Notices by Amir E. Aharoni (aharoni@wikis.world)

I want to tell you about an unsung hero of @wikipedia software localization: @mcdutchie, one of the most epically prolific translators on translatewiki. He translates to Dutch and to Interlingua, making Interlingua one of the very few languages that are almost always close to 100% localization of @mediawiki core and extensions. This is especially amazing given the fact there is no machine translation into Interlingua, which probably means that he types everything by hand.

(And yes, I know that saying that someone is both "epic" and "unsung" is a bit of an etymological fallacy. What I mean is that he's epic to the people who follow the inner workings of translatewiki.net, but unsung to the rest of the world. This little post is trying to fix it.)

@evan OK... I wasn't familiar with this term. That's a very, very big if. It's an oversimplification, and it's somewhere on the spectrum between useless and harmful. So yes, I guess you could say I'm not a fan of this term. Not necessarily because it's not true; *in some ways* it is true. But I'm mostly not a fan because the actual reality of the number of states on that land cannot be usefully described in one microblogging post.

@evan That's not what I said, and I'm not even sure what "one state reality" means. It's not a term I remember seeing.

@evan Of course it isn't.

There was something very similar to a civil war in Gaza in 2007, and it's not remembered much.

The expressions of the Duolingo characters' happiness about my correct answers are somewhat incongruous with the exercises' content.

I've been listening to Daily Show as a podcast since 2018 (I had neither the time nor the equipment to watch it on an actual TV).

I struggled through the year without a permanent host, listened to all the episodes with the temporary ones, and even enjoyed many of them.

I unsubscribed in the middle of the first new Jon Stewart episode.

I don't have any deep commentary about this. He was just not funny.

Unsubscribed from 99% Invisible after about 8 years. It's not just the Robert Moses stuff, which was too long, but not too awful by itself. It's just that everything there became tired.

Also, the ads became too awful. I can skip them, but juat knowing that they are there makes me cringe.

I pay for a few podcasts, and I'd pay for this one to be how it was in 2019 or at least 2021. AFAIK, it's not an option.

Unsubscribed from Vox's Today Explained podcast after about 6 years. I enjoyed it as one of my main news sources, but then they called someone who writes for Electronic Intifada "a journalist". It is legitimate to agree with that website; it is not legitimate to call it "journalism".

Annual reminder that the holiday celebrated more or less today is commonly called "Lunar New Year" in the U.S. and in some other English-speaking countries, but actually it's the New Year in the culture of China and some other East Asian countries. English Wikipedia correctly says that are lots of Lunar New Years in different seasons—Jewish, Muslim, Indian, Native American, etc.

I am indifferent to pretty much all holidays, but I wish happiness to all who celebrate.

@evan That's certainly one example (relevant, but one sided). The comparison of Benny Gantz to Joe Manchin is another (if anyone really insists on comparing Gantz to an American politician, maybe I'd suggest Mr. Biden, but even that is *far* from perfect). Talking a lot about Israel-U.S. connections (which are true) and not mentioning Palestine-Russia connections (which really shouldn't be ignored). And so much more, not just in this in this interview, but in everything he writes.

For people reading English mainstream media about Palestine and Israel issues... I'd like to say that a lot of it is actually OK! I'm mostly for mainstream media, and you should be, too.

But then there's Thomas Friedman, who is, like, the heart of the mainstream and who is taken seriously by lots of people for reasons I can't comprehend. Some of the things he says are sensible and some are mind-blowing malarkey. If you don't live in the Middle East, telling the two apart is probably too hard.

@sslaia that, and even more. Russian school students learn about six: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. In advanced linguistics, even more than six are identified, but there's no consensus on how to call them (vocative, partitive, etc.)

@clacke except Japanese is ACTUALLY not related to anything :)

(Explanation, just in case you need it: Latin is an Indo-European language, and so is Russian, which already makes them related. So is English, but Russian preserves ancient Indo-European features, such as noun cases, much more than English does, and in that regard, it's even more similar to Latin. So it's not remote at all.)

I actually love Poland A LOT, but you know, people sometimes say that Jews should "leave Palestine and go back to Poland", and events like this are just *one* of the reasons why Jews are not enthusiastic about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFAmS5JRORU

@rlcw of course it's 100% racist bullshit 🤷🏻♂️

It's very disappointing that you and I even have to say explicitly, but we live in this stupid world where it's necessary.

@shachar I haven't read anything else about it, but several articles in The New York Times say that the exact opposite is the truth, e.g.:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/16/us/cte-youth-football.html

American schools: Pay so much attention to allergies that there is a (Canadian) brand called "School Safe", which makes snacks without nuts and milk (albeit with a lot of sugar).

Also American schools: Encourage children to play (American) football, in which, according to the New York Times, the only way to avoid severe brain injuries is not to play.