English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:42 AM

Isn't that a different being?

@CowperKettle Not quite anecdotes, but small-scale praeliminary research.

It is too early to tell, but the data that we have are pointing in said direction.

> How many spiders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Only two. But how the hell did they get in there?

2:23 AM

We show that agents do not learn these tasks well from reward alone, but achieve >90% performance when they are also trained to generate language explaining object properties or why a choice is correct or incorrect.

I wonder when AI will reach the stage when it could be registered on StackExchange as a user and ask questions.

3:08 AM

en.wikisource.org/wiki/…

tchrist

3:19 AM

@CowperKettle haha

President Putin has issued a promotion to Head of the Prisons in Irkutsk, who famously promised to inmates that he will make guards **ck them. "You will be **cked!" -- he cried before the row of inmates who dared to protest tortures.

"And you will **ck each other too, I promise you that!"

Lovely chap.

After that, there were renewed reports of torture from Irkutsk.

Perhaps they were already doing that anyway.

Do you think Putin himself decided?

Or did he merely stamp some form?

Est-ce que le roi le savait?

A month ago, a huge video archive was clandestinely brought to the West by a Russian human rights group. In the records, prisoners in Russian colonies are getting tortured by broomsticks being pushed up their rectums.

After the archive surfaced, people who uncovered the tortures fled to the West, and the Russian officials launched criminal investigations.. against them.

3:23 AM

Of course.

Почему в России пытают / вДудь

►

"Why do they torture in Russia?"-- currently trending at No.2 in Russian Youtube

A video published 2 days ago by a famous YouTube TV anchor.

Some horrible cases described there.

One guy relates how he was tortured with electricity until he confessed to a murder he did not commit.

Due to his luck, a high official was with inspection just then, and he told the official that "I've just been tortured, in the next room, with electricity. I'm innocent". The official pretended not to hear that. After several seconds, the official mused aloud -- "It seems like he (the prisoner) failed to undersand something".

And the prisoner was led away for futher torture.

3:39 AM

@CowperKettle yeah, it's exactly the kind of real world experimental design to test semantic content (not just for comparing differences in varieties). Most linguistics field research is talking to people and recording them and asking them questions (and hoping they won't get annoyed with all these weird nerdy questions). Doing an experiment is the next step to really finding out what something means.

@CowperKettle Wasn't there an addon to an IDE made that generated code from comments, trained on code in StackOverflow?

oh yeah here it is...

Github Copilot can write code for you trained on SO code

12:22 PM

> woodcut illustration from Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (A History of the Northern Peoples) c.1558 by Olaus Magnus

septentrio

Noun: septentriō m (genitive septentriōnis); third declension

Ursa Major, Charles' Wain, the Big Dipper
Synonym: Helicē, Arctus maior
Ursa Minor, the constellation including the most recent pole star
Synonym: Cynosūra
The north

(3 more not shown…)

Latin word of the day: septentrio = North

> From septem (“seven”) +‎ triō (“plow ox”; “Ursa Major”, “Ursa Minor”), from terō (“to rub”), the Latin name of both Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, from their appearance of milling around the current north star Polaris.

Riders riding across the Baltic sea

Ah. It says "prelium glaciale"

proelium

Noun: proelium n (genitive proeliī or proelī); second declension

a battle, combat, conflict
a warrior
a contest, strife

proelium glaciale is Icy Battle

1:42 PM

@MattE.Эллен so the voting is pretty clear at this point: a definite no to 'no slurs used or mentioned' and a definite yes to ...well... I'm not sure what Andrew's answer is saying. I could interpret it to mean no difference from the current setup (ie like ColleenV's answer), he's just emphasizing... what exactly? That we should allow questions about slurs? That's already part of the current practice.

All would be helped by specific examples...but they have already been adjudicated (eg the 'colored girls' song quote, and the recent one that triggered your meta question).

@Mitch I think Andrew was voicing disagreement with the idea of censoring, rather than proposing a policy, but since my suggestion is reviled, and the other two have little support, we can stick with the status quo

I'll give it a full week before I give up

155 view isn't a lot to go on. it would be good to know how many of those views are from different users

2:10 PM

@Mitch Except that examples would be illegal under the proposed régime.

> some red states are paying people not to get vaccinated, by cutting checks to workers who quit or are fired because they refuse covid-19 shots.

This does not make sense to me.

If the states are cutting the paychecks of refuseniks, aren't they doing the opposite of "paying people not to get vaccinated"?

I think that unemployment to those who are fired is fine

no I think they are cutting checks as in distributing them

Ohh it is some American idiom?

yeah it is

I thought cutting as in cancelling/reducing.

OK.

at least I am familiar with it being used in that manner, being from the US midwest

2:22 PM

You are no doubt right, or it would make no sense.

@Cerberus my word you're dramatic.

@MattE.Эллен Why?

Isn't it true?

That is exactly what makes such rules problematic.

it would not be against any law I know of

@Cerberus exactly. I think its interesting though, whether or not this will be veiwed as acceptable reason to receive unemployment. Normally if you are fired for a reasonable cause you are not able to collect unemployment payments. But in this case I believe that the argument is that being fired because of refusing a vaccine mandate is not reasonable.

@Cerberus also, linking to a specific example of what I'm talking about would not be against rules current or proposed

2:26 PM

@MattE.Эллен It is your proposed rules that I meant.

@Flats It is debatable.

@Cerberus I think that unless and until there is federal support for a nationwide mandate, that this reason for being fired will be deemed unreasonable. But that's my opinion I suppose

@Cerberus "cutting a check" means writing out the check to someone I think based on the older technology of haveing a ledger (a book of paper, in which you write the amount in two places and literally cut out the second one and send it to the person you owe.

@Cerberus yes, if everything is taking literally. presumably there's room for higher levels of mentioning, mentioning a mention which has even less taboo force than just one level of mention.

@Flats I wonder if there's precedent (pre Covid). Like did health care workers need to be vaccinated for MEasles/Mumps/Rubella to keep (or get) their jobs?

@Mitch Ah, I see.

I think we should use exclusively slurs to avoid offending some users who would feel unjustly targeted by specific posts that use them. If we all use slurs to refer to everyone mentioned in posts, we can standardize the experience and remedy this issue.

2

I think checks existed here when I was a little boy, in the eighties.

2:36 PM

@Flats The slurs would need to be calibrated for severity

@Mitch But the idea of taking everything 'literally' is exactly the idea behind this movement, no doubt inherited from orthodox Protestantism.

@Mitch Even if they were, they would have been made aware of that before they began working. So they could have made the decision on whether they wanted to or not

@Cerberus oops 'taken literally'

@Flats A good solution!

@Mitch Just make them all the highest severity so that there is no worry of special treatment of certain groups

2:39 PM

@Cerberus Yeah, I don't know.

You may use your slur of choice for me. Make in pungent. As long as we know that you don't mean it seriously, why not?

@Cerberus: How do you pronounce the Dutch name Klaes?

@Flats It will be problematic, part of the power dynamic is that supposed slurs against the 'power' class (rich, mainstream, in-power ethnicity, etc) are usually very weak. eg 'cracker' for poor white southerners has very little force.

@Robusto Like klahs.

@Mitch In the current case, they are already employed, and so their terms of employment would be changing, forcing them to either comply or get fired. This obviously has happened in other situations, but this one is particularly charged

2:40 PM

So I suggest corporal punishment to make up the difference.

In older spelling, you could 'lengthen' a vowel by either doubling it, or adding e, or adding i.

I always hear people pronounce it like klaiss

(This 'lengthening' also includes a quange in quality, but that is a detail.)

@Robusto As in /klais/? That would not be correct.

Ae is very common still in Belgian surnames.

@Mitch But the real question is why do these slurs carry less weight? I propose that we raise cracker to the same level as other slurs. Perhaps we could organize a series of hate crimes and be sure to profusely use this slur to give it more weight?

Always pronounced as lengthened a.

2:42 PM

@Cerberus Well, that's how they pronounce it in The Expanse series. But Hollywood has never been a stickler for correct pronunciation, so ...

Right.

No erudition there.

@Cerberus Lenthened a as in father, correct?

Nor yet any effort to consult someone who would know.

@Flats It's the power dynamic. because it naturally doesn't acquire force.

@Robusto Equally long, but with a different quality.

I forget what the exact IPA symbols are.

2:43 PM

@Robusto That was the Belter accent you're hearing

But it is somewhat close to the a in father.

@Mitch Didn't we have enough corporal punishment with Napoleon and Hitler?

@Mitch Perhaps.

@Robusto Corporal I think one could get acclimated to. The only real solution would be capital punishment

@Robusto ...which i often found to be a mix of Caribbean and ... some other stuff

maybe Dutch then?

@Flats People don't learn from capital punishment

@Mitch It varied widely, depending on the actor.

2:46 PM

oh... -other- people might. hm...

Klaes is just an archaic spelling of Klaas.

@Robusto different upbringings? Born on Mars, teenager on Ceres, 20's on Ganymede, vs a lifetime on a satellite?

Besides, I thought the patois was a mix of European and East Indian accents.

@Mitch WHAT ABOUT CAPS IT ALL PUNISHMENT

@Mitch They wouldn't need to because all of those who refused to comply at first would be eliminated and so you are left with all of those who cooperate

2:47 PM

@MattE.Эллен HM...

@MattE.Эллен THE WORST KIND OF PUNISHMENT

@Mitch Well, yeah. Who knows what people will sound like 200 years from now or more.

@Robusto Chinese

ha ahh ahha

actually

on average we're already there

How many on the Chinese space station at the moment?

I will still have the same accent I do now. I'll make recordings of my voice now, and practice it, so it sticks

@MattE.Эллен OK...I only just got this. Yes, to your point that would be a worse punishment. I'm so sorry

2:49 PM

lol

@MattE.Эллен You're culturally appropriating yourself

@Mitch it only bad appropriation if I don't respect myself

Belter is composed mainly of Chinese, Japanese, Slavic, Germanic, and romance languages because Earth's most common tongues would be the ones to survive to form the new brogue of the cosmos. Uh, not to mention English. Elephant in the room and all that.

@MattE.Эллен Respecting yourself is reprehensible enough

brogue

Irish will not make it

2:51 PM

doesn't Spanish have a large userbase?

Not as large as English. Or Chinese.

But quite large by comparison to French, to say nothing of German.

Does it surprise anyone that France thinks the new language for the EU should be ... French?

@Robusto it most obviously shouldn't be English

It should be English, because we're the most important country near the EU

But could French become the new lingua anglica?

@MattE.Эллен uh Russian is actually right on the border

2:57 PM

@Mitch and?

@MattE.Эллен Well, you are English. Or so I was led to believe.

It's closer?

@Robusto lol

@Mitch but less important

Nothing comes between Russia and my Polish jeans

It should be luxembourgish

You should polish your Polish.

2:59 PM

A mishmash of french German dutch sounds like a cheese

Mmm sounds like pommes frites

You should have those with your Saucisses Américaines.

3:29 PM

Luxembourgish is the chili-cheese fries of language

4:41 PM

minus 7°C

5:09 PM

Gorbavhyov was the only ruler of the USSR who was actually born in the USSR. All others were born in the Russian Empire.

Xi Jinping was born in the Communist China, but Hu Jintao was born in the pre-communist years.

The darkest days of the year

Federal health officials on Wednesday authorized a new COVID-19 antibody drug for people with serious health problems or allergies who can’t get adequate protection from vaccination.

Tixagevimab/cilgavimab

Tixagevimab/cilgavimab is a combination of two human monoclonal antibodies, tixagevimab (AZD8895) and cilgavimab (AZD1061), under investigation as a treatment for COVID-19. It is being developed by British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company AstraZeneca.In October 2021, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) started a rolling review of tixagevimab/cilgavimab, which is being developed by AstraZeneca AB, for the prevention of COVID-19 in adults.Also in October 2021, AstraZeneca requested Emergency Use Authorization...

Regulators said the required two antibody injections may be effective at preventing COVID-19 infections for six months.

Looks like a nice thing.

The more the better.

6:53 PM

Coffee palace

A coffee palace was an often large and elaborate residential hotel that did not serve alcohol, most of which were built in Australia in the late 19th century. Temperance hotels were first established in the UK in the 1850s to provide an alcohol-free alternative to corner pubs and residential hotels, and by the 1870s they could be found in every town and city, some quite large and elaborate. In the late 1870s the idea caught on in Australia, where the appellation "coffee palace" was almost universal, and dozens were built in the 1880s and early 1890s, including some of the largest hotels in the...

I want to buy one of those grocery store dividers, but the cashier keeps taking it off the moving belt and putting it back on the rack.

7:19 PM

A team of researchers working at Sorbonne Université, reports that people may be more creative if awoken just after falling asleep. For instance, they can tear your head off in a more creative way.