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LordGronkon You weren't meant to have a boss (2008)

It’s also that, with the current system, a person who is young, talented, and ambitious who is interested in public service has little to no reason nor incentive to work outside the beltway or a state capital, leaving local governance to retirees and incompetents.

LordGronkon Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover

I would love this if it were to produce viable unabridged ebooks of Francis Parkman’s “France and England in North America” vol 2-7. All the existent digital editions were poorly scanned and don’t separate footnotes from the main text.

LordGronkon Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline

Damn and here I was looking forward to the day when I could finally marry Lockheed Martin

LordGronkon The Elements of Euclid

I would love to someday see a version of this or a hardcopy of Byrne’s version but with the original greek text and a modern apparatus criticus.

LordGronkon Pseudonymity in Academic Publishing

As I recall, JCRI does know the identity of each author.

LordGronkon We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus

He mentions Ian M Banks, who was not from the US

LordGronkon Top Russian rocket scientist dies from ‘mushroom poisoning’

Just looking at the list below, there’s no way that anyone could get me to enter a building with two or more stories if I were an important Russian.

LordGronkon What’s the world’s oldest language?

History shows that many humans of the same species can “interact” without friendly communication, or, for that matter, preserving fully functional languages (Just look at the Minoans, Etruscans, Harappans, Rhetics, and the numerous other peoples who spoke something that we can’t read, or can understand but only with great effort)

LordGronkon What’s the world’s oldest language?

I would say Coptic and Latin are not exactly a 1 to 1 comparison, primarily because today coptic is attached to a specific ethnic identity and the attempts at community revival that come with that. Of course one might argue that there are Latin revival groups too but equating organised families and expat communities that function like the Copts (or similar groups like the Mandaeans) with, say, internet organised neo-pagans that have little continuity or an organisation like the Catholic Church that solely uses Latin for official documents and discourages its use is, at best, a comparison that lacks any sort of diachronic subtlety.

LordGronkon What’s the world’s oldest language?

I think a better and more interesting question would, perhaps, be “What is the most conservative language as supported by written and spoken evidence (the variations of ancient greek dialects tracking with orthographic differences shows that it can be done). And Anglo-saxon is not the same as modern English to any degree. 1066 and the great vowel shift saw to that. A great book on the history, and conservative nature of Egyptian is “The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study” by James Allen. If you really want to get into the weeds “Ancient Egyptian Phonology” by the same author. The latter in particular points out the extreme similarities to more rural Coptic dialects and Egyptian as found in the Heqanakht papyri.

LordGronkon What’s the world’s oldest language?

it has a steady liturgical use and children are raised to understand it in church, along with small spoken revival groups here in the states so, while not exactly living, I would say it’s in a far better state in its community than Latin post vatican 2. But note, I never said it was alive. Just that it’s not as dead as, say, Sumerian (in fact it’s about as alive amongst the coptic community I know as Sumerian was at the time Akkadian was spoken, as a language of identity and education)

LordGronkon What’s the world’s oldest language?

There’s no evidence that Homo Sapiens, aside from some interbreeding with other hominids interacted with other hominids who were capable of complex language for that to be possible. And a multiple origin scenario for behaviourally modern humans flies in the face of modern science, archaeology, and palaeontology to such a degree that it would basically require magic.

LordGronkon What’s the world’s oldest language?

Historians and linguists generally agree that Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record. All three are extinct

Umm, what? Coptic is a (barely) living Egyptian. It is close enough for us to have deciphered hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic, at the old, middle, and late stages. Yes the Greek on the Rosetta stone helped but Coptic sealed the deal, particularly with transliteration. Thus I would say using the term “Egyptian” to refer to any particular language with obvious stages and then saying it’s dead when you have a stage still spoken is absurd, and does a great disservice to linguistic communities that need help. I expect better from a publication as “woke” as Scientific American. Copts and their language may not be thriving nor reviving but news of the death of the Egyptian language is a bit exaggerated.

LordGronkon Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata

The 2nd edition JACT Reading greek course is excellent, I highly recommend it.

LordGronkon Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?

I use Freedom on Ios and SelfControl on MacOS to limit myself to 30 minutes of slack per day. Using those apps it is literally inaccessible outside of a predetermined window (turning them off outside of the window requires a lot of work, or just wiping the device). I have it set up so that any important announcements go to my email, which I can see and reply to if they are in predetermined channels.

LordGronkon Should We Celebrate Acquisitions?

Personally, I would think there are two answers to this:

a) the "we" in the question is exclusive, i.e, it only includes those that are part of the deal. In this case, I think "maybe". It brings to mind a perhaps slightly seemingly unrelated tale of how, prior to the current Paramount+ show, Halo was to be a film made by Niel Blomkamp, when that project was killed due to paramount's acquisition of the rights after years in development hell, a celebration was held by those rightfully glad to be free of shit management and the chance to move on. I have seen similar incidents in tech, but I don't want to elaborate.

If the "we" is inclusive, than the answer is no, no one is even slightly obligated to celebrate other's business deals, society, as is, seems to demand we celebrate far too much already.

LordGronkon China has pioneered a law to empower people over algorithms?

I think the issue he is pointing out is that China has plenty of laws that, as written, guarantee the exact opposite of what the state actually does. For instance, article 35 of the PRC's constitution guarantees "freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.", yet that is obviously not the case in practice.