Depends on the size of your fridge.

“I wasn’t asking if you want to eat one.”

We wasn’t exactly as nice about it as I was lead to believe a Canadian would be.

Break laws and move things.

You are acting like you deliberately want to be offended. Congratulations, you got what you came for.

Which makes my assertion correct.

Can you grow up in Wales never learning Welsh? Yes.

Can you grow up in Wales never learning English?

But the post also says

They’re disempowering themselves. Describe themselves as a victim of circumstance, powerless and without responsibility. It’s a disempowering narrative. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. In this story that we live, you are casting yourself as an npc.

And that part was what I was responding to. Because nothing in there is correct.

In which case “I can’t” is not giving up agency but instead taking agency in a way that’s harder to dispute.

When one says “I can’t” instead of “I won’t”, it’s not a “I don’t know how to” but a “I will not do that and I won’t let you talk me into doing it”.

“The little one has been awake all night, can you please take her so that I can get an hour of sleep?” - “I’m good. Thanks”

There’s a ton of precedence for this.

We have accepted that our clothes don’t fit, that our non-fitting shoes ruin our feet, that our furniture all looks the same and doesn’t fit into the spaces we have, that consulting by knowledgeable sales people was replaced by product listings that can’t even reliably tell you if a printer is monochrome or color.

Enshittification is nothing new. It’s something that has been going on for at least the last 70 years.

I mean, just compare the fabric of clothes from 20-30 years ago to new stuff. I still got some clothing from the early 2000s that holds up just fine, while the newer stuff just falls to pieces after a year or so. You can even see that in the marketing. If you look at clothes ads even of cheap brands from the 80s, they all advertise with long-lasting quality. Pretty much no brand does that anymore.

So yes, AI will just make customer support, marketing and software quality way worse and we will just accept that like we have done for the last 70 years.

I’m not argueing that it isn’t the national language. I just said that you could grow up in Wales never learning Welsh, because English is just as much (if not more) the language used in every-day dealings.

That said, the farthest north I have been was Merthyr Tydfil.

At least in the areas I have been in and the time that I lived there, Welsh was a language you had to actively seek out and not a language that was necessary to know if you lived there.

And that’s the point of the 3rd category: That’s the language you need to know to get around well in that country. If you go to the doctor’s, if you want to talk to your coworkers, if you want to make friends with the locals, which language do you need?

I’m from Vienna and it’s a similar thing with the Viennese dialect. While there is a limited revival happening, it’s mostly a cultural relic more than a necessity in every-day life. 70 years ago, if you didn’t speak Viennese you’d be an outcast. Now it’s rare that someone speaks it.

While I was in Wales I got myself Welsh language resources and actively sought out Welsh speakers to try to learn the language, but of all the people I met there, I only met two adults who could fluently speak Welsh. The kids learned it in school as a second language, but by and large the adults didn’t speak it.

I think now is a good time to get into malware AI plugins.

I lived in Wales for a year and I managed to learn some very basic Welsh myself. It’s been about 15 years now, but at least back then it was mainly old and very young people who spoke Welsh. Most people aged 20-60 didn’t speak Welsh at all, with the younger ones learning it at school.

But I guess with that generation being up to maybe 35 now, speaking Welsh is likely much more common than it was back then. So yeah, my chart above is likely outdated.

Not any more. It used to be, which is where the term comes from, but it hasn’t been for a long time.

Languages come in tiers. English is the global lingua franca. People use it to speak to anyone, no matter whether English native speaker or not. If someone from Norway wants to talk to someone from Japan, they’ll most likely use English since both of them likely speak it.

Then there’s regional lingua francas, languages like Spanish, Russian or Mandarin. These languages are popular in specific parts of the world and often used to get around there. Someone from Ukraine can speak to someone from Belarus using Russian.

Lastly, there’s local languages that are spoken only in a country (or even only a part of a country). People speak them because that’s what they were grown up with.

So in general, there’s 4 “language slots” of languages people speak:

• The global lingua franca
• The regional lingua franca
• The language of the country they live in
• The language they grew up with

One language can fill multiple slots.

So for example, if you grew up in Ukraine and moved to Germany, you might speak the following languages, according to the slots above:

• English
• Russian
• German
• Ukranian

If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:

• English
• English
• English
• Welsh

If you spent your life in the US, it would be like this:

• English
• English
• English
• English

This is the reason why people living in countries with lower-tier languages frequently speak 3-4 languages, while English native speakers really struggle to even learn the basics of one additional language. Because the former group has an actual use for more than one language, while the latter one don’t.

Infinite scroll amplifies the “I’m never going to find that again” problem. That’s the thing I hate most about it.

“It’s a tra…y”

In newer Star Wars (especially stuff like Andor), I agree. In old Star Wars (especially episode IV-VI), no. These movies are 100% black and white.

The most grey character that exists in there is Darth Vater who’s whole life of horrible atrocities was forgiven within 2 minutes because he betrayed space Hitler and was the Hero’s dad.

There’s not really anything on that account, tbh. I only ever used it a few times to talk to friends when playing minecraft.

2D printers are way more difficult than 3D printers. The only reason we didn’t have 3D printers in the 90s is Stratasys and their stranglehold patents. Hobby-level 3D printers only became a thing because the Stratasys patents expired.

Before that they were just able to ask for €70k for what’s essentially a cheap ABS FDM printer.