Which is also how Digg v4 ended up, the brands as content submitters.

Exactly. Almost like Reddit decision makers know how Digg died, and yet they’re unable to not follow its steps.

To be frank it’s only the start - I’ll need to plant and select at least five generations of the hybrid. But I’m really happy, the hardest part was done.

Thank you!

I was finally able to cross pollinate two pepper varieties! They are:

• yellow bell pepper - just some market variety.
• dedo-de-moça - Capsicum baccatum, red, 5k~15k Scoville heat units (hotter than a jalapeño, milder than a cayenne), great flavour.

I want the breed to be: yellow, large, mild but not heatless, finger-shaped. And hopefully more resistant to insects than bell peppers are.

In the meantime I’m still waiting for my chocolate-coloured habanero to grow flowers, so I can cross-breed it. Likely with dedo-de-moça too, I like the shape.

Props to the rooster - he’s afraid but still does what he needs to do. That guy is a champs.

I hope the dog issue gets solved. My former front neighbours had a half dozen dogs like this, who roamed my street, it is fucking terrifying. (The problem got solved when they moved away. One of the dogs stayed behind, another neighbour adopted him. He’s still a bit problematic but at least now he got attention and can’t roam the street any more. Thank you, local crazy cat/dog lady.)

Cordwell and Barker expect user growth for Reddit to stall in 2025 and, as a result, see revenue growth becoming more reliant on making the platform’s proposition more attractive for advertisers.

This won’t be even remotely fun for the people still using that platform. Because “making the platform’s proposition more attractive to advertisers” boils down to either more ads or ads that are more obnoxious, more disguised as content, more targetted.

When people leave home, Siegfrieda often meows loudly. Either towards the door or towards whoever is still home - as if saying “they’re abandoning us, do something about it!”.

But it’s really loud, to the point of being annoying. And this week Kika got enough of this shit: once Frieda started meowing, Kika jumped off her cardboard box, pawed Frieda on the head twice, then went back to her box. As if saying “enough of this drama dammit, the human is back soon.”

I cannot think of any language besides English in which an “f” can be written as “ph”.

Latin. In fact it’s where this mess started out.

Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction between the following sets of consonants:

• ⟨Φ Θ Χ⟩ /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ - they sound like English pill, till, kill; there’s a clear asphhhhiration in them
• ⟨Π Τ Κ⟩ /p t k/ - they sound like English spill, still, skill; no aspiration
• ⟨Β Δ Γ⟩ /b d g/ - more like English bill, dill, give; instead of aspiration you vibrate the vocal folds before the consonant even starts

Latin borrowed a lot of Greek words. The words with the second and third set of consonants were no problem; they were mostly spelled in Latin with ⟨P T C⟩ and ⟨B D G⟩. But Latin didn’t have the sounds of the first set, and for Latin speaking ears they sounded like they had /h/. So they were spelled with ⟨PH TH CH⟩, to represent that /h/ sound.

So back then the digraphs still made sense… except that Greek changed over time. And what used to be pronounced /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ ended as /f θ x/ (like English fill, think, and Scottish loch). And Latin speakers started pronouncing those words with the “new” Greek sounds instead of the old ones. But they were still spelling them the same.

From that that ⟨PH⟩ spread out across a lot of orthographies using the Latin alphabet.

Italian and Spanish subbed ⟨PH⟩ with ⟨F⟩ ages ago; examples here and here. Portuguese stopped using it in 1911 (ACL / “European” standard) asd 1943 (ABL / “Brazilian”) standard.

In Portuguese it was part of a wider wave of orthographic reforms, that also got rid of etymological double consonants and ⟨Y⟩. A lot of people were hilariously annoyed, example stolen from Wikipedia:

Imaginem esta palavra phase, escripta assim: fase. Não nos parece uma palavra, parece-nos um esqueleto (…) Affligimo-nos extraordinariamente, quando pensamos que haveriamos de ser obrigados a escrever assim!

Imagine this word phase, written like this: fase. It doesn’t resemble us a word, it resemble us a skeleton. (…) We get profoundly afflicted, when we think that we would be required to write it like this!

It depends on the amount of errors and if you used the -verbose option.

The opposite, it ultimately comes from a Chinese language via Portuguese.

I’m binge watching all three seasons of Log Horizon. And already in the third one. Fuck, I forgot how fun that anime series was.

My bad, and thanks for the info! I’ll correct my comment, I kind of rushed checking the etymologies.

China comes from sina/sino. I don’t remember where this comes from. Sanskrit?

Odds are that both were independently borrowed from Sanskrit चीन / Cīna:

• China: Sanskrit, then Persian, Portuguese, English. By then Portuguese likely still had the [tʃ] “tch” sound.
• Sina: Sanskrit, then Persian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, English. Arabic converted Sanskrit [tɕ] into [sˤ], then Greek into [s].

Note: dunno in English but at least in Latin “Sina” (often Sinae, the plural) refers specifically to southern China. The north is typically called Serica (roughly “of the silk”).

back to Sanskrit, being the grand daddy of English

Sanskrit is more like English’s uncle than granddaddy: English is from Proto-Germanic, and both Proto-Germanic and Sanskrit are from Proto-Indo-European.

English likely got the name from Portuguese, “Japão” *[ʒä’pɐ̃ŋ] (see note). I don’t think that it’s from Dutch “Japan” because otherwise the name would end as “Yapan”, as Dutch uses a clear [j] (“y”) sound.

In turn Portuguese got it from either Malay or some Chinese language. I think that it’s from Cantonese 日本 jat⁶ bun² [jɐt˨ puːn˧˥]. Portuguese has this historical tendency to transform [j] into [ʒ] (the “g” in “genre”), and to mess with any sort of nasal ending.

The name in Chinese languages can be analysed as meaning simply “Sun origin”. Because it’s to the east of China.

In turn, there are a few ways to refer to Japan in Japanese:

• 日本 / Nihon - it’s a cognate of that Cantonese jat⁶ bun². Except that it uses the Japanese rendering of Wu Chinese words.
• 日本 / Nippon - same as above, with a slightly more conservative pronunciation (Japanese converted a lot of [p] into [h]).
• 大和 / Yamato - it’s metaphorically referring to the whole (Japan) by one of its part (the Yamato province, modern Nara).
• 日の本の国 / Hinomoto-no-Kuni - poetic and dated name. 日/hi = Sun, 本/moto = origin, 国/kuni = land, の = an adposition**. So it also means “land of the origin of the Sun”. The big difference here is that all words used are inherited from Old Japanese, so there’s no Chinese borrowing involved.

*note: that [ŋ] is reconstructed for around 1500 or so (Nanban trade times), given the word was also spelled Japam back then. A more typical contemporary pronunciation would be more like [ʒä’pɜ̃ʊ̯].

**the best way I know to explain Japanese の/no is that it works like a reversed English “of”: in English you’d say “origin of Sun”, in Japanese you’d say “Sun no origin” (hi no moto = 日の本). I only remember this because of Boku no Hero Academia, because “boku no” = “of I” (my).

Shameless plug to [email protected] . This sort of question is welcome there.

Latin already did a bloody mess of those suffixes:

• if you were born in Roma, you’d be romanus (“Roman”)
• if you were born in Eboracum (modern York), you’d be eboracensis (“Yorkese”)
• if you were born in Gallia (roughly modern Belgium and France), you’d be gallicus (“Gallic”)

In turn those suffixes used to mean different things:

• that -anus was originally just -nus. Inherited from Proto-Indo-European *-nós; you’d plop it after verbs to form adjectives.
• that -icus was originally just -cus; from PIE *-kos, but you’d plop it into nouns instead.
• nobody really knows where -ensis is from but some claim that Latin borrowed it from Etruscan.

Then French and Norman inherited this mess, and… left it alone? Then English borrowed all those suffixes. But it wasn’t enough of a mess, so it kept its native -ish suffix, that means the exact same thing. That -ish is from PIE *-iskos, and likely related to Latin -cus.

And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔

There’s some awareness among English speakers that “[$adjective]istan” means roughly “country where the [$adjective] people live”, so the suffix is simply removed: Afghanistan → Afghan, Tajikistan → Tajik, etc.

That -istan backtracks to Classical Persian ـستان / -istān, and it forms adjectives from placenames.

In turn it comes from Proto-Indo-European too. It’s from the root *steh₂- “to stand”, and also a cognate of “to stand”. So etymologically “[$adjective]istan” is roughly “where the [$adjective] people stand”. (inb4 I’m simplifying it.)

Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain…

Note that India doesn’t simply have different “languages”; it has a half dozen different language families. Like, some languages of India are closer to English, Russian, Italian etc. than to other Indian languages.

That said:

• “India” ultimately backtracks to Greek Ἰνδός / Indós, the river Indus; and Greek borrowed it from Old Persian 𐏃𐎡𐎯𐎢𐏁 / Hindūš. That ending changed because it’s what Greek does.
• “Hindi” comes from Hindi हिंदी / hindī, that comes from Classical Persian هِنْدِی / hindī. That hind- is the same as in the above, referring to the lands around the Indus (India), and the -ī is “related to”.

Now, why did Greek erase the /h/? I have no idea. Greek usually don’t do this. But Latin already borrowed the word as “India”, showing no aspiration.

Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the “Ph” and decided to use an “F”? 🤔

So, the islands were named after Felipe II of Spain. And there’s that convention that royalty names are translated, so “Felipe II” ended as “Philip II” in English. And so the “Islas Filipinas” ended as “Philippine Islands”.

…but then the demonym was borrowed straight from Spanish, including its spelling: filipino → Filipino.

Note that this mess is not exclusive to English. As I hinted above, Latin already had something similar; and in Portuguese for example you see the cognates of those English suffixes (-ese/-ês, -an/-ano, -ic/-ego… just no -ish).

Except that for Portuguese simply inheriting the Latin suffixes wasn’t enough, you got to reborrow them too. So you end with etymological doublets like -ego (see: Galícia “Galicia” → galego “Galician”) and -co (see: Áustria “Austria” → austríaco “Austrian”).

Then there’s cases where not even speakers agree on which suffix applies, and it’s dialect-dependent; e.g. polonês/polaco (Polish), canadense/canadiano (Canadian).

Besides afegão vs. Afeganistão (Afghan vs. Afghanistan), another example of a word where the demonym is shorter than the geographical name is inglês vs. Inglaterra (English vs. England). But it’s the same deal: -terra is simply -land, so people clip it off.

There’s also the weird case of “brasileiro” (Brazilian), that -eiro is a profession suffix. Originally it referred to people extracting brazilwood, then the country name was backformed from that.

Etymologically “agent” is just a fancy borrowed synonym for “doer”. So an AI agent is an AI that does. Yup, it’s that vague.

You could instead restrict the definition further, and say that an AI agent does things autonomously. Then the concept is mutually exclusive with “assistant”, as the assistant does nothing on its own, it’s only there to assist someone else. And yet look at what Pathak said - that she understood both things to be interchangeable.

…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more. They’ve used those dumb text gens, gave them either a six-fingered thumbs up or thumbs down, but they’re generally aware that it doesn’t do a fraction of what they believed to.

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Survive-em-up?

Seriously I fucking loved the name.