Notices by maco (maco@wandering.shop)

Did you know that MIT researchers found that if there's a critical period for language learning, it ends around 18, not 5 or 10 or whatever people often say?

And they're not even sure it's a biological shift at 18, noting that it could be the demands of adult life getting in the way.

https://news.mit.edu/2018/cognitive-scientists-define-critical-period-learning-language-0501

#LanguageLearning #science

@futurebird also, the “crack baby” fear mongering? They’d show videos of low-birth-weight babies with tremors and predict low-intelligence, lives of crime, and future drug addiction.

Premature babies weigh less and often have those tremors. Yeah, crack usage resulted in earlier labor, so they were often born prematurely, but they were otherwise normal for preemies.

And a decades-long study shows no lingering effects on behavior or intelligence.

https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/BTB_23_PRECON_Poverty_Simulation_3.pdf

Ugh, #Lyft is really pissing me off. It told me a 12 minute wait then a 20 minute ride.

I waited for 40 MINUTES! I should’ve arrived 10 minutes ago. They just kept canceling at 2–3 minutes away and assigning new drivers.

This isn’t the first time. What kind of shit is this?

@GreenSkyOverMe @ayis
*mostly* it's a question of whether you're emphasizing a trait or distinguishing between several things, and i think that's even kinda true on some that change the meaning

"mi amigo viejo" tells you which one…the old one, not the young one

"mi viejo amigo" is emphasizing the age of the friendship

also, poetry can be a little loosey goosey with it

If you’re a U.S. citizen registered to vote, and you speak English + another language that’s spoken by 5% or more of your local population (tip: in most cities, that’ll include Spanish), consider signing up as an #election worker.

The law requires that anywhere with 5% or more speaking a given language, every polling place needs at least one person who speaks that language.

In my area, the number of polling places is directly limited by English-#Spanish #bilingual poll workers.

@blogdiva @Annalee @polotek I remember the screenshotting, yeah. Can’t remember what those got called after the QT feature was added. But it became a way to avoid the notification.

Does it not show the preview on posts from before they added QTs?

I’m just remembering discovering that once QTs became a feature I *couldn’t* make a plain text link anymore because it’d automatically convert to a QT.

@Annalee @polotek and before a QT button existed on the other site, it was just a text link to the OP. Then they added what amounts to a fancy link preview _with a notification to the OP_.

You can still do the text link here. Some clients will even do the fancy link preview.

But there's no notification to the OP that _that's_ why they might get a flood of replies from randos, so the experience here is _actually worse_.

(I'm seeing people say "it's so weird that when you @-mention someone in a private message, they can see it," which comes from the fundamental misunderstanding that it's a private message system and not a @'d-people-only setting. Once you've @'d them, they're in!)

idk about folks using #Mastodon in English, but on my Spanish UI, the word "private" (well, "privado") does NOT show up in the posting setting that is marked by an "@".

It says "only show to mentioned users."

That's because it IS NOT a private messaging system.

Mastodon DOES NOT HAVE a private message system.

Do not expect it to work as one!

It is SOLELY a way to keep your conversation from cluttering unrelated people's feeds.

It is not designed for #privacy

@gme just gonna tag #elixir folks: Pleroma and thus Akkoma are written in our language of choice