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1:02 AM
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer, pattern-matching email in answer (349): Where does the expression "to sell your soul to the devil" originate by Richard Bradley on english.SE
 
 
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9:53 AM
 
 
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12:08 PM
Guess what that is.
 
@CowperKettle I know. And I've found the Twitter post with the answer.
 
12:29 PM
Or possibly, because I found it.
 
12:58 PM
@CowperKettle Cherokee
 
Looks like an eye chart
 
Is it "wording are required" or "wording is required"? I think the latter, because here "wording" is an abstract noun. Or maybe uncountable?
 
1:36 PM
@FaheemMitha Wording is countable and uncountable. In either case, it would take the singular copula unless pluralized.
 
2:08 PM
> The research will involve reprogramming elephant DNA with mammoth characteristics, like thick hair and layers of fat, to help the hybrid animals survive in the Siberian tundra, according to multiple reports. Researchers have targeted 60 genes that make up the mammoth’s distinctive characteristics, and they will use elephant eggs or tissue.
A smart material.
> The road to wisdom?
-- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
 
2:34 PM
@CowperKettle In my faux inner jafaican accent reading of that, I get: "Uh and uh and uh again..."
@CowperKettle "a quantum material"?
Bollocks
All material is quantum if that stuff is.
It's like saying "Salt is an atomic material" a hundred years ago (atomic theory of matter was pretty new then).
It'd be like saying "Bronze is an elemental material" 4000 years ago, because bronze is made of elements.
It'd be like saying "Unk urgh gronk MEAT narg EATING MATERIAL" 10,000 years ago because meat is made of things you can eat.
 
@Mitch Yes, the use of this phrase also stumped me.
 
It'd be like saying "Bloop blorp beep - beep beep boop beep - blorp blorp" three hundred years from now because bloopity blorp blorp.
 
Quantum materials is an umbrella term in condensed matter physics that encompasses all materials whose essential properties cannot be described in terms of semiclassical particles and low-level quantum mechanics. These are materials that present strong electronic correlations or some type of electronic order, such as superconducting or magnetic orders, or materials whose electronic properties are linked to non-generic quantum effects – topological insulators, Dirac electron systems such as graphene, as well as systems whose collective properties are governed by genuinely quantum behavior, such...
 
haha. "bloopity blorp" a multitemporal pun.
 
Turns out there is such a term.
Unter Quantenmaterialien versteht man solche Materialien, deren makroskopische Eigenschaften wesentlich durch die quantenphysikalische Wellenfunktion von Elektronen geprägt werden. Dabei unterscheidet man Eigenschaften, die auf Wechselwirkungen zwischen Elektronen zurückzuführen sind (wie z. B. Ferromagnetismus, Antiferromagnetismus und Supraleitung), und Phänomene, die von dem topologischen Charakter der Wellenfunktion abhängen (wie z. B. topologische Isolatoren, Dirac-Halbmetalle, Weyl-Halbmetalle). Ein neuer Forschungszweig beschäftigt sich mit Materialien, die beide Arten von Phänomenen kombinieren…
Sounds even more sciency
 
2:43 PM
@CowperKettle I suspected that it was a technical term, but it still sounds ... like they're trying to sell something.
AI is full of hyperbolic terms that sound like they're selling a sports car to teenagers (or those in a mid-life crisis).
Like XGBoost... I've ignored that for too long because it sounds like they just made up the name. it's a perfectly fine algorithm like RF but with boosting instead of bagging... just the name sounds like a caffeine and alcohol infused sports drink sold at raves.
It sounds like a an attachment to a skateboard that gives you better height on a reverse nollie kickflip
It sounds like a naugahyde-covered padded executive desk chair that duals as a gaming chair and spaceship commander's seat, with dual-oversized intercoolers and ram-thrust dorsal-injected distribulators for hyper-acceleration. Plus cup holders on both armrests
And that's all just XGBoost.
 
XGBoost is an open-source software library which provides a regularizing gradient boosting framework for C++, Java, Python, R, Julia, Perl, and Scala. It works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. From the project description, it aims to provide a "Scalable, Portable and Distributed Gradient Boosting (GBM, GBRT, GBDT) Library". It runs on a single machine, as well as the distributed processing frameworks Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Dask.It has gained much popularity and attention recently as the algorithm of choice for many winning teams of machine learning competitions. == History... ==
> XGBoost works as newton raphson in function space unlike gradient boosting that works as gradient descent in function space, a second order taylor's approximation is used in the loss function to make the connection to newton raphson method.
aaaaaaaaaa
I can make out some words in this sentence.
"Newton Raphson in Function Space" looks like a good nickname.
 
3:00 PM
Newton-Raphson is a classic numeric zero-finding procedure, which can be used for 'gradient descent' (which is also a zhuzhed up name for hill-climbing (another classic numeric optimization problem).
So we're not even at AI yet.
 
It's all Chinese to me
 
Anyway that wiki article has a chaotic perspective. IT comes off first as though XGBoost is an open source -product, when it is really an academic object, an algorithm, and the first part of the wiki article happens to talk about its implementations in software, which is a very different thing.
 
It's all way too complex.
 
The wiki link says Chinese is the universal 'incomprehensible' language.
And the Chinese say ghost language or bird language or Martian.
 
La locuzione latina Graeca sunt, non leguntur - nota anche nella variante Graecum est, non legitur - si riscontra in numerosi manoscritti dell'età medievale. L'espressione, che letteralmente significa "è (scritto) in greco, non si legge", veniva inserita dagli amanuensi in sostituzione dei passi in lingua greca incontrati nel corso dell'opera di trascrizione. Essi infatti non conoscevano il greco (la cui tradizione si era persa in occidente) e, non essendo in grado di trascriverlo, si limitavano a segnalare la presenza nel testo di tali passi. Analogamente nel corso dell'insegnamento del diritto...
 
3:11 PM
De Italia non est disputandum.
 
3:38 PM
> In a period of severe personal depression after World War I, he gave away his entire fortune to his brothers and sisters.[20][21] Three of his four older brothers died by separate acts of suicide. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
> Wittgenstein claims there is an unbridgeable gap between what can be expressed in language and what can only be expressed in non-verbal ways. Picture theory of language states that statements are meaningful if they can be defined or pictured in the real world.
It's all Chinese to me again.
 
@Robusto So "wording is required"? But how cna it be both countable and uncountable.
 
4:01 PM
I found an interesting site to read: lesswrong.com
 
@FaheemMitha The same way that cheese is countable and uncountable. english.stackexchange.com/questions/469071/…
 
 
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5:11 PM
> The prevalence of refrigerator blindness among prepubertal children raises the question, Could the current epidemic of obesity occurring among young Canadian males1 be due in part to refrigerator blindness?
 
 
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7:50 PM
@FaheemMitha Many nouns in English are both countable and uncountable. Take water, for example. In normal usage it's a mass noun: "I'd like some water with my meal, please." But when viewed in a different context, it can be counted: "The site was located ... near Tiverton, Ontario, on Lake Huron where it had access to the waters of the Great Lakes." You can even tell a waiter that the table requests three "waters" for those dining there, etc.
So the noun water can be counted when it refers to a variety of water: normal water, so-called "heavy water" (deuterium oxide), sparkling water, flavored water, and so on; or when the term is used as a synecdoche to refer to a portion of water.
 
8:04 PM
@Robusto Yes, I understand. Thank you for the clarifications. I think I was just being dense.
 
No worries. I get brain cramps from time to time too.
 
8:22 PM
8
Q: What influenced people to start using "I'm good" in answer to "How are you?" and in other contexts?

Isabel ArcherThere are many posts on this site about the appropriate responses to the question "How are you?" and there are many different opinions about which responses should be used. My intention is not to bring that question up here. My question is about the evolution of the expression "I'm good". I hear...

I don't see how this could be anything but "opinion-based" ...
 
8:43 PM
The top answer begins with: "It could be a kind of illogical carry over from another language. This is a colloquialism that could have started with bilingual/illiterate populations."
 
9:00 PM
Hey hi! I read something about a programming language, the person said that a language is "high-motivation, low-productivity" as in when a business has dev projects using this language it can attract people who will do great things with it but for general business purposes it can be more or less useful. Is that meaningful English to you and does it say what it purports to mean?
I mean is that a way of saying something like "elitist language"?
 
9:41 PM
@Robusto I think it's good.
@EylaChu-Generis Even with your explanation, don't fully understand the description in question...so I'd say, no!
 
@Cerberus Where would you find an authoritative source for that?
 
I don't know.
Maybe some linguist has published an article about such expression.
 
It's been over a year. What are they waiting for?
 
Or maybe a good answer will come up with a good theory, possibly with quotations from stages in between.
Etc.
 
And the way it's phrased: "What influenced people to start using ..." Seriously?
 
9:44 PM
Read with charity!
There could be archetypes, foreign influences, no idea.
 
@Cerberus As the saying goes, "You can wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first."
 
I haven't read the answers. Maybe they are only partially helpful. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good question.
 
I must disagree.
 
Soviet nuclear zeppelins. Three words that inspire confidence... (1976)
 
@Cerberus Thanks, when I read it I understood because of context (an example was provided) but it wasn't clear just from reading that phrase I quoted. It's from this.
 
9:53 PM
@CowperKettle But it's so brightly coloured.
I like it.
 
I guess it's come kind of pros/cons sort of construction. Anyways.
 
I'm afraid Quora won't load for me without allowing Javascript there.
 
"Industrial use [of Haskell] is mostly restricted to talent retention. Haskell is a low-productivity high-motivation language. Java and Go are high-productivity low-motivation languages. So if you want someone as smart as Simon Marlow work for you, letting him use the tool he adores is a better idea than merely attract him with a buck. And by productivity I mean large-scale productivity...."
"You can get huge overall productivity of your Java team by employing thousands of mediocre interchangeable devs. Haskell is counter-productive with mediocre devs but the productivity of Simon Marlow will likely be higher in Haskell than in anything else. This is how I understand the “avoid success” mantra: keep it highly-attractive. And IMO Haskell is more attractive in 2018 than ever."
Andrii Melnykov on Quora.
 
@CowperKettle What could possibly go wrong?
@EylaChu-Generis Productivity is a squishy concept, especially in that statement. Companies that employ "thousands of mediocre interchangeable devs" are not going to make breakthroughs, and eventually their code will ossify to the point where even those mediocrities will not want to work on it.
 
Oh, I'm no developper, I'm really about language here. I don't have a specific opinion on the topic, I just don't know it. I've worked with devs in this life, but yeah. @Robusto
 
10:03 PM
@EylaChu-Generis Unclear language. But my guess would be that a high-motivation language is such that one needs a high motivation to learn it?
And a low-productivity language is such that it is not easy to churn out high productivity using it?
The text is just poorly written, I suspect.
 
@Cerberus But I guess the person they're talking about is full stack. I find it somewhat unclear too. But I'm interested in expressing what it's trying to express. Maybe it's just niche. It's like expanding on the elite/niche idea. It will attract people who are dedicated to it but it's not mainstream for day to day, something.
But with sort of business terms. With the flipside or pros/cons phrasing somewhat. Anyways, thanks all.
 
Yeah, awful 'business' language.
 
10:58 PM
@EylaChu-Generis 'elitist' and 'high motivation/low-productivity' are not synonyms, if that is what you're asking, but I suppose there could be some implication from the latter the the former.
'high motivation' means 'fun to program, people really want to use this language'
'low productivity' means 'in practice is hard to make do useful things'
So if someone were hired to program in such a language, they must be very good at it for management to spend money on such a hire (to get the productivity out of that person to match others. And that implies something in the direction of elitism, ie only the best programmers might get to play with the shiny toy (Haskell) because they are good enough to make something useful out of it.
 

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