Don't worry about it. And don't call me OCD!
145 karma · joined December 12, 2009
Screenshots: https://vgy.me/album/v8fzwq7Z
crontab: https://snippet.host/ymeofo
DB schema (which I'm sure could use some refinement, lol): https://snippet.host/fiyxhr
query one-liners: https://snippet.host/vouqax
Let's bring back pronominal adverbs! You may already be familiar with such classics as "therefore" or "whereas". Why not revive all of them? No longer are "hereunder" and "thereinafter" the sole domain of lawyers. That alone would be an epic meme indeed, but we must go therebeyond. It is difficult to believe that anyone ever actually used words like "therethroughout" or "wherewithin", but we can make sure someone does.
You can even make up your own!
Just take any demonstrative (this/that/these/those), interrogative (what/which/who/where), or third-person personal pronoun, and turn it into the corresponding locative adverb, depending on whether you want to indicate being at, coming from, or going to something:
This -> Here/Hence/Hither;
That -> There/Thence/Thither;
What/who/which -> Where/Whence/Whither;
Him/Her/Them -> There/Thence/Thither; etc.
Makes sense? No questions? Great!
Now pick your favorite preposition and stick it on the end. Don't forget to experiment with some archaic prepositions like "anighst", "overthwart", and -- here's a really good one -- "withinside". That one means "within / inside" and I'm sure you can already see the potential.
"What place should I go into?" Nope! "Whitherwithinside should I go?" Now we're talking.
for (let i = 1; i <= 4; i++) {
woman.getOn(floor);
try {
getDown();
} catch (e) {
if (e instanceof NotUpError) {
getUp();
getDown();
}
}
}I applied to an insurance data entry job to fill the gap. It was Q4 2019 and I'd been in the workforce since 2008. Lots of tech support including big-boy serious-business firewall stuff. I think the application asked if I had a high school diploma, but I figured it was just a cursory formality. Naturally, the background check company pops up, wanting to "verify" my high school diploma. It was a home school diploma, in Texas, where home schooling is completely unregulated except for a one-liner statute declaring home school diplomas equivalent to normal high school diplomas. There's nothing to verify.
In the end, I had to get my mother on the line with these people so she could . . . tell them she really did home school me. And they were like, "cool thanks" and pushed through my background check. I mean, she could have been anybody! It's not like they validated anything. If they were checking something that was actually a big deal, that could have been mildly scandalous or something.
HireRight. Intelligence to move forward.℠
*but, well,
Note also that the speeds listed are described as beginning level. Contrast this with the speed contest(1) featuring literary (i.e., a speech or some kind of governmental literature or something to that effect) read at 200-220 WPM, jury charge (instructions) read at 200-260 WPM, and Q&A ([witness] testimony) read at 280 WPM.
These are the kind of speeds that have been typical of stenographers pretty much as long as it's been a thing, even when it was done with a pen rather than a steno machine -- well, back into the 19th century at least; I personally can't speak to the performance of the earlier shorthand systems off the top of my head.
Those "beginning" speeds are about at the top of what most of the best longhand typists can do at any serious length (see, for example, hi-games.net typing leaderboard for a 5-minute(2) vs 10-second(3) test).
As to the WPM cutoff to be considered a "typist"? I mean, it's not like it's a professional credential or anything. Anyone can be a typist if they're typing, I suppose, or if they choose to take it seriously enough. Even the de facto standards of job requirements are nothing much to go by: The typing speeds listed as required in the job postings for nearly all customer service, tech support, general office, and other such jobs, quite frankly, range from underwhelming to laughable. Even transcriptionists (longhand, as in not steno, and offline, as in not real-time) don't need to type more than about 80 WPM to find work in the field, if even that much. In my view, 80 WPM is still an awfully tedious sort of speed, but I understand it's more commonly considered a respectable one, and more than adequate for most tasks, so I guess I'd be fine with that number if I had to pick one.
I'll also throw in with jb-wells above and say that anyone who's touch-typing (and preferably making progress into the triple digits, or so far as their own ability will allow) might as well be considered a typist -- or anyone who managed to convince someone to pay them to type things at any speed.
1. https://www.ncra.org/home/the-profession/Awards-and-contests...
Also, as an aside, re "not a real programmer" salt: If we suppose, as I've been led to believe, that the "true essence" of programming is the ability to granularize instructions and conceptualize data flow like this, and if LLMs remain unsuitable for coding tasks unless the user can do so, this would seem to undermine the idea that someone can only pretend to be a programmer if they use the LLMs.
Anyway, I used Copilot in VSCode to "Fix" this "code" (it advised me that I should "fix" my "code" by . . . implementing it, and then helpfully provided a complete example):
# Take a URL from stdin (prompt)
# If the URL contains "www.reddit.com", replace this substring with "old.reddit.com"
# Curl the URL and extract all links matching /https:\/\/monkeytype\.com\/profile\/[^>]+/ from the html;
# put them in a defaultdict as the first values;
# for each first value, the key is the username that appears in the nearest previous p.tagline > a.author
# For each first value, use Selenium to browse to the monkeytype.com/profile url;
# wait until 'div[class=\'pbsTime\'] div:nth-child(3) div:nth-child(1) div:nth-child(2)' is visible AND contains numbers;
# assign this value as the second value in the defaultdict
# Print the defaultdict as a json objectI'm free all w--
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Type_Logical_Syntax/ML7...
The name center embedding comes from the fact that the relative clause is embedded after the nominal subject head and before the VP.
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/Narrative_Complexity/-u...
Consider sentences 1 and 2 below. The first is right branching, the second center embedded.
1. The man drove the car that hit the dog that died.
2. The dog the car the man drove hit died.
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/Human_Language/Xr60DwAA...
A well-known construction is center embedding, where several (of the same type of) structures nested inside one another make sentences increasingly difficult to process. . . .
(7) a. The intern [who the nurse supervised] had bothered the administrator [who lost the medical reports].
b. The administrator [who the intern [who the nurse supervised] had bothered] lost the medical reports.
Sentence (7b) has been shown to be considerably more difficult to process . . .
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encoding_and_Navigating...
[An example of multiple center-embedding that tends to be prohibitively confusing]:
The patient the nurse the clinic had hired admitted met Jack.
[An example of a sentence "with two degrees of center-embedding" that "can still be comprehended under certain conditions"]:
The reporter who everyone that I met trusts said the president won't resign yet.
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https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Origins_of_Grammar/...
'The typical center-embedded clause is a relative clause' (p. 374). One firm constraint is 'Double relativization of objects (The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt) does not occur (p. 365). An example of a centre-embedded clause (underlined here) at depth 2 (C^2) in Karlsson's notation) is "She thought that he who had been so kind would understand." This is centre-embedded because there is material from its superordinate clause before it (he) and after it (would understand). . . .
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Others not quoted:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/English_Grammar/Lem4miC...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encyclopedia_of_Languag...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Syntax/1U4gAwAAQBAJ?hl=...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Handbook_of_Linguis...
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It is understood by Lessees, standing liable for violating obligations inter se, hereinbefore set forth in Clause 3 of this real estate agreement, that Lessors shall be exempt from liability for any damages, to the maximum extent not prohibited by law, unless Lessors knew of the possibility of such damage and acted with scienter. Lessee's aggregate liability inter se for all claims, including those based on tort or statutory liability, is limited to $1000 by this agreement. Personal injury damages, limitations of liability of which, excepting those for emotional distress, this jurisdiction prohibits, are not affected by the foregoing provisions.
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"So much for plain language: An analysis of the accessibility of United States federal laws over time"² clarifies what these researchers count as center-embedding:
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Center-embedded clauses.
Plain-language guidelines discourage the use of "convoluted" sentences, particularly those that are "loaded with dependent clauses" and which separate the "essential parts" of a sentence from each other (i.e. the subject, verb and object). The most notorious examples of such sentences contain center-embedded structures, in which a sentence or clause is embedded within the center of another sentence or clause ("all such payments and benefits, including the payments and benefits under Section 3(a) hereof, being hereinafter referred to as the 'Total Payments'"). Center-embedded structures cause processing difficulty for readers (Gibson, 1998) and have been shown to inhibit recall of legal content relative to clauses that have been un-embedded into separate sentences (Martinez, Mollica, & Gibson, 2021). Here we calculated the percentage of sentences in each corpus containing a center-embedded clause. We coded a sentence as containing a center-embedded clause if a predicate dependent clause as parsed by Stanza (i.e. clausal subjects, clausal complements, open clausal complements, adjectival clauses, and adverbial clauses) was followed by a word as opposed to an end-of-sentence punctuation mark.
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Most examples I've found seem to focus more strictly on constructions along the lines of:
The ice cream{that the boy [that the girl liked] bought} melted.³
As opposed to this one, which is not center-embedded:
The girl{that likes the boy [that bought the ice cream] } sang.
I'm not sure exactly how strict the definition of a center-embedded clause is meant to be. If it does mean only a phrase embedded within another phrase of the same type as described in the Wikipedia article, then aren't Martinez, et al. taking some liberties with it? Or is it really a broader concept than that?
Going back to the second paragraph of this comment, "including those based on tort or statutory liability" seems especially out of place. Does a mere parenthetical phrase -- and not a particularly disorienting one at that -- really count? It isn't a recursive relative clause of the kind I see people use to illustrate center-embedding.
The supporting information for "Even Laypeople Use Legalese"⁴ has what I assume are more examples of center-embedding according to these researchers (in the statutes linked):
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Any person who trafficks in marihuana by knowingly or intentionally manufacturing, distributing, dispensing, or cultivating or possessing with intent to manufacture, distribute, dispense, or cultivate, or by bringing into the commonwealth a net weight of fifty pounds or more of marihuana or a net weight of fifty pounds or more of any mixture containing marihuana shall, if the net weight of marihuana or any mixture thereof is [ . . . ] [f]ifty pounds or more, but less than one hundred pounds, be punished by a term of imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two and one-half nor more than fifteen years or by imprisonment in a jail or house of correction for not less than one nor more than two and one-half years.
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1. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S00100277220005...
2. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/hpxqu
3. https://www.polyu.edu.hk/cbs/sjpolit/classes/cbs516/psycholi...
4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/suppl/10.1073/pnas.2405564121/suppl...
public void throws if throw new
try if else do return true
catch this class int while float short
enum interface instanceof import
abstract package with byte sealed
exports private for null yield
switch case break when default var
permits double final char
strictfp const synchronized
static volatile provides
transitive record extends
transient requires opens
boolean assert goto
implements long continue
super native, finally,
protected; these words are keyI guess one actually realistic version of the fully-jacked-in-hacker fantasy is network guys who are in so deep that they can read bin/hex numbers fluently without consciously "converting", etc. This I know of, and from there, I can conceive of someone who has become familiar with the binary representations of certain instructions? Or something? But I guess it would have to be a very specific (and probably read-only) situation. And, unless I'm missing something, it wouldn't amount to a deeper or more enlightened understanding of anything meaningful to software concerns
So, people on the internet who feel like they are some kind of computer wizards will try to school each other online about how computers work. They will go on, like, Quora and ask weird questions like "what is one programming language every real hacker should know?" And someone will come along and write an incredibly definitive-sounding and confident essay about how a real hacker has to know the language of binary, because everything that's happening in a computer is all just binary, 1s and 0s. They heavily imply (at the least) that a real hacker regularly peruses binary values. Not like how you might use a hex editor. Rather, as if wannabe hackers read source, but real hackers read the raw binary. Some kind of M-x Butterfly shit. Assembly language is rarely mentioned.
I don't blame them for it, it's just kind of funny. I can kind of imagine that the way low-level things are glossed over for the sake of explaining high-level things has reasonably left some people with the impression that binary is somehow expressive and that people who truly know computers are fluent in it. And I probably had stranger conceptions than that on my own journey.
Anyway, this screenshot is what they must imagine a turbohacker's computer looks like all the time
I gave it a shot, but I wasn't able to get very deep about it in the first place. I couldn't even begin to come up with any ideas of what could really go wrong if everyone's papers could be freely read by the rest of the class. I couldn't read someone else's papers either, but this was generally because there was no motivation to go to the trouble of gaining access to them, not because it would have been wholly unacceptable.
Maybe I'm just tired, but I think I'm not really grasping how this whole thing follows from / connects to the parent, or within itself; you might have to spoonfeed or state the seemingly obvious or something
This is the part where you "draw the rest of the teacher"(1)
The part where all the magic happens. Public school teachers' day jobs anymore are rather focused on curriculum delivery and exam prep. They cherish the chances to actually engage in teaching -- not (necessarily) lecturing, not traffic-policing the classroom, not admin overhead, but connecting with a student and their understanding of a thing, and navigating the ways to conceptualize and illustrate it, and the ecstasy of the Click, and the pride of watching them sail forth into brilliance. That's the whole part of teaching that anyone ever became a teacher for (I hope, but not optimistically) -- namely, the part involving teaching.
If this seems unclear, it could be a semantic thing. Here, "teaching" refers to the actual essence of the profession, its locus of fundamental distinction from other professions, and the true target of a passion or fascination for teaching. Much as everything a doctor or developer does at their job cannot accurately be described as "practicing medicine" or "developing software". Some of the activities that are not the essential teaching or developing or practicing medicine are necessary, or at least ancillary, but there's not-insignificant amounts of stuff occupying the "not exactly what I got into this for"-to-"actively a waste of time" range.
I'm not trying to say that a One True Pure Essence of the Sacred Art of Teaching exists and is the sole motivator for all teachers everywhere forever, or anything. It's just that it seems like you thoroughly gathered up all the parts that are distinctly not seen as teaching proper (at least in my world, which I hope isn't an unusual perspective) and said something like, look, GPT can do all the support-work/busy-work/paper-work. What do we need the teacher for anymore? After all, GPT has got to be faster than the teacher at coming up with different ways to phrase explanations too, right? And so it is, I don't doubt that. But good teaching goes way deeper, and I have my doubts that an LLM is near the point of being able to act upon a nuanced theory-of-mind of a student's current understanding of a concept in context of their previous experience and learning/personality style and aptitudes. For example.
Maybe we overlap the same page, so let me not be uncharitable: There are surely many people employed as teachers who seldom teach anything to anyone (as opposed to, say, merely informing them of it). I would agree that their work is well within GPT's wheelhouse, and all speed to them on the way out, along with the content marketers who write pretend-useful articles all day, et al.
I would blame my (pretty small) commercial driving experience. But no, not really. Before I ever took a Smith System course, I would have had trouble understanding this. I'm regularly concerned, to say the least, at the complacency/obliviousness I've seen. I don't get how someone could be comfortable with not having active situational awareness of these things.
And that's the only way I can imagine it being a realistic concern that children or other drivers will suddenly and unexpectedly appear in their path. Which is the only serious kind of thing I can imagine those camera FOVs helping with. Which they shouldn't have to, because people should be cognizant that backing is one of the more risky parts of driving in terms of likelihood of any kind of collision during it, so they should be on guard -- not merely as they are backing up, but the whole way to the car. Any children in the area should be easily noticed -- unless they are lying in wait on purpose for some reason -- and positive knowledge of their locations should be actively maintained until backing is done. Nearby cars parked but still running, or with people getting in or out of them, etc., should also be fairly trivially observed and noted. If positive awareness has been broken, then so has confirmation of a clear path, and in that case it's completely reasonable to go as far as getting back out of the car and walking a few steps and taking a couple of seconds to evaluate who is within "reach" and what they could conceivably do to screw up your day in the time it takes you to get out of the parking space. It seems like it isn't that much of a reach to do some simple due diligence that should, in a ideal world, make the backup camera a solution in search of a problem.
I don't know if you're a network person or what (in 30-second hindsight, networking knowledge may not be necessary to understand the "metaphor") but often it feels as if I'm on Collision Avoidance and everyone ("everyone") else is using Collision Detection.