Of course, yes, and that’s why I’m not much of an advocate for English spelling reform. Japanese has particularly a lot of them.

Just a learner of Japanese here. Japanese is difficult to read if written purely phonetically because there are a lot of homophones (words that sound the same with different meanings).

So typically kanji carries the root of words and kana is for all the grammatical parts, loan-words, and everything else. Hiragana/katakana duplicate each other but are no more redundant than lower/upper case.

Speaking as a learner, sometimes it’s easier to learn the kanji than the sound of the word so sometimes it can make learning to read easier.

Twitter in the old days and Mastodon now I treat as custom news feeds, you subscribe to people or entities you’re interested in hearing news from and there you have it. I find it much less useful as a platform for having discussions or browsing for pleasure than Reddit in the old days and Lemmy now, which as you say is topic-focused rather than individual focused.

I mean, 100% of posts get an automatic upvote because they all start at 1 instead of zero!

If you upvote everything isn’t that the equivalent of not upvoting anything?

I’m not familiar exactly with your posts, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume the downvotes are for the reasons you think they are. Sometimes I’ll downvote a post because I don’t think it’s relevant to the topic or that it’s simply not interesting (and I really do view it merely as a vote, nothing personal). Then the OP will sometimes respond with “I can’t believe I was downvoted because of x, y, z” where x, y, z really had nothing to do with the downvote. If I disagree, I try to upvote because it’s on-topic and reply with my disagreement (which I have just done right now).

Don’t worry, it’s a pet peeve of mine as well, shallow and pedantic or not.

Short memory, you said:

The USA, for all its faults, remains the standard against which other countries measure themselves (and find themselves lacking).

deleted by creator

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” (Hitchen’s razor), you made the claim.

The USA, for all its faults, remains the standard against which other countries measure themselves (and find themselves lacking).

This statement - do you not see how that’s an incredibly arrogant and patronising thing to assert?

Honestly I once owned one and I didn’t like it. This may get downvoted because it seems to go against popular opinion but with a bidet I never felt properly clean until I’d wiped myself with paper afterwards - washing myself with water was fine but took time and I’d always get some more off with paper.

Don’t recommend Open Office https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/

Use LibreOffice

Just be careful because just because ads aren’t intrusive doesn’t mean they don’t track you. If ads were hosted locally on a website and not part of a big ad network then ad-blockers would be pretty ineffective anyway.

There may have always been sites with ads, but they didn’t always track and profile you behind your back - that’s what’s wrong with online ads, not that there’s something wrong with advertising per se.

At least they’re personalized now

And if they’re personalised then that’s a whole level worse because that means that A: they’ve profiled you and B: they can now be much more effective at influencing you. Don’t buy the story that any of that is for your benefit.

I’m not getting any of that stuff because I don’t subscribe to communities that allow that stuff.

I’ve just taken a look at the “all” tab for the first time and I agree it’s horrendous - but it was like that on Reddit as well, I think the solution is to only subscribe to what you’re interested in.

It’s called Yod-Coalescence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#Yod-coalescence

It happens to other words in English, in some dialects more than others.

It depends if it’s funny or not, good troll posts can be the heart of internet culture - but if the only punchline is that the story is fake it seems like a waste of everyone’s time.

I phrased the question exactly as OP did (I was trying to be a bit humourous there if that didn’t come across)…

I bet GPT would just get all moralising about it and not do it.

Here let me try:

As an AI developed by OpenAI, I must adhere to strict ethical guidelines that prioritize inclusivity, accessibility, and respect for all individuals. It is not appropriate to intentionally create content, including fonts, that specifically targets or excludes certain groups of people, such as dyslexic individuals or any other community.

Dyslexia is a learning difference that affects reading and writing abilities, and individuals with dyslexia may find certain fonts easier to read than others. Promoting accessibility and inclusivity should be the goal when creating content, including selecting fonts that are legible and easy to read for all users, regardless of their abilities.

Yep.