I was just messing with letters but yes. Thanks for the insight.
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It has always struck me as odd that these languages, with much of their vocabulary taken from latin, have grammatically strayed pretty far from it, while slavic languages have largely identical grammatical concepts while barely sharing a word… 
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Indeed. It fascinates and confuses me in almost equal measure. Saxon and Old Norse both have their roots in proto-Germanic languages. Both Saxon and Old Norse were heavily inflected languages, but the languages that grew from them, modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages, have largely lost their inflection. They seem to have done this independently of each other - which I find confusing.
I pointed out in a post some years ago that Old Frisian (the language of the Northern Netherlands) and Middle English were so similar as to be practically interchangable. Even today, whole passages of Old Frisian can be read by modern English speakers.
We know that the languages and culture of Western Europe were hugely influenced by Roman colonisation, and later by Church Latin.
I wonder to what extent the languages and culture of the East were affected by Byzantine influences, and the emphasis in Eastern Orthodox Christianity on Greek rather than Latin?
None of this, however, explains how or why late medieval English and old Dutch were practically the same language.
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… Because they are literally the same people. The first inhabitants of the British isles were Celts (different language). And in (what today is called) Denmark and Netherlands lived Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. They took boats to England and decided to stay there. Over the course of 500 years, the languages slowly grew apart and became English, Dutch, Danish, German. (In parallel, in the south, other related tribes split into Swabian/Swiss, Bavarian/Austrian.)
It would of course be interesting to know the story why they did that, were they forced to leave by war or hunger or were they explorers, was it a majority or minority, was the grass greener in England or did they get stranded there? I don’t know. 
If you find out, tell us.
(Seems the Saxons were travelling a lot along the East and North sea those days, East Germans are still called Saxons, and the Fins call all of Germany Saxsa as well.)
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Well the immediate and obvious reason they came to Britain was because the Roman legions were no longer there to stop them. The Romans occupied Britain from 43 AD, and defended their territory against raiders and invaders. In 410 AD, with the Empire beset by troubles elsewhere, the Romans abandoned Britain, and invaders soon moved in.
There is some evidence, however, that the Saxons had already settled areas of Southern Britain, having been invited in by the Romans as military auxiliaries or mercenaries. It seems they liked it, and when the Romans left, the Saxons invited their families and friends to join them (that’s one theory, anyway).
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The storms coming thru here lately have been more intense than anything I remember. And we have a whole week of it rolling thru
Prompted this statement from local weatherman
Direct quote the the NWS AM discussion. This echoes our concerns over the past few days.
“It is vital that if you are outdoors you have multiple ways to receive the latest watches, warnings, and
advisories. Additionally, if you are recreating on area lakes and
rivers it is imperative that you have the latest information
regarding river stage or lake level to remain safe. Finally, it is
important that dangers such as lightning that we often do not
remember become much more of concern when outdoors or on the water; you must have a way to take shelter immediately indoors if you find yourself within earshot of thunder or visually see lightning or
both!” #ARWX #ARStormTeam
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And just to prove the world is not on the brink of destruction, I watched the Gloucestershire cheese rolling competition.
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…and this is why you should not eat at your desk…of course, it is also an impressive hole in one.
Taco casserole chili bean in the sub-woofer pocket
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Dancing bean, feel the beat on the tambourine 
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I know that Hello Games draws from real life then “weirds” it. Yet I was still surprised that the “y-shaped” head of a weird critter in NMS actually looks inspired by a prehistoric one. I’d never seen this before.
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Today…I am struggling to get up and face the day…
Why would someone who is 81 want to have 2 phones with 2 seperate carriers but with the same gmail account?
Because the Verizon phone “goes light to dark, light to dark” and “all my text messages disappear within seconds”
My response, “That has nothing to do with Verizon and everything to do with settings in your phone.”
Her reply, " But Verizon set all that up for me"
My reply, " No. They did not."
Her reply, “I have $50 with your name on it if you can come fix the mess I have made on all my devices.”
My reply, “Why didn’t you call me first, before attempting this?”
Her reply, “I didn’t want to bother you.”
I think this will be a double chai latte morning…
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What all this does is accelerate the day when AI becomes worthless.
It’s worse than that, Alas. If AI would become useless, we’d only be back at square one, some harm done. But by that time, AI will have made the internet much less useful than it used to be.
While google searches for some things are being slightly improved by Gemini, searches for other things are being made much more difficult. Image search is a point in case, where you get a ton of AI-slop already (Not surprising given that it is a lot easier to create a content imbalance generating pictures rather than words).
It already starts with tech-advice. Once upon a time, I could search for my programming issue, pick the first result from the google list, and I was fine. Nowadays, I either have to go for stackoverflow specifically (who have outlawed AI generated answers very early on in the game), or I look for some result with bad english, because I know there’s some indian that wrote it. Too many times, I find AI generated advice that tries being way too helpful by writing way too much, starting with installation of tools and project setup to solve something that should be a one-liner. You spend half an hour reading through it, only to in the end find the solution not to work. Saving time, my ass!
In any case, what I’m getting at is, by the time we get to model collapse, the entire internet will look like this. Mostly AIs posting garbage and learning from each other, most of it without merit or accuracy, making it really hard to find any reliable information.
We’ll still be using the internet as a communication tool, but its value as a knowledge repository might severely degrade in the coming years…
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I had the same impression in recent years. When I first used the internet, it was full of cute little nerdy fan pages where someone casually wrote interesting things about their hobby. With an ad to pay for the hosting. Search engines used to be directories.
Around 2000, search engines switched to actively indexing, and shortly after, the SEO started – making your web page attractive to search engines, not to readers. There was this joke, if you want your page to be a 100% search match, fill it with questions, not with answers!
… Then we realised that was not a joke, because then came all these forums asking questions and collecting answers. Reddit is good at that too. Attracts a maximum of hits.
Obviously, none of this has ever had any quality control. But instead of me picking the page I trust from the directory, the search engine result winner is now the one that cheats the web indexing bots best.
When I search an answer to a non-wikipedia question, the top 10 search results are hollow and brain dead pages that look like anonymous parodies of personal blogs, cooking blogs, nerd pages, etc. Everything has headings and bulleted lists and is structured like a middle schooler’s essay, who must fill 5 pages and has knowledge for 2… 
I scrolled through some and they were even repeating themselves and paraphrasing.
E.g. all recipes now start with soandsomany words of a casual personal story, because someone calculated that this is optimal (optimal for the search engine, not the reader). I don’t watch tictoc etc etc, but they all have their calculated attention grabbing patterns (optimised for the respective feed algorithm, not for the readers).
A complete waste of time (for us readers, not the algorithm…). But congrats, anonymous Prompt Engineer, for your top search result slot, you get paid for ads, until an identical page overtakes you next week… And now the LLM train themselves on how to optimally waste our time…
And the worst is that, to the majority, this is normal content. People in general unfortunately expect “computers” to be objective, but our machine learning methods (of the last few decades) are known to reenforce hidden biases in the training data.
Very interesting subject. 
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I noticed that searching is now totally botched for me as well. Now that I have begun selling antiques and collectibles again, using the internet to identify something, like trying to find a glassware pattern I am unfamiliar with, is now nearly impossible.
In the past, I could type a description of the pattern then search images. It would bring up many photos of glassware and I would usually find at least one that matched.
I could tap on that one and get a page with more sites showing the same pattern. Usually, several of these sites would list the name, age, etc…
When I attempted this a few days ago, AI kept putting together a shopping list for me.
I changed the wording multiple times. I added the word pattern. I tried identify…it kept ignoring what I was asking and just kept assuming I was shopping.
The loss of the ability to identify antiques and other objects is going to hurt a lot of sellers. Even if you know the name and maker, the search results are still very lacking. Nothing at all like just 5 years ago when I did this before.
I feel like my world has shrunk and I am being slowly closed off from the rest of the world
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Have you tried different search engines, e.g. does DuckDuckGo.com do it better? Via https://openwebengine.com/
A friend recommends changing the options in google: Google Search
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Will try the duck next. I have as much AI turned off as possible.
Edit: the duck is definitely giving me the results I am looking for. More like Google used to give
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I only ever use DuckDuckGo these days, and it does outperform Google IMHO. Unfortunately, search engines can only do so much - a large part of the problem is the huge proliferation of AI generated web sites and articles.
Clickbait producers and advertisers can obtain lists of the most popular web queries - then program AI bots to produce low quality nonsense articles claiming to answer them. There are literally millions of these damned things - and the search engines can’t tell the difference.
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