@rgs@metasocial.com
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

rgs

@rgs@metasocial.com

Internet plumber | Languages (humans and computers) | Thinks in (distributed) systems | Nocoiner | Ineffective altruist | Claude Lévi-Strauss | Thelonious Monk | Barbie | he/him

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wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I am currently in the odd position of trying to decide if the utility of yet another French grammar book is worth the extra weight in my luggage for the flight home.

And yes, you can assume I have bought enough physical books that the question's not a silly one. :)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Achète-la, achète-la! 📚

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper "que je passe le bac" I suppose

ainmosni, to Netherlands
@ainmosni@berlin.social avatar

I'm honestly still in shock from just how horrible the new coalition in the is. I mean, I knew it was going to happen for over a decade, but now that it actually happened... fuck.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@ainmosni Next one coming up: France

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

When the AI is in charge of the post-mortems https://botsin.space/@2001faster/112436354724392199

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

Deeply telling about how far the Overton Window has shifted in 40 years that Ronald Reagan took a harder line with Israel than Joe Biden, never mind Mitt Romney.

(But then, per wikipedia Romney was best buds with Benjamin Netanyahu at university. So this tracks.)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@cstross “Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin said Sunday President Reagan 'hurt me very deeply' when he described a massive Israeli airstrike on Beirut as a 'holocaust' during an angry phone call.” — https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/29/Begin-says-Reagan-used-word-holocaust/3133399441600/

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

I assume when Mekka hears about how awesomely innovative the US VC industry is he doesn’t actually laugh. Much. https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112423073679596246

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper I work in payments. The US payment rails are old, cumbersome, insecure, difficult to use, full of corner cases (health care for example), and prone to fraud. Nobody wants to work with them. Especially the parts that involve EBCDIC (hi, Visa!). A lot of these things have been solved in Europe, Asia and Africa by actual innovation. In the US, the VC industry delivered blockchains.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Getting tired of Anglocentrism everywhere and especially in tech – the belief that particular features of the English language are somehow applicable all other languages. One most egregious example is text search and indexing. In English it's easy; in languages where words change depending on case or noun category, it's not so straightforward. Incidentally this makes English especially well-suited to train LLMs.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

I bet ChatGPT would find a morphologically complex language such as Sanskrit or a Bantu language harder to learn. – Also English is remarkably context-free. Japanese is the opposite of that: you literally can't say anything without taking into account the relative position of speaker and listener. (For example there's no single word for "that" in Japanese: you have one for "that thing away from me but close to you" and one for "that thing away from both of us". And everything is like that)

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Also, gender. No, gender is not isomorphic to pronouns. Many languages don't have gender at all, although they might have an intimidating number of pronouns (Japanese again). Or they could mark gender on the verb instead of the pronoun (Hindi). Or many other configurations. The "thing" that is being gendered varies. Sociologists and anthropologists study this. The gender worldview that comes with English doesn't need to be forced on speakers of other languages.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

This goes even as far as literary forms themselves, fiction and non-fiction. Tim Parks was remarking that novelists in 'minority' languages nowadays tend to adopt a style that will make them translatable into English more easily, at a loss of the richness of their native language. But the dollars are in the vast market of English readers. Same applies to philosophy and social sciences, sadly (although the French and the Germans valiantly resist, in their own ways, building on their traditions).

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Anyway, bottom line advice is: learn new languages. It's fun. You don't need to be fluent in them. And it will enormously open your worldview.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

Yeah, Nice is nice.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Ah, my dear hometown. I'm going to recommend climbing the stairs up to the top of the Castle. And go get lost in the Old Town.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

After quite a while studying French, and with memories of studying its predecessor language in school, I am now firmly convinced that aliens exist and Latin Grammar (and the grammar of derived languages) is the proof. Granted, proof by “OMG this could only have happened because we were being trolled” but, y’know, take the proof where you can.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Take latin, add more cases, add more tenses (like aorist), add the dual number, add ridiculously long compound words like in German, add rules about vowel inflections on the root when the number changes (also like in German), and you get Sanskrit. Now we're talking

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Me when I put my phone on DND. (Attempt at a translation in alt text)

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

It's nice to recognize (30 years later) that France could have stopped a genocide and did nothing. Let's not this happen again, OK? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/04/macron-to-say-france-and-allies-could-have-stopped-rwanda-genocide-in-1994

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

Having the substring “util” in a filename should be a fatal compile time error.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper trying to enforce this would be futile

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

“The issue isn’t that Americans weigh things differently. It’s that most of them don’t weigh things at all.” https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/apr/02/cups-v-grams-why-cant-american-and-british-cooks-agree-on-food-measurements

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper Sometimes I toy with the idea of using an American recipe, I go to an online cups-to-grams converter, I realize that this is too confusing, I give up, and I go look up another recipe on a non-US website instead

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

I should know it by now, but the extremely strange, sudden bug I had to deal with today, and that couldn't be possibly caused by DNS, was caused by DNS.

jastrow, to random French
@jastrow@piaille.fr avatar

Vu récemment au musée Guimet (de Paris) : l'exposition « À la cour du Prince Genji : 1000 ans d’imaginaire japonais ». Des peintures, des estampes, mais aussi des objets d'art (collection de Marie-Antoinette !). C'était très chouette et ça donne envie de lire le livre (ou du moins le manga qui l'adapte). Fermeture le 25 mars

Estampe d'Hosoda Eishi représentant une jeune fille debout, en kimono, tenant un rameau d'arbre dans une main et un message attaché au rameau dans l'autre : la poétesse Ono no Komachi. Époque d'Edo, 1797.
Bouddha Amida assis (en position du lotus, levant la main droite et tenant la gauche ouverte devant lui). Période de Heian, première moitié du XIe siècle. Bois sculpté, laque et dorure.
Illustration du Dit du Genji : l'impénétrable armoise (Yomogyu), livre 15 (un aristocrate se promène parmi les broussailles, précédé d'un serviteur qui écarte les branches et suivi d'un autre serviteur qui tient un parasol). École Tosa, fin du 17e siècle-début du 18e siècle.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@jastrow Il y a eu pas mal d'adaptations en manga au Japon. Ici on peut trouver celle en un volume (donc très résumée) de Sean Michael Wilson et Inko Ai Takita, que j'aime bien, d'ailleurs les auteurs l'avaient présentée au musée Guimet il y a quelques semaines. https://asiexpo.fr/le-dit-du-genji-version-manga-parait-chez-synchronique-editions/

rgs, to Anime
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

I saw Blue Giant yesterday at the movies and it was extremely good. Hint: to avoid spoilers, do NOT listen to the music before seeing the movie (the music is by Hiromi Uehara, so you can trust it's going to be good). This is because the music is really treated like a character of the plot. Which is pretty exceptional even for musical movies. https://youtu.be/gUf5R-MzITU

ainmosni, to cooking
@ainmosni@berlin.social avatar

I hate recipes that use volume measurements for solids.

A cup of chopped onion... Buy a fucking scale.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@ainmosni Hah "solids". I've seen recipes using cups for flour. Nonsense.

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@ainmosni Flour is compressible, unlike proper solids. Or liquids, for that matter.

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

Finding out that August Strindberg wrote Inferno in French, thus joining the small club of writers who wrote books in a language that was not their native one nor their colonizers’. (Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Jumpa Lahiri, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac. Others?)

rgs, to random
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

French ADHD is like buying another baguette at noon because you forgot you bought one already 🥖

rgs,
@rgs@metasocial.com avatar

@wordshaper because it will tempt me into eating more cheese 🧀

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