bigbangdangler

Alternate version:

Step 1: Don’t.

STOP TEASING

“Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Because no one could possibly protest against raw patriotism!!*

• in fascist form.

The playbook hasn’t changed. But now they’re showing their work and still missing the point.

Most of them weren’t serious about it. They spent 8 years bitching that extra amount because the President was black.

It has been extremely entertaining to watch that sub recently.

There are signs of intelligent life in the comments, almost always followed up by some variant of “what’s up, fellow conservative” where other users doubt the first’s conservativeness conservativity because of too much critical thinking.

Many posts bemoan censorship by the “Democrat” party while their comment threads sit mostly empty, save for the few MAGA-friendly word vomits that the mods have allowed.

Someone should run an analysis looking at how many posts critical of Der Trumper have been allowed since the Iran war started. There used to be significant numbers of posts about Epstein supported by comments from folks who said they had pitchforks in their hands. It seemed like it might be the issue that broke MAGA. Once there was a military operation, it seems like they’re all too transfixed to care about those ever-important principles anymore.

But who could have seen it coming? Well, anyone who has watched right-wing reactions at any point in the last 50 years. Nuclear levels of energy, followed by goldfish levels of memory, all further limited by pet rock Kid Rock levels of thought.

Sigh. None of this is surprising in the least. The cost of AI infrastructure and compute (coupled with the complexity of the chain) makes it prohibitively expensive.

It only has appeared cheap because of investor money flowing like Niagara on the off-chance that it could be made cheap enough to be profitable after getting everyone addicted to using it. I really don’t think it’s there, and it’s definitely not cheap enough to continue flying for free much longer.

Aha, that makes sense. Thanks.

Indeed, which is why it is generally classified as an analytic language (as opposed to e.g. fusional). It is sometimes misclassified as an isolating language, which it really isn’t, since Mandarin does have compounds. It is worth noting, though, that no natural language fits perfectly into the morphological prototypes.

That said, fewer complexities in one part of a grammar tend to even out in others. In fact, there is some tendency of tonal languages to lean isolating or analytic exactly because the ratio of morphemes-to-word is lower (often 1-to-1); given that syllables can only be so complex (a limitation of anatomy), analytic languages will tend to have more homophones than non-analytic ones, and thus the tone tends to be required to maintain the same information density. To look at it another way, tone is a method for distinguishing what are otherwise homophones.

Now, how any of that relates to whales… well, it very likely doesn’t.

10 x 9 x 8… etc. yields 1,814,400 possible combinations of no repeats, right? I’m confused what the “whole” is if this is expressed as a percent.

Have to admit, I agree. I know there is a lot of sensationalism out there, but there are serious reasons to take issue with Boeing’s output, especially newer models.

It’s not like I’m refusing to fly on Boeing and I think that’s generally an overreaction… but there is a slight, very slight relief when I see my flight is scheduled with an Airbus.

Holy shit.

This thing collapsed at the gate, before passengers were on board.

A collapse on takeoff or landing could have killed everyone on board.

I believe that these approaches to technology stem from having too little competition in any given space. Companies can only sell products with unpopular features when a) the product remains necessary and b) there are no real alternatives which don’t also have the anti-feature (or, the anti-feature is not seen as enough to deter against buying the thing).

It’s not just tractors: feels like every piece of tech now has a bunch of shit you don’t want (and even some that harms you), all in a disposable, unrepairable package that costs more than older tech. That older product was often just as good if not better than the newer one.

Thanks for sharing the actual research.

I’m curious to dive into this (pun intended). It sounds like a bit of a stretch to analogize these whale signals to Mandarin or any other human language simply because of this:

However, our analogy has a limit: while in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.

The jump is, though they may be referring to the whale sounds as “tones”, in human languages “tone” and “pitch” are two distinct concepts which share a modality. The former has to do with meaning, while the latter has to do with things that are extrasentential or even extralinguistic. Consider the rising pitch at the end of a question in English: this nudges the listener into thinking they heard a question, but it doesn’t carry meaning in the lexical sense, which makes it pitch and not tone (cf. the various books like e.g. the Cambridge series on Pitch vs. Tone, even though there are common terms like “intonation” which belie the scientific terms).

If there is no evidence of a mapping between meaning and pitch in whales (as the above quote suggests) then it really isn’t linguistic “tone”, even if it is musical tone or some other type. It’s certainly a sound with some sonorant quality, minimally pitch.

Could all be entirely wrong. As I mentioned, I haven’t yet read the paper fully.

Seen this headline with slightly different details about 100 times since the early 2000s.

News media in a country with a two-party system: dangling a carrot in the right spot to constantly keep the people in charge in the butter zone.

Well yeah, doing actual research or understanding a topic would cut into his golf time

To date, I have not heard a single CEO talk about where the money will come from if no one is employed.

How can consumers consume if they don’t have any money?

This is and has always been a tactic to attempt to discredit any election results he doesn’t like. The thing is, he now knows that it works on a significant portion of the US population.

Oh yes, definitely one of the greats!

Not a continuity error specifically, but this has always irked me: In STIV, Kirk says that he and Spock are headed “back to San Francisco”, presumably from Sausalito. But anyone with a passing knowledge of geography can see from the position of the bridge behind them that they are, in that moment, standing in San Francisco. In fact, you can see Sausalito across the bay behind them.