me: computer, please read this text file and count how many times each letter appears as the first letter in a word
computer: no problem. like five lines of python and a few seconds to execute on huge documents.
me: computer, please do the same thing but split the words into syllables and count the letters at the beginning of those instead
computer: I'll need several hundred megabytes of language-specific database files and machine learning models, and the process will get OOM'd by the kernel before it outputs anything
#linguistics
several internet friends were passing through Amsterdam so I walked Odin to the station to meet them. There were charity solicitors working the plaza and Odin kept upstaging them and drawing the attention of the people they were talking to, sorry about that Doctors Without Borders #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon #amsterdam
one of my friends took this picture of me with my tiny baby boy 💖
💖💖
#dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon
several internet friends were passing through Amsterdam so I walked Odin to the station to meet them. There were charity solicitors working the plaza and Odin kept upstaging them and drawing the attention of the people they were talking to, sorry about that Doctors Without Borders #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon #amsterdam
my husband sent me photos of Odin having a Random Encounter #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon
day #5905 of attempting to solve the Voynich Manuscript: Odin has licked my notes, smearing the ink. this will set me back hours at least.
I know exactly how many days I've been cursed by the Voynich because it began the day that Randall Munroe posted an xkcd about the Voynich
day #5905 of attempting to solve the Voynich Manuscript: Odin has licked my notes, smearing the ink. this will set me back hours at least.
Thinking about how “a face made for podcasts” is not quite the same insult as “a face made for radio”
the recent burst of companies flagrantly disregarding robots.txt are eating their seed corn — the entire point is that as long as everyone shows some basic manners to other internet hosts, there’s no need for some international regulatory body to get involved and make everyday matters difficult and expensive for everyone https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/ai-site-perplexity-uses-stealth-tactics-to-flout-no-crawl-edicts-cloudflare-says/
one time I was on vacation and a Microsoft employee contacted me personally with an emergency request to get ahold of my coworkers and tell them to knock off whatever they were doing because it was overwhelming a certain chunk of Microsoft infrastructure.
This has always been how the internet has stayed online — direct interpersonal manners and the understanding that being a “you can’t MAKE me show restraint” dick about it will have dire long term consequences for everyone. The AI upstarts who think they’re too special to show manners to their peers are fucking up the common good for everyone.
the recent burst of companies flagrantly disregarding robots.txt are eating their seed corn — the entire point is that as long as everyone shows some basic manners to other internet hosts, there’s no need for some international regulatory body to get involved and make everyday matters difficult and expensive for everyone https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/ai-site-perplexity-uses-stealth-tactics-to-flout-no-crawl-edicts-cloudflare-says/
this might be the singly most unhinged language family map #linguistics
abadidea