@tchrist Looks like you were wrong:

@Laurel Very little of the "North Midlands" equates cot and caught. Those are the areas with striping or cross-hatching.

you thought he might be non-native

I did.

The map, BTW, is mostly derived from Labov's work.

Not familiar with the name but I have seen the map

> I am grateful to the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, for a good part of the data on which this map was based. Specifically, much of the information on the map above and in the Dialect Description Chart below was obtained from ANAE chapter 11 (a draft version available on the Internet), as well as from many other chapters of the same work, with a few ideas from a much older version of the same: ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html.

In any event, I still cannot understand what the user meant by "a rounded a" in FATHER, or what happens when they "drop" the final /t/ in the context of the larger phrase.

What is side-scrote?

sighs

My car hasn't required anything, except routine maintenance and one $300 repair, but now my 14 y/o little Suzuki is dying…abandoned by all her kinsfolk…and recall teams. :-(

Now that's a hallucination

Spellchecker asks to replace 'enteral feeding' with 'eternal feeding'

Still does not beat its "deionised water" - "demonised water"

@CowperKettle I mean if it's continuous it's eternal for small values of eternal

I wonder if there's any free website to create such images. I tried some free websites but they give poor results. Most likely these are generated by paid apps or website.

Perhaps even AI.

I think most of the images @CowperKettle posts are made by AI, no? You can certainly make similar ones with DALL-E or similar sites

Yeah I know it's AI. I mean the AI based websites wouldn't be free if you want imoressive results.

DALL-E is asking for credits.

They didn't ask a few months ago IIRC.

Ah, you were asking if there was a way to get it for free.

Wait are you trying to tell me that's not an oil painting that one founding father tamed a dinosaur AND grew out some sideburns to pose for???

I mean, they could've been done using Photoshop. Certainly similar works of digital art existed long before DALL-E.

Or like, you know, an actual painting

Nowadays I see some people using traditional art for stuff we wouldn't expect to see. Unless I'm actually seeing AI depictions of people painting like this or something

There's also a lot of that going around, see 404media.co/…

I hate to think about who's profiting off all this

@Laurel OpenAI

You're welcome. Now you don't have to think about it.

@Vikas 1) DALLE-2 was totally free for as many requests as you could do (by hand, not automated). I think recently they must have changed because I too see 'you have {x} credits left' as though you get so many every month and you can't go beyond.

2) DALLE-3 (these names are just versions of -something-) is only usable through ChatGPT Premium, which is ChatGPT where you pay $20/month.

(how do I know this? I happened to explore it yesterday when I wanted an image for "attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion" to see if it gave Rutger Hauer's face)

DALLE-2 is awesome, but it is kind of old by today's hyperexponentialized timelines (maybe 2 years?)

So it hasn't been updated so it has all the possibilities for classic genAI errors like bad number of teeth or fingers or arms, and often distorted discontinuities in photographic-like images.

DALLE-3 supposedly doesn't have these problems (I ain't gonna shell out $20 a month for fun I only play with every other month)

@alphabet I think that sometimes you can say "Yes, yes that is an error of performance" and not "Oh that's just the way they speak"

The person is uttering that sentence in real time and forgetting exactly where they were halfway (or in this sentence 1/3 way) through.

planning ahead for an adjective but changing midcourse to phrasing that requires a noun that you can't remember

@HippoSawrUs 14 years is pretty good

@Laurle Isn't it OK to acknowledge someone if you use part of what they said in an answer?

@Vikas There's Bing Image creator with Microsoft Edge, (90 free images a day). I don't know what's involved to use that (I just foind it by googling)

There's midjourney, which is free but you have to join through a discord server (which seems painless but everytime I use discord my laptop grinds to a halt so I avoid that). Also I've never done this/used midjourney so I don't know.

I'm working on finding evidence that this construction is so ubiquitous in everyday speech that it doesn't make sense to call it ungrammatical in all cases.

@Mitch Well yeah but I mean the accounts posting these images

@alphabet Is all you watch on YouTube raccoons and resumptive pronouns??? Maybe one day you'll find the place the twain do meet

@Laurel you mean the account(s) where @Cowperkettle finds them? (he could be creating them himself but we have no way of knowing).

@Lambie If you're quoting you must cite them. Otherwise, it's only recommended (tho I don't cite people who write answers in comments that are so obvious that I was thinking it before reading the comment)

I'm sure there are sites where people just post their creations for fun. The only people making money are the site managers.

eg here

@Mitch Yeah, but also pretty much every image sharing site has that type of thing, and it's almost never attributed to the AI. You just have to count fingers in some of these images I guess

I'm wondering how many of these accounts are bots that plan to switch to something more sinister when the time is appropriate, like election manipulation. Maybe the accounts get sold

@Laurel the ones that Cowp just posted look pretty good (I'm not trying to look at any of the details, they just have the aura of 'better'). So I'd guess DALLE-3 or Midjourney

@Laurel that's scary.

@Mitch Yeah they do look pretty good, though when you look closely you notice things like the guy's right hand looks more like a root vegetable than a hand

@Laurel checks for root vegetables

Or, and hear me out, that guy is really old

Actually that's a pretty apt metaphor for my theory about bots too

I'm impressed with either 1) the person who created the propmt for those images really added a lot of detail "Jesus holding a cat and a gun riding a t rex and venus staues with zombie heads"

I hope to be able to ride a dinosaur like that when I'm just as old

or 2) no detail at all "weird Jesus" and the genAI just picked a bunch of stuff

@Laurel I'd think it's pretty safe because their arms can't reach back and throw you off

@Mitch I'll try.

@alphabet Yeah

@Laurel But there is no "rule" about this right? They shut me down in the Portuguese site for doing that and made a big deal out of it. Among other things telling me it's not a chat site. And I told them that on ELU, there is acknowledgment in answers of comments that have been used in answers. In fact, some contain only that and are entered by a user who thinks the comment was great. They told me this is "a big discussion now" on the site.

You can read the English bits: portuguese.stackexchange.com/questions/9864/…

In fact, on ELU I have seen multiple answers that have become answers because they were comments first.

@Lambie Usually, if my answer is largely just quoting a comment, I make it a community wiki, so that I'm not using others' work to gain reputation. If my answer borrows from a comment but expands on it substantially, I'll cite the original comment, just like how I'd cite a book or paper or other source I'm using.

@Lambie What's really happening is that there are two conflicting rules, one where you should be attributing and another where you shouldn't be using answers to thank people. In that case I personally would have worded it more academically than "thanks [user]". Like "as [user] said in the comments". That may have smoothed it over, idk

lol the more appropriate ELU moderator to ask in this case would've probably been @tchrist

@tchrist The hiragana part shouldn't be adjacent to the kanji, since it is simply the pronunciation of the kanji. Interestingly, those two kanji (文学) also spell bungaku (ぶんがく) meaning "literature"; this is similar to our term "letters" meaning much the same thing.

@Laurel Thanks. Sometimes asking for help can be disappointing...

@Lambie Uh, sorry? I'm just saying that cuz he's actually a moderator on Portuguese SE while I don't even have an account lol

@Laurel Laurel, over the years, I have noticed that in certain situations, mods just do not want to get involved. But, yes, he is a moderator there but only seems to intervene in grammar/language issues. Anyway, my question was for all sites. Not just that one. Just wanted an answer from someone else like yourself.

Agree.

> In the laboratory, nasal cell samples were exposed to a similar reduction in temperature, to see what actually happens within the nose in a cold climate. It was found that the immune response was significantly blunted at the lower temperature. This means that the nose's defence mechanism goes cold at lower temperatures, which is why there is a rise in common cold and runny nose in winter. The nose's "potent antiviral immune defense functions" were "impaired by cold exposure."

Because science says cold weather doesn't cause common cold, I wonder if the above thing is true.

@Vikas The above doesn't say cold weather cause common cold but that cold weather correlates with common cold. It doesn't say either that the weather get colder in winter because there are more runny noses ;-)

The actual cause is usually viruses.

@jlliagre "Science says cold weather caused by viruses"

@vikas I went through the motions of getting on Midjourney through discord. After clicking 'I'm not a robot' a hundred times, I finally got to a chatroom where you can ask for an image and it said "Sorry, usage is too high and we can't give out images for free. Here's a link to Midjourney's website to subscribe" and going to the website... it's $8/month.

After all that and you still gotta pay for rehashed images

(the news tells me that Midjourney is having trouble with the law over its use of copyrighted material in its training data.)

@Mitch I'm glad you got my point :-)

Another failure to breach 300 ...

Wow, I think that was my best ever on a sequence.

Flagging this because it isn't a question and seems like a troll or...who knows.

I could just vote to close it, but this isn't even trying to be a question.

It does end with the line "No physical evidence for battle of Stalingrad," which apparently is some sort of bizarre conspiracy theory.

@Mitch Yes, not bad, considering my husband and son each borrowed it for a year, after they blew up theirs. I could've got the serpentine belt defect fixed for free, but I thought I caused it by driving through deep water, in a mall parking lot. How does one develop a drainage problem after 40 years? IDK.

@jlliagre But this way (if immunity thing is true) it is directly linked to cold weather?

@Mitch Trouble must continue!

@Mitch I tried it and seems like it has many restrictions on what kind of image you can create. For example it doesn't like celebrity names in input. It keeps giving alerts like we'll suspend you if you do this or that.