Hopefully he’ll be right next to kissinger

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just being realistic here… Plus is reviving these old languages in the UK going to threaten English? Absolutely not, which is why it’s allowed. If at any point a secondary language threatened the primary trade language of a nation somehow, there would be policy to resist it. Are Londoners going to learn Gaelic? Well that’s how the Irish felt when they were colonized by the British. The Irish certainly aren’t going to speak only Gaelic. They’ll know English as well, which is good enough for the British.

Also an understated part of this whole debate I haven’t focused on too much is how dialects are culture. Each region or town had its own dialect and local customs even if they were ruled by the same king or emperor in premodern times. It’s not a coincidence that European separatist movements can be divided among dialects of a language, like Catalinian separatism from Spain.

That’s also what lead to literal Balkanization as well. Shared languages and dialects deciding cultural borders when a nation fractures.

Even the revival of Gaelic or Welsh doesn’t undo the destruction of industrialization homogenizing a nation. You’ve already permanently lost the regional or local culture of each town and it’ll never come back. There wasn’t a single “Welsh” or “Gaelic” language prior to English replacing it, just like there wasn’t one version of English prior to industrialization. The concept of a universal national language only practically became a thing with the advent of railroads. Otherwise people didn’t move around enough to need a nationwide common tongue. One of the few exceptions to this is ironically China, which had a strong centralized bureaucracy and education system that taught the Imperial language.

It’s just a natural consequence of modernization. It just happens, and now China is making a concerted effort to accelerate it and guide it. They teach simplified Mandarin so everyone reads and speaks the same trade and work language. It’s what every other nation has done, and it’s going to happen the same as how French, English, German .etc all displaced local or regional dialects and cultures into extinction.

I think we both agree China needs to avoid balkanization and excessive pluralism if they want to remain stable long term. I think that’s the Chinese view of their own situation as well.

Even if you teach the local language people leave due to urbanization and don’t teach their kids. Your community grows smaller and smaller and eventually it’s just hundreds of people speaking that language or practicing that culture, or nobody at all because they all grew old and died.

It is going to happen, it’s not theory here. This policy is a lot more fair than residential schools in Canada or forced spelling and accent training from the French Academy to homogenize France. The end result is broadly similar though and so is the intention behind it.

It’s going to eventually be like the UK with hundreds of dead dialects and a dozen dead languages spoken by a tiny minority of people.

Minorities in China are going to have a choice to speak their language at home in much the same way that I have a choice about being employed.

No international observer found evidence of the German Holocaust either until after the war. Just saying…

The reason the UK needs to try to revive those dialects and languages is the key here. Having a common language is a necessary part of consolidating your land as an industrialized nation, so I’m not surprised China is doing it. You’re right about balkanization happening if you don’t force people to use the lingua franca.

They know exactly what they’re doing and the consequences though. I think it’s disingenuous to say they don’t. The Chinese aren’t stupid so they know even if they teach both languages, when all of the official print, your own work, clients, friends, messaging apps, government forms .etc use Mandarin it eventually becomes the language primarily spoken at home which is where you can begin to break the link between one culture and the next.

Once that happens it’s possible to drop the local language requirement and a minority of people are mad about it at that point (generations later.) Same concept as second or third gen immigrants here in Canada who can’t speak their parents or grandparents language at all unless they pay for private schooling in an immersion school. I’m not saying China will drop the local language 20-40 years from now but eventually they can if they want and people aren’t going to be as strongly opposed once they’re integrated after decades of forced schooling in Mandarin.

They’re following a well tested method for homogenizing their nation. Canada tried and failed at it for the same reasons the Chinese are trying to prevent balkanization. In the end it’s going to destroy these cultures and it won’t be an accident…

Yes I know I’ve read your other comments. It’s the same logic though which is undeniable… The Canadians used exactly the same justifications for setting up the residential schools in the first place to “solve the aboriginal problem” as they saw it. An eerie parallel to China’s domestic “every other culture except Han problem” that they’re solving with this.

This method is tried and true across the world and its exactly how you stamp out other languages and dilute or destroy culture whether that’s the goal or not, just as a consequence of teaching the lingua franca.

The French academy is a good example. Thousands of dialects disappeared because of being required to learn “proper French” as the academy saw it. It worked, which is why there’s far less variation in accents and spelling across France than the UK which took a more organic approach, inadvertently preserving some of the local accents even if the English accidentally wiped out existing dialects due to incentives surrounding employment, along with rail, telegraphy, schooling, and urbanization.

Wiping out competing dialects and cultures is a consequence of industrialization and consolidating the land you have.

Edit: more context and parallels between the residential schools and China’s policy.

Same logic as residential schools in Canada to give native Americans an opportunity by teaching them English…

That’s roughly what I pay and I just got two retroactive 3% raises and a massive increase in my benefits thanks to my union. My employer wanted to cut people or freeze pay and the union made them back down in everything. We got everything we wanted and didn’t need to compromise… Worth every penny in union dues. I’ll have a cheque for a few thousands dollars mid July now.

Unionize!

Pre seasoned lips

👁️👄👁️

Literally 40k level mission objectives

They both suck but you’re right that Iran is more right about this than the US. It doesn’t make them good though.

You’re allowed to not like both of them

Yes you have to verify it yourself you don’t just trust it. The biggest benefit is tests are extremely to read and falsify like simple scripts. It’s faster to generate it than type it by hand, and any edits I make are minimal or require a reprompt that gets it right the second time.

Yeah I felt the same way. My puzzle senses tingled when I first saw it

Yeah this is the type of constrained use case I use it for too. Same with unit tests and testing in general.

AI corporate slop is when you mass generate a bunch of stuff, don’t read it, and then export the mental burden to a different coworker. You make them looks less productive and you look extremely productive, when really you’re stealing the productivity of colleagues.

You just reminded me of that.

I’ve coded “professionally” (solo dev for a small company. Not the full dev experience so big caveat)

I find AI is amazing at writing unit tests and other test harnesses. That’s all it’s good for besides summarizing documentation and even then it’s so misleading it’s basically useless you have to constantly doubt it. It’s a pathological liar… And I mean it’s kind of an impossible task… It’s trained on the entire internet. The strongest weights it has are for the oldest and most popular libraries. Oftentimes it’s telling me to use deprecated shit left and right because that’s biased extremely high during training, and maybe 1% of posts on that library mention it’s deprecation.

I prefer to write my code the old fashioned way. If I have it generate code it’s never pasted in, and I prefer having it explain what I don’t know about what it’s doing. Using it as an assistant and a TDD buddy works relatively well.

Also if you poke at software architecture. I’ve learned a lot (I wasn’t formally schooled in computer science) and it’s good as long as you constrain the scope of what you’re asking about, and make sure to consider it on your own against the existing project architecture. I still make the design decisions myself.

Oh, also having it make design decision documents. I often make those to record “this is why I’m doing this feature this way. These are the options I considered, and why I decided my way is better in this particular case” so I have a record of my state of mind and decision making. AI is phenomenal at making easy to read and well summarised DDDs

“fuck the firefighters!” Said roughly half the population 😍