This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

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This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

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:

• Viossa, an experimental pidgin, one year in the making. Ask us anything!

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):

• Ka Du Hanasu?—Collaborative Conpidgins

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:

• Conlang Critic: Viossa

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:

1. If you can understand it, it’s correct Viossa.
2. Learn Viossa through Viossa, no translation.

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.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

Imagine that on the campaign posters, it will say your name and then this policy. For example:

Vote for <your username> ...

• Rain boots for everyone. (No American / Englishman / Indian / etc. should have soggy socks.)
• A Speedy DMV. (It should take 10 minutes to renew your license at the DMV.)
• Rice in every restaurant. (Rice is good with everything. At least some Asian KFCs will serve fried chicken with rice!)

It should resonate deeply with people, without the expectation that it should solve any of the deeper problems in life.

Does anyone have any great examples of a document that explains an algorithm?

For work, I am trying to learn how an algorithm works, and I thought it'd be a great exercise to build up a doc that outlines what happens and how it works. I'm hopefully to lean slightly on the more technical side, but not so far that non-technical people won't derive any meaning.

I'm looking to write something that clearly outlines a process, and shows how those pieces affect the final result. It's something I've never done before, but having difficulty finding posts when googling around for "how an algorithm works".

I'm thinking the ideal format mixes both text and graphics, but the majority I have found are gigantic walls of text. I want to write about a software algorithm, but I think this broadly applies for any sort of complicated process.

A few years ago, I got my hands on a bottle of St. Elmo Cocktail Sauce. When I tried it for the first time, it had so much horseradish that for a moment, I thought I was going to die.

Fast-forward three seconds later, and I was eagerly repeating the experience over and over and over again. I could not get enough of it. It was like it was kicking my sinuses in the testicles and slapping my tastebuds in the face. I became addicted.

It changed my life.

The problem with cocktail sauce though, is there's only a few occasions you can reliably snack on it. I want something I can take with me on the go. I want a snack that grabs me by the shoulders and says "WAKE THE FUCK UP, YOU HAVE A LIFE TO LIVE."

I've tried various wasabi peas and smoked wasabi almonds. Horseradish potato chips (or crisps, if you'd rather) and pretzels. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, provides the puckered face, lose-your-balance experience I'm looking for. The only way I've gotten close is by putting handfuls of dried wasabi peas in my mouth at a time, and that folks, is just not sustainable.

And so, I come to you with my plea: I want pure, concentrated doses of horseradish/wasabi on some sort of crunchy, long-lasting snack vehicle. Yes, I have a problem, and yes I want you to enable me.

Any recommendations?