Obviously it’s easy to assume that because China has the most people, Chinese must be the most common language. But when you look at total people who know a language (as first, second, etc.) the most spoken language in the world is…English, with about 400 million more speakers than Chinese.
It’s hard to see the downside of everyone speaking Russian or German when compared with the current situation, but English would be better because 1) It would require the fewest people to learn a new language (sort by total speakers in the link above) 2) would be best for communicating with visitors and 3) fuck Russia
being billigual is really easy
Yeah but how easy is it becoming bilingual? Or in the case of Europe, centivigintitrilingual?
You all need to just start making English an official language across the EU. Yeah I know that’s very American imperialist of me to say, but most of you speak it already anyway and it would make travel and communication so much easier. It feels like you all are insisting on speaking different languages just to pretend you have unique cultures when let’s be real, once you welcome McDonalds that ship has sailed.
This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can’t find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions on the park service’s website, but it was using a twitter feed and the top post was “trail is open, come on in!” because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.
There should be some non-profit funded by cities that’s basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.
Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.
I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.
Most people just do not think entirely rationally. Take anything that most people believe - obviously religion, but also their favorite sports team, car brand, dare I say linux distro - it’s probably irrational on some level. Instead people believe what they want to believe.
But why would someone want to see their own life as miserable? Perhaps part of it is who we want to be. Most people want to see themselves as having overcome some sort of adversity to earn whatever they have in life, and that creates a bias to see one’s own life as unlucky and miserable. I definitely went through a phase of seeing my life this way as a kid. Now I try, when I remember, to focus on what’s been lucky and not adverse in my life. And there’s definitely plenty in that regard.
I think we’re running out of advancements that make life better, now all technology does is make production cheaper/increase shareholder value.
So then how do we define natural general intelligence? I’d argue it’s when something can do better than chance at solving a task without prior training data particular to that task. Like if a person plays tetris for the first time, maybe they don’t do very well but they probably do better than a random set of button inputs.
Likewise with AGI - say you feed an LLM text about the rules of tetris but no button presses/actual game data and then hook it up to play the game. Will it do significantly better than chance? My guess is no but it would be interesting to try.
A large number of us CAN be millionaires.
It’s actually technically correct that we all can be millionaires, at least on a household basis. The mean household wealth in the US was $1.06 million as of 2022, by now it’s undoubtedly higher. So with a full redistribution of wealth every household would have over $1 million.
In reality though the median household wealth is just under $200k as of 2022, and doesn’t rise as consistently so who knows where it is now.
In my experience:
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