"for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term."
From my perspective this is the hoax. I come from the alps and we have dozens of terms for snow. Only those people without snow might have one word, because they have no need to describe different versions of snow. I remember Sulz, Firn, Neu, Kunst, Matsch, Harsch, Papp, Pulver, ... (left 35 years ago).
I believe this is the case and the wiki summary seems to agree.
> Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation in Language Log: The list of snow-referring roots to stick [suffixes] on isn't that long [in the Eskimoan language group]: qani- for a snowflake, apu- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.
The Lexical Elaboration Explorer app does not allow one to see the actual words for snow for any language, so the tool is mostly a geographic and word-density plotter, but neither the article nor the website add much nuance to this debate. The hypothesis is fairly obvious: languages have words for common things. It's not really falsifiable and I find this type of analysis typical of modern research. Sloppy, surface-level, coding-tutorial demonstrations of mostly useless data display.
It kind of goes in the other direction, too. Can you say that Chinese doesn't have a word for "because" because 因为 is actually a compound of 因 "in accordance with" and 为 "the purpose of"? Does English not have a word for "ratel" because instead they use two words: "honey badger"? Does that imply they're more important to French culture than to English culture? Is Haiti a transgender paradise because Kreyól lacks gendered pronouns so clearly gender isn't an important concept in Haitian culture?
I'm not going to say that language doesn't say anything about culture in general. But I do think that most specific analyses chasing after this idea are doomed to say more about the analyst than they do about the analyzed.
No because, Firn and Harsch are words on their own.
Yes, because of the way the German language works. It tends to create new words by combining old words not by creating new short words (Dialects like Bavarian work differently though, they often tend to create new words).
Then after centuries people forget that and think it's one word. Like "Enttäuschung" (disappointment) which people no longer realize what the two words are and that "Enttäuschung" really means that you had been deceived ("Täuschung") and now are not longer - the deeper meaning of "Enttäuschung" in German. Same for "Werkzeug" (Tool) - the words get their own identity.
What I found most interesting was Rücksicht, Vorsicht, Nachsicht, Einsicht, Weitsicht (and more) where probably no German would think they are the same word, "Sicht" combined with another one. All of those words have their own, distinctive identity.
Beware = be + ware, but most people don’t use be- as a prefix anymore (“I’m going to bequiz my students this morning”) and they don’t use ware to mean pay attention anymore. The word “sight” Is still in common usage though.
The biggest difference between OSX and Windows is, Apple adds (some say steal) functionality from competition, and open source. They make it neat. On windows to have something working, you need a WezTerm, Everything for search, Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right, Powertoys for an app starter, Folder Size for disc management etc. If you spend a lot of time, Win11 can be ok to work with.
If Powerpoint and Affinity would work on Linux, I'd use Linux though.
Maybe just for your specific preferences. Terminal is plenty fine. Vertical taskbar on the right is straight up user preference. PowerToys for an app starter? Like Alfred? The start search does a decent enough job of that. Folder Size is nice, but enumerating all files is very taxing.
It was removed in Win11, when they rewrote the taskbar to pretend that it's macOS dock (icons centered by default). Today your only options are horizontal taskbar along the top or the bottom edge, and icons aligned left or center.
Last time I checked, Windows 11 lost this capability and 3p solutions like Windhawk are needed. I'd be very happy if they brought this back though, feel free to share a link to some info about how to do it natively.
Using WSL on Win11. I would prefer Linux but I never got used to Open Office/Gimp/... and need to use PowerPoint / Affinity. But WSL mostly works, and added some tools and config to make it useful with WezTerm
NATS.io because I'm using Go, and I can just embed it for one server [0], one binary to deploy with Systemd, but able to split it out when scaling the MVP.
Well at least the datetime library would be a perfectly reasonable place to handle leap seconds. The place that outputs the timestamp to a human readable format wouldn’t at all be that hard pressed to add a second when printing out the local time with timezone considered. It really wouldn’t add that much complexity.
Could you imagine if anyone was stupid enough to think the right place to handle such a thing was the internal counter of seconds rather than the datetime library though? Ha! That’d be ridiculous right! Imagine all the bugs if someone put something that’s only relevant to local timezone time printing there! It’d cause so many unexpected bugs!
Time is so /weird/ that I don't know how computers will ever wrangle it comprehensively.
Just consider the weird but valid scenario in relativity where A can occur before B, B before C, and C before A. I'm not sure how you would wrangle something like that in a data format.
Great wiki page!
It even mentions Boltzmann Brains!
“ This infinite future could allow for the occurrence of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.”
But taking this the other way around : it's also interesting that some cosmologies are known to be incorrect, because they would enable alternative forms of consciousness.
For dramatic effect, my monitor turned off right after "By this point, distant galaxies and starts are receding so fast that their light has become undetectable."
To survive beyond 1 Gy from now, life will need to move underground where the water is and hopefully much cooler than the eventual surface. Also, such life may/will become necessary to relocate to Mars, hopefully taking resources with them. (I don't say "us" because of likely dramatic evolution.)
The only reason that the subsurface rock is cooler than magma is being able to conduct heat through to a cooler surface. When that surface becomes exterminatingly hot and remains so for a while the subsurface will be heating up too. Since the sun is estimated to remain a red giant for about one Gy it will become hotter than the surface.
Completely in line with our propensity for destabilizing harmonic systems in nature. Imagine we do that and all of the other planetary orbits degenerate or become dangerous.
And the architect tells them to submit a new blueprint of the plans otherwise they can't do anything - knowing quite well he's not an architect and can't do that ("Submit a patch").
Thats absolutely not what they asked for, no one was able to reproduce the issue, so they asked for clearer instructions on how to reproduce the issue and were met with hostility. It's not the job of OSS developers to debug someone else's scripts just to then start debugging the actual issue. This is the absolute bare minimum of any bug report, if you think there's a bug but no one else can observe it, in the first instance you have to assume it's something to do with their setup, until shown otherwise. The addition of not just wrong, but completely misleading AI summaries just makes the job of an OSS dev harder, they now have to start debugging the bug report itself to try to figure out whats parts are even facts at all (hint, most of the AI generated content was completely wrong, but sounded plausible).
Personally, the developers of both the LLVM and Mesa projects were far kinder and patient than I would have been, most OSS developers aren't just not paid to work on these projects, but are usually paid to work on other things. Taking up their time with this nonsense is very insulting to them, and the attitude that they owe the author anything at all is, as stated in the LLVM ticket, exactly what pushes many developers out of OSS development.
Because the authors expect him to submit a patch when he stated that he is not a developer. That they expect him to reduce the build scripts when he can't do that. Pointing that out, the dev tells him, they don't expect him to be a developer, when some comments above they exactly did that. That is classic passive-aggressive behaviour.
The dev also writes on their page as the top item on what they do:
"fixing paper cuts for users, so all sorts of bugs;"
"Please try to minimise the steps required to reproduce it rather than producing large scripts with options that definitely won't work for me."
The guy doesn't have to do that, but then, he can hardly expect that people will want to donate their own time to help him with his problem.
Now, I get that he may not have known entirely how to proceed, but instead of asking how, he just says "no" and demands action.
That doesn't leave the dev anywhere to go -- without a way to reproduce the problem they really can't produce a fix.
So only then does the dev say "You're free to propose a patch yourself instead" which I think is pretty obviously rhetorical, meant to point out that there aren't any good alternatives if you don't want the dev's help.
It's all so strangely entitled -- the dev is asking for only the basic minimum of what's needed to actually fix the user's problem and now we've got people trying to shame them on HN.
Sam didn't expect him to submit a patch at first, he said that _after_ the author refused to cooperate and was an ass.
The expectation to have a reasonable reproducer makes total sense, and if your reporter can't provide a clear reproduction, well, the developer can spend time on the bug but they're not obligated to. Our author was speaking like he was entitled to Sam's time.
I do agree "patches welcome" can be pretty passive aggressive, but in this case it was after our user was already an entitled asshole, and after our user posted AI slop, so I can understand why Sam might feel like being short.
Also, it's just wild that a "non-programmer" is submitting bug reports to a compiler, and then defending themselves with "but I'm not a programmer". Who cares about compiler warnings? Programmers. Compiler warnings are literally just for programmers.
Compilers are one of the projects where the devs actually can and should expect 100% of their users to be programmers, by definition. Why else would you be running a compiler?
I guess maybe the director of the CSI: Cyber show would care about them because they'd make the show look more l33t h4x0r, but I'm really struggling to think of any other audience for compiler errors.
> Compilers are one of the projects where the devs actually can and should expect 100% of their users to be programmers, by definition. Why else would you be running a compiler?
Following some random instructions for "downloading good GenAI software from GitHub".
Reading the original issue (instead of the article)
"But I am not blaming you for not having a degree in software engineering."
But then
"And you admitted that the large scripts in question contain hardcoded information such as your personal computer's login username, clearly those scripts won't work out of the box on someone else's machine".
while the other committer ends with
"You're free to propose a patch yourself instead. "
So the committer is acknowledging that the user is no software developer, but then the two of them demand the user to do things that the user might not be able to do.
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