Zompist Bboard Again

But can you solve expressions like (3.89+2.5i)^(4.8-2.73i) in your head? My laptop can solve that in less than one second. I'm not sure that you would ever want to evaluate that in your head. There are serious problems with the concept of a^b for arbitrary complex a and b . I recall not appreciatin...

I'm already working on my own sci-fan galaxy for a story, otherwise this would be right up my alley. I hope you get some folks interested because I'd like to see what gets made, even if I'm not participating.

Very nice. This reminds me that I need to go back to my original post and edit in the reconstruction for Old Japanese pronunciation.

Oddly, I've never had any school dreams with the exception of one dream set at my old high school, but having nothing to do with school anxieties. Then again, for the most part, school was the less anxious part of my childhood. Recently especially, I've had dreams where I have a vague goal to achiev...

... and virtual reality addiction is missing as an additional drug ... It's funny you mention that because they did have something similar to VR: the feelies. They were analogous to movies in some ways but that's explained by movies being a recent technology, especially "talkies" which on...

I'd say that in the bedroom, it's often more like a game. There are agreed upon rules and both parties (in a "safe, sane and consensual" dynamic at least) are able to stop things from getting out of hand. If anything, the sub should have more say about anything going on in the scene, as l...

I actually have plans for a novel about such a scenario in the back of my mind. Earth has made the transition to global democracy and a sustainable lifestyle, but some rich people are not content with that and try to set up a transhumanist libertarian utopia on Mars. Of course, terraforming fails, ...

How many people here would want to compete against something that can perform their job without error or exhaustion at far lower cost? So first off, none of this is performing the jobs of writers and artists without error. In fact one of the biggest concerns is that LLMs introduce A LOT of error in...

I’d be interested to get your thoughts on how to treat multiple sources. ... Do you have any suggestions as to how this should be handled? On one hand, keeping reconstructions and the sound changes together would be ideal in most cases, especially if there are large discrepancies. In the case of Ja...

Funny how so many artists and writers are filing lawsuits against it. Almost as if it poses some threat to their livelihoods... I mean, more threat than fanfic writers selling their derivative* fiction without the permission of the original author. And people get slapped with C&D letters (or th...

What I’ve done in my Polynesian changes is to use the asterisked symbol throughout, and then give the reconstruction in a table associated with each source. So following this pattern, you could simply specify sound changes like e.g. *o1 → o (or whatever it might be) , then give *o1 = [wo] when citi...

Honestly, looking just at that image, I’m not sure it’s even possible to say much about specific sound changes with any confidence. e.g. for the first row, all we can tell is that kiy and kyi merged into something … but what? Just looking at it, I’m tempted to say ki , but I can’t know if this is t...

Caveat 2: All of this applies to written content. I feel bad for illustrators, because to my eye, high-quality AI images are essentially indistinguishable from human-produced ones. But that's my impression as a layperson—maybe that's not actually true and people who professionally evaluate visual a...

This chart is sourced from "The Japanese Language Through Time" by Samuel E. Martin, copyright 1987, and ranges from early 700 CE to 1500 CE. Screenshot (51).png I am going to have to interpret this a little, so I'm going to say that going rightward, when going from a more solid line to an...

I’m not sure the exact dating of sound changes is really within the scope of this project. All we really need for now is the sound changes themselves, in as much detail as possible. So, since we seem to agree that it’s best to transcribe each source independently, perhaps just start with Martin 198...

I'll have to find a book I stored and sort through some PDFs but I'll try to get to it in the next week or so. I'll try to make a post for each version I can track down. This will likely take longer than I thought. I seem to have misremembered where I found a table of sound changes, or hallucinated...

I'd appreciate course 2 as well. I've been able to scrape together some sound changes for the Japonic family (although mostly mainland Japanese) Ooh… could you write them up somewhere and make a Japonic thread please? The other stuff can be dealt with as long as we’re reasonably consistent about ho...

I'd appreciate course 2 as well. I've been able to scrape together some sound changes for the Japonic family (although mostly mainland Japanese), but unless I stick to a specific reconstruction of Proto-Japonic and the resulting sound changes, it might be difficult to get anywhere. So it's probably ...

Well, on one hand, real languages have words in them that sound or look unfortunate in other languages all the time. On the other, conlangs are controlled by the person who makes them and can be changed in various ways to avoid this, at least for languages the creator knows. I conlang in part for fu...

But assuming that they will take the most actively hostile course of action by default Haven't you learned that this is malloc's entire worldview? Unfortunately yes.I suppose we need some pessimists in the world though. That said, it is still an assumption, and maybe he can recognize this pattern i...