Pipoca

@Pipoca@lemmy.world

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Pipoca,

The Onion started as a joke/satire newspaper in 1988. They stopped printing physical papers back in 2013, but you can still buy print collections of their articles.

Their articles range from satire about current events to World Death Rate Holds Steady At 100 Percent.

Pipoca,

Inflation is calculated off of the cost of some particular basket of goods, and tends not to be even across those goods.

Yeah, if you eat a lot of corporate fast food, prices have skyrocketed recently. At a rate that far outpaces the local pizzeria and Chinese restaurant down the street, or the cost of chicken and eggs from the grocery store.

Pipoca,

Not particularly, but I can at least recognize that electing a third party practically requires getting rid of the electoral college.

If no one gets a majority of EC votes, the winner is picked by the house of representatives. So any third party president needs to get a majority of the vote in a majority of states to win. No third party candidate has ever come remotely close to that.

Under STAR, score, condorcet or IRV? It’s unlikely but possible. With the EC? It’s essentially impossible.

Pipoca,

Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown “Ha, Nazi, Schmazi” says Wernher von Braun

Pipoca,

Wood stoves often just have radiators or fans powered by heat differentials.

They’re more of a solution for small cabins than mcmansions, though

Pipoca,

In areas that get cold, you can’t just use a heat pump. Residential heat pumps are only good to about 20 to 25f.

That was true a couple decades ago, but hasn’t really been true in a while.

A combination of inverters, variable speed compressors, vapor injection, and using slightly different refrigerants means there’s a number of cold climate heat pumps on the market that will heat down below -13°F.

Pipoca, (edited )

Symbols display with friendly string-y names in a number of languages. Clojure, for example, has a symbol type.

And a number of languages display friendly strings for enumy things - Scala, Haskell, and Rust spring to mind.

The problem with strings over enums with a nice debugging display is that the string type is too wide. Strings don’t tell you what values are valid, strings don’t catch typos at compile time, and they’re murder when refactoring.

Clojure symbols are good at differentiation between symbolly things and strings, though they don’t catch typos.

The other problem the article mentions is strings over a proper struct/adt/class hierarchy is that strings don’t really have any structure to them. Concatenating strings is brittle compared to building up an AST then rendering it at the end.

Edit: autocorrect messed a few things up I didn’t catch.

Pipoca,

American cheese isn’t made of plastic in the sense of polymers, it is plastic in the sense of being easily deformed or molded.

At its most basic, American cheese is literally just cheese, water and sodium phosphate. It’s “not cheese”, but in the sense that meatloaf isn’t meat and mayonnaise isn’t eggs.

Pipoca,

American cheese is not a fancy cheese, yeah. It also isn’t great cold.

It is a pretty decent cheese sauce, though. It doesn’t taste starchy, with a muted cheese flavor like mornay does. If you put extra sharp cheddar or smoked gouda in homemade mornay or homemade American, the homemade American will be noticeably cheesier. Having made homemade mac and cheese a number of ways, I strongly prefer homemade American to any of the other recipes I know.

I only really eat store-bought American melted, such as on eggs in a breakfast sandwich, on a burger or grilled cheese.

Also, there’s plenty of decent American cheeses, like Humboldt fog, Maytag blue, or rogue river blue. American cheese is called that, but it doesn’t define American cheese making.

Pipoca,

Baked pasta works better if you start off only parboiling the pasta so it doesn’t overcook.

Pipoca,

It’s powdered cheese sauce.

It’s mostly made using spray dryers. Basically, a spray dryer uses hot air to quickly dry a fine mist of something. It’s how they make milk powder and egg powder as well.

Pipoca,
Pipoca,

It’s not that there’s anything unnatural about water. It’s just not a remedy for anything but dehydration.

Pipoca,

Corporations buy housing because they beleive its a good investment.

Right now, they’re right. But a lot of that is because it’s legally hard to build enough new housing to keep up with demand in many cities because most of their area is zoned exclusively for mcmansions.

Housing in the middle of nowhere being cheap if you can’t get a good job in the middle of nowhere.

Pipoca,

keeping state (data) and behavior (functions) that operate on that state, together

Importantly, that’s “together at runtime”, not in terms of code organization. One of the important things about an object is that it has dynamic dispatch. Your object is a pointer both to the data itself and to the implementation that works on that data.

There’s a similar idea that’s a bit different that you see in Haskell, Scala, and Rust - what Haskell calls type classes. Rust gives it a veneer of OO syntax, but the semantics themselves are interestingly different.

In particular, the key of type classes is keeping data and behavior separate. The language itself is responsible for automagically passing in the behavior.

So in Scala, you could do something like


<span style="color:#323232;">def sum[A](values: List[A])(implicit numDict: Num[A]) = values.fold(numDict.+)(numDict.zero)
</span>

Or


<span style="color:#323232;">def sum[A: Num](values: List[A]) = values.fold(_ + _)(zero)
</span>

Given a Num typeclass that encapsulates numeric operations. There’s a few important differences:

  1. All of the items of that list have to be the same type of number - they’re all Ints or all Doubles or something
  2. It’s a list of primitive numbers and the implementation is kept separate - no need for boxing and unboxing.
  3. Even if that list is empty, you still have access to the implementation, so you can return a type-appropriate zero value
  4. Generic types can conditionally implement a typeclass. For example, you can make an Eq instance for List[A] if A has an Eq instance. So you can compare List[Int] for equality, but not List[Int => Int].
Pipoca,

Javascript is generally considered OOP, but classes weren’t widely available till 2017.

Inheritance isn’t fundamental to OOP, and neither are interfaces. You can have a duck- typed OOP language without inheritance, although I don’t know of any off the top of my head.

Honestly, the more fundamental thing about OOP is that it’s a programming style built around objects. Sometimes OO languages are class based, or duck typing based, etc. But you’ll always have your data carrying around it’s behavior at runtime.

Pipoca,

Important words undergo sound changes all the time.

For example, in Germanic languages, Proto Indoeuropean p sounds consistently morphed into f sounds. So the PIE word pods became Proto Germanic fots became English foot. pəter became fader became father. The preposition per became fur became for.

Lox is mostly unusual in that it didn’t have any major sound changes affect it in Germanic languages.

Pipoca,

According to etymonline,

Lax. Noun. “salmon,” from Old English leax (see lox). Cognate with Middle Dutch lacks, German Lachs, Danish laks, etc.; according to OED the English word was obsolete except in the north and Scotland from 17c., reintroduced in reference to Scottish or Norwegian salmon.

It’s weird in that lax died ~400 years ago, then was borrowed back ~100 years ago into American English from Yiddish-speaking immigrants.

It’s a weird loanword in that it was a loaned obsolete word that underwent some semantic narrowing in the loan.

Pipoca,

Which is why it’s one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn’t even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it’s a slang language.

Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?

Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They’ve basically always been tilting at windmills.

Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it’s something that’s been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.

Pipoca,

Yep, 8,000 years ago laks meant any type of fish, living or prepared food.

Citation?

From what I’ve seen, 8000 years ago it meant salmon. Today, in English it means smoked salmon.

It’s a surprisingly minor shift for 8k years.

Pipoca,

Ah, yes, that’s why the French still speak perfect Latin.

Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They’re useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.

But we generally haven’t been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.

Pipoca,

Yes, English didn’t exist 8000 years ago. Instead, there was a language called Proto-Indoeuropean spoken on the steppes of Ukraine. Just like how Latin spread and local dialects slowly became Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc., PIE spread out and its descendants became Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Latin, German, etc.

Part of what happened over time was sound shifts. For example, PIE p morphed into an f in Proto-Germanic. Father and the Latin word pater go back to the same PIE root word, but father exhibits the sound change of p -> f you saw in Germanic languages.

Similarly, Spanish has a sound change where f changed into h. So the Latin word fabulari (to chat) became hablar in Spanish and falar in Portuguese.

The point of the article is that the PIE word for salmon, laks, by random chance didn’t really morph much in Germanic languages. So you have lax, lox, lachs, etc.

Interestingly, the Old English word for salmon was leax, and that made its way into Middle English and early Modern English as lax. It died out in favor of the French-derived salmon, and then we borrowed lox back from Yiddish.

It’s like if beef entirely replaced cow, then we borrowed back koe or kuh from Dutch or German.

Pipoca,

8k years ago, the distant ancestor of English was spoken on the steppes of Ukraine.

Their word for salmon was laks.

That became the English lox, Swedish lax, German lachs, Lithuanian lašiša, Russian losos, and Polish łosoś.

Pipoca,

The Italian word for earth is la terra, while in Spanish it’s la tierra.

Does it make any sense to say that one language had it first? Both are directly from Latin terra.

English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc. all descend from a common ancestor, Proto- Germanic. There’s a lot of vocabulary they all inherited from it.

Pipoca,

If you’d like to look up more about the origins of PIE, look up the Kurgan Hypothesis, which suggests that Proto-Indoeuropean originated on the steppes.

Basically everything we know about PIE, we know from looking at its descendants. If a word appears in multiple unrelated branches, it’s probably from the common ancestor. Particularly if there’s consistent sound changes on one or more branches.

For example, it seems that a lot of PIE words with a p morphed into f in germanic languages. So, given the English father, Dutch Vader, Old Saxon fadar, Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, Old Persian pita, etc. we can figure out that father goes back to some original PIE word which was probably something like pəter.

Similarly, we see similar words for salmon both in Germanic and Slavic. And in the extinct Tocharian language, the word for fish in general was laks. Lox originating only 1500 years ago means that the Slavic and Tocharian would be a pretty strange coincidence.

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