thaumasiotes's comments

On: Eating less can lead to a longer life: study in mi...

[thaumasiotes]

> We know since 1993 with the discovery of the daf-2 gene (a nematode insulin receptor) that genetics can drastically affect longevity.

We've known that since we observed that humans can easily live more than 70 years while cats tend not to go past 20. And presumably well before then.

On: Turkish language has a gossip tense

[thaumasiotes]

In Chinese the terms will also distinguish whether the brother/sister is older or younger than your parent is.

[noisy_boy → thaumasiotes]

Bengali does that too and even allows for age based relative positioning by using a "prefix" + "relationship_name":

    - Father's side:
        Uncle:
            Older than father (age_position_prefix + Jethu):
                1. Eldest:    Boro Jethu
                2. After him: Mejo Jethu
                3. After him: Sejo Jethu
                4. After him: Chhoto Jethu
            Younger than father (age_position_prefix + Kaaku):
                5. Eldest:    Boro Kaaku
                6. After him: Mejo Kaaku
                7. After him: Sejo Kaaku
                8. After him: Chhoto Kaaku
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as above but common suffix: Pishi

    - Mother's side:
        Uncle:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maama
        Aunt:
            Same age_position_prefix as that on the father's side but common suffix: Maashi

     Boro means eldest
     Mejo means middle
     Sejo means younger than the middle
     Chhoto means youngest

So men on the father's side have more dedicated words than others.

On: Turkish language has a gossip tense

[thaumasiotes]

Because "learned" and "reported" aren't aspects? Aspect describes the temporal structure of an event - for example, it might occur at a single moment, or it might occur at several discrete points in time ("I walk his dog every Saturday"), or it might occur over a continuous duration.

Mood describes the relationship of an event to reality.

[sedatk → thaumasiotes]

Ok, let me correct my question:

Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?

[yongjik → sedatk]

In school grammar, "present perfect" is a tense. School grammars are basically tradition, so you can call it whatever you want as long as you agree with long-dead grammarians. Ditto for Turkish - I'm sure it has its own dead grammarians.

In modern grammar, "present perfect" is not "close to a tense" - it's a combination of present tense and perfect aspect.

[thaumasiotes → yongjik]

We can say a little more; in traditional grammar, aspect is not a recognized category. Thus, while it is very clear that Latin has a system of three tenses, two aspects, and three moods (counting imperative), traditional grammar assigns it six "tenses":

    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |  tense  |   aspect  | traditional name |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    | present | imperfect |     present      |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |   past  | imperfect |    imperfect     |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |  future | imperfect |     future       |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    | present |  perfect  |     perfect      |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |   past  |  perfect  |    pluperfect    |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+
    |  future |  perfect  |  future perfect  |
    +---------+-----------+------------------+

This is the reason for calling perfect a "tense": it's traditional. But this model won't stand up to analysis. Interestingly, the Romans themselves do not seem to have used it; where we refer to "pluperfect tense", they referred to the "past perfect-er tense", identifying both tense and aspect (admittedly, both under the name "tense", or rather "time"). I don't know when the conceptual distinction was lost.

[yongjik → thaumasiotes]

To nitpick: under modern analysis "future" is not a tense in English: the future verb "will" (or "shall") behaves much more like "can", "may", "must" and so on - they're collectively called modal verbs, i.e., in English future is a mood.

[thaumasiotes → sedatk]

> Why is "present perfect tense" closer to a tense, but "learned past tense" is closer to a mood?

Are you thinking of these as exclusive categories? Every finite verb has a tense and a mood. That's the point of having separate terms; these are independent dimensions of the verb.

Theoretically, there could also be a "reported present" verb form, except that this is semantically impossible: any event that has been reported to you must have happened before the report did, and the report must have happened before you started talking about it, so reported events are stuck in the past.

It's possible, though, to imagine someone making a statement about reported information in the future, in which case the event would take place before the report, but possibly after I describe how I'm imagining the future. Would anything interesting happen in Turkish for this kind of sentence?

On: Turkish language has a gossip tense

[thaumasiotes]

> English is pretty low on moods

English is fairly low on inflection. It's not low on moods; one of the more important syntactic categories is the modal auxiliary verbs.

On: Show HN: I made a URL expander because short links...

[thaumasiotes]

The partner project to shadyurl.com was hugeurl.com, which is exactly the same concept as here. hugeurl.com seems to have gone down.

On: An exoskeleton let a paralyzed man walk, then its ...

[thaumasiotes]

If that were true, the job would be done by someone who took a personal interest in the subject and didn't need to be paid for reporting it. This is the opposite; it's someone doing a bad job because there's money in the profession and they want to get some of it without actually doing the work that would earn it.

[paulryanrogers → thaumasiotes]

Perhaps. Yet more likely that they're pressured into publishing so often they have little time for thorough investigations. If there were more money in it more people could afford to do it full time, and quality could improve.

[surgical_fire → thaumasiotes]

> job would be done by someone who took a personal interest in the subject and didn't need to be paid for reporting it.

You mean that the job would be done by shills then?

Why would anyone provide free labor otherwise?

[thaumasiotes → surgical_fire]

Why did you write your comment?

[surgical_fire → thaumasiotes]

I am not performing a job, if that is what you are implying.

[xeromal → thaumasiotes]

OR it pays near nothing so the bottom of the barrel gets hired at low wage to keep the ghost shipping running

[kevinventullo → thaumasiotes]

So by that logic, public defenders are your best bet if you get arrested?

On: Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 awarded to Nihon Hidank...

[thaumasiotes]

You might want to consider a little more carefully before putting money down. There is no economics Nobel Prize.

[thrownawaysz → thaumasiotes]

"Although not one of the five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner as and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony"

[justinclift → thrownawaysz]

Where's that from?

On: AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

[thaumasiotes]

What's stopping the users from leaving?

[fsflover → thaumasiotes]

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/

[thaumasiotes → fsflover]

That is not a compelling case for Amazon locking customers in. You can't make a purchase anywhere else because you paid for Amazon Prime?

On: Why Gov.uk's Exit this Page component doesn't use ...

[thaumasiotes]

I don't really mind triggering ctrl-W by accident because ctrl-shift-T will undo the mistake.

An accidental ctrl-Q is much worse, because closed incognito windows can't be recovered.

[umanwizard → thaumasiotes]

I think all the major browsers can be configured to prompt before quitting.

[derkades → umanwizard]

Firefox prompts by default

[TeMPOraL → derkades]

Sorta, kinda, maybe? Even the one shipped with Debian/Ubuntu?

Firefox gave me plenty of scars over the years. CTRL-Q and CTRL-W are just two; another's the fear of the browser randomly going "updates have been installed, you're not allowed to do anything until you restart; shame about that unsaved work you had on the page we just blanked" shit that used to fly on Ubuntu.

(Maybe still does? I browse from Windows nowadays.)

[thaumasiotes → derkades]

While true, that's a very recent change.

On: Why Gov.uk's Exit this Page component doesn't use ...

[thaumasiotes]

For reference:

> I'm an agender (I use it/its pronouns), asexual, alterhuman robot. I'm also a shapeshifting critter on the internet.

This person has absorbed the idea that it's a sin to use natural language to talk about normal phenomena, and the idea that it isn't possible to know what kind of language wouldn't be sinful, but not the idea that maybe that isn't a desirable state of affairs.