no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am

Recommend genki if you’re good with a book

If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.

That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong

In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently

It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that (bolding wa/は)

それらはわたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?

Should be

それらわたしのあかいコートはですか

(sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool

But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above

Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko

But again when you get this wrong duolingo will just say “you got it wrong, here’s what it should have been.” To be fair a book has the same limitation, it’s just with an app, especially a mature well funded app like duolingo they have the opportunity to easily be like you got it wrong and here’s why! And that would accelerate learning by quite a bit, at least theoretically

Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb

And yet feeding it Japanese it usually gives the worst outcomes even if you do this and deepL gives much better ones even if you don’t. I don’t know what magic deepL does to make that happen but when I scanlate manga deepL almost always gives the best result even when I do what you’re doing or feed ChatGPT the images directly

I never know what to tell people like you. DeepL is the best one at translating Japanese and it still is mixed

Japanese is a contextual language. It is difficult for machines to translate because it is not a language where a word simply means this or that.

Take a very short sentence:

がくせいです - gakusei desu

Gakusei is “student”

A literal translation of this would be “am student” or “is student”

But if I say this to you you will infer things based on context and です/desu takes on a different role. If I am clearly referring to myself then gakusei desu in this context becomes “I’m a student” (though to be fair I would probably have said it with a first person pronoun and particle like わたしはわ (watashi wa)

But if I’m referring to another singular person in the room this would be inferred through context, eg “he’s a student.” But this is where it starts getting confusing, the copula (desu) doesn’t differentiate singular or plural, so context is also used to derive plural forms, eg “they are students”.

This copula also applies to other situations outside of he/she like “it” eg コンビニです, konbini desu, konbini being “convenience store”, “its a convenience store”

This is a very very basic idea of why. It gets more complex obviously once you move past these extremely basic examples but honestly someone more knowledgeable at Japanese should explain at that point, I’m self taught and mediocre (thus my use of 0 kanji, I’m pretty sure at a minimum there’s kanji for gakusei and watashi but I suuuuck at kanji. I at least know meat. 肉肉肉 although that’s mostly thanks to anime and the local Asian grocer lmao).

I think AI can probably do it eventually but it will need to be able to do much better job of understanding what the source material is actually talking about and that’s the challenge to overcome. And that’s why it will probably never be able to really accurately translate a paragraph copy pasted into it

As to the sanitation that’s a separate issue about corporate control of AI. If they don’t want their translation services to sound “vulgar” that’s their prerogative I suppose but it also means they sound less human and realistic because people are gross and ugly when they speak. Vernacular is ugly and lexicon adapts quickly in ways that people don’t always love. But to be clear I don’t mean it’s just about slurs and bad words, I mean it’s about slang in general. Words that are generally inoffensive but not considered proper. English equivalents would be what we consider zoomer speak, hella sus yeah bruh type shit (I’m not good at this part)

Oh shit this is great, thanks

I don’t even care about flirting with women I just want a free app where I can practice speaking my second language with actual people and not some sanitized AI that doesn’t understand context or slang instead of watching cringe youtubers

Like Duolingo/genki or google translate doesn’t really capture おっす. Duolingo probably doesn’t bother with that kind of informal speech. Google just translates it as “hey”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even deepl just translates it as yo!, which is much closer but still kind of not really it. It’s more like a sup brah kind of thing. Like a really masculine youthful colloquial greeting I guess is the best way to explain it.

But not discord, fuck discord

Anon wants to play as Micah

These actually had distinction:

Defectives was generally the term prior to like 1845, which is when Howe published “on the causes of idiocy”. That led to more classification

Idiot was what we could call severe intellectual disability. Requiring 24 hour care but some muscular control, cognitive, and speech capabilities. Use was phased out in the late 19th century because it had become pejorative

Fool was a subcategory of idiot with more significant impairment of reasoning and speech skills. This became pejorative and was phased out.

Simpleton was moderate intellectual disability. Some degree of functioning, capacity for speech, motor and reasoning skills, but required assistance with tasks. This also become pejorative and was phased out (see a pattern). This was replaced with several terms, including feeble minded, imbecile, and moron, which were also in turn phased out.

at one point in the 19th century there was a distinction when symptoms of dementia set in. If you got what we would now call early onset dementia, it was called “amentia”. By the early 20th century “ament” was kind of a catch all for “idiots, imbeciles, and feeble minded”

There was also “cretin” which was originally supposed to be a kindness for all intellectually disabled people as it means “Christian” in French or something, but it also became pejorative

Another super racist one was mongoloid/mongolism which was specifically for Down’s syndrome. This is because, no joke, John Down thought people with down syndrome looked like Mongolians. His reward for his racism was the condition bears his name forever, apparently. This was only changed because Mongolia had to petition the WHO to change it because it was offensive

Imo instead of policing language we should maybe recognize that the intentionality behind the use of these terms is what the problem is.

Saying the word “retarded” does not have to be inherently offensive. Describing something that is slowed or hindered as retarded is accurate. Using retarded as a pejorative term makes you a dick, sure. But if I go through all the effort to change “retarded” to “intellectually disabled” guess what happens? The same thing that has happened for the past 175+ years. The people who have used the terms in the pejorative sense will quickly adapt, making your efforts to police language pointless unless you intended to enrich their lexicon.

If you consider actions that could actually be meaningful for the individual it would be something that would address the harm caused by pejorative use. That’s a challenging road to go down (imagine criminal penalties: middle schools would be ghost towns!). we want to feel like we do something though so we instead do this, which is pointless.

That said if the disorder was named by an old racist based on his racism then by all means change it up but maybe don’t memorialize him when you do it. That doesn’t come up as much anymore, thankfully

This honestly makes so much more sense from an environmental standpoint. Why waste so much in terms of resources shipping hundreds of millions of pounds of sugar water every month so picky babies that refuse to drink water will pump more money into the coca cola empire so they can get type 2 diabetes as fast as possible. Instead just ship this little cup thing at 1/18th the weight and save so much gasoline, road wear and tear, etc.

Who am I kidding, they’ll just put this into plastic bottled water that’s been shipped from 3 states over

This is simply not true

Modern meat is generally pretty safe and chicken tartare is definitely a thing. Is it something you should do if you are immunocompromised, a child, or elderly? Probably not. Is it something you should do if you are unsure of how the meat was handled? Probably not

But if you buy quality chicken from a trusted butcher, freeze the surface, blanch it for a few seconds, you can pretty safely eat it raw assuming you’ve done a good job keeping your surfaces and hands clean. You could probably do it with grocery store chicken tbh but the risks are much greater because you have no clue if the $12/hr kid packing chicken breasts properly washed their hands (handling is overwhelmingly where foodborne illness is going to come from in this scenario)

Is it going to be safe 100% of the time? No, of course not. But neither is eating medium rare steak, or eggs with runny yolks. But could you do this every day for a year with issue? Probably.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily consider this the same over the next 4 years of american deregulation

Raw chicken is kind of like scallops btw

They actually called it internet 2.0 back then

Dependent on hardware that allows for such things. I think/hope you are right and that demand for such things will continue to enable their presence for at least some time but I fear the eventual end of things is hardware that is completely unable to be customized, repaired, or modified in any meaningful way. iphones for everyone.

The tech moguls are cozying to trump hard and that’s not for nothing. They’re going to get something in return.

I hope you’re right though

Rockstar are scumbags

Never drop prices, their sales are minimal unless the game is ancient, and they do digital only now

Plus the whole “remaster a game by turning up the resolution and frame rate then charging you 50 dollars” nonsense. In my day we called that a “settings menu option”

fair point

Is this gonna turn out to be trumps version of the Iran hostage crisis sabotage

One guy I knew had a picture of himself giving finger guns as his background and whenever he unlocked his phone he would smirk at it like “oh you”

It wasn’t his lock screen either, just the home screen, so he knew it looked sketch

Yeah absolutely, and any bugs that are found are permanently gonna be there, stuff like that. It sucks. Thus the “I probably wouldn’t bother either”. But if you’re really passionate about it I say go for it, just cover your tracks really well, only work with people you trust implicitly, and don’t popularize the project until you’re ready to be done with it. The moment it gets hyped and picked up by ign/kotaku/etc you’re done.

I think you can still get the word out to get other modders though. These things don’t seem to get squashed at the planning stage, otherwise publishers would be spending tons of resources going after people who have maybe done no actual work. It seems like what happened with this mod, when they make socials and release ongoing updates, screenshots, videos, etc, of their work, that’s what gets people hyped and all the attention (and eventual hammer) on them

Of course this means you get no credit for your work, which sucks. If you’re undertaking such a massive effort and getting 0 credit I could understand why you wouldn’t bother (although it’s kind of badass to do it for no clout)

Use the torrent (but use a vpn as Nintendo is pretty notorious for sending love notes to your isp)

Edit also fwiw just tried the zip, on mobile atm but def works? Download completed, extracted, files are correct. Can’t run it bc I’m on mobile but it’s correct

Of course they can and they did, that game was originally distributed via itch and Nintendo dmcad it within like 12 hours of release. But enough people downloaded it that links and torrents are still active and likely will be for years, is the point. Even if they get that archive link (a bit shocking they haven’t in 2 years, Nintendo is getting weak), the torrent will live on and it’s also uploaded many other places

The dot com bubble was this crazy time where for a brief period a generation didn’t know about this thing that the generation after them was increasingly and rapidly interested in.

So like people use the whole “Wild West” metaphor and it’s really apt. Conglomeration was happening in the 90s with the rise of walmart, home depot, etc and it was becoming clear that opening a retail store was a dying business because the “big guys” were destroying towns. Like it was only a matter of time before a walmart came to your town and shuttered main street

But the internet was different. All these established entrenched companies didn’t care about it, yet. So you could make bank with basic ideas. Like oh, clearchannel owns 70% (now like 95%) of the radio stations in the us. Trying to start anything in that space is foolish, plus there’s all these regulations. But internet radio? Boom, millionaire. Petco and petsmart are rising and putting pet stores out of business. But pets.com? Had prominent national advertising including a float in the macys thanksgiving day parade, a Super Bowl ad, and was listed in nasdaq. Boom, millionaires. Busted after 2 years and now redirects to petsmart tho

Some of them stuck around. Like banking was obviously entrenched with old money but then a couple of rich kids were like what if we use daddies money to do internet banking? Then x.com and PayPal started and now we have elon musk and peter thiels reign of terror

AI seems to have some similarities in that there’s the whole “what if we apply AI to x” thing and VC dummies throw cash at it but it’s not as broad so the bubbles not as big and frankly it’s not as definitively revolutionary. The internet was clearly a game changer. Like anyone with half a brain who used it saw the potential early on; it was a new modality for communication with an unprecedented speed and dearth of information. And after it had matured a few years people started to see how fast it was progressing, especially via stuff like games. We went from doom to quake to final fantasy 8 and everquest in the span of the 90s and anyone paying even a lick of attention saw the potential for things like facetime, netflix, youtube, etc eventually.

But with AI it’s harder to picture. There’s the narrative that it will eventually do stuff and it can do impressive things but for the most part most people’s experience with it is that it’s like having a mediocre employee. Their work is okay but you have to constantly check it because they always make stupid mistakes. They tell you they’ll learn to stop doing that but it’s been several years now and they keep doing it. Just like teslas will self drive in 2018, chatgpt will reach agi any day now, maybe, or maybe it’s an illusion and it’s really just a bunch of if>then statements that are constantly trying to fix themselves but messing up others in the process.

Sure but the project gets completed and released onto the internet. If it’s not of note then it probably won’t get noticed and deleted. If it is then it will probably get covered by publications like this, downloaded a ton, and archived before removal.

Like that links awakening windows port that one dude released. Just showed up and dropped it anonymously, feature complete with widescreen, 120fps, crazy map view upgrades, and dipped. Nintendo nuked it within the day but you can easily still find it for download

Like I just googled it and within 30 seconds found https://archive.org/details/links-awakening-dx-hd