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j'adore le franglish content le code switching c'est tellement fun je sautille from a language to another like a gazelle et toi aussi tant que tu voudras :)

OUAIS baby we are so fucking back. franglais est parfait parce que americans get mad AND it sends evil psychic vibes à l’académie française. The phrase “qu’est-ce qu’y’all doing aujourd’hui�� came out of my mouth this evening and i think that might be the pinnacle of human language. i love being annoying

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dont take bird noises for granted

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i'm trying so hard to get these down in a way that's decipherable (before printing this sheet my writing was absolutely terrible)

tho, writing has been very wonderful for my ability to actually think of the kana in question in a clear and identifiable way phew

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"whoa there pal! looks like your favorite web service is getting hit with enshittification. you should try this NEW PLATFORM, that is only mildly alike in function, has no stable source of funding, and is being ran by some people in their home office as a hobby. this will be a long-term solution for you that you can build a community on, i promise!" <- sentiment i see a lot on here lately. like. lol

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If you use Duolingo, maybe don't anymore? The company is moving to be "AI-first" and is using AI to generate their content. Meaning, AI is now generating your language lessons.

They announced that they were going to use AI for this a while back but now they're annoucing that they're getting rid of the contractors reviewing the AI generated content. So, very soon Duolingo is just going to be AI generated slop that might not even be correct.

For alternatives, I'd recommend checking with your local library. For instance, mine offers Rosetta Stone for free if you have a library card.

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if anyone else learning norwegian is deleting duolingo because of their FUCKASS AI BULLSHIT! i have found a pretty great alternative which is free!

it's basically a spaced repetion flashcard dealy, except its got grammar explainations, real voices for pronounciation, and basically lets you pick whatever you want to look at. They also have a swedish one which i havent tried but i assume is equally as good. They also! Don't replace their contract workers with ai! crazy stuff there folks

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Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

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It's about whether they're headed to Tokyo - that's JR's home station.

Messes me up that they say "上り電車" (upbound train) to talk about trains going south and "下り電車" (downbound train) when going north here.

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Generative AI has destroyed academia.

In the next few decades we’re going to have thousands of people who don’t really know anything, and can’t do any critical thinking.

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As AI art gets harder to clock, I feel like we are going to need to have a discussion about attribution and it's probably going to bum some people out.

Because the surest way to avoid platforming, reblogging, or encouraging AI art posting is to know where every image you share originated and that's 1) boring, tedious research and 2) extremely limiting in what you feel you can reblog. But if unattributed images never gets traction, people will start attributing their images.

I've been guilty of this in the past, but for a while now it's been my policy that if I can't verify the origin, I don't share the image. That goes for stuff like screen grabs of headlines too -- more than once I've avoided spreading misinformation by saving a post to research before I reblog, then seeing the post refuted before I've been able to verify it.

And I usually try to attribute photos I take -- case in point, the "woman with shrimp" post gets a lot of attention but not one comment about it being AI, despite it being pretty similar to something you'd get from an AI. That's because I clearly state it's in a museum and link to its catalogue page.

I'm not saying this to scold anyone -- I think yelling at the Internet to cite its sources is very much a losing game -- but because I don't see this discussed much. We're such fertile ground to be fooled by AI art because we've grown accustomed to not questioning the origins of any given image. And of course I also want to encourage both OPs to attribute their images and rebloggers to verify unattributed ones.

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an important thing to remember about colonialism is that places that were colonized were not perfect utopia but often full of their own horrors and abuses

the other important thing to remember about colonialism that the above does not justify colonialism

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Remember when I told ya'll last month to be ready to start looking for a Discord alternative?

Yeah things aren't looking good for discord.

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On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.

On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.

And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.

Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?

Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting

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CDJapan truly is one of us.

https://x.com/CDJapan/status/1919753660596183174

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Probably some of the best advice I’ve gotten about watching stuff in a language you’re learning when you don’t know every single word and you’re stressing over it is to pretend like the video is on mute and still try to figure out what’s going on. Like focus on the meaning and not the words. Like when you’re sitting in a waiting room and there’s a kids cartoon on mute on the tv or something and you can sort of piece together what’s going on. Do that but with the volume on.

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irasutoya is kinda wild cause it maintains that cutesy artstyle for all of its clip art, even when the subject matter is like. really fucking dark, like

you have images of like, people severely injured from earthquakes, people dying from overwork, or even mental illness depicted with bandaged wrists

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“Beauvoir writes [that] a habit that is ‘thoroughly integrated’ into someone’s life ‘makes it richer, for habit has a kind of poetry.’ […] The poetry of habit is a kind of corporeal mindfulness. [Beauvoir] suggests that the habitual participation in certain rituals can allow for the repetition of a meaningful event whereby 'the present moment is the past brought to life again, the future anticipated, [both] experienced together.’ [For example], the habitual aspect of drinking tea each day at the same time, allows for a connection to the past [and] opens up a future that is not defined by projects and goals but simply by the continued possibility of a joy […].”

— Silvia Stoller, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age