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00:00
Incidentally: Black and White South African English (BSAE and WSAE) are apparently quite different.
@Cerberus there goes my streak.
Apparently WSAE is close to Standard Southern British, whereas BSAE is heavily influenced by local African dialects. (As one might expect.)
Why would you use abbreviations?
(It's probably relevant that, in Zulu, [ɛ] and [e] are allophones.)
Zulu: 5 vowel phonemes, about 50 consonants. Should be easy to learn.
Wordle 713 4/6

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00:08
Wordle 713 4/6

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It did take me a while to think of a word that could fit.
00:21
cerberus: rescue us, scrub. use beer, use bees, use rubs. be sure.
You're making words using the letters in my name?
00:57
@alphabet Yes, of course
@jlliagre I wonder what song his parody is based upon
01:17
@CowperKettle Out of curiosity: I've heard that most ESL teachers worldwide teach British English, rather than American. Is that true in Russia also?
@alphabet I don't know. Probably yes
I'm sure it gets mixed up in the process
@CowperKettle Fair enough. I'm guessing that they focus more on reading/writing than speaking?
ELL users seem to be very concerned with the differences in the usage of the present perfect between BrE and AmE. (These differences exist, but they're subtle, and BrE is slowly adopting the AmE pattern.)
(Well, the differences in where you can use the simple past instead of the present perfect.)
01:34
Normal people are concerned with just understanding the text, and just being able to get their meaning across to the other guy, even with errors :)
Q&A sites give the wrong impression, because they attract an elevated percentage of niggling people.
It's a Q&A bias.
Indeed. Some ELL speakers seem to think that native speakers are listening to them like hawks, just waiting for them to accidentally use the wrong article.
It's like with social network sites, with some psychological research indicating that people tend to over-emphasize their political opinions there, which leads to a higher and higher political partisanship and emotionality, not present in normal life.
I'm trying to make less social network posts, and not even press "like" or "dislike", not to get mentally drawn into this bog again.
02:03
"My Sharona" () is the debut single by the Knack. The song was written by Berton Averre and Doug Fieger, and it was released in 1979 from their debut album, Get the Knack. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, where it remained for six weeks, and was number one on Billboard's 1979 Top Pop Singles year-end chart. It was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, representing 500,000 copies sold, and was Capitol Records' fastest gold status debut single since the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in 1964. It has since gone on to sell more than 10 million...
02:39
@alphabet Argh why the ugly abbreviations!
There is no need!
03:18
@Cerberus Perhaps she has cell-phone-derived keyboard phobia. Unlike Trifonov.
@tchrist I don't know: typing existing words is much easier on a phone keyboard, rather than typing individual letters where you must get each one right. Not to mention the use of extra capitals.
By the way, I didn't know Alphabet was female.
The elegant handwriting is always a tell.
Oh, I haven't seen any handwriting.
Though I know enough people of both sexes who write nicely.
It's late, I know.
So you will need ironicons to infer humorous intent.
Yes, but I still need to make a photo album before bed, in order to have it printed in time.
@tchrist Oh, I thought this was some reference to a discussion I glanced at, about handwriting.
I thought there might have been photos involved.
03:30
And I have a triple-fugue to play through. Rather easier than Trifonov's.
Sounds complicated.
That's the triple he's playing. I'm just doing the C#m one from WTC1.
Cool.
That one.
It starts with the very same signature B-A-C-H theme (transposed) that the last fugue from Art of the Fugue stops on, the one where CPE Bach wrote Ueber dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme BACH im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben and which Trifonov "completed" in the first piece of showed. If I recall correctly, the B-A-C-H was believed to be a 4th theme beginning, so Trifonov did that.
04:01
> I'd finished college for the day, just picking up my mates and we were on our way to the Regatta Hotel (Toowong) to knock back a few tappies. Bloke I knew was an art student and liked taking candid photos.
What are tappies?
04:15
12 policemen arrived to the flat of two women in Kazan because the women had been discussing the Special Military Operation while shopping for furniture 116.ru/text/politics/2023/06/01/72348032
They searched their flat and computers.
@CowperKettle No idea, probably drinks?
The shop's sailswoman reported on them to the police.
@Cerberus Yes, from the beer tap
@CowperKettle Makes sense.
05:04
Maybe I should add "tappy" to Wiktionary
But most likely it's a word coined just for one use.
muck-a-byre? O_O
05:57
Until the end of the year, Russia will create two new military districts: the Moscow and the Leningrad Districts.
Girkin writes that this would require at least 120 000 troops, and many thousands of auxiliary (administrative, command structures) men on top of that.
I'm so glad that my friend is leaving soon.
I told him not to dawdle.
More men will be drafted.
Leningrad, really?
Yes, because it's too expensive to rename a region.
We have Sverdlovsk Oblast, although the city was renamed back to Yekaterinburg in 1990
Renaming a region would require millions of people, including very poor people in villages, to change their documents.
Interesting, even after so many decades.
So there is still an oblast Leningrad?
I see.
06:11
In 1993, people made fun of how one could take a ride on the "V.I.Lenin Metropolitan" (subway) to some street renamed from Prospekt Lenina to its pre-1917 name
And why isn't there already a military district there?
Because there was no danger of invasion into those regions
Ah OK.
So does that mean people are not drafted in those regions?
The "Kremlin Hospital" where top authorities go has recently announced a tender for the construction of an air raid shelter.
@Cerberus They are drafted
OK I figured.
So why do new districts mean more drafting?
06:14
Probably because prior to their creation, there are only some skeleton structures, with no proper staffing.
Based on Girkin's fuming reaction.
Maybe creating these districts would be helpful in terms of having more officers and facilities for training new draftees.
Hmm.
Where they could get to know their future comrades and "team up" before being sent into Ukraine.
Fun.
In the press, some soldiers write that gradually the training process has become better.
It just seems to be too late for Russia to ever conquer Ukraine now.
06:17
In the 17 century it took a couple decades.
The Russo-Polish War of 1654–1667, also called the Thirteen Years' War and the First Northern War, was a major conflict between the Tsardom of Russia and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Between 1655 and 1660, the Swedish invasion was also fought in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and so the period became known in Poland as "The Deluge" or Swedish Deluge. The Commonwealth initially suffered defeats, but it regained its ground and won several decisive battles. However, its plundered economy was not able to fund the long conflict. Facing internal crisis and civil war, the Commonwealth was forced...
The Truce of Andrusovo (Polish: Rozejm w Andruszowie, Russian: Андрусовское перемирие, Andrusovskoye Pieriemiriye, also sometimes known as Treaty of Andrusovo) established a thirteen-and-a-half year truce, signed in 1667 between the Tsardom of Russia and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had fought the Russo-Polish War since 1654 over the territories of modern-day Ukraine and Belarus. Afanasy Ordin-Nashchokin (for Russia) and Jerzy Chlebowicz (for the Commonwealth) signed the truce on 30 January/9 February 1667 in the village of Andrusovo not far from Smolensk. Representatives of the Cossack...
And then Russia only gained territory just including Kiev and a bit to the west of it.
06:31
Of course, in the 17 century each peasant family produced some 8 or 10 kids, or maybe more, so there were people to be recruited. Today, Russian families are down to 1 or 2 kids.
> Kalashnikov was born in the village of Kurya,[1] in present-day Altai Krai, Russia, as the seventeenth child of the 19 children [7] of Aleksandra Frolovna Kalashnikova (née Kaverina) and Timofey Aleksandrovich Kalashnikov, who were peasants.[7]
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (UK: , US: ; Russian: Михаил Тимофеевич Калашников, IPA: [kɐˈlaʂnʲɪkəf]; 10 November 1919 – 23 December 2013) was a Soviet and Russian lieutenant general, inventor, military engineer, writer, and small arms designer. He is most famous for developing the AK-47 assault rifle and its improvements, the AKM and AK-74, as well as the RPK light machine gun and PK machine gun.Kalashnikov was, according to himself, a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weaponry to design arms that achieved battlefield ubiquity. Even though Kalashnikov...
> In 1930, his father and most of his family had their properties confiscated and were deported as kulaks to the village of Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya, Tomsk Oblast.
That's some 600 kilometers to the north.
Much colder, probably, although it's closer to the West.
07:26
Wordle 713 4/6

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07:59
1
Q: Яке значення має слово "сі" у виразі "вже сі"?

CopperKettleРок-н-рол до рана Сидит баба на загаті Маєтки латає Міжи містом і селом Грань вже сі стирає Що тут означає слово "сі"? Підсилювальна частка для слова вже? Я не знайшов її в UKRLIT.ORG.

Turns out that Western dialects of Ukrainian retain the pre-positioning of the reflexive suffix, a feature that vanished from Russian by the 15 century.
I did not even know there was such a feature in our language.
It's as if you could separate "self" from "yourself" and place it before "your". Although in Russian this "sya" suffix is used on verbs. I'm just trying to come up with an analogy.
"See self for you" → "See for youself"
 
1 hour later…
09:06
Yesterday during a jog I saw the fourth man in khaki and with a pair of crutches.
The fourth this year.
Last year, zero.
I don't know whether he lacked a limb or a part of it, because of his long trousers.
And all around people were promenading with their kids or boy/girlfriends, a totally peaceful situation.
Not far from that place, I made a picture last year, in March, of two women who were talking with each other about how they both saw dreams in which their sons were conscripted to war.
State Duma is preparing to completely ban sex change in Russia meduza.io/feature/2023/06/02/etot-zakon-genotsid
09:27
@Cerberus ...I am not, in fact, female.
Did I somehow imply otherwise?
10:14
> In 1978, amateur astrophysicists Frederick Mercury and Brian May posited that the planet's axial rotation was due to sizably-posteriored members of the female population.
10:25
@CowperKettle Brilliant, that would also explain the anomalous precession of Mercury's perihelion.
 
2 hours later…
12:26
Wordle 713 4/6

⬛🟨🟨⬛🟨
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
#Worldle #497 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
> Fat bottomed girls
You make the rocking world go 'round
Daily Quordle 494
6️⃣8️⃣
5️⃣7️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle
🌎 Jun 2, 2023 🌍
🔥 21 | Avg. Guesses: 4.53
🟥🟥🟥🟩 = 4

globle-game.com
#globle
12:55
"Fat Bottomed Girls" is a song by the British rock band Queen. Written by guitarist Brian May, the song appears on the band's seventh studio album Jazz (1978) and later on their compilation album Greatest Hits. When released as a single with "Bicycle Race", the song reached number 11 in the UK Singles Chart and number 24 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.The song is formed around an open bluesy, metallic guitar tuning, and opens with its chorus. It was one of the few Queen songs played in an alternative (drop D) guitar tuning. The song's music video was filmed at the Dallas Convention Center in...
Whelp, this turned ugly fast.
50
Q: It's time for me to resign

Massimo OrtolanoThe title says it all: I'm resigning. In the last few days the Stack Exchange staff introduced a new policy about AI-generated content and how we should moderate it. This is a policy hastily created by Stack Exchange and forced to us moderators in an insulting way, irrespectful of the expertise a...

Unlike the long brewing Monika affair.
13:13
@user4539917 It's getting to be pretty grim. Where are the heady, carefree days of yesteryear, when Spolsky ran the show?
I believe they were consumed by the Panda-mania of the pandemic.
They have decayed for a decade or more.
Word of the time period: wadi n A valley, gully, or streambed in northern Africa and southwest Asia that remains dry except during the rainy season.
I wonder how that differs from an arroyo. I mean, except for location.
Anyway, wadi has been one of my favorite words for a few decades. Hence the indeterminate time period.
14:07
Daily Octordle #494
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Score: 63
@Robusto we have a cemetery in Tabriz called wadi-e-rahmat. The valley of blessings.
@user4539917 eh, mods are burnt out and stuff like this is more like a push over the ledge.
14:22
I recall coming across "wadi" but never knew what it meant. Cool.
14:34
@CowperKettle The reason I know the word is because it is a very common morpheme in Iberian toponyms (sometimes transplanted to the Americas) that originated in Arabic. It's the Guad- elements in Guadalupe, Guadalajara, Guadalquivir and others of that sort.
Wow.
I never knew that!
> In Seville was he born, a pleasant city,
Famous for oranges and women—he
Who has not seen it will be much to pity,
So says the proverb—and I quite agree;
Of all the Spanish towns is none more pretty,
Cadiz perhaps—but that you soon may see;
Don Juan’s parents lived beside the river,
A noble stream, and call’d the Guadalquivir.
There's another hidden morpheme in all those: -al- is the article.
As in alcohol, algebra.
They should make an Arabic neural net and call it AL-GPT
14:38
English has a lot of them, which it got from French, who got it from Spanish or Italian or Portuguese, who got it from Arabic. But Spanish has so many more words starting with al- that it got from Arabic which never made it to English that I couldn't possibly list them all off the top of my head.
> His father’s name was Jose—Don, of course,—
A true Hidalgo, free from every stain
Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source
Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain;
A better cavalier ne’er mounted horse,
Or, being mounted, e’er got down again,
Than Jose, who begot our hero, who
Begot—but that ’s to come—Well, to renew
That one is actually not from Arabic. Hidalgo < hijo de algo(alguien), so that's from Latin aliquod.
More hidalgos and their bigotes. :)
hijo de algo < son of something
And joputa is hijo de puta.
alcalde - from Arabic اَلْقَاضِي‎ (al-qāḍī, “the judge”).
with [x] for orthographic <j>.
14:58
Bab el Oued: The door of the river.
Bab El Oued is a neighbourhood in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, along the coast north of the city centre. As of 2008, the population of the commune of Bab El Oued was 64,732. == History == During the existence of French Algeria, Bab El Oued was established as the main neighbourhood of poor pied-noirs, including many poor fishermen. Towards the end of the Algerian War, the neighbourhood became the stronghold of the Organisation armée secrète, until OAS attacks on the French Army led them to assault and purge the neighbourhood, during the siege of Bab el Oued in March 1962. Soon after, Algeria...
15:23
@Robusto I believe a wadi can be of any size while an arroyo is always small or at least smaller than a río.
@user4539917 really? Are the changes to deal with AI so difficult? I have absolutely no idea what they're telling the moderators to do. @tchrist is the change that the link mentions onerous enough
 
1 hour later…
16:41
@alphabet Oh, my apologies, you did not, but I think someone referred to you by "she" or similar.
@Cerberus No worries
It's a bit odd realizing you don't know the genders of people in chat rooms. How am I supposed to know who I should be sexist towards?
 
2 hours later…
18:46
@alphabet For what it's worth, I always just assumed you were a dude.
@jlliagre Then we don't have a wadi in the West, I suppose.
19:04
@Robusto Thank you very much. I assume you're a dude also 💕
> Over 50 people have died and more than 300 injured as Coromandel, Bengaluru-Howrah Express trains derailed and hit a goods train at Bahanaga station in Balasore district of Odisha. Many passengers were trapped in the overturned coaches of the superfast train. Quoting preliminary reports, a railway official said that the Coromandel train, involved in the accident, was moving on the mainline. Rescue operations are underway.
> Coromandel Express, which was going from Kolkata to Chennai, rammed into the derailed coaches of the other train, which was going from Bengaluru to Kolkata, Railway Ministry spokesperson Amitabh Sharma told NDTV.
I think it happens more frequently in India.
 
1 hour later…
20:17
@Mitch ENOCONTEXT
20:49
@Robusto Oh, I was referring to what is called an arroyo in Spain. It seems American arroyos are different and wadi-like.
An arroyo (; from Spanish arroyo Spanish: [aˈroʝo], "brook"), also called a wash, is a dry creek, stream bed or gulch that temporarily or seasonally fills and flows after sufficient rain. Flash floods are common in arroyos following thunderstorms. Wadi (Arabic) is used in North Africa and Western Asia for similar landforms.The desert dry wash biome is restricted to the arroyos of the southwestern United States. Arroyos provide a water source to desert animals. == Types and processes == Arroyos can be natural fluvial landforms or constructed flood control channels. The term usually applies to a...
21:10
@jlliagre A lot of American Western movies were filmed in Spain. See A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and (especially) The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. And not limited to those.
@Robusto Yes, spaghetti paella westerns :-)
@jlliagre Sergio Leone was Italian, so go ahead and help yourself to a plate of \spaghetti. ^_^
By the way, I left out one of the great ones:
Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian: C'era una volta il West, "Once upon a time (there was) the West") is a 1968 epic Spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone, who co-wrote it with Sergio Donati based on a story by Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Leone. It stars Henry Fonda, cast against type as the villain, Charles Bronson as his nemesis, Jason Robards as a bandit, and Claudia Cardinale as a newly widowed homesteader. The widescreen cinematography was by Tonino Delli Colli, and the acclaimed film score was by Ennio Morricone. After directing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone...
Daily Quordle 494
6️⃣5️⃣
7️⃣4️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle
21:34
Erase una vez en el oeste
@Mitch Oh I misread the ping as separated from the one above it.
And I have no idea what the answer to your question is. All the details are too hazy for the magic eight ball to produce a clear answer, no matter what question gets asked of it.
 
1 hour later…
22:58
@Mitch the way I understand it, the CEO has gotten it into his head that AI is some golden egg and SE has to find a way to profit from the recent AI developments. They laid off 10% of the staff all of a sudden, and it left a bitter taste in everyone's mouths. Then they've pushed the new voting buttons network-wide that look ugly and are horrible accessibility-wise while ignoring and postponing useful features they promised to implement.
Now the CEO has been promoting AI integration into SO using nonsensical marketese sweet talk, claiming the "community" is supporting him in this, and as if his being out of touch and blatant lies weren't enough, he's telling mods not to suspend AI generating accounts with an excuse that's even worse: He's been insinuating that mods are discriminating towards non-native speakers by suspending them when they write fluently by the assumption that they use AI.
I mean: if the AI-generated content is accurate and high-quality, why remove it? And if it's low-quality, shouldn't it get removed anyway? I guess auto-removing AI-generated posts would help mods by removing one source of low quality content. But those "AI detectors" are of mixed reliability.
Using AI to censor AI?
So it's like a thousand molehills that end up making a mountain. 2022 itself was a bit uneventful, so moderators were only recently coming to peace with the fact that the company is ignoring them and pushing for things thay harm content quality to maximize profit (i.e. ingratiate investors, I presume). Some were even hoping that some useful decade-old requests would be fulfilled. Now telling them how to do their job and using a horrible excuse to enforce an unrealistic viewpoint was a step
Too far.
@alphabet it's eloquent nonsense, so it's hard to detect. It's produced in large volumes, so it has dramatically increased moderation workload. Just like every other offense, repeat offenders should be suspended. There's nothing out of the ordinary here. If anything, SE should be helping with removing eloquent nonsense, not trying to stop it
Instead they've been told the AI detection tools that people have been using to find and flag chatGPT generated content is discriminatory. Meaning, either the mods are either some form of racist, or blind fools who approve any flag. As I said, an excuse worse than the insult.
23:21
Hmm.
Unfair. I put time and effort into my low-quality content.
23:44
What they really should invest in is using AI to auto-flag things for moderator review...
Today's weather: 90 degrees, massive thunderstorms. Tomorrow: 55 degrees.
(Fahrenheit. I'm in Boston, not Hell.)
Daily Octordle #494
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4️⃣🕚
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Score: 66
@alphabet Because it's unethical to present the AI's work and expertise as your own. We expect human experts here, not plagiarists. It is not citable and is indecomposable. It breaks the system for a user to gain reputation through cheating, and it is intolerable ethically. You want an AI answer, go get that somewhere else, not here: it's not our mission or our charter or our job to provide that here. It almost instantly lowers the site's reliability.
@M.A.R. Well said.
@tchrist Agreed.
@Vikas So I have read.
Could anyone you know have been on those trains?

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