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00:10
What happens when a microscope crashes into a telescope?
They kaleidoscope.
00:31
What happens when a microphone crashes into a telephone?
They don't kaleidophone; they just howl.
 
1 hour later…
01:35
Connections
Puzzle #618
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I totally wasn't sure of purple.
02:25
I thought this was a kinda interesting question because the answer must be obvious to pretty much everyone (sorry, OP) yet it's extremely difficult to find actual evidence to back that up:
-4
Q: "Curry English": meaning, register, origin

LPHThe term "curry English" is used in this video, and it concerns a certain way of speaking English in the Indian subcontinent. Wikipedia does not mention it. A search in Google Books yields nothing (curry English). Wiktionary shows several definitions of "curry", but none of those permits to deduc...

@Laurel I think the question suffers from the "Trump humiliates India" stigma. It may be an unrecoverable situation.
02:43
@Robusto Tbh, I didn't look at the linked video or whatever it was
I think that the question was asked with such naivety (eg apparently, "curry English" could be derogatory) that people had a hard time seeing it as a question about English and not something with a secret political agenda
03:49
Term of the day: Bayesian ghost - "..we hypothesized that activation of the sensorimotor system first predicts the occurrence and then accompanies the appearance of the Bayesian ghost"
When Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon, he told a friend, “If I had known how happy married life could be, I would have wed 30 years ago instead of wasting time growing teeth.” He was 32.
"Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came."
(Masefield, Up on the Downs)
04:07
@CowperKettle I wonder how long that lasted...
04:34
When I was a kid, we bought a dog from a blacksmith. As soon as we got home, he made a bolt for the door.
 
1 hour later…
05:43
Connections
Puzzle #618
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05:54
Strands #352
“Ouch!”
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Wordle 1,340 6/6

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06:41
Persian borrowing of the day: pajamas - From Urdu پاجامہ (pājāma) (Hindi पाजामा (pājāmā)), from Classical Persian پَاجَامَه (pājāma, “trousers, drawers”), from پَا (pā, “leg”) + جَامَه (jāma, “garment”).
07:02
:67142574
07:23
@CowperKettle Cool, they borrowed it directly from Urdu?
And did English also borrow it from Urdu/Hindi?
08:00
Léo Forest (b. 1985) is a Paris-based artist whose work focuses on capturing movement and energy, primarily through depictions of cats in motion.
 
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10:17
@CowperKettle what are those on the second pic?
 
3 hours later…
13:21
@M.A.R. Most likely stacks of Nvidia cards for training a neural network
13:49
#travle #797 +0 (Perfect)
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https://travle.earth

#WhenTaken #357 (18.02.2025)

I scored 624/1000🎗️

1️⃣📍3.3K km - 🗓️12 yrs - 🥉116/200
2️⃣📍1.9 km - 🗓️51 yrs - 🥉100/200
3️⃣📍3.7K km - 🗓️5 yrs - 🥈128/200
4️⃣📍5.8 km - 🗓️31 yrs - 🥉111/200
5️⃣📍12.0 km - 🗓️15 yrs - 🥈169/200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,340 3/6

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Connections
Puzzle #618
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Strands #352
“Ouch!”
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14:06
@M.A.R. it's the back view of a bunch of server racks. Each tall rack holds 16 computers, each with cables connecting to the Internet.
Daily Octordle #1121
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Score: 72

Daily Sequence Octordle #1121
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Daily Extreme Octordle #1121
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Score: 68
Ho-hum.
 
2 hours later…
16:17
mornin, campers
@CowperKettle some of us spelled it "pyjamas"
@MetaEd The French ones.
@Laurel You've hit on the central problem with all sites on SE. Not all creative writing can have a reference. Thank goodness. We just have to rely on the internalized swaths of English English speakers possess. A recent post of ELL questioned the idiomatic nature of the term "oblique accusation". That does have uses beyond the question (see the internet) but even if it didn't it's completely idiomatic.
The issue of the number of speakers on SE's sites can sometimes get in the way of what people say. So, you might have some x number of speakers around here who don't find "oblique accusation" good English. And, of course, they'd be wrong.
Not everything is always already given (toujours déjà donné-Althusser) and his cohorts.
17:03
> Mice with the human-type NOVA1 gene expressed more variation in tone and pitch in their squeaky syllables. science.org/content/article/…
Another gene candidate for role in speech development
17:27
@Lambie I mean, you can't just say that your type of native English supersedes everyone else's. Such is the nature of dialects
2
17:43
@Laurel It's not about superseding. It's about recognizing speakers above all else. And when these sites here ask for references, in some cases, I myself am a better reference. But not everything has a reference in language. And I often okay things in other varieties of English. I'm not hung up on my own phrasing/usage. That example I gave about "oblique accusation" though pretty much cuts across all educated English speakers.
18:10
@CowperKettle That's a new one for me. I think they are defining a new term for an existing phenomenon:
> expectations can be so strong that they lead to illusory perception of another person who is actually not there (i.e., seeing a Bayesian ghost)
the only connection with 'Bayesian' presumably being that the prior probability of the stimulus occurring is so high that a perception is made even if there is no relevant stimulus at test time. (which must have some kind of physiological mechanism to make that happen).
Wordle 1,340 5/6

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Strands #352
“Ouch!”
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18:28
@Lambie In some cases (maybe more often than you think), the people you're contradicting are native speakers. It's awfully hard to speak even for all "educated English speakers", which is why I often specify an answer of mine is true for the people in my circles or dialect
Connections
Puzzle #618
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perfect game!
19:23
Congrats 🎉
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19:36
@M.A.R. @CowperKettle is largely right, but it is a picture of Google Cloud TPU v5e for AI workload processing, but it is NOT using nVidia graphics card, but Google-developed ASIC, see comparison here. TPU=Tensor Processing Unit, yet another name for a CPU (like GPU=Graphics Processing Unit).
@Mitch Quite a custom interconnects Google has there, quite cool, see description here. They are eating nVidia's lunch.
Even more detail here.
 
1 hour later…
20:55
@Laurel I would expect all high-level native speakers to accept "oblique accusation". It's a register issue, not a dialectal one. I don't even have "a dialect", unless you consider highly educated as a dialect marker. The term dialect is much misused around here.
21:36
@Lambie I'm not a native speaker but spent more decades in the USA than in my native country, and I read a lot of academic books beyond my college years :-). I have seen plenty of "oblique reference" but not "oblique accusation" but both sound okay to me (I don't dare to label it "natural" or not). Maybe this is simply a matter of how common a colocation they are? In Google Books Ngram Viewer between 2017-2022 the former has 18,400 vs. 393 for the latter.
22:09
@GratefulDisciple Well, I don't know what natural even means the way many non-natives use it here. For me, when a writer manages to use unusual expressions that work, I say bravo. This was one of them.
@Mitch The latest TPUv6 (Trillium) made a GA debut Dec 2024 rumored to be made by TSMC with only 5nm process. Don't know whether this is made in USA or in Taiwan, since it appears TSMC Arizona has started production. Cannot wait for 3nm chips to be made in the USA.
@Lambie Yeah, me too. If the reader understands, no problem.
@Lambie I can't help but wonder, even though I was never referred to directly, that somehow I am being accused, not totally straight on, but obliquely.
haha
ha
Where did the contention that "'obliquely accused' is problematic" come from?
@Mitch Good one. It came from ELU. I got two dv's.
@GratefulDisciple Not every pair has to have been repeated for it to be a felicitous and meaningful construction.
The term was obligue accusation but I see you like to verb things up. So, okay.
22:19
Sep 20, 2023 at 14:50, by Mitch
Feb 5, 2021 at 17:03, by Mitch
Aug 13 '19 at 19:18, by Mitch
Aug 1 at 14:32, by Mitch
Jul 14 at 18:02, by Mitch
Dec 4 '17 at 21:05, by Mitch
Sep 2 '16 at 15:26, by Mitch
Aug 1 at 19:27, by Mitch
Jun 27 at 21:28, by Mitch
Dec 17 '15 at 15:36, by Mitch
people are idiots
or, to be frank, undereducated.
or, if you will, solipsistic enough that they think if they hadn't heard it before it's not a thing.
@Lambie I think I purpled that prose enough that I hid your, assuredly non-existent, oblique accusation of me.
@GratefulDisciple for whatever reason, I'm somehow blind to manufacturing and companies and product lines and such.
There were a couple years a few decades ago where I cared a lot about the new API coming out with Windows 3.1 and the Intel 486, but things continuously get better from K to M to G to T
to P to E to Y
Connections
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that I don't bother trying to remember who has what at what speed and size and transistors per femtometer and petahertz and billions of tons of CO2 blocking the suns rays.
that said, I don't think NVidia is going to be hurt too bad by google chips, they're all going to make money hand over fist.
The -buyers- of those chips (or buyers of their services) though... I have a feeling they will just be bleeding out money.
Allow me:
Foreign exchange controls are various controls imposed by a government on the purchase/sale of foreign currencies by residents or nonresidents, or any currency transfers across national borders.
goes back in time and invest in nvidia ten years ago
@Mitch Now the sexy thing seems to be which CPU/GPU/TPU/NPU can crunch more operations, see one AI benchmark MLPerf.
22:31
@Mitch They think over at ELU that if no one has ever said it before, it can’t be English, or at least not idiomatic English. The participants also believe that English has rules, people have always written with these rules in mind. Anything that doesn’t fit is called an idiom.
@Mitch Maybe it's like real estate, whether it's buyer's market or seller's market. If cloud providers overextend their AI servers in their data centers, there may come a point where the supply is saturated.
@GratefulDisciple In my professional opinion, the LLM benchmarks are 1) misleading (don't show generality), and 2) gamed. ie, most systems are doing well on benchmarks, but industries trying to use these systems, once they get past a successful (but cherry picked) demo, are very unreliable.
@Mitch That sounds right. It's still a use-case that varies wildly, unlike benchmarks for GPU intended for video games.
@GratefulDisciple Oh. I misinterpreted. I don't know MLPerf, I thought you were talking about LLM accuracy benchmarks.
Sure, benchmarks for performance on matrix multiplications... those are very robust and reliable.
To comment on a missed opportunity:
I don't think the contraction itself is particularly relevant. As 1 or 2 words, I daresay [whatever I think] has always been far more common in BrE than AmE.FumbleFingers 3 hours ago
@Mitch I still give you a point though, since AI workloads still vary widely (but I'm still learning). Yes, I wouldn't fall into a bait click if someone talks about LLM accuracy benchmark.
22:41
How dare he not say "As 1 or 2 words, I daresay 'I daresay'has been far more common in BrE than AmE".
22:54
I’m not proud about being ambivalent but I’m not ashamed either.
23:48
#WhenTaken #357 (18.02.2025)

I scored 746/1000🎗️

1️⃣📍2.4K km - 🗓️5 yrs - 🥈141/200
2️⃣📍412 km - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥇184/200
3️⃣📍2.0K km - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥈147/200
4️⃣📍3.3 km - 🗓️48 yrs - 🥉100/200
5️⃣📍430 km - 🗓️9 yrs - 🥈174/200

https://whentaken.com
Wordle 1,340 5/6

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