FaceDeer

If there's someone who speaks the language then it isn't lost yet.

I suppose it's interesting to muse about what it means for the last person to speak a language before it becomes lost, but that's still just one person so it's kind an abstract, academic concern.

Bear in mind, though, that the technology for dealing with these things are rapidly advancing.

I have an enormous amount of digital archives I've collected both from myself and from my now-deceased father. For years I just kept them stashed away. But about a year ago I downloaded the Whisper speech-to-text model from OpenAI and transcribed everything with audio into text form. I now have a Qwen3 LLM in the process of churning through all of those transcripts writing summaries of their contents and tagging them based on subject matter. I expect pretty soon I'll have something with good enough image recognition that I can turn loose on the piles of photographs to get those sorted out by subject matter too. Eventually I'll be able to tell my computer "give me a brief biography of Uncle Pete" and get something pretty good out of all that.

Yeah, boo AI, hallucinations, and so forth. This project has given me first-hand experience with what they're currently capable of and it's quite a lot. I'd be able to do a ton more if I wasn't restricting myself to what can run on my local GPU. Give it a few more years.

They learned from the best.

From NYT:

As for Mr. Trump’s threats of annexation? “We don’t even want them to be the 51st state,” Mr. Cramer said with a laugh. But unable to resist, he added: “We want Alberta to be the 51st state. And then we have two Republican senators.”

Fuck these guys. They come on a mission specifically to beg for our favor and they still can't manage to avoid insulting us and our sovereignty.

They're both optional. You can turn it off in Notepad.

"This is a machine that shows a picture of a person wearing a garment."

Uploads a picture of a person and a picture of a garment.

Gasps in shock and indignation as it shows a picture of that person wearing that garment.

So, you'd prefer that the system require you to upload nudes of yourself first?

From NYT:

As for Mr. Trump’s threats of annexation? “We don’t even want them to be the 51st state,” Mr. Cramer said with a laugh. But unable to resist, he added: “We want Alberta to be the 51st state. And then we have two Republican senators.”

Fuck these guys. They're the usual entitled American idiots, blundering around in foreign countries without understanding them.

So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?

If the language stops being spoken then there are no people who speak them, and asking what something means for those nonexistent people is kind of weird.

I'm thinking that the loss of distinct languages in active use is not necessarily a bad thing overall. It means more people can communicate with each other more widely. By all means document these disappearing languages as much as possible before they're gone, but there's likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.

So regulate the uses of the technology. Don't ban it outright.

Those companies are doing their manipulation currently by using the Internet and social media, should the Internet and social media be banned outright? We're using social media to discuss this right now, that discussion should be suppressed?

It supports AI integration too.

"Someone might abuse it" is a reasonable concern. "Therefore nobody should be allowed to use it" is not a reasonable answer to that concern, IMO. We'd never have anything with that approach.