I am fascinated by how languages evolve parallel terms.

For example, Tamil and Malayalam both have the term "adikkiratha"/"adikkiya" which literally means "Do you hit" but coloquially means "Do you drink"?

(Parallel to take a hit/swig maybe?")

In Sinhalese you have "gahanwada"? Which also means "Will you hit?" and is coloquially used to mean "Do you drink?"

Now did these two uses evolve parallely? Or did Sinhalese borrow the term from a neighbouring language?

Or was it something else?

I'm curious and wish I knew how to answer the question 🙂

#Language

Looking at the new Instagram ML-generated accounts, all of them follow 17-18 other accounts — 6 are Meta properties (FB, Insta etc.) and the others are the other ML generated accounts.

One of them, curiously, follows a human (or at least, an account which is not labeled a bot)

Of the remaining bots, 8 are more or less female (one is a fairy) and 4 are male (one is an alien and another a robot — a robot bot 😛).

Five of these could be black, and two might be Asian.

So that's the breakdown as it stands now.

I'm still confused as to what this is in aid of though ...

#Instaverse
Screenshot showing all the acco…

I don't understand the point of Instagram populating their "universe" with generated people.

Are they saying that there aren't enough real people on Instagram?

Or that they want more diversity and so will create fake people to diversify?

What is the point?

#Tech #Dystopia

@londondreamtime I think even without AI, this is probably a thing with the advent of print-on-demand.

I published my first book 20 years ago via print on demand but never got a printed copy (I did proof it before submitting though) since I'd have to pay quite a bit more than the cover price to get it down to Sri Lanka, where I was then.

So if there were issues with the print version, I never knew of them since I'd never even seen the printed book.

I'm a sucker for love stories — especially if they're offbeat, or improbable. Here are the most improbable ones I've seen recently:

Miss You - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32553846
Hi Nanna - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt25433734
Super Machi - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11603828

Interestingly (or not 😛) each one is from a different year from the past three years.

#Movies #Tamil #Telugu

New year, new server, new #introduction !

I've become a #cinephile over the past 5 or 10 years, so I mostly talk about #movies here. I started a #MovieReview blog about two years ago (link in profile), covering new releases (no spoilers).

I'm also a #PhysicalMedia collector, both movies and #music (mostly #rock / #metal ).

Outside that, I'm a professional #programmer living in the Northeastern US. I spend a bunch of time on the #pickleball court. And I love (and collect) #BoardGames

Hello!

Hey!

I am looking for work again. So if you are Germany based and looking for an awesome machine learning, data scientist, statistician, software human I want to talk to you!

#fedihired #getfedihired

@AngelaPreston I'm mostly kidding since I've seen some people get reallly, really adamant about *any* use of ML 😛

But yes, I do find that I write faster when I don't have to do the actual typing ... mostly because I'm very, very lazy 😀

On the other hand, I do have to wonder how this will work practically ... For normal emails and even a novel, I guess it would work OK. But if you were writing something technical where you had diagrams or blocks of code, how much switching would you have to do between dictation and switching over to the keyboard?

If I used an ML-based (Machine Learning, I refuse to call it AI since there is no intelligence there) dictation app to write my novel, would I be accused of writing an AI-generated novel? 😛

#Musings #TechVsCreativity

I have less than a month to leave the USA. It is more important than ever that I get a job ASAP.

If you or anyone you know is hiring for: IT support, Technical writing, or Psychiatric care in the Toronto,ON area.

Please contact me for a resume and portfolio of my writing or forward this message along:

Email relay:
2y3ujkeh7@mozmail.com

If nothing else please spread this around, it's free and could save my life. Thank you.

#jobs #it #technicalwriting #mutualaid #trans

Did a quick digital painting last night to serve as the icon for the reference image app that I'm building. Not happy with the image (and it needs work) but putting it up since this is the first digital art I've done in a while ...

Won't work as icon either 😛

#DigitalArt #Painting
A digital painting of a multi-c…

There are a lot of wonderful artists online and I'm inspired by just looking at their work. I also look at these images to learn from them.

I wanted an easier way to collect and look at the images I liked and so yesterday, I created a new app for that 🙂

Now I'm inspired to start doing some art again!

#Coding #Flutter #Art
A screenshot of a macOS applica…

Didn't get any writing (at least the text kind) done today ...

Started out wanting to do a couple of minor changes to the Bluesky client app and then to get to writing, but instead, spent the whole day adding list functionality to the client. It works. But no writing 🙁

#Coding #Writing #YakShaving

I like amnesia stories 🙂 "Miss You" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32553846) was interesting not just because of the amnesia aspect but also because of the way the story unfolds.

What you think happened/is happening is not always the case. I liked the layering.

#Movies #Tamil #Kollywood

30+ years ago, I used to do Freeware because I enjoyed building stuff that others found useful. (I also met my wife because of that 🙂)

Today, I think most people won't download it because it's free. Or, they'll wonder if I'm stealing their data or training AI with it 😛

#Coding #Freeware #Musings

Exciting news! Trip Tunes was named App of the Year by What the Tech! 🎉

Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded, shared, and supported the app.

To celebrate—and to help with your New Year’s travel—I'm running a 2X tapes sale. Perfect time to relive the mixtape magic! 🎵🛣️

Check out the broadcast: wbbjtv.com/2024/12/26/what-the-tech-app-of-the-year-trip-tunes

@jkirkendall As @AngelaPreston mentioned, the wife and I love playing games together 🙂 For us, the gaming rig of choice has been the PlayStation .. mostly because of games like the "Horizon" series, or "Uncharted".

Unfortunately, though both of them involve shooting and killing though in the case of "Horizon", it's robot animals. We don't really enjoy the killing/fighting games but we did like those two because of the really well done stories.

If you leave out fighting games, it becomes harder to find two player games. I think "Unravel" was already mentioned and that was fun 🙂

But one thing which has made things a lot more fun for us on PlayStation has been the co-pilot feature ... though that might not be what it's called on PlayStation (or other platforms since I believe XBox has this too ..) Basically, you can play any single player game with two controllers and can take over from each other as you need.

Since this is a built-in feature (you do have to enable it in the PlayStation settings) this means that you can play any single-player game together 🙂

This feature did open up a lot more games for us to play together and one of the ones that we've enjoyed playing together this way has been "No Man's Sky", which is a space exploration game where you explore a vast universe.

Also, this site is always useful in finding good co-op games for the platform and genre of your choice:
https://www.co-optimus.com/

@SRLevine

@davemark Would it be cheating to suggest my own book? 🙂

It's humorous science fiction, and is under 500 pages. I think it's a great read, but I might be biased 😀

@zombiewarrior I loved it when it came out 🙂 Or maybe I'm thinking of the later TV series? It was so long ago ...

I personally think that Neill Blomkamp did the concept better in "District 9".

When you say SciFi, people might think rayguns and aliens. For humorous SciFi though, I don't know if they'd have a clear idea.

To me, it's Reagan and aliens — not the crossing borders without visas kind, but the extraterrestrial kind 😛 How would Ronald have reacted to aliens?

#Writing #Humour #ScienceFiction