Sundar @digital_carver@qoto.org

an example of the plausible-sounding bullshit (about the Venpa rhyming scheme in #Tamil). this one's not in the "abcb" scheme, there's no "third" or "fourth" lines, and I think this is not even a Venpa:

#ChatGPT #LLM

The dichotomy of Big Tech bans:

So just learnt that Cloudflare "email protection" is a thing (https://mstdn.io/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection).
Additionally, Cloudflare thinks Mastodon IDs are email addresses: so if you have Javascript disabled, you might find that instead of Mastodon IDs you only get to see `[email.protected]` everywhere. Thanks, Cloudflare, for going far and beyond your duties of serving pages given to you, for the sake of our "protection"!

This is the heatmap of podcasts I listen to. See how much white space there is? Please help me fill those - **if you know of any English-language podcasts outside of the UK and the US**, reply and let me know (Tamil-language also welcome).

I generally listen to deep long form conversations (like Sean Carroll's Mindscape) or comedy podcasts (like Russell and Jon's 6Music radio show), but I'm open to anything; I'll give it a try if you say you like it.

(I want to diversify the places I consume media from, and this is a step towards that goal.)

#podcasts #recommendations #soliciting #suggestions #diversity #worldmedia

Happy deepavali friends (and acquaintances, and other randos that hopefully will become acquaintances one day)! Let your worries burst apart like firecrackers, and joy bloom like a flowerpot.

#HappyDiwali2020 #Deepavali #fireworks

https://karkanirka.org/2020/10/04/roman-soldiers-in-tamilnadu/

Many different interesting little details. My favourite is his theory on the difference between Yavanas and Milecchas (both old Tamil terms for foreigners): "Possibly, anyone whose language was known and could be understood were called Yavanas. People who could not understand or talk either in Greek or Tamil could have been called [Mileccha]." So Mileccha was like "barbarian" in the original Greek sense - people who spoke "bar bar bar" as in you couldn't understand them.

#tamil #history #India #Roman