bradrn

I’ve also noticed this with vinnyvichy and 082349872349872 (who mostly seem to respond to each other). Probably it should be reported to dang if it hasn’t been already.

(The first time I saw it, I wondered if I was going insane, because the conversations seemed unrelated to the topic and nonsensical in themselves… good to know there’s nothing I’m missing!)

You’re welcome!

> “A stray bullet killed a child during police encounter”

To be pedantic, this isn’t passive voice at all. See Pullum on this particular misconception: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html

> Simply CMD+D (fonts) and enable anything you want.

Like I said, you can do it. That’s why I said ‘by default’: the defaults clearly show how LaTeX is optimised for high-quality typesetting to a greater extent than Word is.

> My point is the marginal benefit of using Latex to make documents slightly prettier is negligible.

I disagree with this: it’s not just a matter of being ‘slightly prettier’. I will make the claim that, if you care about typography, LaTeX is easier to use than Word. Given the same amount of time and effort, a document created in LaTeX will look better than one made in Word.

For instance, take the paper you linked. You mentioned that, in order to create it in Word, you needed to make ‘lots of Word styles’, etc. etc. By contrast, simply retyping the text into a minimal LaTeX document will result in an output which is as good, if not better. I’m not going to bother wrestling with Word styles and whatnot, if I can create a far better-looking document in LaTeX with less effort.

> The focus of the researcher should be on the content.

And it is, when I use LaTeX. The whole point of LaTeX was always to separate design from content, and I feel it succeeds pretty well in this.

I don’t think anyone disputes that it is possible to typeset documents like this in Microsoft Word, given sufficient effort. But in LaTeX, I can create documents which look far better than this with far less work. It’s not simply a matter of ‘disliking mouse-and-click’: LaTeX is designed for high-quality typesetting, in ways which Word is not. (To take just two examples, it enables kerning and ligatures by default.)

> Total tangent there's this thing in Japanese where a word ends up meaning one thing and also its opposite, due to being used ironically

This is quite common outside Japanese: e.g. in English, ‘wicked’ can be positive or negative.

You’re missing the point of the article. The primary aim is to explain how Chinese characters work, using English as a reference point.

This is completely valid. Like I said, acceleration isn’t right for everyone! I also started out by reading more advanced maths textbooks, and it’s a great thing to do for students where acceleration isn’t a good option.

> The best school system I ever attended rigorously divided classes between social and academic

This is such a great idea! And it sounds like it works well in practise, too. I’ve often pondered the idea of separating classes by ability rather than age, and this is a really practical method of achieving it.

> I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting.

Oh yes… I also spent considerable time teaching myself interesting topics. It’s a good skill to have. But I was still bored a lot of the time, and being able to do the interesting stuff in school too was a much better experience for me.

A counterpoint: I was accelerated by three year levels, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Otherwise I would have been intensely bored in high school for six years straight, with all the problems that would inevitably have brought.

Of course, this depends so much on the person in question. Acceleration can be great for some people and awful for others. But it’s not about ‘enjoying being a kid’ — that’s something I hear a lot, but I enjoyed myself a lot more in the higher grades where I was actually learning material I found interesting.

It’s more complicated than that. The taboo in this case is hlonipha [0] amongst Bantu peoples, in which you cannot say the name of certain relatives, or any word which sounds like their name. By this stage, clicks had already entered Bantu languages from Khoisan ones [1], and had already started to spread through the native vocabulary. Hlonipha simply sped up that process — if you want to say a word you’re not allowed to say, it’s easy to just substitute a sound with a click.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech#Africa

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan_languages

This is quite similar to the Common Lisp conditions system… which I actually don’t know much about, but I do know that it lets you inject behaviour at runtime like this does.

Based on the following paragraph alone, I feel quite tempted to file this under ‘utter rubbish’:

> Another hypothesized mechanism [for personality changes] involves alterations in the electromagnetic field of the recipient. Pearsall highlighted the fact that “energy and information are the same thing” (p., 5 [4]). One form of energy is electromagnetic energy, and the heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. Information related to the personality of the donor could be stored within the electromagnetic field of the donor’s heart and this information could then be transferred with the heart during transplant surgery, producing a change in the recipient’s personality [4].

Indeed, this is what I was trying to say!

In most languages, doing what this article describes is quite straightforward: you would just define a new type (/ struct / class) called ‘Hash’, which functions can take or return. The language automatically treats this as a completely new type. This is called ‘nominal typing’: type equality is based on the name of the type.

The complication with TypeScript is that it doesn’t have nominal typing. Instead, it has ‘structural typing’: type equality is based on what the type contains. So you could define a new type ‘Hash’ as a string, but ‘Hash’ would just be a synonym — it’s still considered interchangeable with strings. This technique of ‘branded types’ is simply a way to simulate nominal typing in a structural context.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

Klim Type Foundry [1] may also be worth a contact — they’ve been inspired by woodcut type before (e.g. [2] [3]), so I wonder if they might be interested in knowing about this.

[1] https://klim.co.nz/

[2] https://klim.co.nz/blog/maelstrom-design-information/

[3] https://klim.co.nz/blog/manuka-design-information/

It’s a Chinese character and a Latin letter. The idea, presumably, being that of ‘multiple languages’.

To nitpick, the article doesn’t actually use passive voice there. See Pullum on this particular misconception: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html

I already mentioned this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197566

This is really just a matter of how much syntax sugar you want to implement. Idris already has precisely this syntax, and there’s a proposal to add it to Haskell too [0]. But none of this changes the core properties of the system which make it monadic.

[0] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/issues/527

I find it amusing that the system described in this article is simply what Haskell calls the ‘IO monad’. That is to say, it describes an IO system with the following ingredients:

1. Each IO operation returns a special value which denotes an IO action

2. These IO actions can be sequenced using a function which feeds an IO action to a continuation

3. Syntax sugar to remove the annoyance of explicitly writing the sequencing function

Together, (1) and (2) make this a monad; (3) in this article is just ‘do’-notation. The only major difference from Haskell is that Roc doesn’t generalise the idea to other monads, which makes it far less powerful than Haskell’s Monad typeclass.

> the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language

I’d frame this a little differently: the vast majority of languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists must focus on the spoken language. For languages which are written more often, linguists can and do focus on the relationship between the written and the spoken language.

> My favourite for "local area" usage was the old New Zealand Map Grid .. not a polyconic projection, rather a custom complex polynomial optimised to reduce grid error in toto (by multiple metrics) for the North and South Islands of New Zealand.

Paper link: https://www.linz.govt.nz/resources/research/conformal-mappin...

The actual algorithm is somewhat different, and documented here: https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue59/3/full-text.html

What you have described feels like a variant of Eller’s algorithm: https://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2010/12/29/maze-generation-elle...

Slight correction to the title: the fractal is not a single molecule, but composed of many copies of a molecule which self-assemble to form a fractal. (Though the difference is very minor, and arguably irrelevant for many purposes.)

Looking at the figure caption, it appears to be relative to the simulated temperature without doubled carbon dioxide concentration and AMOC breakdown.

> If the Atlantic currents do collapse, Europe will likely be covered by a glacier.

I think you misread the article here. Looking at Figure 15 (temperature change caused by a total AMOC collapse), it appears that Britain, Iceland, Scandinavia etc. would cool by around 2°C, whereas the rest of Europe warms by roughly the same amount. The consequences of such a strong temperature gradient are worryingly hard to predict, but don’t involve Europe being ‘covered by a glacier’. (Scandinavia, maybe? But not most of Europe.)

The New York Times is not a news site I regularly read, but I see quite a different set of headlines highlighted on the front page:

Johnson, With His Job Under Threat, Gets a Lifeline From Trump

Biden Wipes Out Another $7.4 Billion in Student Loan Debt

5 People Killed in Stabbing at Busy Mall in Sydney, Australia

Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on Collision Course

Republican Women Are Divided on Abortion as Bans Spread

Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.

You also list one of these (the last), but the others seem fairly standard things that a newspaper would report, and not clickbait rubbish at all.