My wife thinks it knows when she gets up to go to the kitchen or bathroom because that's when the ads start. I'm thinking it's just coincidence. And hoping I'm right.

You think that they couldn't still send you a list of every video you've ever watched?

That's a fair point, but it misses that they are still going to harvest and sell your data even if you are a paying Youtube customer.

Which is one of the reasons I would be in favor of legislation requiring companies to pick a revenue stream and stick with it. Charge customers for the service OR give it away and sell the data OR run ads. No more combinations. No more running ads on paid services, no more harvesting data and running ads, no selling data for paid subscribers.

You're posting AC. There's no reason to assume this post came from the same angry person that posted the first one. Heck, I'll go ahead and assume this is your first post here ever; and politely request that you tone down the obscenities.

Just take it as a friendly reminder that their primary concern is spying on you all of the time.

That they are WATCHING and they NEVER FORGET.

What a nice way to make it seem like they're doing you a favor instead of spying on you all the damn time.

Yeah, seems like a silly move. Why not just tell their customers "Try ChatGPT instead"? It would be the first thing I would do.

Yeah, that was clever!

Then why fire their customers by hiking the price 100x? That's a strange move.

I doubt Chinese will ever see much use outside of China. 5% of the world will never be able to speak or understand it. It's a tonal analytic language, so the tone deaf cannot hear the difference in sounds. And that's without considering that it has a ridiculous written language non-natives have a terrible time with.

Japanese, on the other hand, is an atonal synthetic language, which makes it much easier for the rest of the world to understand. It also sounds nice, while Mandarin sounds frikking disgusting. It's loaded with nauseating sounds. As in the sounds you make when about to throw up. Tonal languages are loaded with gross sounds, and I hate them. Norwegian is just as bad with those swallowed g's. Yuck!

There are a number of Japanese bands that sing entirely in English. I don't know if that would mean games in English would go over well or not. Probably bears no relation.

That would depend on what you mean by "multiculturalism". That term is usually used to mean one nation comprised of multiple distinct cultures, which is a logical absurdity given the nature of Nations, thus suicidal. It can also be used to mean a culture that adopts aspects of immigrant cultures as they assimilate, which is genetically healthy and can be good for the nation. Or maybe you mean it on a species-wide scale, which is simply the world as-is, and which has advantages and disadvantages.

Linguistically, I think the idea is overblown. Yes, there are concepts that exist in some languages and not others, but that's easy to resolve. For example, Schadenfreude. A concept that did not exist in English until it was imported from German. You don't even need the German word to do it - "taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune" is a concept easily expressed in English. I just did it. Spanish has an interesting way of using the verb "Poder", which translates to English as both "to be able" and "power". This relationship exists in English - I can do it/I have the power to do it - but it is stronger in Spanish and I suspect as a result they are culturally predisposed to autocracy. Why? It also means political power and authority. The result is that there is little conceptual distance from the ability to do something (like rule) and having the legitimate power to do something (like rule). So, "Si, se puede", isn't, "yes, we can", it's, "yes, we have the power/authority".

Well, that's maybe a bit of a tangent. I guess I could have just said that there is no concept that can only be expressed in one language, and as a corollary, I doubt there is a concept that could not be expressed in every language.

The Japanese already use English all over the place. The majority of the population is at least somewhat competent with English. And in many cases, what is being written in Katakana (one of their three writing systems), is English.

Instead of saying they should use English instead (personally, I love the sound of Japanese), I'd try to discourage the ongoing use of Kanji. Hiragana (a bit like English cursive) and Katakana (bit like English block letters, always used for loanwords) are syllabaries with 40-50ish characters including diacritics. Much easier to create fonts for a hundred and some odd characters than the seven thousand or so Kanjis.

It probably wouldn't work. They think of Kanji as "Japanese writing". That doesn't go away easily.

Kanji is like a word with all the letters mashed together. The individual components are called primitives. In part because they reflect the old characters that got mashed together over the centuries. For example, there's a shape that represents the word for 'man'. There's a shape representing a roof. Combining those two primitives make it the word for "house". Roof over person.

That's a general example based on vague memories though, I'm not sure if the character for house is a roof over a man, but that's how it works.

And it only needs to do a good enough job on the characters you need. Which won't be that many.

Yes, but you don't need all of those for a corporate logo. You need exactly the characters that appear in the logo, which you're already paying someone to draw from scratch. If their corporate communications rely on something other than common system fonts... I wouldn't know what to say. I had a boss once that hated Times New Roman. That's as close as my understanding gets.