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12:05 AM
@Reg: Ya gotta do it barefoot to get the big prize.
I never ventured into my son's room without slippers for that reason.
@tchrist You know, scholars might research and find that historical use case, but nobody else in the whole wide English-speaking world will get what he means.
 
@Robusto It's not just English, though. That's the weird thing.
What I posted is just the freehand translation anyway.
 
Weird.
Well, too much ugliness all over the SE-scape lately.
 
There is. It all seems so self-inflected and avoidable, too. My hunch is that that means there were lawyers behind the scenes forcing issues.
 
I think it was some kind of marketing study.
 
If you're thinking of the developers' survey, I believe that came out 3% of the respondents saying they were neither male nor female, somehow.
No, this feels much more like imminent legal action.
 
12:13 AM
2 days ago, by Robusto
Yeah. Here's what really happened. SO management paid a whole lot of shekels to some management consulting firm to find out why their product is slipping, and the firm took their top sheet and folded it twice and handed it over and said "Your users are too mean!" and then said "That'll be $5 million, hand it over" and SO folks decided to get busy alienating everybody.
@tchrist You may be right, and probably are, but that seems way over the top.
 
Perhaps SB 218.
Almost everyone is missing that this is attempting to enforce “grammatical correctness” that may be alien to the target. It's like saying we had to talk about Stack Exchange the company only in the plural. “Stack Exchange are hiring.”
You can say that in UK English, of course, but to force all of America and Canada to talk that way so pena muerte is nuts.
It just causes problems, like the efforts in Spanish and Portuguese to create neuter pronouns and neuter accord.
El pronombre elle es una propuesta de pronombre neutro que no existe en el idioma español. Surgió en el ámbito de los blogs transfeministas como un intento de identificar a las personas de género no binario, así como también en el ámbito feminista para referirse a personas de género desconocido, personas genéricas, o grupos de género mixto. Hay quien aconseja tildar este pronombre para que no se confunda con el dígrafo Ll [cita requerida], pero por ahora se usa con o sin ella indistintamente. Su plural es de forma regular añadiéndole una s: elles. == Historia == Algunas personas hispanohablantes…
This is not well loved.
And just wait till you read what the Immortals have to say about it.
It's a political hot potato in some cultures, but alien to others. And it may have legal force in some jurisdictions. Or there may be actual pending litigation involved here to which we are not privy, and so they felt their hands were tied.
> Para referirse a una persona que no se identifica solamente con el género masculino o el femenino. Por ejemplo: «elle es mi amigue, se identifica como no binarie».
 
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer, messaging number in answer (252): Another phrase/word for recovering/rebounding from setbacks? by john ferr on english.SE
 
You just CANNOT FORCE PEOPLE to talk that way.
You can ask for different vocabulary and tone, but expecting to change grammatical rules of a language by fiat is hopeless.
2
There are similar attempts in Portuguese to use -e/-es to create "neuter concord" so you don't have to offend anyone's sensibilities by using -o/-os or -a/-as when using adjectives that agree with their gender. It is widely hated.
Well, I don't know that. I've read things expressing great unhappiness about it.
I have no fair sampling.
I do have actual reasons to suspect lawyers got involved, but I cannot explain those because they involved privileged information.
All I know this is this the most incredibly self-destructive injury inflicted upon a company's own user base and bread and butter that I can bring to mind. That they doubled down instead of recanting and repenting has to mean something.
2
No one feels safe any longer. Trust will not return.
Once upon a time, people used to believe Google's Don’t be evil motto. All childhood fairytales fade with time as we grow up.
 
12:37 AM
Yeah. Google is all grown up now. And evil.
@tchrist This place is first and foremost about money. "Community" comes way down the list.
You saw the utter ruthlessness with which they hammered the nails in on the Lou Reed lyric fragment, didn't you?
 
12:54 AM
@Robusto Ouch! Molten plastic on your feet, that will hurt.
@tchrist Oh, really? How awful. Can you at least suggest from which general direction this information came?
 
@Robusto That's why I think this has lawyers behind it.
@Cerberus Elsewhere.
 
@Cerberus It doesn't need to be molten to hurt.
 
1:10 AM
From UTC 2019-09-27 00:00 (last Friday) to UTC 2019-10-05 00:00 (today), there've been 24,352 chat messages posted in the network-wide mod-only chat room. That's 3k/day, or 2/minute, nonstop, averaged over more than a week.
 
@tchrist OK.
@Robusto I know, I was joking.
@skullpatrol Yeah, it's crazy.
 
what a marathon
 
It's basically all about Monica, the new rule compelling speech, and how to respond to SE.
A letter is being drafted, for which everyone is invited to vote once it's ready. It will be posted on meta.stackexchange, probably around Tuesday.
 
thanks for the update pal
 
1:27 AM
Always!
 
:-)
 
@tchrist I'm sorry you got dragged into the witch-hunt discussion. Be assured that it's only a few people who are like that; they just happen to hang out there. Better let them be. It's an unwinnable argument.
 
They don't know what they're talking about.
And it's not my job to educate them.
 
those are the worst type
 
That was... a bit rigid.
 
1:37 AM
@tchrist I'm very sorry.
I only wanted you to see the open letter.
 
@terdon welcome back pal :-)
 
I didn't know you knew Monica that well either.
 
@skullpatrol Skully!
 
how goes it?
 
Eh. Been better :)
 
1:40 AM
@tchrist No, indeed.
 
@tchrist for what it's worth, I know you were making a grammatical point with no social undertone whatsoever.
 
We could start a separate open letter expressing why compelling singular they is a mistake. There are already two questions on meta.stackexchange which express the problem well.
 
Yes, but it will be hard to tread the line between grammaticality and bigotry.
Probably not the best time for that.
Most folks don't care as much about language as the people who hang out in this room.
 
@terdon Well, those answers on Meta got tons of votes, so I think the large majority will agree. Perhaps we should wait for the first letter. But I am concerned about the lavender letter, which I would not have so named if I had know that it should turn out like that.
 
@Cerberus I was wondering about that. What part concerns you?
 
1:47 AM
@terdon Let me see what it looks like now...
This is terrible.
 
@Cerberus It has happened though.
There have been a shocking amount of seriously bigoted opinions coming out of the woodwork recently.
 
tsk tsk
 
@terdon But not because of the reason stated.
@skullpatrol I'm really sorry, Skully.
 
np pal
 
The mod room is so hostile, I don't feel free to speak there. But I shouldn't speak here about what people say there.
It's all bad.
 
1:50 AM
yeah...
It's been a very tense few days with some seriously heated discussions.
 
I blame it on the agressive rugby world cup :P
 
snort, well you would!
 
2:06 AM
@skullpatrol Of course, how could we not have realised?
 
2:31 AM
Haha.
Difficult choice.
 
 
2 hours later…
4:07 AM
Hey, @Cerb. I'm playing this game, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which takes place in Ancient Greece. They have gone to a great deal of trouble to make things echt, including layouts of the Acropolis and all, and even (they say) Greek pronunciations.
So when I got to Euboea they were pronouncing it something like Yevwiya or even almost Evia. Do you know if those are accurate or not? Also, Euripedes was more like EvriPEEdes.
 
4:21 AM
@Robusto The former sounds like New Greek.
Euripides has an i there, so that should sound somewhat like English EE; but the u should not sound like v.
I have seen a video about the game; it did look rather beautiful, as did the one in Egypt.
Is it enjoyable?
 
 
4 hours later…
8:26 AM
hey
anyone here
"The reason introverts often select activities and environments that are less stimulating is them having an above-optimal cortical arousal level." is the use of "them having" in this case appropriate?
 
9:24 AM
@Luyw yeah, it's fine
 
9:36 AM
@tchrist The french are looking at ille as a gender neutral one. Cross between il and elle
The trouble with suddenly created widespread words is that they don't feel natural to people
Words don't get coined that way
You're more likely to get semantic change
 
so hungry
 
@CaptainBohemian 🍔
In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word's meaning. The boundary between word formation and semantic change can be difficult to define: a new use of an old word can be seen as a new word derived from an old one and identical to it in form. See 'conversion'. == Types == There are a number of methods of word formation. === Derivations === === Compounding === === Blending === A blend is a word formed by joining parts of two words after clipping. An example is smog, whic...
 
too hungry to read
but once I go out to eat, I don't want to go back to read immediately. I don't like to read on mobile phone and actually free WiFi isn't easy to use.
it can only be accessed in some places and it breaks intermittently
 
There are limits to this kind of construction; for example, *the horse in second place's chances is not acceptable.
Lies!
There's a well-placed [citation needed] on that.
In grammar, the genitive case (abbreviated gen), also called the second case, is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus, indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can also serve purposes indicating other relationships. For example, some verbs may feature arguments in the genitive case; and the genitive case may also have adverbial uses (see adverbial genitive). Genitive construction includes the genitive case, but is a broader category. Placing a modifying noun in the genitive case is one...
 
 
3 hours later…
12:44 PM
@Cerberus Quite. You can actually set it to "tour" mode where you just go around and look at things, go in temples, etc. And it's all really gorgeous.
In "tour" mode the game is your docent, with things you can click on that give you the history of this or that place or thing.
 
 
2 hours later…
3:11 PM
I don't get any of it.
 
 
1 hour later…
4:15 PM
@Robusto interestingly, in Russian it's more than four.
But yeah it's smooth sailing now. Entering notes at a breakneck speed.
 
It takes until about 9 and a half minuts in, but he finally gets to the punch point and it's worth it.
 
The first couple pages always take the longest because you want to get the basic setup perfect. The sound mix as well as the typesetting. All the margins and the kerning and everything. That takes ages even just for the first bar. But then when you're finally satisfied with your template, you can just enter all the rest of it as fast as you can type the note names.
 
I'd never heard of the double-beat metronome theory of Czerny and indeed Beethoven. He presents a rather convincing case.
 
@tchrist is that AuthenticSound?
 
Yes.
 
4:18 PM
Looks like the kind of thumbnail he'd do.
 
Is he a nut?
 
He sort of is. In that he's trying to make the same point over and over again.
 
The half-speed Beethoven's Ninth doesn't convince me, though, not like the Czerny Bach did.
 
But he is up against 90% of the uneducated music world, so he kind of has to.
 
4:19 PM
I've been subscribed for ages, but I've stopped checking every video a while ago. These days I pick and choose.
 
The AuthenticSound guy, not quite so much the slow 9th.
 
@tchrist it absolutely is.
I was first introduced to the idea that Beethoven et al. were being played way too fast about twenty years ago by my guitar teacher.
 
I'm used to the 7th being rushed.
 
It's been twenty years and people still haven't sorted it out.
 
Some of the sonatas.
 
4:21 PM
You'd think they would by now.
 
Even the end of the last movement of the 9th, let alone its second movement, can be frenetic.
 
So yeah. All the props to this guy fighting a losing battle. Especially now that every idiot can just enter the notes in MuseScore, set the tempo at OVER 9000, upload it to YouTube titled "Beethoven as originally intended", and then get a million fucking morons commenting on it "at last! the best version I have ever heard!"
On a version that cannot be physically played on any instrument.
And not because of the physical limitations of the human operating it, but because of the limitations of the instrument itself.
 
Yes, that's his point. He chooses a very very simple piece that everyone knows to show this.
 
Even a robot could not play it that fast.
Doesn't make people stop posting that garbage.
 
Shows what 11 different professional recordings have historically chosen for it.
 
4:24 PM
But yeah with that out of the way, it you're a proponent of that point already, it's sort of pointless to watch all his videos. So I pick and choose.
Sometimes he has very interesting pieces, other times very interesting guests.
But for the most part I just see the thumbnail, nod and move on.
 
Here's a link to the time mark where he shows his 11-artist comparison: youtu.be/crtHnsLlbuA?t=301
 
@tchrist the problem with J.S. Bach in particular is that he wrote music so good it sounds equally fine at any tempo at all.
With Beethoven that is actually not the case.
And with lesser composers it's basically one tempo only and the rest sounds like you're stepping on a cat.
 
I don't think Beethoven sounds equally good at all speeds, but certainly I've heard multiple interpretations of the same piece that are all convincing.
 
In the last 10-70 years (depending on how you look at it), it's been taken to the extreme in that composers have quit being composers and started being sound engineers.
So Samuel Andreyev, for example, physically cannot write a single note until he decides on the instrumentation.
Because he's not looking to write a note, he's looking to encode a very specific timbre.
So you take a modern piece written for a tin can, and you just can't play it on the piano or the mandolin or the clarinet. You can't even play it on a differently proportioned tin can.
I am on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. I'm with Bach. If I write a note, it should be equally fine if you give it to a flute or a balalaika or just hum it in the shower.
 
I have trouble with music lacking a(t least one) readily apprehensible core melodic line.
 
4:37 PM
Well the melody and the harmonies and the rhythm is what you remember. The instrumentation? Well, what's the point in remembering "there was a clarinet and a harp and a bass drum". You can remember that very easily, but where's the music? You've lost it all the second it stopped playing.
 
This morning just after sunrise I set down and improvised a Rick Wakeman style arpeggiated version on Chopin's Cm prelude (the Op 28 No 20 one) that started with just single very light notes filling out the largo quarter notes with very light arppegiations of the now-broken chords, usually as sixteenth notes.
Just to hear sort of "infer" the harmonic progression instead of having it bludgeoned on me like a dirge.
 
If Shakespeare wrote the Hamlet monologue for exacly one very specific actor's voice, and it would sound like complete gibberish when spoken by any other person at all, how much would you remember of it.
You simply couldn't.
 
Speech doesn't have pitch annotations, nor even tempi.
 
Anyway, I must go back to speedtyping Bach. Still dozens of pages to go.
 
okdokey
 
4:41 PM
Latorz.
 
donkey
That's the Sagrada Familia.
Which you realize about 150 milliseconds into it.
 
5:16 PM
@tchrist What about people with high or deep and fast or slow voices?
 
@Robusto I hear they even used the Egyptian one in school!
 
The video is just one in a whole series Charles has uploaded, featuring himself seamlessly accompanying celebrities talking
 
 
4 hours later…
8:57 PM
@Cerberus Here's the video I saw that induced me to get the game:
It might start a few minutes in, but you can bring it back to the middle. There's something weird about YouTube that when you watch a video part way through (I finished on my living room TV because the views were so spectacular) it will not let you start the video again at 0. FFS.
 
@Robusto It starts at the beginning for me!
Will watch.
 
9:25 PM
@RyanUnger it always surprises me to see you here?
 
9:36 PM
why
 
Most folks don't care as much about language as the people who hang out in this room.
 
9:57 PM
I'm a big fan of English
 
10:11 PM
ok
 
11:09 PM
I love how through it all Opera stays pretty much the same.
When I used to have to support Opera I'd use it for testing about once every six months, which meant that each time I used it I'd have to download the new version.
And shit never worked on it anyway, so I'd just shrug and go on with my life.
 
@Robusto Interesting.
By Jove, Firefox has dropped under 10%.
But, in absolute numbers, Firefox will be in a much better position?
Because I think there has been a tremendous growth in devices with a browser all over the world.
Most of the new devices will use Chrome (mobile).
 

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