Flemish is more of a political construct than linguistic, it's a grouping of belgian-dutch the coastal, brabant and limburg language groups with each having their own regional dialects.
It's more than political. In speaking Flemish is to Dutch as UK English is to US English. In writing however there is no difference in spelling, but there is a difference in word choice.
Now, being from Belgium, even within that small part of the country where everybody is supposed to speak Dutch, I genuinely don't understand people from near the coast, which was about 150 miles from where I used to live.
Not sure that should be the qualifier, there might be more people able to speak Basque in the world than Danish, doesn't stop Danish from being well supported.
Quick google points to about 1M Basque speakers in the EU against 5-6M Danish speakers, there's also the fact that Basque is not the only official language in the country it belongs to, and that it's in fact not spoken in the vast majority of the country.
>One of the EU’s founding principles is multilingualism.
>This policy aims to:
>communicating with its citizens in their own languages
>protecting Europe’s rich linguistic diversity
>promoting language learning in Europe
With this in mind, the first intention fails by an enormous margin, given that 95%+ of Spain doesn't speak an iota of Basque, the second is met handily, given the long history of the language, and I'm not sure what to think about the third, any language whatsoever would serve that purpose.
I think those 24 languages reflect all the languages that are official languages at country level.
So for instance, Basque is not an official language of any country (only French in France and Spanish/Castilian in Spain). Belgium's official languages are French, Dutch, and German, "Flemish" is only a local variant of Dutch (Belgian French is also only a local variant of French).
Official is a weird concept though. Turns out Dutch law never really bothered to define an official language, Dutch simply is the de facto standard and is required for a lot of things making it effectively the standard. This makes Dutch Sign Language the only language officially recognised by law. An attempt to recognise Frysian and Dutch as official languages in the constitution failed.
Sweden didn't have an "official" language before the Language Law of 2009. Five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sámi, Yiddish) were officially recognized as such since 1999.
Basque is an official language and declared as such in the Spanish constitution however restricted only to the regions that decide to apply it (Basque Country and Navarra).
If we want to go all legal, I believe that Spanish/Castilian is the only official language of the State, so at country level, with the other "Spanish languages" only official in their respective areas:
Section 3
(1) Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it.
(2) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective Autonomous Communities in accordance with their Statutes.
(3) The richness of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage which shall be specially respected and protected. [1]
In the US, people will resort to fisticuffs, over variants of Spanish. I usually translate into Castilian Spanish, because that seems to be the equivalent of "Vanilla" Spanish. No one is really happy (except the Spaniards), but I'm not accused of favoritism.
For what it’s worth, Castilian sounds very odd to American ears. For a good time you can ask «¿en castellano?» and be met with either a blank stare or laughter.
It already sank their revenues in the past decade as 'support bots' were a thing before chatgpt but now it's far better, for some definition of better. But all services I used before 2020 already had 'chat bots' and that killed very many call centers / revenue then already and that's accelerating now. Now you can (for some definition of 'can') instruct the llm to ONLY escalate when nothing else works which enables many companies to get their in house staff to handle those few.
As someone who has been literally involved in this business (AI support), not very successfully unfortunately, I wouldn't.
They're literally the best suited companies to take full advantage of this new technology!
They have existing customer relationships, training manuals, past call recordings (== training data), and enough humans for fallback / oversight (often legally required!)
But yeah, you have to continue being entrepreneurial or risk being replaced by being complacent
I just posted this a few days ago, but the corporate people at the top won't look at it from a technical perspective, I'm sure. They'll look at how much they can save the company by quicky implementing the latest & greatest AI solution and lay off the people working there.
>> It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits.
> Did we really let customer service get so bad that people think this will be an improvement?
Yes.
One of the things that I learned, early in my career, is that the best customer service, is good product design, obviating the need for customer service. That’s something within my control.
For many companies, post-sale customer service is a money sink. I remember being told that the margins on a product were so thin, that a single call from a user would wipe out the profit.
But I was also never given support to produce a decent UX, because that was expensive.
This is a really good article. It’s not my bailiwick, but it must be extremely useful for folks that work in this space.
> When someone’s standing in front of a potential buyer trying to look professional, a slow-loading app isn’t just an annoyance. It’s a liability.
I liked reading that. It’s actually surprising how few developers think that way.
> Mobile is the web
That’s why.
I know many people that don’t own a computer, at all, but have large, expensive phones. This means that I can’t count on a large PC display, but I also can reasonably expect a decent-sized smaller screen.
I’ve learned to make sure that my apps and sites work well on high-quality small screens (which is different from working on really small screens).
The main caveat, is the quality of the network connection. I find that I need to work OK, if the connection is dicey.
> When someone’s standing in front of a potential buyer trying to look professional, a slow-loading app isn’t just an annoyance. It’s a liability.
I've been there myself as a Dev and later on as a manager. You have to really watch out not getting locked into local minima here. In most cases its not bundle size that wins this but engineering an app that can gracefully work offline, either by having the user manually pre-load data or by falling back to good caches.
This reminds me of functions that rely on properties, but the properties could, themselves, be functions (in Swift, we call them "computed properties," and they are indistinguishable, on the outside, from stored properties).
C++ can also have a lot of tripwires, from overloaded operators (same with Swift, but people don't overload operators very often, in Swift. They compute properties, all the time, though).
Isolated instances do not a period define. We can always find some example of someone who did something, but the point is it didn’t start like that.
For example, there was never a period when movies were made by creating frames as oil paintings and photographing them. A couple of movies were made like that, but that was never the norm or a necessity or the intended process.
What about Basque? Is that too controversial?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Beau_Séjour
reply