mathieuh

For an English speaker it would be difficult. It is a highly synthetic language (meaning the markers which tell you which parts of the sentence are doing what), compared to English which is an analytical language (meaning there are extra words like prepositions which tell you which part of the sentence is doing what). This is why Finnish (and other Uralic languages’ words) look so long to us, because where we in English would use prepositions and word order to denote object, subject etc., much of that is expressed in Finnish through suffixes.

Perhaps for a speaker of another synthetic language like Polish it might be easier to learn Finnish as their brain might would already have the wiring but even then, as the article notes Finnish is not an Indo-European language so it is further removed still.

I guess I'm just not asking it big enough things. I'm asking it things on the level of an individual function or component. To be honest I really haven't had much success at all with IDE integrations and giving it access to the whole codebase. I get far better results by asking very focused questions, which means I'm only waiting a few seconds for a response.

This is Claude Sonnet 4

Depends how good your QA is. Where I am it is terrible so most of the time I spend in “code review” is spent checking out the code locally and testing it myself.

It didn’t just happen. It happened through struggle and its continuation is not guaranteed. Look at all the reactionary movements springing up around the world. This is not an area I believe we can settle on “good enough”.

I would say "octopuses" personally. "Octopodes" is more etymologically correct but you run the risk of not being understood, and "octopi", while in common usage, is etymologically wrong and people who are aware of this might look down on you slightly.

"Octopuses" is both understandable and correct etymologically since "octopus" is a normal English word.

You can eat like shit and do a lot of exercise and be overweight.

I’m 90 kg at 180 cm. I ride my bike 450 km per week. A few weeks ago I did a 340 km, 3000 m elevation ride at 25.6 km/h and yesterday I did a 220 km ride at 27 km/h. Last week I burned 13,468 calories from cycling (this should be fairly accurate as I have a power meter).

I would say I’m quite fit, I can obviously ride my bike further and faster than the vast majority of people but I am definitely overweight and look fat.

Amazon also has their own book printing service that they sell books from under several marques, I assume to make it more difficult to tell it’s from them.

The books are very low quality with poor typesetting that makes them unpleasant to read.

> How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Doesn't really work for me at the moment with 3.7 Sonnet.

If I point out redundancies it will fix them but just giving it an open-ended kind of directive hasn't been very successful in my experience.

All those non-English words you used do actually come from languages with phonetic alphabets (albeit only in one direction for French).

And while English spelling is inconsistent an educated native speaker can often pronounce newly-seen words with decent accuracy based on previous encounters with similar words so it’s not completely arbitrary.

English spelling gives you a pretty good idea of a word’s origin, which gives you a hint to its pronunciation. And this phenomenon of importing foreign words unchanged is hardly new so I think it’s something most native speakers would be familiar with.

Personally I really like English’s spelling. I like being able to look at a word and have a good idea of what its origin is, I think it adds something to the language. Reading English is like looking back through time. I understand the arguments for phoneticisation but I really think we would lose something great in the process.

The arguments from the other side are of the "think of the children" and "tough on crime" variety. They are purely emotional and if you try to dispute them they just respond with "so you don't care about children?". It's like trying to argue with a religious person on matters of faith, you're just not very likely to convince them.

*edited to add "on matters of faith"

One argument which I find profoundly stupid is the "well it doesn't matter what we do, look at China". In reality doing things more cleanly can make a huge difference to your local environment. Do you want to live right next to a coal-fired power plant just because that's what they do in China? Do you want to walk past roads clogged with dirty, polluting cars?

If a device doesn't require grounding the third pin is often just made of plastic so it opens the shutters.

I know basically nothing about this area so take all this with a large grain of salt (or rice), but my understanding is they can go through the femoral or brachial vein to inject things directly into the heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripherally_inserted_central_...

It depends what your goals are. Also, some people can handle more volume than others, and some people need less volume than others. I am training for a 340 km/3000 m elevation bike ride in June and I am doing 15 hours of cycling per week which is as far as I plan to take it.

This is about 50 % beyond what I would normally be doing, and a couple of times after upping the volume I did get close to backing off because I felt like I was overdoing it, but after pushing through for a week I started recovering again.

The difference in my fitness is almost unbelievable. I can knock out 160+ km rides with no problem when in previous years I would have found them very difficult.

And beyond just results on the bike, I feel much better in myself, even than when I was doing 10 hours per week. I never get out of breath, hills I used to walk up with the dog I now realise I am walking up breathing through my nose the whole time, I handle heat much better, my resting heart rate is in the mid-to-high 40s, I have more energy, etc.

If your goal is to do well at the local 5 km run in the park then lower volume is probably fine, but in my personal experience I still don’t think I’ve hit my limit even at 15 hours per week.

I don’t know anything about the technical details but you can also hear the difference when plucking in different locations on the string very clearly on a classical guitar, to the point where it is an integral part of right-hand technique and is marked on music. Plucking closer to the neck has a very round, resonant sound, plucking closer to the bridge has a very sharp sound, and plucking exactly halfway along the string has a particularly round sound.

As Segovia said, the guitar is like a miniature orchestra https://youtu.be/DJrEl4Nsmsg?si=voLmARBDxGe8iDRo

As they say, ex-communists make the best capitalists.

Leaving aside the question of whether AI is/will ever be actually capable of what tech bros claim, I don't think there is anything inherent to AI that will cause these issues. The problem will be with society's mode of production. We have a society now where people could be doing less work but are instead forced to do—as Graeber calls them—Bullshit Jobs.

Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes said almost a century ago that as technology advanced people would have to do less work. I think if AI lives up to the hype it could be a tremendous boon for everyone if we can restructure our societies to take advantage.

I used to look at ADHD with scepticism until I met someone who it to a debilitating level. Shared a room with them once at a conference and seeing them in the morning before taking their pills was eye-opening. They were trying to have about 10 conversations at once, switching between them from sentence-to-sentence, every time they sat down to do something they instantly sprang up and started doing something else before springing up and switching yet again to something else, it was exhausting for me and I was just watching.

Whether I believe that the number of people who actually get diagnosed with ADHD is correct, especially in places that have medical systems and cultures like the USA, I’m not sure, but certainly I now see how for some people it can be completely disabling.

It’s the same in non-American Anglo countries as well. Zero-indexed with the zeroth floor being called “ground”.

I recommend the book “Why Only Us?” by Chomsky and Berwick on this topic. It gets quite technical in places but I still got quite a lot of out it.

Sounds like an offshoot of one of those Death Panel conspiracy theories

In language “interrogatives” are words related to asking questions. Who, what, where, when, why are all called interrogatives.

It’s definitely a less common usage but as you say it has the sense of questing or probing or feeling out. For me it belongs to a higher register of language, it’s a word I might use in that sense when writing a report or a formal email or something of that nature.

The dock just annoys me. I’ve been a Mac user for almost 15 years and it has never seemed useful for me. I cmd+tab or use Alfred to switch apps. To switch between windows of one application it’s cmd+`.

Note that you can also use cmd+tab and then while continuing to hold the chord use the pointer to select an application switch to.

2C-B never had any headspace effects for me except in very high insufflated doses (and even then it was minimal), taking normal doses orally would just give me a couple of hours of visuals. For me it was nothing like LSD in terms of headspace.

It’s a common misconception that American accents have changed less than British accents. Both accents have changed. There’s a pretty obvious example that American accents have changed in the fact that many American accents have vowel mergers that result in pronunciation mergers of syllables with different spellings that aren’t merged in non-American accents. Wikipedia gives the example odd-facade-thawed, which all rhyme in most American accents but which have completely different sounds in non-American accents.

Likewise some American accents have lost the distinction between the vowels in marry-Mary-merry, or merge the vowels in pin-pen.

If American accents had changed less then why would they continue to use spellings that no longer match pronunciation in their own accents but which do match in many non-American accents?

The reality is that both accent groups have diverged.

I broke my elbow last year (in a very minor way but still), when I was in the A&E the doctor told me to keep moving it and that I wouldn't be able to move it in a way that would affect negatively affect recovery. Within about 10 days it was markedly better and within 21 days I was back riding my bike, and now a year later as far as I can tell it's as good as new.

I didn't need physio or anything, the doctor just told me to keep using it as normally as possible.

The problem is vegan is now a Bad Word. I no longer say I am vegan, I say "I don't consume animal products", which seems to get a better reception than "vegan".

I wonder if using the word "vegan" will harm them in the long run from people who take pride in avoiding "woke" vegan things. A cursory glance at the right-wing tabloids in the UK will I think demonstrate that this is a real concern.

I get up really early and stay on back roads. But for cars, there's a lot you can do in terms of road position and so on. For me, if I feel like I'm approaching a dangerous situation I move into the middle of the road. I also generally ride quite far away from the kerb. A lot of drivers will happily pass you way too close if you give them the opportunity, but there aren't a lot of people who will just drive straight through the back of you if you're in the way.

That leads into riding defensively. I ride with the mindset that everyone is trying to kill both me and themselves. I expect people to pull out in front of me, I expect doors to open etc.

To get a bit more used to being around cars I would recommend getting up early.

But really the main thing is confidence. You have just as much a right to be there as anyone else, and in reality the vast majority of drivers are great. I very rarely have bad experiences with cars. Obviously it takes time to build up confidence, but at the end of the day a confident, assertive rider who signals and manoeuvres well ahead of time is going to be safer than a nervous, skittish rider.

I meant "flat" as in not potholed to fuck, the roads where I am are completely destroyed

I actually live in a fairly hilly area, per 100 km I would expect to do at least 1,000 m elevation