Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

@Robusto Canadians also say "Aluminum"

@Mitch Yeah, our current medical tech is both miraculous and very very limited. There are "surgeons" who, eg, claim to be able to re-attach a severed head. That's just total bullshit, however, we do have a very good understanding of why it's bullshit, and know a lot of things that we need to learn/invent in order to turn it from sci-fi to science. I'm no biologist but I do think, barring major catastrophes, we will be able to assemble organisms from parts in the next 50-200y

@Mitch I mean, we've come a long way in terms of being able to re-attach limbs or even do certain kinds of transplants.

@Mitch It's merely a matter of achieving the right balance of brain chemistry by forming the correct thoughts.

@Mitch There you go, already making your mind feel better with calming rationalizations! That's the ticket

@Mitch What is happiness anyway? Maybe everyone is happier this way

Don't worry, that weird eugenics couple in California is going to provide new breeding stock to replace the world's population in a few generations with their superior genes, so it's all fine.

popcenter.asu.edu/sites/default/files/conference/…

@Robusto I joke but the rest of the slides were informative.

except for this slide

I found a slide deck that explains things

"Here's a bar graph of sales per quarter. Here's the dang gi z score"

like when people put profanity in their code comments or variable names

so complicated the chart has a swear in its title

@Mitch What's a dang gi z-score?

@Robusto At first, yes. Then it becomes load bearing.

@Robusto Can I introduce to you the facade pattern?

@Mitch Yeah, I don't understand how putting the higher levels of abstraction into the hardware makes it faster or easier to optimize. We don't even know how to fully do that in software at higher levels - condensing programmer intent into optimized code is fraught with problems. Mathematically the problem space is the same no matter whether it's in hardware or software, but it's way easier to fix the problem if it's in software.

@Mitch I've never really understood this desire. Almost everything in computing is built by combining primitives together to make more complex things. Why put the hardware interface at the language level when you can just do it in software? What is the advantage?

@Mitch They did that by never making C a high level language

@Mitch Most newer architectures use RISC principles; x86 uses microcode and better compilers.

@Mitch As Orwell taught us

@CowperKettle I think it mainly gives them vision problems

@Robusto I feel like that's less of a problem in Chinese.

@Robusto Doesn't Japanese have a lot of different ways to pronounce kanji?

打喷嚏 - The first character is a common one, but the other two are super rare

Plus there are many many words nobody knows how to write. The classic example is "sneeze"

as more and more writing is electronic anyway, nobody notices that they can't "spell" anymore until you had them a pen and paper

Many adults are writing using tech now, where they type in the pinyin pronunciation and it shows the character

Adults who learn how to write characters learn the system of how the characters are composed, but once you know that system, you can only write a given character in one or two ways. This means that if you can't recall part of the character it becomes very hard to write anything. There's a thing called "Character amnesia" where you can't recall it at all. Can't make a single stroke on the paper.

but getting started from scratch? it's hard

Actually if a child knows a few words and is writing a sentence, they'll usually use pinyin to write the missing words

You can use pinyin, I guess

If you don't know a character you usually can't write it at all

There's no equivalent in Chinese

Countless hours of memorization

So for alphabetic languages you have lots of tools for increasing your language skills

if you see a word, it's very difficult to remember how to write it later

if you hear a word, you can't write it

It makes learning new words hard because you can't know how to pronounce them

The language isn't particularly hard per se, but the writing system is probably the hardest.... well maybe Japanese Kanji beats it, because it has all the problems from China plus extra Japanese weirdness.

@Robusto My problem is that the only Chinese I was getting was from my classes. There was a gap in class availability and my cohort (who'd been together a few years) disintegrated and I had two small kids and fell off the wagon, so to speak. It's been years now... both kids are teenagers....

It's like how the only Chinese I can recall is 我不会说中文

Close enough!

I imagine that says something like "I can speak no Russian"

THERE'S MORE?!

Da, nyet, vodka

@Robusto Maybe you can start using "It's all Russian to me" and see if it catches on

You mean, why don't people cite Russian as a hard language?