Sundar @digital_carver@qoto.org

https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html
is interesting.

I once went searching for more natural-sounding singular pronouns than “xe” or “ze”, but couldn’t find any that had any significant following. (Singular “they” is ok in some places, but often sounds unnatural, and introduces more ambiguity in a language that’s already ambiguous and difficult enough to learn for newcomers.)

Stallman’s suggestion of “perse” (from person) for “he/she”, “per” for “her/him”, and “pers” for “hers/his” is easily to learn, sounds natural pretty quickly, and doesn’t sacrifice clarity. “perse” and “pers” sounding alike in speech might be an issue, but maybe the context will clarify it in most cases, and maybe it’s less of an ambiguity than arises from singular “they”? What do you think?

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”!

Epistemic humility, personal confidence.

Scientists discover oldest known human-made nanostructures in ancient artifacts in Tamil Nadu

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/scientists-discover-oldest-known-human-made-nanostructures-in-ancient-artifacts-in-tamil-nadu/article33149622.ece

Another project similar to ToSBack: https://github.com/ambanum/CGUs-versions
Somewhat easier to use, cleaner commits.

Full diff between the current and upcoming versions of Instagram ToS here.

The change should also appear as a commit here at the ToSBack project, once it’s live (in a month). It’s a pretty cool project, they track ToS and other policy docs of many sites in the crawl and crawl_reviewed folders, and commit each version to the repo so we can track their histories. It looks like Instagram updates their ToS from time to time without notice - even while adding the note to tell you that things are changing in December, they snuck in a few other changes, for eg. saying that they could keep your content for 90 days or possibly forever after you delete your account.

Looks like Instagram’s ToS is changing, to explicitly tell you that you are the product:

How Our Service Is Funded

Instead of paying to use Instagram, by using the Service covered by these Terms, you acknowledge that we can show you ads that businesses and organizations pay us to promote on and off the Facebook Company Products. We use your personal data, such as information about your activity and interests, to show you ads that are more relevant to you.

The Amazon Prime Music experience in India is so bad, it’s like they took a version of one of the other music services from 8 years ago and slapped an Amazon label on it.

Some more relevant links I found from looking around, mostly on reddit (along with the country they’re from):

• https://historyofexploration.net/ (France, no recent episodes)
• https://www.cmpod.net/episodes/ (Israel, no recent episodes)
• http://theeasternborder.lv/ (Latvia)
• https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/ (Qatar?)
• https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/ireland-now-nine-of-the-best-irish-podcasts-1.3004035 (Ireland)
• http://www.freespeechhistory.com/ (Denmark)
• https://letsfightaboss.simplecast.com/ (Ireland)
• https://www.sanspantsradio.com/podcasts/dd-is-for-nerds/ (Australia)
• https://2debate.eu/ (Germany)

#podcasts #worldmedia #diversity

My own recommendations under that criteria:

• Omega Tau Science and Engineering - detailed talks about particular technologies and scientific fields, from Germany.

• The Green Horizon - an Irish sci-fi comedy drama, about a bumbling space crew and their hilarious adventures

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