English is not my main language but it’s the new “Lingua Franca”, and for international purpose, I speak English.
I downvote non-English posts not using the appropriate language tag.

https://pirahxcx.neocities.org/

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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: October 3rd, 2025

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  • It was (the first world wide language used for diplomacy). If you want to quote Wikipedia, then:

    “French is sometimes regarded as the first global lingua franca, having supplanted Latin as the prestige language of politics, trade, education, diplomacy, and military in early modern Europe and later spreading around the world with the establishment of the French colonial empire. With France emerging as the leading political, economic, and cultural power of Europe in the 16th century, the language was adopted by royal courts throughout the continent, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Russia, and as the language of communication between European academics, merchants, and diplomats.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca#French

    Maybe sailors communicated with locals through a broken pidgin, but diplomats and aristocrats used French.


  • I first heard of the expression in a fancy dinner a relative brought a diplomat she was dating, and for diplomats all around the world for the last four or five centuries French was the Lingua Franca, as well for meetings between courts, aristocrats, academics, and the first language a book would be translated to because up until a few generations ago if one wanted to learn an “international language” it would learn French, which makes the etymological assumption understandable. However I just went to check some info about it since I was just told Franca doesn’t come from French… turns out, it has nothing to do with Germanic languages as well, but a mix of mostly Romance languages used through the Mediterranean for trade and that maybe got its name because Arabs, Turks, Persians, etc called all Europeans “Franks” and it was synonym of Westerner.





  • Just an hour ago I changed my profile mentioning Lingua Franca because I’m downvoting non-English posts not using language tags… the last time I heard that word being used was probably like… 20 years ago maybe? It’s not a common word specially because the word itself doesn’t make much sense anymore (been several decades that French is no longer the trade language, so it just sounds funny)… and after just mentioning it in my profile I see it being used again… by any chance, did you read my profile? lol



  • In my country you have to registers SIMs with your real id/name, however criminals just use stolen SIMs hehe
    The other day a neighbor of mine got a new phone and asked me to do the start configuration, create Google Acc, download Facebook, TikTok, Whatsapp and crap like that, she had all of that in her previous phone, but she traded it and didn’t remove the SIM card and thought it was a less of hassle creating a new acc for everything and registering a new SIM in her name than simply keeping her SIM and writing down her email addresses and passwords… and I believe a large portion of our population operates like that, absolutely barbaric.





  • In high school, but not much party politics, I mostly read old anarchists. At college you kinda have to go through the post-structuralist course, but it was then that I got more into reading economy and post/neokeynesianism - which wasn’t even part of the stuff I had to study…
    I used to care about arguing about politics and economy, but since my 30s politics became “not my thing” because I watched American politics being spread through Twitter and young people reading more trending American internet liberal activists instead of their local union newspapers, and then I watched all the biggest media conglomerates of my country raising the flag of those activists and they believing they are “winning” without realizing they became so harmless they are being mocked. Nowadays, I just believe we absolutely deserve everything we get.

    I’m particularly tired of the echo chambers social media created that turned everything in an “us vs them” mentality that when you don’t agree 100% on every topic you are a them and an enemy and everyone is under that homogenizing peer-pressure to conform… and I include the Fediverse on that, it’s the same crap. I don’t feel like being a part of any “us”, especially because I see everything corrupted by the American WASP-culture addiction to guilty and shaming that equally encompass conservatives and liberals, as the “us vs them” slowly kills all the real transgressive. I want distance from all the “us”.




  • I just want to say I disagree about the decline, I think there was a time there was huge decline indeed, first there were too much shitty autogenerated and bait content getting high in the index, then they shoved more and more sponsored results and early filter bias were shitty, but I believe it all improved greatly in later years, specially with AI search, Google indeed manages to give you most relevant stuff on top now, and most of times it will cover all you are asking, I find the difference from other engines noticeable, the problem is that Google is fucking cancer…
    I mostly use Starpage, sometimes results aren’t too good and I go to DuckDuckGo. I sometimes use Leta and Brave Search as well, but there are times I need to Google, especially for shopping.



  • I asked them exactly that hehe
    So, technically the sites you are redirecting from will never know you tried to access them and the addon is not interacting with any page, but the dev didn’t address/think of probing. I don’t have enough tech knowledge to confirm the addon won’t react to anything, thus making itself known. I don’t know which probing techniques there are and how all those resist-fingerprint and sandboxing settings from privacy-conscious browsers work against it… it does, however, sound like a sophisticated and resource-consuming method that I don’t think they would be using on regular internet unless they have specific targets, so if they have such probing techniques they are probably using it on IPs going through the TOR network (and you shouldn’t use any addon on Tor anyway).
    It’s all about your threat model, if you just want to avoid regular tracking and profiling the addon should be fine, now if you are afraid of some sophisticated and resourceful threat actors targeting you, don’t take your chances with any addon.