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4:00 PM
You can say stuff like "The guy that's standing under that big cherry tree was dating the girl in the bright red sweater and long blue jeans, but she broke up with him because he stole her mom's cat"
 
@pxeger It's good to disambiguate but gender is a bad way to do so
you should be able to use this/that for people
 
@RedwolfPrograms But what if they were both the same gender (which is like a 50% chance)? Then the pronouns are useless
 
just assign variable names when you introduce a new person to the context
 
^ unironically
 
But humans don't process language like that
 
4:01 PM
@hyper-neutrino +1
 
@RedwolfPrograms is that not what names are?
 
@user Sure, but I'd rather it be ambiguous 50% of the time rather than 100%
@hyper-neutrino Maybe you don't know their names
 
@RedwolfPrograms "The guy that's standing under that big cherry tree (call him Bob) was dating the girl in the bright red sweater and long blue jeans (call her Bob2), but Bob2 broke up with Bob because Bob stole Bob2's mom's cat"
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale TIL demonstratives refers to these
 
@RedwolfPrograms yes, so what i mean here by variable names is just artificial/fake placeholder "names" for someone who you can't name by their real name
 
4:02 PM
@RedwolfPrograms Why not use variables, though? Then it'd be ambiguous ~0% of the time
 
@user now that's just bad variable naming conventions
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale and "yon"! Everybody always forgets yon
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale Ok but imagine I named them sensible names lol
 
but it's still better than pronouns
 
Maybe we should have like four pronouns, and rely on context/position in the sentence to decide what corresponds to what
 
4:03 PM
@Wezl-acautionarytale I would like to use "it" for people. We already use it for babies, animals, and corpses, and we also say things like " It was him! He was the killer!" where "it" refers to a person
 
I don't trust programmers to name people, everyone will just be i, j or k
 
@RedwolfPrograms Mmm, too complex imo
 
Maybe a few vars
 
@user yes. I support singular they, but only because it's already more popular than using it
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing i, j, k is better than nothing imo
 
4:04 PM
@user No, getting rid of both the gender and animacy distinction is even worse!
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale it's not that bad, but I don't think it would be hard to come up with a better system. We could use, for example, birthday modulo two, and everyone just announces that value when they introduce themselves to allow the use of those pronouns
 
@user Yeah, but normal names are even better :P
 
@RedwolfPrograms Wait why? You'll have variables so you know you're not talking about a dog walking a human or sth :P
 
@pxeger this/that and pointing
 
4:04 PM
Why don't we wear very tall hats with our names prominently displayed?
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing True, true, but I assume programmers would learn to do it properly
 
All of you are overthinking this: just don't talk to people
 
Demonstratives (abbreviated DEM) are words, such as this and that, used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame of reference and cannot be understood without context. Demonstratives are often used in spatial deixis (where the speaker or sometimes the listener are to provide context), but also in intra-discourse reference (including abstract concepts) or anaphora, where the meaning is dependent on something other than the relative physical location of the speaker, for...
 
Problem solved
 
@RedwolfPrograms YES! My shop teacher did this (well, we had name tags the whole semester, but simlar thing)
 
4:05 PM
says caird :P
 
@user We can call the hats pronouns
 
No.
Pronouns bad.
 
Why invent a new word instead of reusing the one for the thing we replaced?
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing Ey, that's my new pronoun!
 
4:06 PM
communicate in unary by not communicating for a specific period of time
 
Like when iceboxes became less popular, we took their name and used it on refrigerators, and named them iceboxes
 
@RedwolfPrograms Oh I thought you meant referring to the hats using "he" and "she" lol
See this is why I dislike English
 
@user gendered hats, very bad idea
 
We should just refer to anyone of an unknown gender as "ur mom"
 
4:07 PM
english is already being replaced by emoji
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing How much would you like to bet they already exist?
 
We've got gendering contained to people (at least in English), don't spread it to objects
@user Oh, I'm certain they do
 
He hats: Camouflage pattern, can store gun, sleeping bag, protects from sun, ice, rain, and bears
She hats: Has flowers
 
An annoyingly large portion of the population is obsessed with gendering literally everything
 
grammatical gender is not that bad a feature (because of redundancy), it just shouldn't be conflated at all with human gender
 
4:08 PM
r/pointlesslygendered
 
@user She hat: is pink
 
@pxeger But it doesn't eliminate much ambiguity much of the time
We need something to cover cases where everyone involved has the same gender/pronouns
 
@user "What are your pronouns?" V O I D
 
My pronouns are no/no. Please do not refer to me.
 
Nov 5 '21 at 22:14, by user
Pronouns: My pronouns are “”. Do not refer to me. Ever.
 
4:11 PM
Jun 24 '21 at 3:37, by caird coinheringaahing
Hi, my pronouns are do not/refer/to me :P
 
Wow, "don't talk to me" conveyed via pronouns is a common theme here :p
 
Birds of a feather flock together
 
Idk about you, but it's a fairly common meme in the lgbt meme circles I browse :P
 
I do remember seeing it on Reddit now lol
 
4:12 PM
@user I'm clearly a dog wearing a hat, not a bird
 
I love how most Twitter posts I see I first saw on Reddit
 
And I am a jagged disconnected blob of polygons
 
user image
2
 
@cairdcoinheringaahing Dogs of a ...fur ...flock together?
 
Sigma grindset
 
4:14 PM
chat: pxeger_ has joined the chat
pxeger_: My pronouns are no/no. Please do not refer to me.
chat: pxeger_ has changed no. Please do not refer to me. name to pxeger
 
Dogs don't flock, they...pack?
 
How dare you spell pxeger with an underscore
 
We live in the most powerful age of the Internet, where essentially every bit of content is just screenshots from 4 different websites being posted on each other
 
@pxeger Was it supposed to be "Nunya business" lol
 
@user it's if you're representing a business rather than an individual
 
4:15 PM
Are relative pronouns allowed?
 
oic
@Adám What are those?
 
which, that, who
 
nvm, should've just Googled it meself
 
"Same as yours."
 
I don't see why they should be called pronouns tbh
 
4:16 PM
Maybe that'd be called "Dynamic pronouns."
 
@Adám Is this some sort of quantum entanglement thing? When someone observes your responses, your gender is determined to be the same as theirs? :P
 
Woke up! Gender ≠ pronouns.
 
You know how sometimes people will say something along the lines of "I don't care what pronouns you use to refer to me, just use what you'd use to refer to yourself"? Imagine if we did that with regular nouns.
 
Oh you're not talking about actual pronouns
 
@pxeger p̲x̲e̲g̲e̲r̲_̲ >:)
 
4:18 PM
@RedwolfPrograms I feel like I saw someone recently who actually specified that
on CGCC
 
@RedwolfPrograms "Hi Redwolf! / Oh hi, Redwolf! / Hey guys, this is Redwolf, he's from TNB. / Thanks Redwolf! How are y'all?"
 
@pxeger You mean that they'd want you to call them pxeger?
 
no, pronouns, not names
 
Oh ok
 
I believe in binary pronouns. Call me 01/10/10
 
4:19 PM
Uhhh
 
Unary pronouns. I gave II to III because III asked I for II
 
Should I pronounce that one/two/two, zero-one/one-zero/one-zero, or one/ten/ten?
@pxeger Numbered pronouns wouldn't be bad
"Alice (P1) and Bob (P2) went to eat apples. P1 stole P2's apple"
 
Courts do that.
 
Sounds nice
 
The utility of differentiated pronouns is really only when you can infer the gender from the noun.
 
4:21 PM
Oh wait I was supposed to be doing work for the last hour, not discussing cats, static typing, and pronouns
 
@Adám But you almost never need to know the gender
 
The grammatical gender, yes. Obviously not anything to do with self-perception or physiology.
 
Also, if you're talking with friends about people you know, they'll know those people too
Although then you have nicknames instead of pronouns to help shorten your sentences
 
Alice met Bob today. They told them a funny joke.
 
Right, but "they" is an ugly hack put into a language with no good alternative
 
4:23 PM
Alice met Bob today. He told her a funny joke.
or
Alice met Bob today. She told him a funny joke.
 
"Alice met Eve today. She told her a funny joke." <- what's that supposed to mean?
 
@RedwolfPrograms during the static typing discussion I was in class. The problem is that it's a 6-person advanced class where we're all expected to pay attention and answer yes to questions that the teacher asks every 3 minutes
 
@user Alice told herself a funny joke, duh :p
 
Then it'd be "herself", so we can eliminate that case, thankfully
 
Exactly. Only differentiated pronouns have utility, and only if the connection between the different pronouns and the relevant nouns can be inferred.
@user Again, only because of differentiated pronouns.
 
4:24 PM
Yeah
 
Use some kind of very basic checksum on the word's spelling, then
 
Yes, e.g. initial.
Alice met Eve today. E told A a funny joke.
 
pronouns for the former and the latter would be handy
 
"the former" and "the latter" are those pronouns.
 
or shortened versions. not sure if they count as pronouns
 
4:26 PM
The problem is there are really only two pronouns if you don't go with "they": "he" and "she". That's pretty useless a lot of the time. Neopronouns are kinda nice because there's a ton of them so you're less likely to have two people with the same one, but very few people use them and you need to remember extra pronouns, which is annoying
 
@Adám I'm not sure 26 pronouns are really practical, especially if you're trying to talk about literal letters.
 
Temporary pronouns made up on the spot don't force you to memorize them for everyone and allow differentiating between as many people as you want, regardless of their gender/age/name/whatever
 
@user in that case neopronouns are basically worse nicknames
 
Yeah
 
Abraham Bernhard Claus von Düsseldorf-Eckensteinfeld met Fredrick George Heinrich XV today. The former told the latter a funny joke.
 
4:27 PM
lol
 
@Adám Your saying that made me realise that former/latter are mainly used to refer to concepts, not objects (and definitely not people)
 
I seem to recall having seen them used for people plenty of times.
Ugh, it gets weird using pronouns to talk about pronouns.
 
hmm, maybe when talking about people semi-indirectly, not using names actually
 
Basing pronouns on age would not be terrible, actually. You can have more categories (one pronoun for people 0-10, one for 10-20, etc.), you're not forcing people to pick one pronoun ("he" and "she" don't fit everyone), and there's more classes, reducing ambiguity
Still not optimal though
 
Alice replaced Bob, the latter having retired earlier this year.
 
4:29 PM
@pxeger like "The client spoke to the clerk today. The former was very upset"
 
@user Cue ageism complaints.
 
@user but you can't infer age from a noun only
 
Neither can you infer gender from a name. At least not any more.
 
@pxeger well, not very well
 
True, so you'd need to ask people for their ages, which would not be fun
@Adám I think we all agree that gender-based pronouns are not the best idea
 
4:31 PM
It is common human nature to categorise. When people feel hurt by categorisation, the system breaks down.
 
I'm two and will always be two
^^
 
:(
 
@Adám well, still reliably enough for gendered pronouns to remain somewhat useful
 
But we could make them better
Let's make English great again by adding variables/aliases/whatever you want to call it! Who's with me?
 
@pxeger It is a mine field these days.
 
4:32 PM
and since everyone knows that all NB people must use the name "Jay", you immediately know when someone doesn't use he nor she ;)
 
Wait, really?
 
Kim, Lee, and Alex want a word with you.
 
whatever we base pronoun categorisation off of, humans will get better at it so they can speak. I'm sure we can integrate this with cryptocurrency somehow :)
 
Blockchain FTW!
Let's use proof-of-work based pronouns.
2
 
All conversations lead to blockchain
@Adám ?
 
4:34 PM
Just being silly.
 
Different pronouns for employed and unemployed people?
 
On a serious note: In Sweden, it used to be the norm to use work titles as pronouns, even in second person. "Does the doctor want…?"
 
@user no, it was a joke because Jay just seems to be a very common choice by NB people (In fact, I know 2 NB/GNC people, both of whom are called Jay; I know two people called Jay, both of whom are NB/GNC.)
 
Oh ok
 
@Adám does the Right Honorable Gentleman for East Woking want...?
Wait I just realised that's still gendered
 
4:36 PM
Yeah.
 
Genteel? No idea what the gender-neutral form of gentleperson or whatever is
 
Many languages have gendered versions of job titles.
I have a cousin that goes by Guy. Can you guess my cousin's gender?
 
Erdős number pronouns
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale 72 don't think that's a very good idea
 
Most don't have one.
@pxeger don't doesn't
 
4:37 PM
 
First and second person pronouns don't have many issues.
 
@Adám I was using 72 to refer to myself, on that estimation of my Erdős number
 
> 1, 2, 3 are children without fixed personalities; they play together.
 
@pxeger Ooh, what mathematical papers have you written?
Hey, Romans used to give their children ordinal names.
 
4:39 PM
Cool
@Wezl-acautionarytale Infinity would like a word
 
But of course, the numbers are gendered too.
 
The Pythagoreans?
 
@user Proof-of-work is a concept behind how Bitcoin's blockchain works
 
NaN doesn't think so.
 
@RedwolfPrograms oic
 
4:41 PM
@Adám I am acknowledged on one of my dad's papers for helping him with methodology; he wanted to make me coauthor, but the journal wouldn't allow it. So If I consider myself as having authored that one paper (which is not mathematical, btw, so it will take a lot of steps to get to Erdős), then I can have a non-undefined Erdős number
 
Idea: grapheme-gender synesthesia :p
 
Better idea: graphene-gender synaesthesia
 
You associate genders with shapes/colors?
 
Society at large arguably does that with pink and blue
 
@pxeger What was it about btw?
@pxeger Marketing :|
 
4:43 PM
@user No, grapheme means letter/number
 
@user I don't want to provide enough information to make it possible to discern the exact paper, because my dad is less private than I am online and it would reveal too much about me
 
E.g. I have grapheme-color synesthesia, the most common type
 
Oh ok
 
Are there taste and smell synaesthetes?
 
Yup
I wish I had some kind of synesthesia where I could taste pizza whenever I touched wood or something
 
4:44 PM
@pxeger I co-authored a research paper with Roger Hui but it was only published by Jsoftware, and in an official real journal. If we count (or publish) that, then I'm a 3.
 
@pxeger Yeah, I ran into one on WB.SE and asked them a bunch of questions in a comment but no response yet
 
I imagine being a synaesthete and being asked loads of questions gets quite tiresome
 
I really want to meet someone with both grapheme-taste and color-taste synesthesia, and ask them if red tastes the same as the letter a
2
@pxeger Idk, I love when people as me a ton of questions about it :p
Although maybe I just like talking about myself
 
on that topic, is there anything you want to know about me :P
 
I wonder how graphene tastes.
 
4:50 PM
Favorite potato-related dishes?
 
@Adám grey, I imagine :þ
 
Not black?
 
@RedwolfPrograms potato-related? So can I say something with no actual potato in it?
 
Yes, but that would be boring
 
potato is boring
 
4:51 PM
roasted new potatoes are good
 
Potatoes are awesome
 
@pxeger Then you need to come to my house for a meal.
 
There are dishes which contain potatoes and are awesome. Potatoes alone or mostly alone are quite boring.
 
I want to try potato ice cream
what could be better to eat than a nightshade plant
 
4:52 PM
A potato is like a blank slate; you can do almost anything with it
But it tastes better than a blank slate
 
@pxeger Baked with salt?
 
Yeah, even just putting salt on a potato and cooking it makes it very good
 
@Adám nice enough, but still fairly boring
 
@RedwolfPrograms (I wish my school could consistently figure out how to do both of those)
 
a few herbs and/or spices would make it actually interesting
@RedwolfPrograms smiley-face potato waffles :)
 
4:55 PM
I think they have those but I've never tried them and I don't plan on it :p
 
PSA: vegan chicken nuggets are good
 
ooh, I've never thought of those before but they sound like they would be good
 
So are normal chicken nuggets though :p
 
do they have a vegan burger like filling, potatoes and mixed veg?
 
if you don't like the taste, you can drown it in mustard anyway
@pxeger yes
but it's very easy to find bad vegan burgers
vegan burgers are like pronouns
they
are something discussed in the TNB ;D
 
4:58 PM
oh I was very confused for a minute there
 
Okay, opinions on: Peanut butter and maple syrup sandwich
 
it's all part of the plan
 
@RedwolfPrograms I heard someone talking about it in a class and I don't know how to feel
So I'm outsourcing my opinion generation to y'all
 
@RedwolfPrograms sounds good. Probably better without the maple syrup, because I'd rather not have it soak through
 
@RedwolfPrograms too anaphylactic for my liking
 
4:59 PM
Apparently you can't just put peanut butter on some bread and put maple syrup on it, you need to mix them in a bowl first
Now that I think about it, it's probably pretty good
Although maybe without the bread it'd be better, since peanut butter and bread are both pretty dry
Unless you like moist floppy bread in which case I hate you
 
@pxeger that sentence is technically anaphylactic >:)
I don't like big words, so I attack them when I can
any discussion of anaphylaxis is anaphylactic
 
@RedwolfPrograms I prefer moist floppy peanut butter :P
 
so I declare your use of "anaphylactic" too anaphylactic for my liking
allergenic is nice and shorter
 
@user Kindergarten teachers disliked this
@Adám I think Japan is that way too.
 
Problem is with letting people chose their self-identified educations/professions/etc.
 
5:06 PM
potato is my favorite fruit :P
 
@user really user?
I won't change my username.
You need to do more than that...
 
Why are some countries prefixed with "the" sometimes?
Like "The Ukraine" or "The Gambia"?
 
The Gambia's official name is "The Gambia" and they're quite insistent about the "the"
"The Ukraine" sounds more archaic to me, like "the levant" or similar
 
@user I'm sure that's accurate enough, but I want to see the statistics on how many animals are killed by dogs, for comparison. It's not zero. And some of them are cats. :(
 
Well at least four
 
5:08 PM
But then "the Netherlands" more or less has to be prefixed by "the"
@user I can be a cat person without owning a cat
 
I want TNBers' opinions of voiced vs unvoiced "th"
 
@RedwolfPrograms It's complicated, and it depends on which language you're speaking. In French, France is "la France."
 
@pxeger You can also be a catperson without owning a cat
 
should english use thorn+eth?
 
owo
 
5:09 PM
I like th, thorn/eth aren't necessary imo
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale I think we get by okay with the current spelling, but I wouldn't mind that. (I'd prefer theta over thorn for IPA reasons, tho.)
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale Voiced th occurs almost exclusively at the start of words, and generally only in function words
 
^
Well, and also at the ends of words like "bathe"
 
so it's unambiguous enough I think
 
It only matters in like a couple of words
 
5:10 PM
should we unify p/b t/d k/g?
 
No
 
Certainly not
 
a gaudionary dale
 
5:11 PM
The t in cautionary is hardly the same as in t/d
 
CMQ: Is there a minimal pair for voiced vs. unvoiced th? (That is, a pair of words that are pronounced exactly the same except the th is voiced in one and unvoiced in the other)
 
@Wezl-acautionarytale Hebrew unifies p/f b/v t/th d/ð k/kh g/gh
 
ether and either
 
what exactly are yall discussing
 
5:12 PM
thigh and thy
 
and of course i'd favor unvoiced pronounciation because it's better
 
@RedwolfPrograms Ah, nice
 
@RedwolfPrograms the vowel lengths are different
 
@DLosc than (no that's voiced) tan
 
@pxeger English doesn't distinguish between lengths of vowels does it?
 
5:13 PM
Subtly
Compare "to" and "too"
 
@RedwolfPrograms I think some dialects do
 
Although I don't actually pronounce "ether" with an unvoiced th
 
eithernet?
 
@DLosc But "either" and "ether" sound like the same vowel length when I say them
 
I pronounce "either" and "ether" the exact same yeah
 
5:14 PM
Then too, some people say "eyether"
 
Let's just drop english entirely and make up a nice regular conlang instead
 
Sure, if we can all agree on what features we want it to have. :P
Actually, I think (half-seriously) that Indonesian would make a good universal language.
It's got a reasonably simple sound system, the grammar isn't super-complex, and it's already been somewhat tailored to be a common language for lots of people with different cradle tongues. And tons of people already speak it.
@cairdcoinheringaahing When I was shopping online for an umbrella several months ago, I learned that umbrellas come in two genders: female and unisex. :P I think I ended up buying a female one because all the unisex ones were monochrome and boring.
 
Idea: "a".repeat(-1) gives you a "negative a", which removes an a at the end of a string when you concat it with one
 
Idea: "(".repeat(-1) gives you ")"
2
 
5:25 PM
That might legitimately be helpful in certain code-golf challenges. (Actually, both ideas might.)
 
@DLosc dark magic
 
what would "abc" + ("c".repeat(-1)+"d") give?
 
@DLosc lol that looks like such a whython feature
 
@RedwolfPrograms Something very similar works in APL.
You can concatenate a negative number of "a"s.
 
Whaaat
 
5:29 PM
wait what
is that an Extended thing
 
@Adám whatatat
 
@Adám ಠ_ಠ
 
@Adám does it somehow reverse it's ascii position or something like that?
 
f⍣n applies a function f n times.
If n is negative, it still works.
'a'(,⍣3)'xyz' gives 'aaaxyz'
'a'(,⍣¯3)'aaaaaxyz' gives 'aaxyz'
So that's concatenating 'a' negative three times.
 
Ah, okay, so it's not "concatenate a negative number of 'a's," it's "concatenate 'a' a negative number of times." Still cool
 
5:35 PM
Yeah. I did say "very similar".
 
Doesn't work in BQN, sadly (unless I'm doing something wrong).
 
It may work in some implementations.
 
How are yall doing on my stegano challenge?
 
J has it too, but overly eager. It allows inverted concatenation of elements that aren't there to begin with!
 
@RedwolfPrograms I don't know whether this is actual synesthesia or just my imagination, but I used to associate certain pairs of words/things/people with the colors gray and brown. Brown felt rounder, gray felt skinnier.
Steven Curtis Chapman is brown; Scott Krippayne is gray. 2004 is brown; 2002 is gray. And "gray" is brown, but "grey" is gray. =P
 
5:42 PM
Sounds like (mild, sort of?) synesthesia, although I think it's probably normal
 
The rounder/skinnier part of it sounds like the bouba/kiki effect, now that I think of it
 
@DLosc I think it's somewhat common to kinda have synesthesia when you're young and grow out of it later
@DLosc Doesn't mean cats aren't bad :|
 
5:57 PM
do you know how many animals hUmAnS kill every day?
this is why I'm teaching the toddler I babysit about vegetarianism
 
Yes, and I kinda feel like exterminating humanity wouldn't be a bad idea, except...it would be a bad idea
@Wezl-acautionarytale Durn vegans, brainwashing our children!
 

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