henrikschroder

There are many ways of representing vowel sounds, umlauts is one way of doing that, but it's just one way of many.

Swedish has 18 monophthongs, Standard German has 14, RP English has 13, so although there's some correlation between the number of vowel letters in a language and the amount of vowel sounds, different languages solve the problem differently.

And in the case of English, horribly. English orthography is objectively crap, where vowels represent multiple vowel sounds depending on context and the history of each word to a ridiculous degree.

Because they're not letters of the German alphabet, by definition, and they're not German vowels, by definition.

They're characters that represent vowel sounds, sure.

It's kinda the same thing as how in the English alphabet, Y is by definition a consonant, despite being used to represent a vowel sound in many words. (beauty, many, cyst, tryst, for example)

Yes, both the Swedish Ä and the German A-umlaut came from the desire to have more vowels in the language and wanting to write AE in a more compact way, but no-one in Sweden thinks of Ä as "some kind of A". They're not related, there's no vowel-shifting going on, no case where words that used to be written and pronounced with an A are now written or pronounced with an Ä. There's no actual umlauting going on.

If anything, there's a dialectal glide from Ä to E in some places, so we think those two vowels have way more in common than Ä and A.

If you write E instead of A in a word, we can read it, but you look like a small child who hasn't learned proper spelling yet.

If you write Ä instead of A in a word, we're confused, and you look like a foreigner who's learning Swedish and is still confused about the extra vowels.

Ha, I get to do an ackshually!

> The umlaut symbol originated in German but has been borrowed into other languages, including Swedish

Actually, no. In Swedish, Ä is not an A with an umlaut, Ä is a distinct letter of the Swedish alphabet. Swedish has nine vowels: AOUÅEIYÄÖ, unlike German, which has five vowels: AEIOU, and three umlauts: ÄÖÜ.

The evolution of it in Swedish comes from Æ -> Aͤ -> Ä, while in neighbouring Denmark and Norway, they kept both Æ and Ø. All three languages also have Å, which comes from AA.

Super-mega-pedantry edit:

Okay, the article says Swedish borrowed the umlaut symbol, and this is actually true. In the 1500's when printing presses were becoming common, Swedish printers imported them from Germany, the German ones didn't have Æ types, but they did have Ä types, and the Swedish printers essentially went "ah, fuck it, can't be arsed", and started using Ä and Ö.

...while the Danish printers also imported the presses from Germany, but said "fuck you, we're making our own types" and kept using Æ and Ø.

TikTok is outcompeting its US rivals Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts because their algorithm for choosing which videos to put in front of users is simply superior. Divesting means that they would need to sell that algorithm as well, which is pretty obviously worth a lot more than their US market, which is why they're making this decision.

> rage-inducing profit seekers

That pretty accurately describes Twitter and Facebook these days. TikTok, not so much, which you would know if you had used the platform. (Or, you have used the platform, and you prefer rage-inducing crap, so it continues serving that to you)

The proponents of the ban keep mentioning some kind of nefarious "communist" propaganda, and some kind of nefarious privacy data access, but I've yet to see someone show concrete examples of what that would look like.

My TikTok feed contains a ton of funny cat videos, Europeans shitting on clueless American tourists, OF models hawking themselves, the ubiquitous dance videos, people making caricature cringe videos, and a bunch of viral meme videos. And a lady drinking Costco peach juice.

Where's the propaganda? Not in my feed, that's for sure.

Where's the rage-inducing bait? Not in my feed, that's for sure.

What privacy data can the nefarious CCP access about me? That I like cat videos and memes?

You forgot this: /s

"I could do better if I had more space"

"Nah, the art form is dying"

Absolutely hilarious meta-commentary!

To be fair, we do have a couple of hundred years of history where Russia was always the big bad. Pretty much the only large-scale scenario the Swedish military trains and prepares for is a Russian invasion. The enemy always comes from the east.

Alfred Nobel was the only donor, and his will spells out the rules: https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will/

In 1968, the Nobel Foundation accepted a donation from the Swedish central bank to establish a prize in economy, but in hindsight that was a pretty bad idea, and the probability of them accepting future donations to establish prizes in other fields is very slim.

Trusted? The will of Alfred Nobel states that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is the body that selects the winner, you can't change that.

Also, I think the process looks fairly decent:

https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/physics/

Gather nominations, make a shortlist, research the shortlist with actual field experts, present candidates, discuss, and vote.

And in 50 years you'll be able to find out who the other candidates were!

Philipp Lenard had a patent on cathode ray tubes, Marconi on wireless telegraphy, Dalén had plenty of patents on the automatic lighthouse regulator he got the prize for, and many others.

You can continue looking yourself: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-...

Or maybe you can ask ChatGPT for a better summary?

Maybe read the announcement?

"With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science, they have showed a completely new way for us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many of the challenges our society face. Simply put, thanks to their work Humanity now has a new item in its toolbox, which we can choose to use for good purposes. Machine learning based on ANNs is currently revolutionizing science, engineering and daily life. The field is already on its way to enable breakthroughs toward building a sustainable society, e.g. by helping to identify new functional materials. How deep learning by ANNs will be used in the future depends on how we humans choose to use these incredibly potent tools, already present in many aspects of our lives"

When I went to high school, I'd walk through an allotment garden to get to school. Always great for a snack on the way home, someone had amazing raspberries! Some lovely cherry trees as well as several varieties of apples.

Public? Free? Pschht, everyone knows that what's outside the fence is free for the taking!

But there were also tons of fruit trees in nature in the city. Went jogging one time at a jogging trail, saw chanterelles in the forest, came back with my t-shirt full of tasty, tasty mushrooms.

If you've grown up with always being able to pick fruits and berries and mushrooms in nature, maps like this are so weird. Why would you need a map? Nature is full of it?

Oh, you're not allowed? Oh, you can't access it? Oh, there aren't any around, really? How sad.

Ok, cool, but would you pay a monthly subscription fee for the ability to talk out loud to get lights to turn on, instead of hitting the existing light switches?

Because that's what they're asking.

One of the most enlightening courses I took in university back in the day was digital electronics. Not because I ever wanted to muck about with it, but because we actually got to build our own super-simple physical 8-bit CPU. We had registers and an ALU and RAM and eight output leds, and we got to write the microcode for the fetch-execute cycle. Clock? There was a physical switch you would toggle on and off to make it step through the cycles to slowly execute the program we wrote in our own machine code. Realizing that instructions are just a bit-pattern saying which unit should write to the bus and which unit should read from the bus was quite eye-opening.

Every single time an article about aphantasia gets posted, there's always people like you in the comments going "wait, what, when people say they see things they're imagining, they actually do that?"

Yes. Most people do.

> That seems insane.

Think of a song you like. Play it in your head. Can you hear it? Can you tap the beat? Can you whistle along with the melody? Can you join in and sing the chorus when it comes? But you know you're not actually hearing the song, right?

Visualization is just like that, but for your vision, not your hearing. In the same way you can replay a sound you've heard in your head, most people can replay a thing they saw in their heads.

> do people actually see the red star in their head in the same way that I'm hearing Hell's Bells in my head?

Yes, that's a very good description of what the experience is like.

When you're auralizing(?) a song, you can choose which memory of the song you're listening to, and you can tap along with the beat, whistle along with the melody, sing along with the words, while being absolutely conscious of the fact that you're not actually hearing the song, right?

Visualizing something is the same, you can manipulate the image in your mind, rotate, choose different memories of the thing - or imagine new ways the thing could look, while being absolutely conscious of the fact that you're not actually seeing the thing in front of you.

When you said "red star", I imagined a red giant star, protuberances and sunspots and all, floating in space. Then someone else commented about a "five-pointed star", so I shifted my imaginary image to a stylized five-pointed red star icon instead. Same as you would imagine listening to one song, and then swapping to a completely different one with the same title.

One of the original overpromises from Musk was that you could definitely totally summon your car from NY to LA and it would magically drive all the way, next year, for sure.

Yeah, because if it understands hand gestures, it totally won't be used by criminals, directing it to a chop shop where they can disable it and cut it to pieces. What are you gonna do as the owner?

Machine-learning of any kind has this uncanny ability to get you really far with very little work, which gives this illusion of rapid progress. I remember watching George Hotz' first demo of his self-driving thing, it's absolutely nuts how much he was able to do himself with so little. Sure, it drove like a drunk toddler, but it drove!

And that tricks you into thinking that the hard parts are done, and you just need to polish the thing, fill in the last few cases, and you're done!

Except, the work needed to go from 90% there to 91% there is astronomically higher than the work needed to go from 0% to 90%. And the work needed from 91% to 92% is even higher. Partly because the complexity of the corner cases increase exponentially, and partly because everyone involved doesn't actually know how the model works. It's been hilarious watching Tesla flail at this, because every new release that promises the moon always has these weird regressions in unrelated areas.

My favourite example of complexity is that drivers need to follow not only road signs and traffic lights, they also need to follow hand signals from certain people. Police officers, for example, can use hand signals to direct traffic, and it's illegal not to follow those. I can see a self-driving system recognizing hand signals and steering the car accordingly, but suddenly you get a much harder problem: How can the car know the difference between lawful hand signals, and some dude in a Halloween police uniform waving his hands?

You want to drive autonomously coast to coast? Cool, now the car needs to know how to correctly identify local police officers, highway patrol officers, state police officers, and county sheriffs, depending on the car's location.

Good luck little toaster!

> The fact they are so convincing at it is a different, but definitely new and horrific problem on its own.

I tried one to help me get the syntax right for the config file for a program. It started by generating a config file for the latest version and not the old one I was using, but once I told it that, it fixed that convincingly and spit out a config file that looked like it was for my version.

However, the reason I asked for help was that the feature was very badly documented, and yet ChatGPT happily invented syntax for the thing I was having problems with. And every time I told it that it didn't look quite right, it confidently invented new syntax for the feature. Everything it made up looked pretty damn convincing, if I had designed the config file format I could have gone with either of those suggestions, but they were all wrong, as evidenced by the config file validator in the program.

At least Stack Overflow had comments and votes that helped you gauge the usefulness of the answer. These glorified toasters have neither.

The norm in Sweden is that every position is "probationary" for the first six months, which then automatically converts to a permanent position. What it means is that the employer can terminate the employment without cause during the probationary period.

It's kind of a necessity in places with strong employee protection, otherwise companies would have an even harder time hiring. Now, companies can take a chance on someone without risking very much, so I think it's a good thing. Obviously, the companies have to pay new employees the same as the permanent ones and give them the same benefits, sick pay, PTO, etc.

The flipside is that some unscrupulous companies churn employees every six months to avoid having too many permanent full-time employees. Not common in the IT industry though.

I saw a crow use a slippery metal roof as a slide one time. It would hop up to the top, step out on the slippery part, slide down while carefully keeping balance with the wings, rattle with joy at the bottom, and repeat.

Wheeee!

Clever little birds.

The economics for rental cars relies on resale value after one to two years, frequency of damage, and cost of repair.

All of these things suck for EVs in general, and Teslas in particular. The recent price cuts have demolished the resale value way more than any other car, rented EVs get damaged more frequently because people are unfamiliar with their behaviour and torque curves and acceleration, and the cost of repair is atrocious for Teslas, since their service infrastructure is severely lacking, i.e. it takes forever to get parts.

And on top of that, rental customers do not want an EV in an unfamiliar place. Everyone can find a gas station and fill it up before returning, but having to schedule your entire trip around charging infrastructure is a complete waste of time.

The only rental customers it makes sense for is people who already have an EV, love it, and know how to live with. But the problem is that Hertz was throwing the Teslas at customers willy-nilly as some kind of "luxury upgrade", with crap results.

On a serious note, it's so amusing to me to read the comments of people who hate TikTok, but who clearly haven't used it. They simply have no idea what it looks like and the kind of content that is popular on it.

But they're very certain that it's bad!

Meanwhile, I'm scratching my head trying to understand how my watch history could have any value whatsoever. Cute kittens, shirtless guys chopping wood, sad hamster memes, Sanchez the sleepy racoon, Young Royals edits, some dude eating all kinds of cheese, A bunch of confused Americans in Europe and vice versa, PEDRO PEDRO PEDRO, guys promoting their onlyfans, schwapeepee, and of course Donghua Jinlong content, although it seems to have run its course now.

> idealizes "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and increases division in Western countries.

You're right, everyone I know now buys their glycine from Donghua Jinlong instead of using domestic manufacturers. This is clearly not because of the superior manufacturing capabilities of Donghua Jinlong, who are ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified, and whose glycine is industrial AND food grade, but because of an insidious campaign by the CCP to promote Chinese glycine across the entire industry, trying to crush American glycine manufacturing. I demand congressional hearings about what our elected politicians are doing about this threat to American-made glycine!

Is this the year when this scam conglomerate finally goes belly-up? Halving happened, and there is zero hype around future use cases, the people who are in are just hoping that the value magically goes up. The one thing pushing the value up is Tether fraudulently printing USDT without backing and buying bitcoins with that, but the miners have electricity bills they need to pay in real money, to the tune of millions of dollars every month. If a corresponding amount of money isn't inserted into the system each month, the miners go bust. It's obvious that none of the surviving exchanges are actually sitting on enough real money to back their crypto holdings.

If this is true, you should expect results to be the same across countries, and the measurable drops in IQ should correlate to infection rates.

Five bucks says you won't find that.

That doesn't matter for this discussion, because the average American spends way more on healthcare as a percentage of their income than the average European.

~25% of the federal budget goes to medicare and medicaid, i.e. healthcare for other people. On top of that, you're paying for your own medical insurance as an implicit deduction on your salary for your employer-sponsored healthcare plan, or you just pay for your plan directly if you're self-employed.

Those percentages add up.

Whereas in the UK, or in Sweden where I'm from, you only pay once through your taxes for healthcare for everyone, including yourself.

On top of that, copays are higher in the US, annual deductibles are much higher, procedures are much more expensive, medication is much more expensive. Healthcare in the US is simply disproportionally more expensive than in the rest of the world, as a percentage of people's income, and as a percentage of GDP. It's got nothing to do with salary levels.

> or voluntarily imposing self austerity

The problem with this line of reasoning is that the only people who care are the anxious western upper-middle classes. Anyone poorer can't afford to care.

You absolutely cannot solve the problem through voluntary change of behaviour, and thinking that you can is a sign that you need to step out of your ivory tower. Instead you have to change the economy so that the most environmentally friendly alternative is the cheapest, and so that environmentally disastrous activities are prohibitively expensive.