English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:50 AM

@RegDwigнt And then you got the new world, with Covid.

The Sentences Computers Can't Understand, But Humans Can

@RegDwigнt No new worlds are currently available. Come back next century.

@CowperKettle: BTW, my brother-in-law, who is a department chair in Computer Science at a major technological university, believes AI is way overhyped, especially in natural language processing. He just linked me this video as an example:

Debussy: Syrinx for solo flute (Emmanuel Pahud)

@RegDwigнt: Here's one I've definitely played:

@Robusto I know someone who works in Facebook’s language translation area.

AI, not parsing etc.

They gave up on the linguists.

1:06 AM

And how's that working out?

@Reg: And notice how he has the good sense to play in a live room so he gets all that reverb.

@Robusto He thinks it’s working well, but they’ve got a lot of humans checking stuff out for them.

They are using corpora to feed the machines, then removing passages that aren’t literal enough.

Like a creative translation of sayings or metaphors.

@Xanne So they're leaving out 90% of all prose?

@Robusto No, as far as I can tell, just picking through to delete the hard parts.

So the machine no longer has it as source from which to learn.

”Learn,” that is.

So they’re not tagging nouns, etc.

Well ...

Seems like there's still a loooong way to go before machines can do any more than the most basic constructions then.

@Robusto Surely, that’s why they’ve got the humans checking out the translations. But the effort is to fix the source material. They use The Bible heavily, because it’s been translated into so many languages.

1:20 AM

Good luck on understanding the Bible too. ^_^

Exactly. The light under the bushel.

Why does everyone have individual taste for food?

Everyone just needs energy for the body to function.

Individual taste is the feeling of how the world treats her.

@Robusto Interesting!

@Xanne Facebook's translation is inferior to Google, in my opinion. I regularly go to Google instead to translate posts on Facebook

Google Translate is amazing.

1:36 AM

@CowperKettle The person I know thinks they’re doing well with respect to Google, but he sort of acknowledged that Google is better.

I think Google is all AI too.

> "What? Putin is still President?"
Agafya Kuznetsova, who got lost in the woods of Yakutia 19 years ago, finally discovered by oil riggers.

A Russian mock news website

It's easy to get lost in Yakutian woods. It almost equals India in size, yet has a population of 900 000 people.

My city, Yekaterinburg, has a population of 1.5 million, with an aglomeration of about 2 million.

@CowperKettle Reminds me of a joke from 1969. Some guy goes into a coma in 1959 and wakes up exactly ten years later. He sees the flag outside is flying at half staff and asks who died. "Eisenhower," he's told. The man frowns and says, "Then I guess that bastard Nixon is president now."

@Mitch would probably understand that one.

It's funny because Nixon was the vice president under Eisenhower in 1959 and became president on his own in 1969.

@CowperKettle How did she survive for 19 years out there?

@Robusto It's a mock website, posting fun pseudo news

Oh.

1:51 AM

There is a woman hermit called Agafya Lykova

Agafia Lykova

Agafia Karpovna Lykova (Russian: Агафья Карповна Лыкова, born 17 April 1944) is a Russian Old Believer, part of the Lykov family, who has lived alone in the taiga for most of her life. As of 2016, she resides in the Western Sayan mountains, in the Republic of Khakassia. Lykova became a national phenomenon in the early 1980s when Vasily Peskov published articles about her family and their extreme isolation from the rest of society. Lykova is the sole surviving member of the family and has been mostly self-sufficient since 1988, when her father died. == Early life == Lykova was born in a hollowed...

> In the summer of 1978, a group of four geologists discovered the family by chance, while circling the area in a helicopter. The scientists reported that Lykova spoke a language "distorted by a lifetime of isolation"

> The Soviet government paid for her to tour the Soviet Union for a month, during which time she saw airplanes, horses, cars and money for the first time.

On the photos, she looks more optimistic than a lot of people in the streets.

Wow.

2:07 AM

@CowperKettle Is there a short form for your city? Like Y-burg, or Y-kat?

It would be E-burg if it was a burg at all ^_^

I think Boris Yeltsin was from there, but it started with an E at the time.

Yekat or Yeburg

Prior to 1990, Sverdlovsk

Prior to 1918, Yekaterinburg

@CowperKettle Thanks! And is the Ye pronounced like the ye in yes?

I think the emphasis on the syllables puzzles me.

Five syllables?

@Xanne The equivalent of "e" in Russian is pronounced ye or yo depending on diacritics.

In Russian the city is spelled Екатеринбу́рг.

I remember that much from the one year of Russian I took in high school.

Not much else, I'm afraid. It was just a taste of an interesting language.

2:21 AM

Yes, one can write it as Ekaterinburg if it suits better

But Yekaterinburg is closer to the real spelling of the word in real life

So are you familiar with chess, @Cowperkettle?

forvo.com/word/…

@Robusto No, I'm dismal at chess

Oops, need to work. Bye!

cya

KannE

2:49 AM

@Mitch Everyone at the beach knows what it means. Tie your towel to the cooler handle. Simple.

fnished a shower

it's great if a machine can serve me a meal

@Robusto I liked that translation video. Even simpler than whether the trophy goes in the luggage or the luggage goes in the trophy is the German expression “It burns under my nails” (per website Auf den Nägeln brennen). Not hard to translate from German, but in English it’s literal, not figurative. i wonder how AI figures that out.

Only literal, rather.

4:51 AM

Turns out there's a whole party in Russia, called The Party of 5th of December, that was formed in 2013 and has been denied registration ever since, year after year. Just for the fact of being an opposition party.

I thought this denial only concerned Navalny's party. Parties that are considered mild by the regime are allowed to keep their registration. Further, parties that are blatantly faux and created only to present a multi-party environment to the world are registered right away.

SmokeDetector

5:47 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Manually reported answer (94): Is there a word for "bright colored eyes"? ✏️ by SergioLeonard on english.SE

6:08 AM

Finished a meal.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Pattern-matching website in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (79): Is the word “borderline lunacy” a ‘stand-alone’ phrase or just an accidental combination of ‘borderline’ and ‘lunacy’? by Md Ikram Parvez on english.SE

Q: What do we call a document to be written according to no particular predefined template?

6:27 AM

0

A sentence I've translated from Russian: The Applicant must also fill out a Technical Appendix (in free form) providing, as far as this is possible, the most detailed description of the consulting activity and the expected results (technical documents, study protocols, final reports etc.). Here "...

phrase-requests

Started a question

Got a closevote already!

That's some progress for today, so I'll go and fetch some water from the pump and have a second breakfast.

SmokeDetector

7:41 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title (193): " Cornela consulted the herbal center with her husband in Ghana". Is it an ambiguous sentence? If " yes" what are the possible meanings? by ANAKPA on english.SE

9:05 AM

@CowperKettle It's not an SWR about the place that has mud, hence the close vote

Q: How to understand to use grammatically right?

10:40 AM

@Robusto here, have a question to nicely go with that.

0

The dictionary suggests the synonyms of the word "would" which is "should" and "could". This synonyms at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/would take numbers 2 and 9. Would do you explain when to use this right? and how to understand occasions of a usage?

word-usage

Yes.

The answer is yes.

The problem, and that's not a new problem, we've known that forever, is that to understand language it is not sufficient to have a working model of the language. To understand language you need a working model of the whole world.

So you need an AGI rather than just an AI.

I think that's what Tom explained in that video, but it's been a while since I watched it and it's too much work to click on it again.

You need a general intelligence, not a specific one. An AI that's good at chess is good at chess alone. It cannot drive a car. It wouldn't know what a car is even if it knew that cars existed.

For Facebook to translate a message from your mom, they'd need not Deep Blue but Skynet. And we all know how that ends.

Except that that's not how it ends in movies. That's how it actually ends.

They can feed the Bible to a bunch of code some unpaid intern wrote all they want. Google was done with feeding all the versions of the Bible to all their AIs a decade ago. And all of their AIs combined still don't fully understand that Friday does not translate to Donnerstag. Because none of their AIs understand what a day is.

Some of them can play a mean game of go, though. Or even drive a car. Just not both. And not if you ask them to do it on a Friday.

AI don't roll on Shabbos.

To anyone interested in a good primer on AGI design and all the challenges, easy and hard, current and old, I can recommend looking up Robert Miles.

Not the one who stormed the charts in the late 90s, but the one they occasionally feature on Numberphile. He has a channel of his own. With a ton of videos, all of them short, and all of them excellent.

Why Not Just: Raise AI Like Kids?

Why Would AI Want to do Bad Things? Instrumental Convergence

11:15 AM

Q: Why are PCIE's coupling capacitors so large

1:30 PM

6

I was looking at the PCIE specification, and I don't understand the requirement for coupling capacitors. For 2.5GT/s, the standard requires AC coupling capacitors of 75nF to 265nF. I tried to analyze the number like in this article in High-Speed Digital Design Online Newsletter. The line is te...

signal-integrity pcie

So here's a good question with a good answer, and I don't understand a single word of either.

2:29 PM

@Robusto It's funny because Nixon, while pretty awful, did all these great things: détente with China, ABM and SALT arms treaties w USSR, ended the draft, established the EPA, signed Title IX, and had the integrity to resign before being impeached.

I had to look up the rest of that list after China.

Researchers find abstract art evokes a more abstract mindset than representational art

What do we call a criminal case that is still not closed, meaning that it is still in process? Open criminal case? "Pending criminal case"?

phrase of the day: the contract is discharged by performance

Weird.

Today the police forbade people to gather signatures in Yekateringurg for a petition to restore mayoral elections. The signature gathering posts have been stationed in a couple of locations in the city for a couple of weeks, and only today, seeing that the required number of signatures (10 000) is very likely to be collected, the police came and shut the central signature point down.

Terran Swett

3:07 PM

english.stackexchange.com/questions/542754/… – And let's not even mention the phrase "fast rate of speed".

In Russian, the expression expensive price is quite often used, although a tautology

дорогая цена

3:56 PM

are you tired?

I am very tired.

@CaptainBohemian At all times? Do you exercise?

4:10 PM

I am encountering a problem with referring.

Explosion in Beirut: twitter.com/tvrain/status/1290678333156364289

Quite large. Must be a lot of victims.

@CaptainBohemian What is referring? Making references in a document?

4:21 PM

twitter.com/MiddleOfMayhem/status/1290682510939062273

Even from a distance of 8 km, the sound is deafening

You know what really sticks in my craw?

popcorn husks

kxkxkxkxkk

Ack

4:47 PM

I constanly mistype singing a contract instead of signing a contract and the spellchecker does not help.

Terran Swett

5:04 PM

Hmmm, what's the equivalent of the phrases "calendar day", "calendar year" and so on for hours?

Is there a phrase that means "the period of time from the top of one hour to the top of the following hour"?

The period of time from 9:58 to 10:03 only lasts five minutes, but it spans two... calendar hours?

"Calendar hours" sounds weird because, of course, calendars don't have hours on them.

A good question for the main site, Terran. Only add the requirement that it must be a single word, they love it there ))

5:38 PM

Can we call a company functionary an official, or is this word only preserved for governmental workers?

6:21 PM

@CowperKettle It depends. You can call that person an officer of the company if at VP level or above, or has some other official capacity. Officer is currently supplanting official, but both have about the same usage in the corpus. Whichever you use, nobody would be confused or even bat an eyelash at it.

@Robusto Thank you!

Can we call a state-run company a public institution, or is this term reserved only for institutions like schools, libraries, hospitals, parliaments?

I was using the term state enterprise for translation of государственное предприятие, and another translator uses public institution.

@CowperKettle Well, state-run may mean different things in Russia vs. the US.

For example, what is NASA? It's supposedly independent, but it wouldn't survive without funding and direction from the government.

And is a company whose stock is traded on the NYSE public or private?

It's not completely private unless it buys back all its stock, which is called "taking the company private."

2

I assume that's meant to represent Rupert Murdoch.

6:43 PM

Can a public institution be a company that provides consulting services?

@Robusto I've seen this somewhere, but drawn differently and with different characters.

@CowperKettle Interesting.

@CowperKettle I find that unlikely, but I could be wrong.

ctvnews.ca/politics/…

So, how weird is it that the US alienating Canada doesn't even surprise anyone?

I think that borders should be completely open, and all people have the right to travel and work everywhere they want on the planet.

I hate it when people say, those Tajiks and Uzbeks are making Tajikistan and Uzbekistan out of whole city blocks. So what.

@CowperKettle What? I didn't get that sentence

6:59 PM

@M.A.R. People use to gripe that guest workers are turning whole city blocks into their little motherlands, where every second person you see is an Uzbek

There has been an influx of guest workers and migrants from Central Asia in Russia

And the general mood is "throw them out". I'm not sure about that. I prefer for people to mix up.

But now that Russia is suffering economically, the influx is not as great as it used to be.

Does one have to register with officials in order to live in a city in Iran? In Russia you cannot stay more than a week or two without special registration, as far as I recall. The police must always know where you might be located, even if you have no criminal record.

@CowperKettle Oh, so the normal jab at immigrants

Meaning if you come to stay with your friend for a prolonged period, you must register in the friend's city.

@CowperKettle Heh, we have not one, but two social ID thingies

The double ID system is just redundant Kafkaesque stupidity, not for extra security or whatever.

@M.A.R. We have a city district called Sortirovka, "the train sorting yard". When I bicycle there, I sometimes feel a bit in a different country. There are Uzbek and Tajik women in long baggy dresses. ))

You can do most things without one, a restaurant is not gonna ask for your ID to hand you your food

7:06 PM

Same here.

But every sorta document requires it I think. So to buy or rent a house legally, you'd need that

But the police may trouble you in the streets if they discover you're staying for a long period of time in a different city without registration.

@CowperKettle That must be nice. Traditional clothes are only ever seen in some rural areas and very distant desolate cities in Iran

@CowperKettle OK that's bullshit, why?

It's another city, not Area51 or a military zone or whatever

My uncle had an outward appearance of a person from the Caucasus, and during his business travels to Moscow he was constantly accosted by the police who were hoping to get a bribe out of him. They were not happy to discover he was not a Georgian but a Jew.

@M.A.R. Because the state wants to know your whereabouts.

How can you still call it Russia if you'd need documents to be in another city? You're living in a country called Yekaterinburg then.

7:09 PM

In my Russian Passport, I have several pages with stamps of places of my official registration (City name, Street name, building, apartment)

Do you pronounce the Y?

Or is Ekaterinburg closer to the original pronunciation?

Yekaterinburg.

@M.A.R. forvo.com/word/…

OK

@CowperKettle Lol that sounds like if a Turk pronounced it

@M.A.R. Isn't it like this in Iran? What if you go to a different city and rent a flat in Iran? Don't you have to registed with the authorities at your new place?

@M.A.R. Because Trump.

7:11 PM

Sure you do, some tax documents need to be updated with your new location etc.

nods

But a police officer bothering you for being in another city?

For a long time it was very hard to get official registration in Moscow. Because Moscow was privileged.

No nothing of the sort here

@M.A.R. Maybe for being in another city for a long time without registration.

7:14 PM

In the US we don't need to do anything when moving domiciles except to get a new driver's license in the new state if we plan to take up permanent residence there.

The revolution was rather popular. If the regime wanted to crack down on some people after that, they would be minorities. We hadn't needed the iron fist.

That might change, and has partially changed for some things

Moscow was so privileged that people from other cities agreed to work for 10-20 years on some low-paying job just in order to get an official registration in Moscow, in Soviet times.

But we're mostly imitating totalitarian regimes and painting it with a religious brush and calling it our idea

The Soviet authorities learned the main lesson - that revolutions are made in the largest cities, and so the living standards were kept artificially high in Moscow and St. Pete

That's smart

7:16 PM

And the same tradition is kept by Putin's regime. When you go to Moscow, you feel like in a different country, it's so relaxed and rich there.

@M.A.R. Are the Bahá'i considered minorities or foreigners?

@Robusto Right now? Foreigners mostly. We still have very few Bahai'i people around, I dunno about Tehran. It's still seen in negative light for the previous generations that consider Bahai'ism a British invention

I have no idea how true that is. Anyhow, any individual being a Bahai'i now is obviously not pursuing some political purpose

A famous chart. Municipal improvement spending. The lower bar is Moscow. The other bars are other regions.

7:19 PM

And people have the government to groan about, we don't care much about religion unless it's a Shiite vs Sunni fight

For which people blame Saudi Arabia

Interesting. And I'm curious about Sankt-Peterburg. Is that the actual Russian name?

10% of the population live in Moscow. Nobody even knows where Kemerovo or Tyumen is. Not even the people who live there.

@CowperKettle Here I think Tehran has always been the center of unrest whenever there was any

@Robusto Yes

WHen was it Petrograd?

7:20 PM

@Robusto It was briefly renamed Petrograd in 1914-1918

Ah.

In order to avoid a German-sounding name

A nice name, Petrograd.

It was Petrograd when the Russians started hating on the Germans. And changed anything German-sounding into its Russian-sounding calque.

Jinx.

Grad means "city" in Russian.

@CowperKettle Well that didn't last long, a last political resort?

7:21 PM

@CowperKettle I know that.

Cf. Stalingrad, etc.

Ah

@M.A.R. It was Leningrad from 1918 to 1990 ))

And Stalingrad is now called Volgograd, and it was Tsaritsyn

Joseph Stalin commanded an important battle in Tsaritsyn during the Civil War, and so it was named after Stalin for some time.

there's a beautiful book about the Stalingrad battle by Enthony Beevor, I've listened to it a dozen times.

But I thought Peter was Pyotr in Russian.

Meanwhile in Germany they are now renaming streets to be more Russian-sounding because Black lives matter.

And I'm not even making that up.

@Robusto it's an umlaut. As yo pretty much always is. And everything else. Including some consonants.

@RegDwigнt Don't they mean "Red" lives matter?

@RegDwigнt Yes, I know that. But why Sankt-Peterburg instead of Sankt-Pyotrburg?

7:25 PM

@Robusto Those have mattered for the longest of times, hence the Beautiful square still being called the Red square for some fucking lack of reason.

@Robusto ah well, but that's because it's German (or rather Dutch). That's the point. Is why it then got changed.

Here every street is being renamed to some martyr's name

There is no Peter in Russian, and no Fugen-S for joining roots.

@M.A.R. And when you run out of martyrs you can always mint some more!

We have quite a few Soleimani's now, and only in Tabriz, which is hardly a town by western standards

@Robusto yeah the only problem is 90% of them are all called Muhammad.

7:28 PM

@Robusto We're at that point where assuredly no one believes in anything anymore. The only step remaining is someone whispering it.

They need to get a couple Shakiras and Kanyes in there or sumthin.

Like how everyone knew about Weinstein and it took 20 years for someone to whisper it

Oh, Courtney Love had been saying it forever. Not whispering, saying. In interviews. On red carpets.

It's just that nobody listens to Courtney Love.

@RegDwigнt A friend visited Egypt some while ago and wanted to take a cab, whereupon some practical joker told him to make sure to ask for Muhammad at the taxi stand. Hilarity ensued.

See. No such issue with Shakira or Evgeny.

7:30 PM

@RegDwigнt I'm a Muhammad. But my full first name (I have no idea how it's supposed to work) is Muhammad Amin. So they call me Amin, except my parents

@RegDwigнt You're out of your element, Donny. Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov!

Yeah they should name a street in Damasque after him, that'd be nice.

In our defense, the Persian Mohammad rolls off the tongue way more easily than if you pronounced Muhammad with a 'pure' Arabic accent

@M.A.R. Can you transliterate the differences for us?

P.S. I think we have quite a few two-syllable named that sounds nice

This guy pronounces the Persian version: forvo.com/word/mohammad_khatami

Veeery slooowly

Weinstein And Spacey - Is This What Hollywood Is?

7:33 PM

Azeri Turks sometimes shorten it to Mamad

@M.A.R. Interesting. He kind of crescendos into the last syllable, yeah?

Here, just one clip that I am able to quickly find.

@RegDwigнt Wasn't Spacey found not guilty?

Well let's not open all cans of worms all at once.

7:34 PM

@Robusto I think that's how a guy sounds like when they feel like they're making a speech to the whole world, which happens the first time you use a mic

That's what #metoo already did for us. Any chick out of her prime could, and often did, use it to her advantage. At the expense of people who had done nothing, and lost everything as a result.

Same for Spacey as far as I recall.

Meanwhile Gibson gets a pass because they can still squeeze some bucks out of him

Here I'm just linking to the time stamp of Courtney Love saying what she's saying. To Comedy Central. On TV.

It's not enough to blow a whistle. It's not enough to even outright shout it from the roofs. You also need people to actually fucking listen.

Why are we switching from the beauties of language to the uglies of predation?

It's called code switching. That's linguistics!

7:37 PM

I lost the code for that.

Also we're not switching. I came here to talk about none of this.

There was a current of language flowing through chat, and now it's drying the fuck up.

You know what really grinds my gears?

I came here to wonder who between me and Hot Licks was trolling whom at this point.

A stick shift

7:38 PM

Your Dad joke got tweened.

@Robusto god dammit

Blame @Reg.

@RegDwigнt HL is as sincere as ...

well he's sincere

He is a legend in his own mind.

@Robusto I. Uh. 世の中を　憂しとやさしと　おもへども　飛び立ちかねつ　鳥にしあらねば.

7:39 PM

Anyway, my peeve of the day is people who use 'a blog' to mean 'a post (on a blog)'

@RegDwigнt - Not true. English stole words from the Nordic languages, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic, among others. — Hot Licks 1 hour ago

I think he does know that I do know that he knows that I know that.

A blog is the site or the collection of posts, and a post is one article on blog.

@Mitch why are you posting from the 2000s?

People did that in the 00s.

@RegDwigнt OK, that's charming, but don't put spaces in between syntactic fragments. Just run all that shit together.

@Robusto it's logical grouping. So I can play it easier on the flute.

7:41 PM

@RegDwigнt They still do and it is still stuck in my craw

@Mitch the fuck is a blog mate.

@Mitch My peeve is with Vlogs. I mean, how do you pronounce that unless you can pronounce Vladimir?

I only TikTok these days.

@Robusto okay that's more recent, so A for Affort, but still. That's five years ago like.

I want to create a Lyme disease blog called TickTalk.

I only avoid Instagram these days

7:42 PM

@Robusto Do it.

@Robusto So only people that can pronounce Emmanuel can pronounce Email?

How much funding do you require.

@M.A.R. True. And if you pronounce it Immanuel you Kant pronounce it Imail.

Let's call the whole thing off.

I can't pronounce anything at all, which is why I type.

Jun 15 at 19:51, by Robusto

Let's call the whole thing Gershwin.

7:43 PM

Sep 10 '13 at 14:59, by RegDwighт

You can read the rest of the story for twenty easy payments of thirty easy payments each.

Some Worker's paradise this is ...

Some, not others

Something's wrong with that RegDwighт name

@M.A.R. It's the tau.

Well I do use Elton John more often.

With the added benefit that it's even gayer.

Apr 23 '11 at 1:40, by Robusto

@RegDwight — "Elton John going down on George Michael in a public restroom? Less gay." — Lew Ashby, Californication

7:48 PM

Yeah that's less gay, which is why we never did it.

江戸の雨何石呑んだ時鳥えどのあめなんごくのんだほととぎす

@RegDwigнt You realize it's 東京 now, right? 江戸 is old school.

Rain in Edo, you magnificent bastard!