Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.

Maybe, but OP’s found the ideal site if you just want husky bloopers.

X is pretty small.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.

As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.

Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.

Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Blusky: the social media site where people post bloopers of pet videos featuring huskies. It’s a very small niche.

What about the reed instruments where you have to give your instrument oral, and it’s your tongue and lip control which determines the note you produce?

You also make music nose by beating animal hide with sticks.

I also remember hearing how the Japanese word “ramen” is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.

It’s cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.

I don’t know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it’s a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying “I’m hungry”, they just say “hungry!” Presumably though, they do use “I” when it’s needed for disambiguation.

For, example, if you’re with a friend and someone asks “are you guys college students?” The response would probably be something like “He is but I’m not”, right?

Yeah, well it’s hard to do it without any errors, but it’s an error every 5 minutes or something, whereas a perfectly competent normal person when sight-reading text will probably make an error every 30s.

Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.

I’ve heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that voice actors who specialize in narrating books have to be superstars at this. Not only are they expected to be able to sight-read an entire book without making mistakes, they also need to do the required acting so exciting scenes are exciting, happy scenes are happy, gloomy scenes are gloomy, etc. Plus, as they come across new characters in the book, they’re supposed to be able to give them distinct voices and remember and recreate those voices as they show up later in the book.

Of course, a blockbuster book with a big budget for the audio version won’t have an actor wing it. They’ll be able to pay to have an actor and a director read the book first, and then have the director work with the actor to tease out the best possible performance. But, for a smaller budget, you have to deal with tighter margins so every second in the voice over booth counts.

One thing I love doing is to learn to say “I don’t speak <language>” as well as possible in a language I don’t speak. If you’re good enough at it, people will assume it’s a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don’t actually know. Apparently I’m pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn’t know.

I always read emphasis as “em-FASS-is” just for fun.

The only way to learn what something sounds like as a non-native speaker is to look it up or listen to someone pronounce it. There are no rules – or at least no useful rules, because any rule will have many exceptions. Even different English dialects differ in how to pronounce words. There’s simply no making sense of it.

For example, in many British English dialects, the “a” in “can” and the one in “can’t” are pronounced completely differently, despite “can’t” being a contraction of “can not”. It’s literally the same word, just with a different word afterwords, and yet the two get different pronunciations. There’s no way to guess at that being the case, or come up with a logical reason why. You just have to accept it.

How do you pronounce gnocci, gnat, etc? They may start with a ‘g’ but the proper pronunciation is just /n/.

And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.

I remember back when my mom was just anxious. That was bad enough, and meant that I’d avoid sharing any problems with her because she’d worry too much. Since then she’s gone off the deep end, believing just about every conspiracy theory that exists. So, now it’s not just that I avoid sharing any problems, or any deep things. I actively have to watch everything I say around her to avoid triggering a rant involving a conspiracy theory.

I think the anxiety fed into the conspiracies. IMO many conspiracy theorists feel a complete lack of control over their lives, and conspiracy theories make them feel better because they can blame “the powers that be” for their problems. And, even if they still feel out of control, they at least feel like they know the hidden truth of what’s happening. Knowing that hidden truth makes them less anxious. The world is still scary and they have no control, but someone has control, even if it’s someone evil. It’s not just random things happening with no plan.

Anyhow, I hope your mom just stays anxious and doesn’t go nuts like mine.

I’m continually amazed that my mom manages to function in the world with all her crazy beliefs and issues.