Not baseless, I explained my reasoning. If you say it’s not the case, that’s fine.

The transcript, yeah.

Yep. The letter K is basically a concession of the Latin alphabet to make some more sense of Greek loanwords, where the letter K is originally from, following a series of pronunciation shifts. But C is the Latin K, so words of Latin origin (the majority of vocabulary in Romance languages like Spanish) will normally only use C for that sound.

K is more useful in languages where the soft C has entered use (like French, Spanish, English, and others) just because K is always hard and makes it easier to define the pronunciation of (loan)words that may otherwise encourage the wrong pronunciation when paired with certain vowels (kite, cite, and site all being different words in English, for example).

EDIT: Oh I just remembered another funny exception for “ch”: In “Chemistry” the “H” is neither pronounced nor does it modify the “C” to make the normal “ch” sound. It just sounds like there is a “C” there. Like “Cemistry.” Except looking at that, that pattern is used in something like “Cemetery” and then the “C” sounds like an “S”. I’m going to stop now because there are so many of these I could probably go on forever if I kept thinking about it.

That one’s the loanword problem. Greek has letters Κ (kappa) and Χ (chi, pronounced similar to “key” but from the back of the throat). Kappa is a close approximation to the English K, while chi doesn’t have anything like it in English. So loanwords from Greek that used chi are written differently.

Wall of random language knowledge coming:

In the Latin language, where our alphabet derives, C was originally always hard (like “calendar” as opposed to “celery”). When Greek loanwords entered Latin, kappa was transliterated to C (Kronos—Cronus). Chi, being similar but just a bit more breathy, was transliterated as Ch (Chimera).

Latin experienced pronunciation shifts and gradually branched off into the modern romance languages. In several of them, the letter C conditionally softened (e.g. cerveza in Spanish, cent in French, etc).

The Latin alphabet did not enter use for the English language until Christianity came to Britain in the middle ages. Before then, Old English, which should be more accurately called the Anglo-Saxon language, was written in Futhorc, a runic system like old Norse. The Latin alphabet was adapted to Anglo-Saxon, but there were not always 1:1 pronunciations, so pronunciation of certain letters shifted and some runic holdovers from Futhorc like Þ (thorn) for Th remained in use.

In the intervening centuries, Anglo-Saxon/English would undergo a pronunciation shift, a series of invasions from the Danes and Normans, and Ecclesiastical Latin (Latin after undergoing a pronunciation shift) remained present for religious purposes. All of these would introduce new loanwords and expand the English vocabulary at different times. The Germanic loanwords would be transliterated, while the Romantic loanwords would be lifted directly or edited slightly because they already used the same writing system. The softer Ch sound (like “chair”) existed in English by the time the Normans arrived, and they started writing it like Ch because that sounded closer to its use in French.

Finally, this was all further complicated by the invention of the printing press. By the time this occurred, the Latin alphabet became the de facto writing system for most of Europe, but languages did not quite meet 1:1 on which letters were used. Some innovations like the letter W stuck, because it was very convenient for German. And as it happens, the German printing presses invented by Gutenberg were the first to cross over into Britain. The German W was a convenient enough replacement for the English Ƿ (Wynn), but German had no equivalent for Þ (thorn) or Ð (eth, the th pronounced like “that”), so early English printers first approximated by using the letter Y for being less common and looking close enough (“ye old” is really “the old”) before eventually settling on Th.

Okay, one final note. On the random topic of W, and why it looks like two Vs, V is how U was written in classical Latin, and so W is double that. You’ll find the logic of W persists in a lot of words if you replace it with a U, even though we think of W as a consonant and U as a vowel. You can look at an edited word like “flouer” and potentially still read it as “flower” because we have other words like “flour” which have the same sound.

The visually impaired don’t really get anything from descriptions like “in a wider shot” though, nor is “now with no visible mouth” a relevant detail because the style of the comic does not depict any character with a mouth unless they are speaking. That’s LLM logic.

Volunteer singular, maybe. It’s the same person on every post I’ve seen today.

To me it just doesn’t seem to satisfy the purpose of alt text. It reads a lot more like an LLM being asked to visually describe what it sees. It’s too verbose.

Is this AI generated?

I had to dig a bit on that page just to find what SDF stood for. This whole time I assumed it was “Software Development Fund”

Don’t forget the Azure/Intune outage not one week after AWS, too.

The outages are almost beginning to feel deliberate at this point.

Hm? It seems to make sense to me.

They’re saying Cities Skylines could have filled a niche similar to the Civilization series, with a modest but devoted following. Cities Skylines 2 was set up to be a AAA game in scope, but neither the publisher nor the developer were willing to put the resources and work into making it happen.

Sorry, I think I misinterpreted your comment. Are you using something like the “royal we”? I initially read it as referring to Lemmy as a collective, figuring you were talking about something that happened here.

I’m out of the loop, did I miss some drama?

Cyberpunk is very nice when using the Dualsense.

And the battery lasts almost 1 full play session for me!

Just to address the potential for US defaultism, “our country” in this case should be read as the United Kingdom, where Rockstar is headquartered and the union busting in this instance took place.

There are some accounts that explicitly label themselves as bots, though. So on those, you’re basically guaranteed to never receive any response or engagement from OP.

I don’t know, I kinda like most of the newer icons. They’re not perfect, but then neither were the old ones.

Monument Valley 1, 2, and 3 (mobile games). An interesting set of puzzle games with good visuals. They only require single taps to work.

Also can get a mouse for the Steam Deck (or a PC if you have one). There are a lot of good games that you can likely use with a mouse if the hand/wrist motion doesn’t cause pain or discomfort for your thumb.

That’s what they said

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_D._Melvin