The huge language issue
When Trilema was started, it was designed and intended as a Romanian language personal blog. Things, obviously, never work as intended on the medium term, and so here we are : as I'm contemplating writing a Spanish translation of the Argentina for business article, I decide I want to fix the languages on this blog.
First step is to open a page, look at the source, and sure enough...
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" >
That's all fine and dandy, until you stop to consider that, for instance,
Doesn't look that much like lang="en", does it. (I've changed it, by the way, and I'm having the remaining bits of Romanian entrenched in the various administrative tasks expunged as we speak).
More importantly : Wordpress doesn't really have a way to specify language on a per-page basis. Because it's made by and maintained by fucktards, which is to say ESLi speakers, and what do you mean there exist things in the world ?!?!
Even more importantly : you're supposed, according to "the standards", to mark by paragraph, sentence and even meta-relation. I kid you not, strange like
<para>Il faut utiliser <abbr title="Simple Object Access Protocol" xml:lang="en">SOAP</abbr></para>
The problem here is this : on one hand, not being the owner of the machines, I have very little incentive and even less inclination to make it easier for the machines to interact with my text.ii On the other hand, Trilema is meant to be read by humans, not by machines anyway. On the third hand... fuck.
So in conclusion : I am going to have the stray Romanian bits fixed. As I started writing this article I was imagining I will also put in an order for someone to figure out how to make it so correct language markings appear in the headers of all articles, probably by expanding the database with an extra field. But then, what to do about (the very numerous!) articles where languages are mixed ? Have someone else run through the entire databaseiii I suppose and find them and mark them. But then... Trilema often enough makes specific use of ambiguity, deliberately, to confuse this very matter. How would someone other than me be ever able to wholly solve this separation problem, and moreover why exactly is it that I wish to undo what I have done ?
At which point I took a step back and realised the foregoing. I don't in fact wish to undo what I've done to any degree, on the contrary.iv So I'll be simply striking the language bit off the header. And, for completeness, I will be also striking the "document bla bla" bullshit. It's not needed, and besides, whoever came up with the string isn't even in my WoT.
So there. No problem is truly insurmountable to the man wielding a flamethrower and willing to use it.
———English as a single language. [↩]Think about this for a second, will you. If you expend five minutes to "properly" add xml language markings on an essay you write, this has cost you five minutes. What does it benefit you ?
From the opposite camp, if you spend those five minutes to "properly" add xml language markings on the essay you wrote, this has benefited google, facebook, every other USG-VC captive ponzi operator plus every third world scammer trying to cash in on the USG ponzi cycle. Now they can more easily take your text and use it for their own purpose, whatever it may be, and make money. Money which they will use : the third worlder to pay for a plane ticket over, and the Ponzi circuit to pay taxes to the USG, so the USG can pay the TSA, so the TSA can hire some third worlder fresh off the boat to shove his fist in your wife's asshole whenever you visit her parents.
Does this sound like any sort of deal to you ? It doesn't to me, and I'm not even suffering from half of those constraints. Of course captive "standards bodies" would make standards to make text more accessible to machines. This isn't something you actually want, as a general principle, unless you actually own the machines. Which, by and large, they do.
Yes, I know, I know, you're innocent. You simply don't have any poltical bones to pick, because this can now happen somehow, magically : agency without agency. Just like that, by itself, of itself, all for you.
Whatever. Enjoy the next fisting trip. Is the daughter of age yet ? Actually... it doesn't really matter what age she is when they do her, does it now. It's only terrorism, child porn and money laundering when you do it. Well... good that you don't have any political bones to pick, then. Enjoy your flight, sir. [↩]Trilema consists, as of the time of right now, of 7`066 published articles (thus excluding this one). That comes to a lot of words, check this out :
mysql> SELECT SUM(LENGTH(content) - LENGTH(REPLACE(content, ' ', '') )+1) FROM posts
WHERE status LIKE "publish";
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SUM(LENGTH(post_content) - LENGTH(REPLACE(post_content, ' ', '') )+1) |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 12272503 |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (8 min 41.84 sec)
It's kinda cool when you can make a computer work for minutes at a stretch. [↩]This is a very deep matter. Consider the following exchange :
mircea_popescu http://btcbase.org/log/?date=12-03-2015#1050204
Friday, 13 March, Year 7 d.Tr.