Notices by Rafael Garcia-Suarez (rgs@metasocial.com)

An in-depth article exploring the anti-liberal, anti-democratic forces at play in our world https://www.noemamag.com/from-statecraft-to-soulcraft/

@skinnylatte yes this. It’s the only effective way I know to untangle my brain.

Note to people who write alt texts for their images: please think of the colorblind 😢. I have seen two joke posts in succession today which I believe would have made sense if I could have decoded the color patterns. Eg people like me won’t recognize the trans flag colors because we don’t see a difference between pink and light blue. And I am not even mentioning maps with red/orange/green encodings. So it’s much appreciated when it’s explicitly outlined in the alt text. Thanks! #accessibility

Here's a version of the timeless classic Night in Tunisia, but in 11/8. With Roni Kaspi on #drums. I know, this is becoming a Roni Kaspi stan account. But it's worth it! https://youtu.be/4RaR210hglo

Getting tired of Anglocentrism everywhere and especially in tech – the belief that particular features of the English language are somehow applicable all other languages. One most egregious example is text search and indexing. In English it's easy; in languages where words change depending on case or noun category, it's not so straightforward. Incidentally this makes English especially well-suited to train LLMs.

Also, gender. No, gender is not isomorphic to pronouns. Many languages don't have gender at all, although they might have an intimidating number of pronouns (Japanese again). Or they could mark gender on the verb instead of the pronoun (Hindi). Or many other configurations. The "thing" that is being gendered varies. Sociologists and anthropologists study this. The gender worldview that comes with English doesn't need to be forced on speakers of other languages.

I bet ChatGPT would find a morphologically complex language such as Sanskrit or a Bantu language harder to learn. – Also English is remarkably context-free. Japanese is the opposite of that: you literally can't say anything without taking into account the relative position of speaker and listener. (For example there's no single word for "that" in Japanese: you have one for "that thing away from me but close to you" and one for "that thing away from both of us". And everything is like that)

This goes even as far as literary forms themselves, fiction and non-fiction. Tim Parks was remarking that novelists in 'minority' languages nowadays tend to adopt a style that will make them translatable into English more easily, at a loss of the richness of their native language. But the dollars are in the vast market of English readers. Same applies to philosophy and social sciences, sadly (although the French and the Germans valiantly resist, in their own ways, building on their traditions).

Anyway, bottom line advice is: learn new languages. It's fun. You don't need to be fluent in them. And it will enormously open your worldview.