Is English just badly pronounced French?[1] I wish English would’ve adopted conjugation and other patterns the Romance languages use. I doubt it would’ve fit correctly. But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.
English is a Germanic language with a Latin alphabet, as spoken by Celts, after being ruled by people from France who were originally from Norway (or maybe Denmark)
1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of politically agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people. It’s just a cultural element formed over hundreds of years of government policy.
2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many words in English derived from French. But today they’re English words, with a French history. There are many more words that are not French in origin, so it’s quite disingenuous to call English an “incorrect” or “mispronounced” French. Why is it not an “evolved” or “improved” French? (See point 1).
3. English is conjugated, it’s just different than French. “I am, you are, he is”. “I look, you look, he looks”. Or more obviously “I jump, I jumped, I am jumping”. Most of the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.
No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
Or stuff like "cow" (from Old English) vs "beef" (from Old French). Which kinda makes sense when you consider who grew meet vs who ate it.
It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.
Boy have they atrophied. Even as a German speaker in whose first language these words have current equivalents I'm not 100% certain when to use thou, thee, thy, thine etc. that still were part of the language at Shakespeare's time and have since been simplified into you/your/yours etc. But it's true, English takes this stuff in stride, with modernisms e.g. "sick" meaning something good gradually being incorporated into the mainstream, rather than fought against by language purists.
Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup."
> But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.
They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin
It's a typical French loanword in German too: "Champagner" isn't pronounced with standard German prounciation rules. Even localized ones, e.g. in my childhood a sidewalk was called a "Trottoir" in the French pronunciation. For some reason nobody gets exited about French loanwords.
It’s made no difference for me. I stopped replying STOP a couple mm the ago and just did report and block. The amount SMSs have increased, I get 5-10 a week.
Just like robo-taxis are supposed to be driving us around or self driving cars. Not to mention the non-fiat currency everyone can easily use to buy goods nowadays.
Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024.
Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.
Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.
Waymo is a great example, actually. They serve Phoenix, SF and LA. Those locations aren’t chosen at random, they present a small subset of all the weather and road conditions that humans can handle easily.
So yes: handling 100,000 passengers is a milestone. The growth from 10,000 to 100,000 implies it’s going to keep growing exponentially. But eventually they’re going to encounter stuff like Midwest winters that can easily stop progress in its tracks.
About driverless cars, new tech adoptions often start slow, until the iceberg tips and then it's very quick change. Like mobile phones today.
I remember thinking before smartphones that had entire-day battery and good touchscreens: These people really think population will use phones more than desktop computers? Here we are.
I wouldn't say so, because the cars are not at all autonomous in our understanding of autonomous.
The cars aren't making all their decisions in real-time like a human driver. They, Waymo, meticulously mapped and continue to map every inch of the traversable city. They don't know how to drive, they know how to drive THERE.
It would be like if I went to the DMV to take a driving test. I would fail immediately, because the parking lot is not one I've seen and analyzed before.
"true" self driving is not possible with our current implementation of automobiles. You cannot safely mix automobiles that self-drive with human drivers. And the best solution is to converge towards known routes. We don't even necessarily how to program the routes - we can instead encode them in the road itself.
It might occur to you that I'm speaking about rail. The reality is it's trivial to automate rail systems, but the variables of free-form driving can't be automated.
In the first case there are inherent safety constraints preventing it and thus its not available to public to freely use. It's highly regulated. With GPT to writing code, it is already generally available and in heavy use. There are no such life-and-death concerns in the main.
In the second case there are inherent technical challenges to using non-fiat currency and the fx volatility with fiat is wild. There are also barriers and inconveniences to conversion. With GPT writing code, the user can review for quality and still be many x more productive and there is far fewer fees and risk of loss.
It's risky to take two failed or slow innovations and assume that all innovations will be failed or slow.
On a small subsection of US roads, British roads for example don’t make any sense.
However, generally I think being a software developer might be not a career in 10 years which is terrible to think about. Designer too. And all of this is through stealing peoples work as their own.
These models are not repositories or archives of others work that they simply stitch together to create output. It's more accurate to say that they view work and then create an algorithm that can output the essence of that work.
For image models, people are often pretty surprised to learn that they are only a few gigabytes in size, despite training on petabytes of images.
Not fair to consumers. Mega Corp created pretty metal cups and we moved off of plastics ones like nalgene. Vacuum sealed metal containers hold ice much better than glass or plastic.
Jokes on us, Mega Corp sprayed plastic liners and/or PFAS onto the metal for longevity. Same with milk cartons. Most of us didn’t know this until years later.
Glass is not an option for people with young children. I don’t want to pick up glass out of their car seat again.
NYC is notorious for behavior like this. NYPD, Port Authority, corrupt unions, and other mafia like behavior. It’s the reason they have a hard time updating their subway and other things. It immediately becomes a power grab for many parties.
In other cities like mine this would be big news. Not to say they won’t give other cops a break but the card system is corrupt at its core.
Yes I agree this tracks with the long history of NYC, certainly a fascinating rabbit hole but quite nasty to live through
NYC was once a political powerhouse and a bastion of corruption, using unfettered illegal immigration as a lever to manipulate votes and outcomes - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
Did you do it for nostalgic purposes? I buy the cartridges for nostalgic purposes. Most of the time the used games I want are only $10-$15 dollars less than a good Amazon or Target price.
I don’t think the younger generations care as much, they just play free games anyway.
> Most of the time the used games I want are only $10-$15 dollars less than a good Amazon or Target price.
I bought Zelda Breath of the Wild for 25€ while it is still sold around 60-65€ on my country's amazon market and is not available anymore in many places.
I mostly buy cartridge because I want to be able to play games regardless what happens of my nintendo account and I like being able to lend and borrow games with other switch owners.
I remember as a kid we would swap games with friends for a few months so we can have access to other games.
[1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...
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