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aatharuv

406 karma · joined February 16, 2016

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aatharuv··on Costco’s butter recall, explained
The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.

If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.

aatharuv··on Notes on Guyana
That taboo is long since gone (I'm assuming you're talking about South Asia, though).
aatharuv··on FTC Pushed to Crack Down on Companies That Ruin Hardware via Software Updates
This reminds me of when Sony disabled their officially supported OtherOS support (used to install Linux and other os's dual boot) with an update. Of course without the update, no access to the Sony Store, games that require the latest Sony PS3 stopped working, etc...
aatharuv··on Australian government approves AAPowerLink project to export solar to Singapore
Your politicans, like Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, believe that the laws of Australia trump the laws of Mathematics, in the context of trying to weaken strong encryption. In at least some areas, they need a better education.
aatharuv··on First languages of North America traced back to two groups from Siberia
It makes sense but it's not trivial to discover, since languages separated by about 10,000 years have changed enough that it's almost impossible to find similarities. This paper talks about separations from 12-24 thousand years.

Proto-Afro Asiatic (edit: ancestor of Coptic, Hebrew, Amhara, Arabic, Tigre, the Berber languages, Aramaic, Hausa (IIRC), and a number of less commonly spoken languages) likely dates back to more than 10K years ago, but we have the benefit of more than 5,000 years of writing in both Egyptian and the Akkadian. We don't have that benefit with any of the indigenous languages of Siberia or North America.

Also, linguistic typology is not the best way to show relatedness, since languages change. For example, proto-Indo European had Nominative Accusative alignment, and was highly inflected, but modern English is almost completely uninflected, and Hindi has Ergative-Absolutive alignment for some tenses.

I looked at the structural features they mentioned, and at least some of them are well known to change quite dramatically. (Some Indo European languages picked up a difference between exclusive and inclusive we, places of articulation change, languages develop and lose gendered nouns, others have lost some distinctions of number (dual has been lost in most IE languages).

But I'm not a linguist, so any linguist can comment on whether these are fair criticisms.

Also, as others mentioned Na-Dene (Navajo is the most spoken language in this group), is already believed to have a connection to the Ket language of Siberia.

aatharuv··on U.S. imposes first-ever national drinking water limits on PFAS
Lowered IQ, impulse control, and increased levels of aggression.
aatharuv··on USCIS announces strengthened integrity measures for H-1B program
There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration.

Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.

aatharuv··on Oracle extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037
In general, when the SHTF, or things rapidly deteriorate. When the war finally starts. Etc.
aatharuv··on Iran seizes oil tanker in Gulf of Oman
No, you're not.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is the closest thing to being a US Protectorate without being a US posession.

It is officially an Associated State with a Compact of Free Association with the US. Its (non-naturalized) citizens have a right to work in and live in the US, equal access to welfare programs (that even green card holders don't have), and many US domestic agencies provide services there (the US Post office, and FEMA amongst others). And of course they have DoD protection (Edit: for Marshallese owned ships only), and use the US Dollar.

But it's even true in places which are _definitely_ not US proxies. Note that the US financial sanctions have an insanely wide reaching effect, given the need to be able to transact in US dollars.

Because of the US sanctions against Carrie Lam, the previous Chief Executive of Hong Kong, she had to withdraw her own salary from the Hong Kong SAR government in cash, because no bank in Hong Kong could deal with her and also offer US dollar denominated services.

aatharuv··on Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss
Now I wonder whether wearing photochromatic lenses (transitions lenses) would have reduced the damage. I do believe they are triggered by UV.
aatharuv··on Pantographia: 1799 specimen book of all the known alphabets
Malabaric seems to be both Malayalam and Tamil here.

Malabaric 2 is from Tranquebar -- the Danish factory in modern Tamil Nadu.

Malabaric 3 could read as Tamil, and I believe could read as Malayalam too, but I'll ask the Malayalam speakers here to comment.

Malabaric 4 looks like a strange form of either the Malayalam script or the Grantha script. (Modern Malayalam has a very curved ka -- this one looks more like the Tamil ka, but Tamil does not have the same repretoire of characters that Malayalam does. Grantha (traditionally used in Tamil Nadu to represent Sanskrit, and with a greater visual similarity to Tamil) does.

They also list Tamoulic (Tamil in French is "Tamoul") on page 293, which is somewhat like modern script but not really.

Talenga is listed right above Tamoulic (presumably a corruption of Telugu), but it also states that this language is also called Badega. Badaga is a minority Dravidian language in the area, but closer to Tamil and Kannada.

They made lots of mistakes.

aatharuv··on Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
2 decades ago, when X windows support for Indian language display in Unicode was spotty at best, I'd created an LD_PRELOAD hack, libxindic, to do character reordering for mostly correct display (It really didn't do the right thing with Tamil as Tamil ligates the -u and -uu matras to the base characters. It was useful back then, and even worked with Mozilla (but was a bit unstable).

http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/aatharuv/projects/xindic/

aatharuv··on Heat pumps show how hard decarbonisation will be
In California, at least, they seems to be recommending it. (I'm currently in the market to replace my Central Air system and talking to vendors.)
aatharuv··on My Caste
I'd like real numbers, but I've come across, a disproportionate number of people in interreligious, inter-ethnicity marriages, and presumably inter-caste marriages, except that I can't really tell one's caste unless they have a caste based lastname, and I know that name is associated with a caste.

I've heard of numerous cases where Indian-Americans didn't know their caste until they were asked about it by people not of Indian origin, who seemed to have the 4 caste + outcastes model in their heads, which barely maps to how caste is understood in modern India.

(Parents came here from India in the 1970's).

This may also differ by generation.

aatharuv··on Ancient Earth globe
I think the question we need to ask is how fast climate can change and how much can climate change.

For which I'd say, at a rate and total amount of change low enough to be compatible with the survival of human civilization, not having mass deaths, and keeping ecosystems intact, even if changed.

Civilization developed during a time of relatively stable weather. Rapid instability can cause mass dieoffs which at the very least will cause havoc with our food supply -- think fish. Or what's happening with peach production in Georgia.

We need to stop the bleeding (by going carbon neutral), and in parallel think about how to mitigate the problems, and reverse the changes.

aatharuv··on An arrowhead made of meteoritic iron from the late Bronze Age
The written forms of some Afro-Asiatic languages often did not (and still don't) include vowels, as they didn't provide any information that couldn't be gathered through context. The actual languages did have vowels.

Coptic, the descendant of Ancient Egyptian used by liturgical purpose by Egyptian Christians uses vowels, while very distantly related Arabic and Hebrew (part of the Semitic branch of Afro Asiatic) don't use vowels except in rare cases.

aatharuv··on Text rendering hates you (2019)
One of the examples for Devanagari that is claimed to be broken is a nonsensical combination that really isn't supposed to work either as per any of the Devanagari script using languages or the Unicode standard.

Devanagari (roughly speaking) has Consonants (with an inherent vowel A), dependent vowels signs added to a consonant, and independent vowel letters. And a few other signs for aspiration, nasalization, and cancelling the inherent vowel to combine consonants.

न्हृे Starts with N (the consonant NA with the inherent vowel A cancelled and ends with the Devanagari Consonant HA with _two_ vowel signs added to it - DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC R and DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN E

CV is the standard for Devanagari "syllables". When you do want to write two vowels after each other, you would write CV, and then another independent Vowel letter, so it would look like

न्हृए (which would end with DEVANAGARI LETTER E instead of DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN E)

*These are syllables as per the script definition rather than linguistic syllables.

https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/UnicodeStanda... section 12.1 has more details on the specifics of implementing Devanagari script, but not necessarily all of the conjunct forms between consonants, which are used especially when rendering Sanskrit.

aatharuv··on India Pauses Plans to Add New Coal Plants for Five Years, Bets on Renewables
It's guaranteed to increase. The question is how fast will it increase, and will it increase more slowly than expected.
aatharuv··on India Pauses Plans to Add New Coal Plants for Five Years, Bets on Renewables
Here's the original article it links to:

https://apnews.com/article/india-coal-pause-plan-climate-ren...

Some of the useful tidbits:

- India currently plans on reaching net-zero by 2070.

- This does pause any coal power plants under construction, and for now doesn't prevent planning to add new coal power plants after 2027

- Lots of increased electricity demand during the day to to hotter weather and longer summers because of climate change can be met by solar power.

- India plans on adding 500 GW of clean energy by 2030, but needs to pick up the pace to meet the target (from 17 GW constructed/ year to 40 GW constructed/year ).

- Instead of 8GW of new Coal capacity, India would be building out battery storage instead.

I do wonder how needs will go down, if India's population starts dropping earlier than expected. India's population is expected to start dropping by 2050.

aatharuv··on Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino
The UK made concessions too late. By the time they decided to stop kidnapping* American sailors and forcing them to work in the British Navy, the war had already started.

*impressment is the word they used.

aatharuv··on France bans flights between cities linked by trains
I presume there always are people always flying in from overseas into one of the larger airports and catching a connecting flight domestically. It'll become annoying if they suddenly have to grab their bags, go to the train station and catch a connecting train.

Even if there are exceptions, the flights just might become unprofitable and go away.

aatharuv··on Apple India Sales Near $6B as Cook Begins Retail Push
That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks

From the article akmittal posted at https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/apple-gets...

>> The local value addition in iPhone manufacturing is currently around 18%, and with the partners coming in, that could likely go up to 50%

aatharuv··on Apple India Sales Near $6B as Cook Begins Retail Push
My understanding is that from the article, assembly was being done, not complete manufacturing. Which means that many of the components are imported components that are being assembled.

Parts from one country may get transported to another country to be built into a component, and returned to the original country for further assembly.

So it would be interesting to learn what the value of the individual components imported in is, and how much value is added by Indian made components and during India assembly and by Foxconn and Wistron.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/india-apple-iphone-manuf...

Assembly is fine to start out with, but to bring more of the value add, one would need to build out an entire ecosystem of factories building the components.

aatharuv··on Apple India Sales Near $6B as Cook Begins Retail Push
Downvotes for that?

Okay, let me rephrase that. How much value is added to the phones in India?

aatharuv··on Apple India Sales Near $6B as Cook Begins Retail Push
I wonder what the value add in India is.
aatharuv··on Tiny, cheap smart speakers unlocked the rise of digital payments in India
Africa is possibly another target. Its literacy rates are a little bit under India's, and it's another place where digital payments have gone big, even earlier than India.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SSF/sub-saharan-africa...

aatharuv··on Great California, Nevada, Oregon Flood of 1862
No, it means that there were extreme weather events going on even without the industrial revolution in full swing.

Extreme weather is just going to be far more common https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/weather-climate#:~:te....

The 500 year flood is going to be a 100 year flood and a 100 year flood is going to be a once a decade flood.

aatharuv··on KFC apologises after German Kristallnacht promotion
This is what happens when the people responsible don't have basic cultural competence. Or possibly poorly written code. Or more likely poorly defined requirements handed from product management.

There are holidays where it is appropriate to advertise food sales. And there are days of commemoration of tragedies where you just may be in mourning.

aatharuv··on India fines Google $162M for anti-competitive practices on Android
India really hates big _foreign_ monopolies. The last really big foreign monopoly to get a place in India, the British East India Company ended up taking over the country.
aatharuv··on Ukraine officially recognized the Northern Territories as part of Japan
Germany doesn't claim Königsberg, now known as Kaliningrad, or any of the territories it ceded to France, Russia, Poland, and I believe Lithuania after World War II.

Japan still claims the Northern Territories.

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