English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2023-11-21

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Robusto

00:24

#waffle669 5/5

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🔥 streak: 3
wafflegame.net

jlliagre

01:13

#waffle669 4/5

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🔥 streak: 11
🏆 #waffleelite
wafflegame.net

alphabet

Out of date dictionaries–with native speakers from UK/USA/Australia!

Ignore the fact that this is 90% a paid infomercial

Do pay attention to the utterly ridiculous pair of glasses he's wearing in the last half of the video

alphabet

01:46

World War II Every Day with Army Sizes

Cerberus

02:02

@Robusto That is pretty impressive.

Cerberus

02:22

@alphabet Hmm the map is recent.

Laurel

@alphabet He says diction-reeeee which is something that sticks out to me every time I hear him say it :p

alphabet

02:57

@Laurel Indeed. He only speaks British, not English.

Cerberus

03:15

Do not speak words so heretical!

huffs & puffs

alphabet

So strange, how some language teachers claim to be teaching English when they're actually teaching British.

Scammers.

Cerberus

There is no other English.

Only provincial dialects which don't count.

alphabet

Next time a non-native speaker asks which dialect they should learn if they want to succeed, I will direct them to this helpful chart

Cerberus

Oh, it's all about money.

How typical.

alphabet

There's a pretty clear correlation

Cerberus

03:38

Furries also think furriness is the measure of the world.

Laurel

03:48

@Cerberus reddit.com/r/furry/comments/g8fpiv/…

Apparently the conclusion is the same if you're looking for the country with the most furries

alphabet

Sep 21 at 19:16, by alphabet

@Laurel Religionwise, can you wear a fursuit instead of a burqa, or do you need a separate burqa under it?

Cerberus

04:14

@Laurel I rest my case.

alphabet

04:37

@Laurel The problem is that most furry literature hasn't been translated to British yet.

CowperKettle

05:34

There was an ancient martial arts master who bested all of his opponents by waiting for just the right moment to strike. His name was Tai Ming.

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

07:39

user image

This guy's jail sentence was due to end in 2030.

He was part of a company of Satan worshippers who rutually killed three teenage girls, dismembered them, ritually washed new members of the group with the blood of their victims as an admission ceremony, and cooked and ate the girls' hearts. His role was to make the first cut across the throat of victims.

He has been pardoned after 6 months on the frontlines in Ukraine, and is now free.

76.ru/text/criminal/2023/11/21/72933266

user image

Varya Kuzmina, one of his victims

Xanne

08:13

Wordle 885 4/6

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1 hour later…

CowperKettle

09:27

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1 hour later…

Vikas

10:44

@M.A.R. Yeah they likely considered students studying and problem solving school books as "reading". I wonder if it's actually reading.

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

12:08

Surname of the day: Dijkstra (Dykstra) - a Frisian surname describes a person who lived by a dyke. The suffix "-stra" is derived from old Germanic -sater, meaning sitter or dweller. The name originates in the northern Netherlands province of Friesland.

jlliagre

12:22

@CowperKettle Van Dijk is more common.

jlliagre

12:48

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CowperKettle

13:07

@jlliagre Yes )

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1 hour later…

jlliagre

14:09

@CowperKettle Tupperware Fridgesmart advertisement...

Robusto

@jlliagre Doesn't the Acadamie get their panties in a bunch over the use of "weekend" in that ad meme?

jlliagre

No. Weekend has been fully adopted in France. Québec uses fin de semaine but it has a different meaning for us.

Robusto

It always amuses me, though, when organizations try to prevent languages from changing.

jlliagre

@Robusto De cette loi, dont l’Académie n’est pas tenue ignorante, j’attends beaucoup à une double condition. D’une part, qu’elle ne soit pas étroitement chauvine, et là-dessus je rejoins notre confrère des Inscriptions, M. Jean Favier, qui disait récemment que ce n’est pas week-end qui est dommageable à la langue, pas plus que ne l’a été tramway, mais que c’est solutionner qui est calamiteux. Maurice Druon, 1993

Robusto

14:25

@jlliagre I don't understand why the solution would be calamitous.

jlliagre

I'm not found of solutionner in French. Résoudre is prettier.

Resolve vs solutionate?

Robusto

Solutionate?

jlliagre

That would be the equivalent neologism in English, wouldn't it?

Robusto

@jlliagre I don't know. More likely we'd try to work with solvent in some capacity.

jlliagre

How would you consider: Help me solutionate this problem ?

Solucionar is of course fine in Spanish.

Robusto

14:32

@jlliagre That would be laughable if someone actually said it.

If we were to use something besides solve, we might just verb the noun: "Help me solution the problem."

jlliagre

@Robusto We do not use nouns as verbs in French.

Robusto

But solve just works so much better.

@jlliagre Quel dommage.

The easy transference of nouns to verbs and vice versa is one of the cool things about English.

jlliagre

14:47

@Robusto I didn't laugh but was surprised when I heard solutionner used by native French for the first time. I never use solutionner because it sounds ugly and has no advantage outside being simpler to conjugate. The latter doesn't compensate the extra syllables imho.

Not very popular anyway.

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We have both solvable and soluble too, but their meanings don't exactly match their English counterpart.

Solvable: someone able to pay a debt. Soluble: something that can dissolve into a liquid. Insoluble: something that can't dissolve OR a problem that has no solution.

Robusto

15:07

@jlliagre Soluble means the same things in English.

Solvable exactly corresponds to one meaning of solvent in English.

Wordle 885 4/6

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jlliagre

@Robusto We have solvant (and dissolvant) but only as nouns, not adjectives.

Wordle 885 2/6

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Who said my starting word sucks? ;-)

jlliagre

15:27

Solucionar made it but Soluzionare failed.

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Robusto

15:44

@jlliagre Lucky start.

alphabet

15:57

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giphy.com/gifs/raccoon-10phT4zFb4ouQg

Argh

SO chat does not like to send GIFs properly

Robusto

16:38

@alphabet It doesn't like URLs that have lots of stuff in the query strings. And there are other impediments.

M.A.R.

17:00

@jlliagre I actually like this. Sort of stylish.

Robusto

Stylish for a pineapple.

alphabet

I have heard solutionize before.

It's the sort of word that makes you wonder what exactly your project manager gets paid to do.

> A recent poll of 2,200 registered Muslim voters in key states, including Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, from Emgage, a Muslim-voter mobilization group, paints a clearer picture of how far Muslim Americans' threat to ditch Biden in 2024 resonates: 5.2 percent of respondents said they would vote for the Democrat if they had to cast their presidential ballots now, plummeting from the 80 percent who said they voted for Biden in 2020.

Robusto

17:25

Is Google always listening: Live Test

Wow. This I did not know.

Robusto

17:43

Daily Octordle #666
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Score: 61

Daily Sequence Octordle #666
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Score: 68

CowperKettle

18:22

Why do you see so many dyslexics walking in Paris?
It's safer than walking alone.

jlliagre

18:44

@CowperKettle I'm afraid I don't get it.

user 726941

Pairs vs Paris.

Sort of a play on minimal pairs, I guess.

jlliagre

Ahhhhhh!

user image

user 726941

Russia is 50/50? Even with a war going on.

Robusto

19:02

@Mitch: I'd be curious to hear your opinion about this podcast: Mayhem at OpenAI. This is an Apple link, but you can find it anywhere, esp. on your favorite podcast manager.

@jlliagre Weird use of color there. The opposite of what I would have guessed. Maybe the designer was colorblind?

@CowperKettle Seriously? That is strained to the breaking point, but alas not to the braking point.

user 726941

Minimal pairs and triplets are the bread and butter of the so called English pronunciation classes.

They train the ear as well as the voice.

Mitch

19:33

@user726941 but you don't capitalize 'pairs'

We'll have to send this one to the punitentiary

@Robusto Podcast? Apple? Hear? Is?

user 726941

Why not, it's the first letter of a sentence.

Robusto

As puns go, this one is no honey.
It is puny instead of being punny.
It's confusing and scant,
It turns "can" into "can't,"
And it's certainly not very funny.

Mitch

Yeah it's everywhere, not just podcasts, but front page NYT/WaPo, probably Guardian, Figaro, the Uganda Monitor

@user726941 not the P

user 726941

You lost me.

Mitch

But, re the OpenAI weekend mess...

It's a mess.

@user726941 it says 'Paris' not 'paris'

If it were 'Dyslexic tennis shoe wearers, untie!' that would at least be recognizable as a pun.

user 726941

19:44

1 hour ago, by user 726941

Pairs vs Paris.

Robusto

@Mitch +1

Mitch

snort

user 726941

+0.999...

Mitch

oops gotta wipe my nose

re the OpenAI de BACK ull

I'm being huh RASSED

this is all so BAY null

re the OpenAI brouhaha

Robusto

Did you mean brew HAHA?

Mitch

19:48

brew huh HA? or brew HA ha?

ha haha snort huh huh huh

now I need a tissue

Robusto

Maybe a shot of Afrin would help that.

Mitch

@Robusto I don't believe in guns

user 726941

Guns kill people

Mitch

I believe in the right to arm bears

I had well-founded and insightful opinions about some of the players before Friday at 3pm

user 726941

For the people by the people and of the people

Mitch

19:51

you know.. Friday afternoon, time to relax with a little idiotic twitter scanning

user 726941

Xitter

Mitch

and the place was blowing up, rightly, about the most visible AI guy in the universe being dumped from CEO of the company creating the most visible AI in the universe

and then a cofounder saying screw you all for that (and the repurposing/demotion)

user 726941

XXXitter is coming soon.

Mitch

and then employees signing a 'if he's leaving, I'm leaving' letter

and then it was 5pm and things started to heat up

so it was quite entertaining seeing all sorts of conjectures flying since then (and -none- resolved)

both about what certain individuals would do and what it all meant

and MSFT stock dropping like a rock

now we've gotten to 6pm

But my opinion as of Saturday evening, once it came out that the board of directors (who had fired Altman) was publicly (or not... who can tell?) are trying to get Altman back, I thought that the board (as a single entity) was incompetent and should be replaced entirely.

Within the board (of 4 people, who I only am aware of now because of all the public (=twitter) investigation, I'm sure some were for keeping him and some were against, but 'for' won out.

user 726941

3

Q: What ways can ChatGPT assist with learning a foreign language?

I believe ChatGPT's strong linguistic capability would enhance language learning. But I think it depends as ChatGPT may sometimes provide incorrect responses with confidence. and language learners may struggle to determine the accuracy of ChatGPT's responses. And so far as I have tested, ChatGPT ...

Mitch

20:01

Whatever the decision process was within the board, it was incompetent. Sure people disagree on such big decisions, but you don't try to undo them immediately once made based on public opinion (you should have a good idea of public opinion first).

user 726941

theory?

Mitch

[languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/theory]!

How do you get that tag as a button?

user 726941

[ tag: word ] remove all the spaces.

^remove 3 spaces

Mitch

More opinion...or rather speculation... all the people who jumped horses in the middle of a mixed metaphor when ChatGPT came out, and developed all these apps built on top of ChatGPT are now shitting themselves because of the instability (that was always there but now it's obvious).

user 726941

word

Mitch

20:09

@user726941 OK like this: shittingthemselves ?

hm

seems to work...but what about that tag in -another- site?

languagelearners.theoreticalhorseshit

Nope.

user 726941

It works in the other site's chatroom

Mitch

@user726941 [wellyeahbutIwantittoworkin-this-chatroomtorefertoanothersites:tag]

user 726941

good-luck-with-thst-pal

Mitch

Nope

bad luck

user 726941

bad-luck-is-better-than-no-luck

Mitch

20:19

i-disagree

last time is the charm

Lucky charms are worse than no charms

those extra weird colored bits that are supposed to be marshmallows but taste and feel like styrofoam? no thanks.

Robusto

@Mitch I know it's everywhere, but the podcast has some interesting things to say, including an interview with Sam Altman a few days before he was fired (and apparently unaware of the coming axe).

Mitch

@Robusto That's the one thing the board did well, which was keep everyone in the dark about a decision they had trouble making probably during the week before.

Robusto

@Mitch That's too bad. Guns believe in you.

Mitch

20:36

My opinions:
1) as a CEO Altman is always selling, which is a good trait to have
2) What he's selling is way overhyped (beyond its profitability (that's another unsubstantiated opinion which I haven't made)), and he may be aware of that or maybe
not.
3) It felt like Sutskever (one of the board members, one of the founders, and also one of the smart guys who was part of the Deep Learning turning point about 10 years ago) was the instigator for getting rid of Altman, but he's also apologized on Twitter for, not for doing so, but for being part of the board that got rid of Altman. So I can't t…

You've heard my opinions on how ChatGPT is way overhyped as tech (awesome, but just can't do a lot of things claimed). But I think its profitability is way overhyped... I just don't think it is good enough to be reliable enough to drive reliable products and users of products will quickly get upset with unmet expectations.

Also it felt like all the AI hype men were exactly those crypto bros escaping the ~~sinking~~ ~~foundering~~ ~~sunk~~ whatever FTX is now ship.

Robusto

@Mitch Yeah, #4 is a really good point. What the conversation kept steering toward concerned what "safety" meant with this product, etc., and that that might go out the window if Altman and his crew were hired by, say, Microsoft (which they were) and given carte blanche to step on the gas and disable the brakes.

Mitch

@Robusto If you had any particular things mentioned in the podcast that you were particularly interested in, I would be glad to comment.

@Robusto a big difficulty with safety with LLMs is that language patterns are so infinitely diverse, it is hard to anticipate all the 'bad' things that could happen.

Robusto

@Mitch Only vis-a-vis balls-to-the-wall full dev vs. caution and brakes applied judiciously.

Mitch

I mean NTSB has this really in depth procedure for any kind of plane crash and plane engineering is (while I can't say well understood because I just don't know) it has a hundred years of engineering experience behind it

Robusto

Altman is definitely a salesman, but he does have long pauses where he is searching for measured (i.e., non-hyped) answers.

Mitch

20:46

and supposedly in the past 10 (maybe 20) years there have been way fewer airplane accidents than before so maybe they're doing their job well?

@Robusto He does have a tech background (undergrad) and was a cofounder of ycombinator, the tech company VC/accelerator. So he's competent in tech.

The obvious comparison is Jobs. Jobs was more hands on. But Altman to me says intelligent things (when I hear Hinton ('godfather' of AI...actually Sutskever's PhD advisor) speak, there's too much in every sentence to say 'well actually'). Altman seems to have a handle on the subtleties. He -says- counter-hype things (it's not AGI, GPT5 won't be that much better) even though he's sell-sell-selling.

@Robusto That's hard for me to disentangle fro how it's funded and optimism and doomerism and one hand not knowing what the other is doing.

CowperKettle

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MetaEd

Wordle 885 3/6

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Mitch

@Robusto I don't think that's an act, but let's say I think that is behavior that gets the sale done.

Can I quote Woody Allen or is it fair game now to just say it like you came up with it the first time?

"The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you've got it made."

by Woody Allen

who stole it from George Burns

who stole it from WC Fields

who stole it from Mark Twain

who stole it from the future when somebody erroneously ascribed it to him in 1990.

user 726941

Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Mitch

@Robusto All the safety and ethics and transparency stuff should be going balls to the wall along side the developments of the actual tech.

@user726941 There is another quote... somethign along the lines of "Copying from others is not stealing. Copying from one person is stealing."

Also, DALL-E is stealing actual copyrighted material from -everybody-

making a lot of people upset.

CowperKettle

21:02

> This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Mitch

Yee haw!

user 726941

LoL

Robusto

@Mitch I think Lenny Bruce said that.

MetaEd

Sep 20, 2012 at 17:20, by ΜετάEd

@Cerberus 82% of all statistics are made up.

CowperKettle

> The fatigue of depression and its morphing into disconsolate apathy provides a nice case study of the role of hierarchical interoceptive inference in producing affective me.

Robusto

21:14

@MetaEd Nice, except my comment wasn't related to statistics.

MetaEd

@Robusto It is now.

Robusto

I disagree.

MetaEd

That's a "yes" and a "no", so it is related to statistics, P ≈ 0.5

user 726941

Come on guys, we all know if you torcher stats long enough, it will tell you whatever you want to hear.

MetaEd

13 mins ago, by Robusto

@Mitch I think Lenny Bruce said that.

Robusto

21:24

@MetaEd What I think is P = 1.0 because I do think that. Whether that is correct is another matter.

MetaEd

@Robusto you only believe you think that. P < 1.0

user 726941

Lenny Bruce - How To Relax Your Colored Friends At Parties (1961)

Robusto

If you can't trust my assertion on that, I don't know what I can do for you. I am the only reliable source you will ever meet for what I think.

Mitch

@MetaEd I know you said he believes he thinks that, but are you sure?

MetaEd

@Mitch You only think you know I said he believes he thinks that.

Mitch

21:27

@Robusto until they get that mind reading MRI helmet thing working

@MetaEd Well, actually

seeing is the closest to knowing we got

Robusto

@Mitch I don't think that will happen while I still have a thinking machine in my head.

MetaEd

@Mitch we have seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and the various touch senses, plus our cognate notions. We believe our cognate notions are knowing, but the best we can actually say is that a thing is real when we disbelieve it and it doesn't go away.

Robusto

21:43

Aug 11, 2013 at 13:12, by Robusto

@JohanLarsson "Sincerity is the most important thing in all relationships. Once you can fake that, you've got it made." — Oscar Wilde

OK, as I recall I attributed that quote to Wilde because, hell, why not? Nobody is going to check that.

Robusto

22:05

Feb 10, 2011 at 19:21, by Robusto

Who was it said "If you torture numbers long enough they'll confess to anything?"

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." — Ronald Coase

> There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. —Benjamin Disraeli

MetaEd

23:05

uh oh. Kernel patches.

Mitch

23:31

@Robusto oh I'm sure they'll remove it and have it replaced, if that's what you're concerned about

@MetaEd I think the condition of our disbelieving is not necessary

But give some due measure to lasting delusion.

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