I remember learning as a little kid the difference between a sound & a word. My little brother, before he could talk, would make this sound that was kind of like "owl", & my mom taught him to say that in response to "What's your favorite bird that says 'hoo'?" I asked her if that counted as his first word, & she said no, because he wasn't actually saying "owl"; he was just making a similar sound.

Anyways, that's how I feel when people go "Well AI's at least useful for gathering information."

@Yuvalne We all know that G-d actually took the rib from Adam's side so that he could...

wait no I'm mixing up my common misconceptions

@Yuvalne Given that it's a letter to the editor from two professors in different fields, it does seem quite likely this was a half-joking thought someone had over lunch with an old friend that they decided to write up. A letter to the editor isn't peer-reviewed, so the real question is whether this is an idea other scholars have engaged with. At a glance, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5467932471916020843&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en does show it being cited a fair bit, but I haven't looked closely at what those citations are saying.

@Yuvalne To my moderate surprise, it's a valid citation, but should have been attributed to its authors in-text rather than implying it's a mainstream view. Fixed that. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Baculum&diff=prev&oldid=1336911315

(n... mije jan li toki lon "palisa unpa", la tenpo mute la ona li kepeken ike nimi "palisa". soweli la ala a a a.)

@Impossible_PhD Nor the worst consequences to someone doing that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90or%C4%91e_Martinovi%C4%87_incident

(For anyone worried that link will take them to something really gory, no, the guy was fine, he just managed to start a civil war in the process.)

@iro_miya The only solution I've found is to completely opt out. Not just to refuse to play stupid social-capital games, but to refuse to engage with those who do. If people are promoting discord in my community at a time when it needs to come together, then they are not the people I should be looking to for guidance on right and wrong. Eventually I went and wrote this up as https://essays-by.tamz.in/inverse-dni/, which I feel a lot better having done.

@iro_miya There are certain neurotypes for whom the prospect of "If you try hard enough and follow every unwritten rule, you'll be able to avoid ever upsetting anyone and then everyone will love you" is like heroin. In that it feels very nice, is incredibly addictive, and is a false promise that will eventually chew you up and spit you out. 1/2

@iro_miya Most lighthouses actually do shoot light in multiple directions at once! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse#Lens

Two things you'll never unsee in movies if you've lived somewhere with a lighthouse: They're always depicted as a single beam, and they always move an order of magnitude too fast.

@LucasWerkmeister Because shearing a yak is efficient. Shaving one isn't. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:Yak_shaving.jpg

(This is the first time I've heard this phrase, but it reminds me of finding https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/141652 deep into writing some of the most cursed code I've ever written, in advance of the tokwiki import.)

https://youtu.be/VEVk4I_htWE

Fellow fedizens! As decreed by https://xkcd.com/843/ some fifteen years ago, it is once again time to spend the morning reading through the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions.

#xkcd #xkcd843 #misconceptions #Wikipedia

I get the faint suspicion that this comment comes from a bot...

@iro_miya Hobby: Treating phatic expressions that are pronounced as a single word as proper nouns for toki pona purposes. "ah ouais ouais" → "mu Awawa". "il faut que j'y aille" → "mu Ipokisija".

@spamcan.bsky.social mu.

(https://nimi.li/mu)

Seen in the chumbox ads on the CNN app... big if true

Overheard: " 'Dreyfusard' sounds like a Pokémon."

On that note, time for my quarterlyish repost of @deviantollam's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI