stratocumulus0

Long before that, a known religious zealot used to close his online store on Sundays and put out a very in-character lecturing note if you tried to visit it anyway.

It generated me an Anatolian farmer from the 19th century who spoke... Ottoman Turkish. It's like taking a peasant Briton from the 1200s and claiming that they spoke French, because it was an official language of the country back then. (Ottoman Turkish was an artificial literary register which was incomprehensible to most of the population.)

I hope that the author learns from the comments in this thread that dry encyclopedic data does not define reality.

Since we are on HN, the analogy that comes to my mind is becoming a founder in an area you have no expertise or even sincere interest in. Not a rare phenomenon at all.

In the left-wing spheres here, terms such as "political act" or "solidarity" are just bloat used to make your message sound more left wing. It's a faux pas not to virtue signal in a way that sounds radical and ensures that it won't affect anyone from outside your bubble as well.

An example from recently would be posters for an expensive kinky rave in Berlin offering discounted "solidarity tickets" for refugees, trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC people. The dress code alone ensures that it's only friends of friends using these labels who will get in anyway.

Can you extrapolate a bit more from my post? It's clear that I've put massive amounts of research into it.

I can evaluate the claim now, but I would not have been able to evaluate the speed gain of an Oracle database using whatever proprietary implementation they are using. Claiming I've called author anything is putting words in my mouth.

Oracle's claims about speed-ups of their database are just that, claims. Their licenses explicitly disallow benchmarking, so basically we are legally bound to rely on their word.

The account name is "Wild West" and it's all agenda posting. Scrolled through it, half of the posts are about criminal immigrants, the other half about collapsing governments in "the West". Links to a dubious news site focusing exclusively on immigrant crime with lots of AI-generated material: https://dzikizachod.eu/. The website operates a shop selling mugs with "Tu jest Polska, nie Bruksela" - a common far-right slogan in Poland.

I'm a bit cynical and I think that this might be a simple cash grab monetizing the anti-immigrant sentiment in Poland, considering that the articles seem to be AI-translated or generated (I found grammar mistakes unlikely to be made by a native speaker). Still, the privacy policy mentions a person who cannot be found online. Not a credible source for sure.

In most cases it's not possible for a refugee who's already in Germany to gain a regular residence permit without going back to their country of origin and starting the entire immigration process from scratch. All this talk about refugees not wanting to integrate, and no one mentioning that there is no point for them to integrate whatsoever, if they are going to be kicked out eventually regardless of their merit.

The cult of 10x got their magical tool that lets them feel 100x. Don't take their toy away from an excited kid.

I'm not claiming any of those.

Yes, this is a valid point, mnemonics are totally valid when you are new to a concept.

I'm learning Turkish right now for example, and the dative forms for me/you (bana/sana) perfectly fit the accusative conjugation pattern in my native Polish. So my mnemonic is explicitly "the opposite of what you feel it is".

This kind of content is usually shared by people who are learning a language out of genuine interest for the first time. Most of the time it's Japanese because of the popularity manga and anime enjoy, and the challenge of learning a language that's so different from one's mother tongue. There are countless blog posts written by people to whom it "clicks" for the first time, and they excitedly run to their computer to share their novel experience. I don't see anything wrong with this, let them enjoy the moment. But if they stick to their learning routine, they will inevitably learn the truth that is that the only way to learn a language is to interact with it a lot through all possible channels - speaking, listening, reading, writing. Mnemonics may work for some time, but in the end one won't be able to actually use the language if they don't learn it intuitively. And there is also the fact that most of those people live in places where Japanese is not in everyday use, limiting their opportunities to practice it.

While others might be like that, the type I'm talking about explicitly does not want to be challenged or alter their worldview. I find a comparison with religion an another poster made to be pretty fair, as the people I know who practice such behavior tend to be either insincere (they don't actually care about politics, but just want to control others) or sincere, but unprepared (they didn't care before, so their ability to form political opinions is still developing).

Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.

Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:

- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.

- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.

- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.

Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.

I'm not saying that this is implausible, but this is one guess in a sea of many. We were shown a single word substitution with a claim that 300 others match, but no documentation of this person's research. We don't know this person's methodology beyond this single sentence. A naive approach would be to collect a thesaurus of Semitic roots and use automation such as an LLM to match those against instances of words. Sounds plausible in the beginning, but words do not exist independently.

To illustrate how things can go wrong, let's try to prove that English is a Semitic language. Suppose that the source material we have is this sentence:

"A baker brought a bushel of wheat to the mill."

Now let's match it to Semitic roots as found on this list: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Semitic_stems. Let's look for plausible substitutions now:

- "Baker" matches "bVkVr-", "first-born son". We have our anchor now. (V means any vowel).

- "Brought" looks plausibly close to "burāṯ-", "juniper" on our list. So far so good.

- "Bushel" is a good match with "b-š-l", "to be cooked"!

- "Wheat" does not have an exact match. It could be a loanword, for example.

- "Mill" looks like "m-r-r", "bitterness" if we assume lack of written L/R distinction. Again, juniper + cook + bitter is plausible, because juniper can be bitter.

- The meaning of particles will be inferred from the sentence structure.

Okay, let's take a look at our translation! We have "first-born son", "juniper", "cook", (wheat), "bitter". Pretty clear that (wheat) must be the name of a dish here. Therefore, the sentence can be translated as "A bitter juniper dish is being cooked for a first-born son". This even matches the context: the sentence was found in a granary, and it refers to food.

My point here is that with such a small sample size, we can extrapolate the data to mean absolutely anything. With no reference material, we cannot assess the correctness of any translation.

True, I did not think of the pi/phi distinction when writing this. There are other quirks exclusive to Linear B that don't occur in Linear A though, such as three different ways to write the phoneme "A" with no clear pattern on when is which one used.

With regard to the origin of the script, Linear A documents have been dated to earlier times than Linear B. And then, there is also an even earlier hieroglyphic script, but its relation to Linear A has not been established.

Always glad to exchange! I'm a software engineer and a hobby linguist only myself, so don't expect wonders from me. But this is a fun topic to research for sure.

An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.

Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.

As an amateur who's been fascinated by this puzzle himself, I will add some context that might be relevant in assessing the plausibility of this claim:

- The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language.

- With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example.

- The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well.

- There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.

It would be great if people started to claim religious exemptions from making money for oligarchs and politicians. We would see this dumb rule gone in an instant.

The word "our" has other purposes than declaring possession. If a company refers to its customer base as "our customers", does it mean that it created them or owns them as property at the moment?

My dad had an immobilizer built into his car (a 1994 BMW 320 bought in Europe) which used this kind of key. I've almost forgotten about this detail until I stumbled upon this post. I don't know if it was stock, though.

It's because restaurants make the most money on drinks, so selling you overpriced water with artificial branding becomes an excuse to charge the same money for water as one would for sodas.

And some cannot be convinced that tap water could be safe to drink. I know a few people who exclusively drink glass-bottled water, because they fear microplastics on top of that.

This is exactly my observation. Every now and then there's an Anglo posting on Polish social media asking people questions about some obscure Catholic doctrines and getting offended after they're told that no one there cares. I guess that such people see the number "98% Catholic" on the page for Poland on Wikipedia and conclude that it must be some medieval tradcath white nationalist theocracy.

I am deeply skeptical of all converts to Catholicism and I speculate that the alt-right spaces online painted a picture of conversion as going back to the foundation of the Western civilization, or at least its idealized white nationalist picture.

My experience is that on American platforms free speech means that these platforms are free to remove whatever content based on whatever heuristics, with little to no accountability. Right now I see examples of American social norms limiting expression worldwide (see people adopting bl**ping out words and using defused meta-expressions such as 'unalive' worldwide to escape any potential bans). Right now American free speech means that I'm subject to opaque, automated laws of a corporation which I cannot influence as a citizen.

Catholicism is different in every country, I would imagine that a church in a secular place such as France would contain itself a bit, because there's no societal expectation that anyone should follow its religion, and therefore the priests have to put in effort into making people stay. In Poland, where I grew up, the Church still holds a lot of power and prestige, and priests consider themselves to have authority over people's lives. Leaving the church is seen as more of a childish rebellion, and I would often hear mocking remarks about non-believers in homilies.

I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.

One major difference is that it was extremely difficult to leave Eastern Europe. Borders with the West were fortified and even in the unlikely event of getting a visa issued, the government would make sure that your loved ones were left behind, forcing you to eventually come back.

The citizens of Iran, in turn, are free to leave the country as they wish. In fact, the official policy is that if you don't like it here, then you are are supposed to move out.

Unfortunately this is our national mentality - no one can tell me what I should do, and if I get told to stop, I will double down just to piss off that someone who insulted my pride.

The biggest enemy of a Pole is always their neighbor. One may suffocate in their own fumes, but what's important is that this loser next door dies as well.