But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.
Mechanismatic
Michael W. Moss | michaelwmoss.com
Writer, maker, and designer. Writer of fantasy, cyberpunk, science fiction, steampunk, horror, and hardboiled noir fiction. Typeface/font designer. Maker of 3D printed, laser cut, and microelectronics projects. Friend of cats and crows.
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You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.
But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.
I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.
The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.
But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.
This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.
Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.
Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.
Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.
Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.
Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”
My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it’s more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.
Mechanismatic@lemmy.worldto
Lichen@mander.xyz•there's no pleasure on earth quite like a good lichenEnglish
1·24 小时前So in this case is the moss the photosynthesizer of the lichen symbiotic network in conjunction with fungi and yeast…?
Mechanismatic@lemmy.worldto
Top Character Designs@lemmy.world•Hooded robes, through which you can only make out the eyesEnglish
1·4 天前Orko from He-Man

Mechanismatic@lemmy.worldtoTypography@lemmy.ml•Worlds first Ai generated font, using nano banana.English
2·7 天前Definitely not the world’s first AI generated font. I imagine there are many out there already. Not everyone is likely advertising it though.
It’s a relatively limited set of characters and the design is nothing new. Dripping fonts have been a thing for a while.
Looking at the font closer shows where an LLM can’t replicate human effort well enough yet - the kerning is non-existent.

The space character in the set is blank:

The punctuation is disproportionate in size to the letters:

Which brings us back to the fact that you need a human with expertise/experience to understand that the LLM isn’t performing as well as a human creator, just (potentially) faster and more recklessly, and to fix the issues with the output to make it actually usable/functional, which just feels like correcting someone else’s homework for them while they get the credit for the result.
Mechanismatic@lemmy.worldto
3DPrinting@lemmy.world•Filament splicing? Do any of you guys do it?English
11·7 天前In my makerspace, we’ve printed using the ends of rolls just to make random multicolor prints. I also recently bought a cheap 3D printing pen for repairing prints or other random purposes, so that’s also a good use for the ends of a roll.
This was one of my bad jokes at the ren faire. I’d walk up to other people with staves and say, “so, you’re also here for the staff meeting?”
My natural inclination would be to make the body in a single color filament and then use a stencil to paint on the logos. It would print a lot easier and look more natural and authentic. The logos were painted on the planes historically. And if you use stencils to paint them on, the logos could be customized for individual prints.
Mechanismatic@lemmy.worldto
3DPrinting@lemmy.world•I'm doing something wrong; can't print this PETGEnglish
2·11 天前To do process of elimination, I’d recommend trying a different brand of filament and a different type of filament (i.e. PLA), preferably freshly opened rolls. I’d also generally be wary of AliExpress, but that’s just been my experience of seeing multiple people be disappointed with what they get. If you’re looking for discounts on filament, there are a bunch of Black Friday deals going on right now.
That testing will at least tell you if it’s the brand or the type of filament that’s causing the issue. If you eliminate those by seeing no change, then you know it’s the printer itself and can start troubleshooting that next.
It looks like you’re printing it with the right side of the model in the picture angled down from the left, so you’re getting more layers to the left, which is giving you some unfortunate border and infill lines. Is it possible to print this all flat so it’s one smooth layer? If it’s the top layer, you might play with ironing as well. It’s hard to tell without seeing the whole model in context though.
Mechanismatic@lemmy.worldto
Linguistics@mander.xyz•How confusing is it when a script's numerals are also letters?English
1·13 天前You might follow the pattern of braille and have a prefix symbol that indicates the following letters are numbers. ⠼ functions like a number or hashtag symbol in front of letters A - J to indicate they’re to be read as numbers, 1 - 9 & 0, not letters.
I use linguistics to make me a better writer. It’s good to understand how language is used and has evolved. It helps you to understand how you can mix up your style without burdening your readers with cognitive puzzles. It’s also great for knowing how to create in-world neologisms that feel authentic and grounded in human linguistic patterns. I especially enjoy researching the etymology of words, finding cognates and homonyms and interesting coincidences and quirks of language, filling fantasy worlds with archaic terms that both convey meaning and support the mood I’m trying to create with the prose.
Outside of my personal interests, it’s useful for analyzing how language is abused. Some people use language not to communicate, but to obfuscate and control. The more I’ve studied linguistics, the easier it has become for me to recognize weasel wording, non-denials, complex phrasing that intentionally omits details, false implications, gaslighting, and logical fallacies.
When wanting more weight, but not wanting to add anything extra to the print, I use modifiers in Prusaslicer to add an internal shape that I set to 100% infill in contrast to the rest of the print. So if I want a weighted bottom to prevent a printed object from tipping over, just throw the modifier in with 100% infill at the bottom of the model before printing.







“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”