BahRamYou
1d ago
I think some countries/cultures are just better at certain things than others, and it's almost random as to what and why.
Like, sure, we could make excuses why Americans don't need to learn other languages, and that's certainly part of it. But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities. We also don't need to be good at niche winter olympic sports, yet we still consistentlly do well and are currently 2nd in medal count, behind Norway (which has the advantage of basically inventing most of the winter olympic sports). We are consistently bad at professional international football/soccer, despite spending increasingly large amounts of money on it, while tiny poor countries like uruguay and croatia do increasingly well at it.
Looking internationally, the pattern becomes increasingly strange. Germans do great at learning English as a second language. Dutch, even better! French... not so much. Swiss people learn English, but struggle with whichever of French/German is their non-native language. Meanwhile Belgiuns, Luxembourgians, and Alsace–Lorrainians (in my highly subjective experience) learn all 3 languages with no problem. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics in the US are all over the place in terms of language skills, but tend towards English-only as they get more removed from their parent country.
In asia, it's even stranger. Japan has been heavily promoting English since the 50s, but is still terrible at it, despite massive amounts of English loanwords. Korea used to be pretty bad at it, but now seems very strong. Taiwan is incredibly strong at teaching ESL. I challenge anyone to find a consistent pattern there.
My only guess is that you need the right balance of resources and motivations. You need enough money to properly teach children a second language, but not so much money that they feel like they don't need to bother. They need to be constantly immersing with the second language, but not so much that they just forget their first language. They need to feel like the target language is "cool" and exotic, but not so distant that it's overwhelming. Basically, they need the right mix of "want" and need" to feel like "I will learn this language within the next 5 years"- not so quick that they give up when faced with drawbacks, but not so distant that they slack off and feel like it will never happen. Willing to spend some money to help them learn, but also willing to just grind and memorize.
BahRamYou
1d ago
It would be interesting to research how this tracks with overall demographics of society, especially in historical times. After WW2 there was a huge shortage of males (because of the war) and also a huge baby boom (...maybe because of the war? But maybe other reasons too? Still not fully understood). As a result, there were a lot of young women, so I think people just didn't notice or didn't care as much about age gaps. If anything, they were more worried about the opposite- what if a woman couldn't find a suitable husband!? Disaster!
Nowadays the population pyramid has been inverted. There's more people above 30 than below, and more men than women below 30, so the competition to date under-30-women is intense. I think it's natural that society in general takes a harder look at such relationships (are we sure there isn't an unhealthy power dynamic there?) and also that under-30 men would feel jealous and protective.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I've watched Pippa a lot. I think the overall culture has changed a bit (partly because of her). Vtubers really took off around 2020, when people were stuck inside due to lockdowns, with nothing to do but consume endless content online. And between covid and the presidential election, some people were desparate to find a happy space where people weren't talking about politics, so vtubers became something of a sanctuary. And the En world especially, everything revolved around Hololive, which was set up like a traditional idol company, with them having a carefully curated image and avoiding contraversial subjects (although they could still be pretty edgy sometimes).
Pippa was originally just some random streamer working for a small unknown agency. She wasn't trying to be "based" or political at all, she was just a weird shut-in who spent too much time chronically online looking up weird edgy content, and then she started talking about it in streams. She intentionally referenced 4chan memes, although usually not political ones, and 4chan at the time was a big hub of vtuber discussion, just not one that anyone in hololive or nijisanji would ever acknowledge.
So OK, she does occasionally mention things like how she owns guns or is interested in the Bismarck. But she's really not doing "based" political content at all. She's just cracking jokes, trying to be high energy, and doing whatever she can to be funny. She'll mention people like Asmongold or Alex Jones, but almost never discuss them in any detail. She certainly doesn't stand up on a soap box for any specific political causes. Still, even that much was pretty shocking the general vtuber culture of 2021-2022.
Nowadays, of course, there's a million indie vtubers, and most of them are a lot farther removed from Hololive or any other "idol" types. So now we have some that are explicitly political. It's not that shocking though, it's just... kinda boring, they repeat the same talking points as anyone else on the internet.
All of this is to say that Pippa just kinda pretends to be edgy, but it's pretty tongue-in-cheek and she's actually a sweet girl, so I wish people would just leave her alone.
Do you get the same problem with it that I usually do? That is, the first attempt is really good, and a few additional prompts make it even better. But the more I work with it, the more it seems to get stuck in weird errors or unnecessarily complicated code. After, like, 10 prompts, if it's not working perfectly I just have to start from scratch. It's like pastry dough- a little kneeding is necessary, but too much can ruin it.
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