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16 votes
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EU supreme court will hear arguments on whether Danish law limiting the concentration of ethnic minorities in certain neighbourhoods violates EU anti-discrimination law
5 votes -
DirecTV agrees to buy Dish for $1
10 votes -
Pete Rose, MLB's all-time hits leader, has died at 83
9 votes -
Babygirl | Official trailer
4 votes -
Coax wire tools
Hi, I need to re-terminate a couple of wires I do not wish to replace entirely. I'm thinking of just buying a cheap Klein crimper but is there a reason to buy something more expensive? If somebody...
Hi, I need to re-terminate a couple of wires I do not wish to replace entirely. I'm thinking of just buying a cheap Klein crimper but is there a reason to buy something more expensive? If somebody with experience has any recommendations here, I'd appreciate them. Thanks.
Edit: thanks to everyone for their prompt replies! I will go with your consensus of no need for an expensive tool right now.
5 votes -
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at fifty
5 votes -
Lies, damned lies, and Impact Hero (refoorest, allcolibri)
4 votes -
Denmark became the world's first country to offer legal recognition of gay partnerships on 1 October 1989 – a day when "something shifted in human affairs"
13 votes -
Joe & The Shitboys – Mr. Nobody (2024)
5 votes -
Emotions are running high in EU foreign policy – and that's ok
5 votes -
Review: Math from Three to Seven, by Alexander Zvonkin
7 votes -
How to setup a local LLM ("AI") on Windows
12 votes -
Are any of you reading Skybound's Transformers? In your opinion, how does it stack up to the other comic book versions from Marvel, Dreamwave and IDW?
I've been enjoying the run so far, but I've been out of Transformers comics for decades, almost the whole IDW era. I'm curious to hear what people think.
8 votes -
Inside the US Department of Justice Live Nation antitrust lawsuit
9 votes -
New titans of Wall Street: How trading firms stole a march on big banks
3 votes -
At least sixty-four dead and millions without power after hurricane Helene devastates south-eastern US states with landslides and flooding, washing away roads and bridges
61 votes -
Bop Spotter
16 votes -
Artificial Intelligence-enabled intelligent assistant for personalized and adaptive learning in higher education
7 votes -
The unique undersea tunnels that link the Faroe Islands
21 votes -
Box office: ‘Megalopolis’ bombs with D+ CinemaScore, ‘Wild Robot’ soars to no. 1
30 votes -
Against the Storm - Keepers of the Stone DLC and Fishing Update (1.4) available!
13 votes -
The Vikings were part of a global network trading in ivory from Greenland
7 votes -
Social networks and digital influencers in the online purchasing decision process
3 votes -
Quartz producing location Spruce Pine, North Carolina just got hit by hurricane Helene. The fallout on the tech industry could be huge.
21 votes -
Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo dies of brain cancer at age 58
10 votes -
Her US state bans gender-affirming care for teenagers. So she travels 450 miles for it.
13 votes -
DirecTV and Dish to merge, creating US pay-TV giant, as AT&T completes exit from entertainment
21 votes -
Blood Incantation (feat. Tangerine Dream) - The Stargate (2024)
10 votes -
Mojang reveals the first addition of Minecraft's new year-round update schedule – the Pale Garden and its attendant Creaking monster will come to the game "in the next few months"
19 votes -
Will Ferrell: ‘If the trans community is a threat to you, then it stems from not being confident or safe with yourself’
56 votes -
My latest instrument, the fron2, on its first day out
15 votes -
Operation Match: The dating service that changed our love lives
4 votes -
Viossa and venting about Etymology Nerd
The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa. If you are...
The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa.
If you are interested in languages & linguistics and, like me, are not immune to the draw of short-form video content, you are probably familiar with the creator Etymology Nerd. He makes shorts on TikTok and other platforms about all things linguistics, usually pointing out some cool facet or etymology. The videos are, due to the their length, often very surface level, but they’re informative and fun, and for the most part, accurate enough – at least as far as I can tell. However, two days ago, he posted this short on TikTok and then a bit later to YouTube: conlangs are so back. It points the spotlight on a constructed language by the name of Viossa: A collaborative con-pidgin, that is, a conlang created by users attempting to establish communication despite speaking different languages. This is rather meaningful to me, as I was one of the original co-creators of Viossa – more on that below. At first, I was quite happy about this, until I went to check out the Discord server and found it effectively on fire. While there were about 1700 members on the discord server, the number of active members was much smaller, certainly less than 100.
In the first day after the TikTok video, over 1000 users sought out the discord server and joined it.
Etymology Nerd didn’t ask for permission, he did not even give a heads-up. He found and joined the server on the 27th, asked a few questions, and then posted his short on TikTok two hours later. And while he learned that the server’s moderation was getting overwhelmed, he reposted the video to YouTube unchanged the next day anyway, merely leaving a pinned comment asking people to be respectful. The Viossa discord is currently on lockdown (invites paused) until things settle down. In the meantime, the short has amassed close to two million views on TikTok & Youtube combined. While I don’t think this can be called malicious, it speaks of a lack of care of the impact it can have to shine a spotlight on a small community when you have such a big following. Who cares what happens to them, I got my clicks, right?
But that’s enough venting. Time for some history. As I mentioned above, I was one of the people who started this whole thing. Back in 2014, before Discord, there was a Skype group for people interested in conlangs. I was in high school at the time, as were most other members – reddit demographics. We realized that many of us spoke at least one language other than English, and decided to conduct an experiment: Could we establish communication through those other languages by finding common grounds and learning each other’s words for things? So on Christmas Eve that year, six of us hopped into a video call and tried to communicate without using English. Each of us would contribute with one or two languages: Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, Albanian&Greek and Swiss German. Within the first night, we had a few words and could ask simple questions. Within the first week, we had a few hundred words and were able to hold uninterrupted, if simple, conversations. We had some other people join the project over the course of the first year, and presented the results on reddit:
Things continued quietly from then on. The number of members grew slowly, while others got bored and dropped out of the project. At some point, Discord rolled around and the community moved there – a far easier platform to join than Skype. Some copycat projects sprung up, but to my knowledge, sadly none really persisted. In 2017, I held a talk at the Language Creation Conference about this style of language creation, and on Viossa in particular. The conference was livestreamed, so you can watch it on Youtube here (ca. 30 minutes):
A major influx of new members came in 2020, when Jan Misali made a video on the language as part of his Conlang Critic series. His video is extremely well put-together, and created in close collaboration with many regular members of the community, and it really is the best showcase of what Viossa had become in the six years since its inception. You can find it here:
This video put the project on the radar for many more people, and it has definitely changed the language. When you get many learners in a short amount of time, the things they pick up tend to reinforce each other, and you get sudden drastic shifts. I’m finding that I struggle with understanding a lot more of the language used by people who joined after this video than from other oldtimers. Then things settled again, until the etymologynerd post two days ago.
And that’s the history of, weirdly, one of the more successful constructed languages, built on just two rules:
- If you can understand it, it’s correct Viossa.
- Learn Viossa through Viossa, no translation.
20 votes -
What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
4 votes -
Problems of scale: How to get a better grasp on numbers?
Inspired by the post about "petty reform" platforms, I noticed a trend, that matched with my own brain musings. People have an inherent problem with number conceptualization(Poor natural magnitude...
Inspired by the post about "petty reform" platforms, I noticed a trend, that matched with my own brain musings.
People have an inherent problem with number conceptualization(Poor natural magnitude conception?).
I recall this being a problem as old as time. Things that have helped me grapple with this are things like Fermi Problems and someone who used a grain of rice to represent the scale of wealth discrepancy in the world, using Bill Gates or Elon Musk as an example (can't find the original video, all the derivatives have been turned into TikTok-esque drivel).
I ask the people of Tildes, what types of scale descriptors, demonstrations, etc. have you found moving in your life? Really putting something into perspective. I will give bonus points for "positive" examples, not just doom and gloom, but welcome anything that tickles your fancy.
13 votes -
Cyan Kicks – Don't You Say I Didn't Warn You (2024)
2 votes -
Melting glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to redraw part of Alpine border
11 votes -
The 2024 European Tram Driver Championships
14 votes -
Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement
9 votes -
Archaeologist Cat Jarman, a Viking Age specialist, joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the Vikings
13 votes -
Linux 6.12 to include Real-Time, Sched_ext, Intel Xe2 and Raspberry Pi 5 support
15 votes -
TheFatRat - Unity 10th Anniversary Mixtape (2024)
7 votes -
Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 198-kilometer border it shares with Russia – move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland
17 votes -
Ukraine's ammo depot strikes - How complacency (and drones) destroyed Russian bases
13 votes -
Treva Silverman, joke whisperer
3 votes -
Jordan becomes the first country to eliminate leprosy
21 votes -
Dice Gambit | Official demo announcement trailer
5 votes