Aceticon

That said, I also picked up “y’all” from a friend in college, so it’s a mixed bag.

When I went to live in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) as an immigrant from Portugal I actually picked up the version of the Dutch "good morning" ("goedemorgen") from the south of the country even though I was living in Amsterdam (totally opposite side of the country) because some colleagues in the first company I worked in and were I started to learn Dutch, said it like that (it was pretty much the first Dutch word I learned).

After a while there learning the language and Dutch customs I eventually figured out I was saying good morning with basically a farmer accent from the south, by I just kept doing if for fun plus by then I abused the shit out of what I called the "foreigner excuse" (you can have tons of fun knowingly humouristically "misunderstanding" local expressions and "misusing" their language and if the joke falls flat get away with it because the locals hear your accent and think "just a foreigner, doesn't know our language well").

It's not just "usage without discernment", it's that AI flattens some costs which are very obvious and very measurable (coding) in such a way that it introduces or amplifies other costs which are much more diffused and hard to measure (code and design reviewing, bug fixing, maintenance, adding new requirements), plus AI is totally incapable of doing the higher level tasks that shape what code needs to be done (technical analysis, requirements analysis and in bigger companies technical architecture).

People who are non-experts, aren't really senior domain experts or have some kinds of unbalanced expertise (they've never really progressed beyond being a coder, or they don't have full life-cycle experience with big projects or they're in an industry or position where they just make the code, shove it out the door and it's not their problem anymore) just look at the one thing they in their ignorance think is THE cost in programming - coding - and go "hey, this AI thing is amazing" even while AI is creating all sorts of much more time consuming problems which they don't really understand formally (they think those things are just "bad luck", "there's nothing we can do about avoiding this" and "it's just the way things are in programming") that require the time of people with higher expertise levels (i.e. who are more costly) to solve and AI doesn't even help with the kind of stuff which if done wrongly or not at all can condemn a software project to fail before it even starts like just half-way decent Technical and Requirements Analysis.

That's why you get some programmers going "this AI shit is amazing" whilst the really senior software development types are just nodding their heads and thinking "these people are ignorant as fuck juniors".

I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.

That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don't speak the language can't really spot accents unless they're at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can't really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be "English" accent, "Scottish" accent and "Irish" accent).

You're kidding, but the "posh" accent of the British upper classes is to a greater or lesser extent trained rather than merely acquired when one is learning the language as a child.

Also people with regional accents often actively make an effort to change their accent to RP (aka the BBC accent) when they move to places like London, though I supposed that's pretty common the World over when people whose regional accents are from places deemed "provincial" move to the big cities in more prosperous regions.

Oh, and immigrants, I almost forgot immigrants: many people with foreign accents do make a lot of effort to speak the local language with the local accent. In fact, for many immigrants in Britain this joke is pretty close to reality.

So there's actually a drop of truth in the joke.

The country of the Great Firewall actually making free and open computing possible in the World at a time were most supposed Democracies are closing it all down claiming it's "for the sake of the children" or "to protect us from Terrorism" or some other thin self-serving excuse for expanding civil society surveillance, would truly be the ultimate role-reversal.

If the Future of free and open computing ends up being Chinese, it's gonna be hilarious.

Also the too few fingers per hand.

People (I suspect most if not all Americans) are unironically cheering for an automated version of what the Stasi did.

Basically the kind of manpower-heavy surveillance like the Stasi did has been done for a long time, but the full automation of it as done in countries like the US and UK has only been possible for about 4 decades for text (and for just keeping track of who people made voice calls to, but noy the contents of them) and maybe 2 decades for voice contents.

You need digitalization so that all communications are digital and computers to properly automate the tracking of people's communications and voice-to-text software to convert voice information into text so that the automation also works on the contents of voice comms.

Mind you, what's being done in the US and UK (and Russia, and China - it's just that the US and UK were supposed to be Democracies) is the same as the Stasi did in East Germany, just automated and with no need to place eavesdropping devices to eavesdrop on conversations not over communications devices, as people nowadays carry their own personal eavesdropping device with a microphone, camera, full networking and fully controlled American software in it - the smarthphone - so it can just be remotelly ordered to record and conversations and images in its range.

I suspect a lot of the influence of Israel and the US on European politicians who again and again act against the European Public Opinon and in favor of Israel and the US, is the ton of blackmail material those two states have gathered on politicians the world over in the modern era of digital communications mainly via American systems, using portable networked pocket computers running OSes from American companies and which have everything needed to be a fully-features surveillance device, including a camera.

Every single vaguelly criminal or even just shameful action of any European politician with a chance of reaching a position of power, done via or around a smartphone or computer running an American OS and/or using American chat software, is almost certainly stored in a database somewhere.

Certainly that would explain A LOT of what's going on in European Politics, especially when it comes to Israel turning full-on NAZI whilst European governments mainly just make believe nothing is happening or propose purely symbolic performative measures with zero effectiveness in stopping the Genocide.

The current Economic structure is designed so that the thing that makes the most Money is having Money and tilted so that the more the Money the bigger the effect.

This is why, for example, many if not most countries have higher taxes on income from work than on income from dividends.

It's not by chance that Social Mobility has collapsed to pretty much non-existence in most of the World, especially the US (were the saying "You can be anything" actually used to be true, but not anymore, not even close) - the Economy is so extremelly rigged for Money to make Money that the dumbest, laziest, most inept rich kid will keep on getting richer their whole lives no matter how much they fuck up.

Good, good - keep going, Mark.