Zompist Bboard Again

"a lice doesn't float" sounds wrong, but I'm not sure if that settles things either way.

A minor point:

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2024 4:26 pm The UK press seems even worse— there seem to be no left-wing tabloids.

There are a couple - the Daily Mirror and the Daily Record - but their readerships are rather smaller than those of the D*ily M*il and the D*ily *xpr*ss, so you don't get to hear about them as much.

This is about an interesting but generally unexplored aspect of concultures: what (type of person, actitivy) pairs allow you to say that "My favourite (type of person or people) can/has done (activity) to an objectively greater degree than your (type of person or people) so clearly I am a super...

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Jun 08, 2024 2:30 pm

alice wrote: ↑Sat Jun 08, 2024 2:20 pm In a previous job, one set of system designers replaced "master" and "slave" with "whisky" and "teapot".

Kettle and teapot would have made more sense, IMO.

Perhaps even "pot" and "kettle"... err, maybe not.

The tradeoff is that it greatly limits flexibility. Essentially, you end up needing to do everything in IPA (or whichever transcription convention it’s predefined), using only the defined features. Or, you can do what I did and make it configurable enough to keep everyone happy :D There’s limits, t...

In a previous job, one set of system designers replaced "master" and "slave" with "whisky" and "teapot".

IMHO "slave" is probably questionable, "master" rather less so.

Maybe it's time to start a new thread or something; we've long since stopped discussing "AI".

Anyway, how possible is it that "the USA will go full fascist"? There'll be some resistance somewhere, surely?

In practice, how many / which kinds of issues do you run into? What happens if you specify a phoneme without any modifiers at all? Is the bang necessary? Can a phoneme have multiple modifiers? Precisely how are ‘modifiers’ related to ‘features’? Does this go any way towards solving the problem of a...

In case this is interesting and/or useful: my SCA distinguishes between "base tokens" and "modifiers" and provides a few ways to match and replace combinations thereof. So you could define some base tokens for vowels and some modifiers to represent tones, and do things like: a! >...

What would happen in the extreeeeeemly unlikely event that Trump stands down, for whatever reason? What would his followers do?

From a later era is Anglo-Saxon Computerese.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was (traditionally) released 57 years ago today. This date will soon become like D-Day: nobody alive will be able to remember it. Does that mean it was now 77 years ago today that Sergeant Pepper told the band to play? A little more, since "today"...

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was (traditionally) released 57 years ago today. This date will soon become like D-Day: nobody alive will be able to remember it.

Note that Scottish schools generally start their summer holidays at the end of June or the start of July. As John Swinney pointed out, Rishi didn't know, or care.

If you're orbiting a black hole, avoid the plunging region: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/17/world/black-holes-einstein-plunging-region-scn/index.html Responsible black hole owners will put up warning tape, but this is not always present. Standards have really deteriorated since we were young, haven'...

Dunno if this is actually relevant, but about 20 years ago, when I was on holiday in Donegal, I was told that for a long time "socialism has had virtually no appeal in Ireland" and "Irish politics is always about personalities, not policies". Admittedly things might have changed ...

To get this thread back on track, what would an AI Trump do?

I had noticed that the prose of it was to my mind unusual yet i had not quite noticed it till it was pointed out. For those of you who are wondering, this was my reaction too. Some of the idioms (e.g. "makes segmenting speech a breeze") struck me as peculiar, but I put that down to the fa...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2024 10:32 am

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue May 07, 2024 5:29 am Shouldn't this be in L&L?

Agreed - this is very much a topic for L&L.

So I realised too not long after logging out, aaarrrggghhh.

But I think you might need to read the paper more closely; some of its points are quite subtle.

See what you make of this, if you haven't already seen it. It's quite provocative.