I've been trying to learn a new language (Vietnamese) and a thing that has been driving me crazy are all these instances of letters being randomly pronounced differently in different words sometimes. If you don't think about it too much, it's easy to go "this language is dumb, why do they do this?" But then I think about English and we have so many examples of this or other linguistic oddities that make no sense but which I've just accepted since I learned them so long ago.

So I wanted to generalize my question: For all the languages where this applies, why are there these cases where letters have inconsistent pronunciations? For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one? For cases where the letter or combination of letters creates a new sound not already covered by existing letters, why not make a new one? How did this happen? What is the history? Is there linguistic logic to it beyond these being quirks of how the languages historically developed?

So I have some food sensitivity issues and in particular I don't like raw tomato. They're gooey and seedy and they just make me feel kind of weird. Unfortunately there are a lot of things, especially sandwiches, which use tomato as a fairly critical part of the flavor of the dish. So just taking it out isn't ideally because it sometimes just makes the dish bland. I feel like processed tomato things like ketchup and tomato sauce don't really fulfill the same kind of role in these dishes.

Does anyone have any opinions/suggestions on what types of foods could plausibly be used as a substitute for raw tomato? It could be anywhere, but I'm thinking of things like sandwiches, salads, etc.

I've been reading a lot about things like AI, mass surveillance, changes to social media algorithms, etc. lately and it got me thinking:

Have developments in information technology reached a point where they are no longer improving society and are instead largely harming it?

• I grew up alongside the internet. When I was a kid, my computer was so slow that I turned it on when I came home from school to give it time to boot up while I did other things. When Youtube became a thing bandwidth was slow enough that I had to do something similar with loading up videos I wanted to watch ahead of time. Over time, improvements to bandwidth and data transfer protocols have enabled us to go from just being able to send numbers and text to being able to send high resolution pictures, video, audio, and even data necessary to update the gameplay of an online game in real time. At some point in the last few years, this got good enough to do everything I wanted at the speed I wanted and I haven't really had much in the way of bottlenecks or slowdowns since then outside of some very specific tech issues.

• I went from having something that just made phone calls to having a miniature computer in my pocket that can do all of the above about as well as my dedicated computer.

• Media editing software has become so widely accessible that ANYONE can participate in generating culture and sharing it with the world.

• Search and recommendation algorithms got good enough at some point that it made it possible for people to effectively comb through this new massive ocean of data.

And then.... what kinds of new technology has been developed or improved in the last few years? Algorithms have been made worse by being optimized around advertising, data collection, and other business interests. The availability of AI has led to a deluge of garbage gunking up the web and has made misinformation commonplace and hard to ignore. Mass surveillance has become more widespread and advanced. etc. It feels like all our recent and ongoing advancements have been net negatives for society outside of serving the interests of a handful of capitalists. So many of the brightest minds of our time are working on things that don't help anyone.

So what do you think? When was the last innovation (in internet technology, obviously we've had advances in medicines and things like that.) you'd consider to be good for us? Are there any promising lines of work being done today that you believe will lead us into a better future for the internet? Or are you pessimistic about it?

I have some questions about advice on what I should do and how to go about doing it. But reading the rules of this community (and asklemmy), it isn't clear to me that such questions are in the spirit of the community, but I'm unsure. Is this an appropriate place to ask such questions? And if not, can you point me to more appropriate communities? (It's not mental, medical, or professional advice)

Not necessarily looking for an answer in this thread, but I suppose just to provide a sample question to better consider what I mean:

• I am thinking about possibly moving to another country. What are things I should consider to decide if I should do so? What actions do I need to take to plan and make such a move? What are some resources that could make those move actions easier or even any companies that can do some of that work for me?