Typhon

Indifferent would be a better word.

In any case, Esperanto has no feature which set it apart from other European languages, whether in lexicon (obviously) or in grammar, it is thoroughly european (as demonstrated in great detail here : http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ )

It makes me kind of sad when people assume that "Chomsky's work = the whole of linguistics".

Furthermore, all known human languages allow you to attribute utterances to another, earlier speaker, what is known as reported speech (often, though not always as Pirahâ demonstrate, through an embedded clause "He said that X").

Human non-verbal communication (which is EMPHATICALLY NOT to be confused with sign languages), on the other hand, is typically not very expressive. Apart from the admittedly very important, but nevertheless quite specialized domain of human emotion (conveyed by facial expression for instance), it is more or less inadequate for much of what we want to communicate.

Are they ? As far as I know, neurons last more or less from before birth to death. There is neurogenesis in the hippocampus but it doesn't replace existing neurons, and the new cells themselves last until death.

I think there's a contradiction in PG's (and Sam Altman's) public attitude towards Trump and their attitude regarding Thiel.

I mean either Trump is beyond the pale, in which case they should not associate themselves with any of his supporters, or he is not, in which case they should cut the goddamn hyperbole.

I think this 'outlier excuse' works when talking about serial killers or even criminal gangs, but I'm talking about violence on a much bigger scale, a scale where cultural factors are always contributing.

Anyway, as far as I know, although my country has committed its share of horrible massacres around the world, none of it has happened in my lifetime... I just hope it'll last.

I guess some decided that Dijkstra didn't have enough inflammatory quotes attached to his name and fabricated the other one.

Even if there are more minority languages in SE Asia and South America, I'm not sure they're treated better there than in Europe.

J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.

It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave.

Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape. E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.

Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.

EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language. More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.

All the tools to create personal websites existed more than 20 years ago. They haven't disappeared.

If anything they're probably cheaper, easier to find and to configure now, and also, more diverse, slicker, have more features, etc... And as pointed out by others, distributed social networks have existed for probably about ten years now.

And yes, the fact that the author chose to publish this pompous trite on medium is laughable.

Much like webpages that say "404 not found" with a "200 OK" header.

The picture he paints here of postwar-America as a bland, uniform country dominated by a few mega-institutions reminds me of the USSR.

How ironic.

http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/mnewman/LockhartsLament.pdf

EDIT : Oops, I hadn't seen that he already linked to this text. That'll learn me to post too quickly. Oh well.

they don't really get how much people in the past and in other cultures are just like us, they like funny, silly and fun things too

Thank you for your condescension. Obviously, philologists, linguists and other specialists are stupidly wasting their time while you have it all figured out based on the "obvious" insight of one rather lame XKCD strip.