Just one uncomfortably sentient and angry automobile on a road trip through the fetaverse.

Profile pic credit: openclipart.org - user roland81 https://openclipart.org/detail/150787/comic-red-angry-car

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yup, the White Terror. I didn’t disagree with that.

    My point was that the KMT coming to Taiwan was a wave of migration of people who while very anti-PRC saw themselves as fundamentally Chinese and Mandarin-speaking as opposed to pre-1945 Han settlers who were Taiwanese-speaking and in many cases had been living in Taiwan for hundreds of years already.

    Today, those distinctions have softened, and polling shows that even the people who are descended from that wave of KMT migration mostly see themselves as Taiwanese first and foremost.


  • There’s a lot of layers there, Han people have been settling in Taiwan since the 17th century and this originally Taiwanese-speaking group makes up about 70% of people in Taiwan. They don’t consider China their homeland anymore than Americans do the UK.

    Han people who came with the fleeing KMT government are more directly tied to China, but even they have been largely Taiwan-ized politically since the democracy and identity movements of the 1980’s. Which is to say, very very few people in Taiwan see China as a homeland these days.



  • Tesla is only the second product we have ever reviewed to receive all of our privacy “dings.” (The first was an AI chatbot we reviewed earlier this year.) What set them apart was earning the “untrustworthy AI” ding. The brand’s AI-powered autopilot was reportedly involved in 17 deaths and 736 crashes and is currently the subject of multiple government investigations.

    How utterly unsurprising. Also,

    "Consent” is an illusion
    Many people have lifestyles that require driving. So unlike a smart faucet or voice assistant, you don’t have the same freedom to opt out of the whole thing and not drive a car.

    This is the kicker, many people need cars for unrelated reasons and the fact that ALL car brands abuse our data means there is no alternative.




  • This blog and the Wikipedia are good starting points. I don’t speak Japanese, but I do speak Chinese and have a background in linguistics so am peripherally aware of what’s going on so take that with as much salt as you need.

    It’s useful to note that there were multiple attempts to go the “Oops! All kana” route or use romaji, but for a variety of reasons cultural, political, and linguistic, those didn’t pan out. Writing systems are deeply informed by a specific historical and social context, and what at first seems like irregularity or unneeded complexity, are often actually the traces of that history marked on the language.

    As for issues like why katakana is used for non-foreign words too, I thinks it’s best to think of language feature less as strict rule followers and more like a species in its ecological niche. Katakana is very good at rendering foreign words in Japanese, but if it finds some unfilled gap that isn’t being better filled by some other feature people will use it to to fill that gap too. When the semicolon was developed in English no one imagined at the time we’d use it to do this ;-) but here we are.





  • I’ve been loving RSS for awhile now not only because it’s private but because it seems to be unpaywalled as well? Maybe someone can answer this, but how is it I can subscribe to the NYT RSS feed and can get completely free articles to my reader?

    PS shoutout to NetNewsWire on iOS which is open source and the developer seems like a great guy. It’s not great for discovery as you have to paste in the web url manually, but if you already know what you want to read it’s a great RSS reader app.