For many years, I've had this concept, or perhaps a hypothesis, that over the next few decades, the number of countries in the world will grow, while the number of living languages will shrink. This is because, for example, the world is becoming more globalized, and there's little need to speak smaller languages. They don't offer the usual financial or other advantages. World-famous novels aren't written in them, blockbuster movies aren't filmed in them, and groundbreaking scientific papers aren't published in them. And even if something like that happens on rare occasions, it's always translated.

But now, I'm starting to have doubts about this. If advancements in computer translation trigger a linguistic revolution, making all media, literature, and other information, whether spoken or written, accessible in a vast array of languages, and if it gradually becomes fairly easy to add more and more languages, dialects, and even slangs, then switching to some dominant, widely spoken language might actually become less strategically necessary. On the contrary, you could speak your native language, the one you've known since childhood, with the people around you physically, and everything else from the outside world would be available in that same language too.

If things head in this direction, we might see an explosion of new dialects and linguistic offshoots. If, instead of speaking in person, you constantly receive speech tailored specifically to you, translated into your preferred language and even fine-tuned to your personal tastes, then communication at the level of villages or neighborhoods might be more than enough for personal interaction, and beyond that, everyone's on equal footing.

Some social groups might quickly dive deep into their own slang, while others could start inventing new languages,artificial ones with enhanced linguistic possibilities. Radically reforming existing languages or creating entirely new ones from scratch wouldn't just be possible; it could even become accessible to small groups of people.

If this kind of multilingual explosion happens and then the system enabling all these automatic translations crashes—that would be the real fall of the "our" time's Tower of Babel. (In quotes, because it would still take a couple of generations.)

In the end, I believe both trends will coexist. Old languages will continue to vanish rapidly under the pressure of globalization, but translation technology will spark an explosion of new languages, most of which will be short-lived, such as digital slangs or niche dialects. A few, however, could be radically innovative, perhaps blending human and machine syntax or unifying diverse cultures in a hyper-connected world, offering greater precision and vibrancy while being simpler to learn and better structured for rapid processing. These languages, unimaginable today, would be tailored to future needs, such as AI collaboration or global governance, though their emergence may be limited by unequal access to technology. Still, I believe fewer languages would be beneficial. Fewer does not mean just one, but having hundreds or thousands of languages does not necessarily help humanity grow. Instead, fewer languages would create larger pools of speakers, fostering richer creative and educational material, better cross-country communication, and a larger body of easily accessible knowledge. Yet, no single language is perfect, so maintaining a small number of diverse languages would allow us to leverage the unique linguistic benefits and perspectives each brings.

There have been many attempts to create new languages, even long ago—think Esperanto, designed for global unity, Interslavic (Mežeslavjanskij), or Slovio and even Slovanština, all aiming to bridge Slavic tongues, or the inventive the Shavian alphabet, crafted for phonetic English. With technology lowering barriers, I believe we’ll soon see a surge of such experiments, and some might just take off.

Watched Felidae, a 1994 German animated feature film, a detective story about cats investigating murders.

It's well-made, interesting, and unusual. Generally, all the well-known, high-quality stuff has already been watched to death, and the less-watched stuff is usually of a lower tier. So, if you love Miyazaki, Tekkonkinkreet, Fantastic Planet, Watership Down or Paprika, this one's worth checking out too.

The premise is simple: a cat named Francis moves to a new place because his owner, who writes pulp novels, frequently relocates for inspiration. In this new place, Francis finds himself surrounded by strange cat murders. He meets the locals and starts investigating.

We watched it with kids, eventhough I'd say it's borderline mature content. Yet we all enjoyed it.

Hypothetically, AI suppose be a huge help to creators. Movies, music, animations, books, journalistic reports, software, architectural projects, and the like—all of this could easily be sped up, made cheaper, and, most importantly, improved in quality with the help of AI, even at its current level.

It seems like a whole bunch of people are engulfed in that, but you hardly see any of it on a large scale. In other words, maybe something has gotten a tiny bit cheaper somewhere, but it hasn't affected movie ticket prices or book costs. There aren't any widespread improvements in quality, faster release cycles, or, least of all, price drops for anything in the realm of creativity and art.

It feels like all these improvements are stuck at a grassroots level, while the big players are massively resisting it and all they do is complain, get outraged, demand something or other, and whip up panic.

Word of the Day: sheaf. This is a bundle of grain stalks tied together with the grain heads all facing the same direction.

As always, it's difficult to learn terminology from an industry you're not immersed in when studying a foreign language. What's especially challenging are things you learn as a child and then vaguely remember your whole life but rarely use in daily conversation—like the names of little birds or animals from fairy tales.

Everything that was once widely used in daily life, because almost everyone lived in villages and was closely connected to growing food, has left its mark. Many words are tied to this, and they later get used as allegories, metaphors, and so on. For us modern-day people, the clearest example is the 3.5-inch floppy disk icon in computer interfaces for the save function. But you encounter this phenomenon everywhere.

Animal-related vocabulary is especially difficult for me, with each one connected to dozens of words. Take horses, for example. First, there are different types: mare, stallion, gelding, bronco, mustang, colt, filly. But we also know words like mane, horseshoe, tack, withers, fetlock, pastern, pommel, cantle, martingale, and hackamore. And that's not even everything. A group of horses is a herd. When multiple horses are hitched together, it's a team or span. In the saddle sits a rider, but there are also farriers, ostlers, wranglers, drovers, and bereiters. Horses have stalls and paddocks. Horse colors (coats) also have specialized terms: piebald, skewbald, palomino, dapple-gray, or chestnut. The sounds horses make include nickering, whinnying, and snorting, yet in fairy tales horses say. "neigh-neigh." There are specific words for how horses move: at a hand gallop, collected trot, or extended canter. And there's specialized terminology for horse meat dishes that some people know from Western novels or specialty restaurants—like horse steaks or smoked horse sausage—plus loads of specialized words for leather work like cordovan and horsehide. I'm ashamed to say I only know these superficially now. And then there are cavalcades, Clydesdales, Percherons, and terms like dressage, which I think relate to horses, but I'm not confident about their exact definitions. (I'll go read up on them now)

So many words! Where does a modern person learn them nowadays? It's unclear. But somehow we know them. And a similar spectrum of words exists for every animal. And generally for other agricultural and non-agricultural sectors too. For example, there's a haystack, a haycock, and a sheaf. Why, nowadays not everyone can confidently explain how hay differs from straw, let alone silage. And in English, due to how the language itself is structured, there are incomparably more such words than in virtually any other language, in fact several times more.

I was reading about new Linux functionality where they're adding optimized memory management, dividing RAM into what they now call "sheaves." This got me thinking about words like bale, haycock, haystack, and parcel, and took me on this journey, and now it looks like you too.

Educated people and, on average, people in the West tend to see squares first, while others more often see circles first. Just imagine, that some people only see circles, for me that's is not easy at all.

In fact, the image is simple, there are horizontal stripes with 16 circles cut out of them and rotated 90º. Because of this, some people don't notice the rectangles (often called "squares" for simplicity) formed by this arrangement and only see the cut-out circles.

Industrialization and life in cities filled with rectangular objects and buildings develop a new skill in us to recognize these newly formed rectangles. Without this skill, the circles cut out of the stripes are the natural thing to see, and because of how they're cut, the circles are what stand out.

But the skill honed to recognize the pattern of rectangular objects is so strong that people raised in an industrial environment are led to see the illusion of the formed rectangles as the main subject of the image.

In any struggle we face, any confrontation, political divide, or even everyday conflict, there are opponents, adversaries, or outright enemies. And they always come in three types, and all three exist simultaneously.

The first ones, or we could call them direct opponents — these are those who are generally on the other side from us. The second are those even more radical than we are. And the third are those on our side, but much closer to the first group than we are. Surprisingly, the main anger and the very manifestation of struggle is often directed at the third group. Though most often it's precisely the second group that's the reason we're fighting the first group at all, while the third group kind of smooths things over. The first group, correspondingly, has exactly the same situation. They have their own second and third types, and here's the funny part: when their second group is so far from the center that their enemies would initially be the opposite second group, they'll eventually unite and become almost one entity.

Briefly, this can be described as: the first are direct enemies, the second are radicals often pushing us into the conflict itself, and the third are moderate allies who seem suspiciously close to the enemies. And it's precisely on them that the main fury is most often unleashed.

And of course, the strategy for all three is different. You need a kind of trident of approaches to be able to mount a full defense.

In military science, this is described as "external, internal, and nearest enemies," and this is a classic scheme: external enemy, internal (radicals), nearest (moderates, traitors). Freud explained this through the narcissism of small differences, where the most bitter conflicts arise precisely between those who are similar but differ in nuances. And of course, Kernighan's Law is also about this — alongside enemies, there are also worst allies. And regarding opposites, this is described by the horseshoe effect: opposite extremes (our second group and their second group) converge in methods and sometimes even become closer to each other than to the center.

There's also always what's called the gray mass, or the silent majority, or apathetic don't-care-ers. But this doesn't mean they're the center, which may not be passive at all. I don't like it when these passionate types are described as neutral. They're all on someone's side, and their outward neutrality is most often a defensive reaction. Therefore, they're either with us anyway, or essentially in league with one of the three types.

Here's an important thought: these three types always exist. But what about very narrow situations, for example, a conflict between two people? It seems that if there's only one opponent, the rule of three is violated. No, the rule remains in effect. When we descend to the level of conflict between two individuals, we begin to see that each person is a multifaceted personality, and each has their own divided parts, each with its own opinion. And within the person, there's still a struggle going on, and essentially these are our doubts that we constantly need to grapple with.

Therefore, the rule of three operates everywhere: from geopolitics and world wars to family quarrels and even our internal struggles. External, internal, and nearest enemies are always present. The question is only how we'll build the strategy of our trident.

There is newcomer in the world of wires and connectors — General Purpose Media Interface (GPMI), China's step beyond USB-C. It's a standard, a protocol, and a new set of ports and cables.

First off, it's not just one standard, but two Type-B and Type-C. Type-B introduces a new plug, which is reversible and noticeably larger than USB-C, as shown in the image on the left.

The second type, Type-C, uses the same shape as USB-C. But now you'll have to be extra vigilant about which cable you're holding — is it a cheap USB 2.0, a charging-only one, does it support video, is it USB4, Thunderbolt 3, or even 5, and now, is it GPMI? I suspect manufacturers will, as usual, skimp on labeling because, well, it's such a hassle for them to make things clear for us.

Why all this? Type-C offers data speeds up to 96 Gbps (gigabits per second) and charging up to 240 W. That's higher than standard USB-C's 40–80 Gbps but below the top-tier Thunderbolt 5 modes. Essentially, it's an attempt to improve on HDMI/DisplayPort and create a proprietary — or rather, Chinese — standard.

Type-B is a bit more impressive. It delivers up to 192 Gbps and up to 480 W. The idea is to provide new capabilities for video, replacing HDMI and DisplayPort, plus powering devices with a single cable, as I understand mainly for TVs and projectors.

Regarding Europe, where USB-C is mandatory as a charging port for a range of devices, this doesn't prevent adding extra ports, but selling a phone without USB-C is a no-go. For TVs and monitors, there are no such restrictions. So GPMI won't arrive there immediately, not because of a direct ban but due to market inertia.

What comes after GPMI and USB-C? We'll see. There will be something for sure. I really hope that that something finally puts an end to the cable chaos, if not outright UX sabotage.