symbols, which themselves aren’t language, to try to glean as many features about the actual grammars they’re intended to represent, which are language.

This is why we know much less about ancient languages than we do modern ones - because we have actual recordings of modern languages (the recordings themselves are also not language, of course; they just encode language much better than writing does), so we can get at many more features of the language in question.

Fair enough.

What would you say about a dog growling at you, communicating its displeasure at how close you are? If you back away, understanding what the dog intends to convey with its growl, does that make the dog’s growl language?

Is a honeybee secreting a pheromone to get the hive to swarm language?

If so, how is language meaningfully different from “communication”? And, is human communication with each other the same type of phenomenon as the cases you and I mentioned, or is there some sort of categorical difference there?

(Also, this definition isn’t classical - it’s quite modern. The tendency to conflate writing with language in cultures that have writing is as old as writing is, and disentangling the two is a relatively modern discovery.)