merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner 2 days ago:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit
So, if Stack Overflow generates text based on any answer (or question) in Stack Overflow’s DB, it must credit the person whose text it adapted.
Good luck with that…
- Comment on Stack Overflow and OpenAI Partner 2 days ago:
Chat GPT generates plausible auto-complete text. If it has been trained on saying “this case was reported to your local law enforcement agency”, those are the kinds of words it might spit out.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
The annoying thing is that “I’ll go to work tomorrow” and “I’m going to go to work tomorrow” have subtly different meanings to English speakers, but good luck trying to come up with a rule to explain the difference to someone learning the language.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
The spoken language has more vowel sounds than the alphabet has vowels, even when Danish has added three extra (æ, ø and å).
That’s one thing I think English at least did right. Other languages added extra letters and/or diacritics to try to capture all the variations on vowel sounds. But, in most languages there are far more vowel sounds than there are vowels. So, don’t make things unnecessarily complicated by adding extra letters. The one language that seems to do it basically right is Spanish, where there are only about 5 vowel sounds and they use the accent character not to show that a letter is pronounced differently, but just to cue you in on which syllable is accented when it might not be the one you expect. (With a few minor annoying variations, like el and él).
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
English’s future tense
There are various future tenses.
Future Simple / Simple Future: Will + [base form] – I’ll eat that later; or Going + [infinitive] – I’m going to eat that later.
Future Continuous: Will be + [present participle] – I’ll be eating that later.
Future Perfect: Will have + [past participle] – I’ll have eaten that later.
Future Perfect Continuous: Will have been + [present participle] – I’ll have been eating that later.
There’s also using the present continuous to talk about the future – I’m eating that tomorrow.
Also, the simple present – I eat that tomorrow.
English is flexible, but it’s also weird. There are a lot of distinctions that matter to native English speakers but that are really hard to put into rules. Like “will” vs. “going to”. They have slightly different meanings, but good luck coming up with an easy to understand rule about when to use each version.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
What are some of the issues with Danish?
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
Do you know if that’s unique to Estonian, or also true of Finnish? AFAIK, Finnish (and Estonian) are a weird language branch in that most of Europe is Indo-European. Even distinct languages like Italian and German are more related to each-other than Finnish.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
What does willpower have to do with it?
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
Phonetically, put: /pʊt/ vs. putt: /pʌt/
ʊ is the sound from words like “book”, “hook”, “pull” or "should.
ʌ is the sound from words like “gut”, “double”, “butter”, “luck”, etc.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
I think English allows you more different ways of doing things than most other languages. The future tense being “going to X” and one of the past tenses being “used to X” means that new English learners don’t need to spend as much time studying yet another verb tense.
OTOH, the spelling and pronunciation is such a massive hurdle compared to a simple language like Spanish.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
That’s part of it, but I think a bigger part is all the countries that colonized the British Isles. English has elements of Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Old Norse, etc. It has elements of Latin languages from Latin itself to French. The British Empire definitely resulted in words being brought back from the various colonies, but the English they spoke then was fairly similar to what we know today. It was already this weird, bastardized Germanic / French language.
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 1 week ago:
All languages have quirks, but English is awful.
I only realized that the more I studied other languages, making me reflect on English.
Like, English doesn’t have a future tense. It seems like a pretty basic thing, but in English you say “I’m going to X”. Why do you use the verb ‘to go’ there? Why is that the way English creates a future tense? If you’re headed to the store now: I’m going to the store. If it’s happening later: I’m going to go to the store. WTF is this bullshit? “going to go”? Just stop and think for a second about “going” and “go” in that phrase.
And the verb “to do”, why is that part of questions in English? Statement: You have a dog. Question: Do you have a dog? What does “to do” have to do with any of that? Why is “doing” the verb that somehow is used to turn a statement into a question?
And then there’s “to use”. Using is to take, hold, deploy, consume… so why is it sometimes part of the past tense. Sure, you can say “I walked to school”, but if you want to talk about habits or routines: “I used to walk to school”. Why is “to use” even involved there at all?
That’s not even accounting for spelling and pronunciation which is just ridiculous in English.
We have a letter ‘k’ that reliably makes a certain sound, and a letter ‘s’ that reliably makes another sound. But, a huge variety of words use “c” which can make a ‘k’ sound like cat, or an ‘s’ sound like city. The letter ‘c’ has no sound of its own, it’s just a randomizer machine for one of the other useful sounds. The letter ‘g’ has one sound that no other letter makes, in words like “grip” and “great”. There’s another letter “j” that makes a different sound, like in “jet” and the name “Jim”. But, for some reason, sometimes the “g” makes a “j” sound, so “Jim” and “gym” have the same sound but completely different spellings, leading to bullshit like the confusion over how to pronounce “gif”.
English has roughly 20 vowel sounds, depending on the accent, but the vowel letters are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, and sometimes ‘y’. So, you’d think that at least those 5/6 are sorted and the other 20 come from combinations, right? Nope. In British English, for some reason “can” and “can’t” get a different vowel sound for the ‘a’, despite “can’t” being a contraction for “can not”, which literally contains “can”. The letter “u” can sound different between “put” and “putt”, even though you’re just tacking a ‘t’ to the end of that combination of letters. If you tack an ‘s’ on the end it doesn’t change, but if you tack an ‘e’ on the end… whoa, an entirely new sound different from both “put” and “putt”.
I’m glad the world is slowly converging on one language that allows everyone to communicate with everyone else, but it sucks that the language that came out on top is English.
- Comment on fossil fuels 2 weeks ago:
the specific argument you put forward is rather weak
I wasn’t claiming to pick the most environmentally destructive thing that people do. I was just picking a random, easy-to-understand thing that seems innocuous but still contributes to climate change. People know that driving cars is bad for the environment, but often don’t stop to consider that eating a banana could also be bad because of the shipping.
the problem cannot be solved from the consumer’s position
Not completely, but consumers can change their habits and make a significant dent in the problem. For example, “people sitting in tons of steel making short trips”. If people stopped driving, or at least significantly reduced it, that would have a real effect.
I’d argue that the problem can’t currently be solved by voting either. Yes, government regulation eventually has to be the answer, but right now there are too many people who would vote against that kind of a change, or who at least wouldn’t make it a priority. And, with all the fossil-fuel special interest money flowing into politics, even if it is a priority for a voter, there will often be elections where both major party candidates are in the pocket of the oil industry.
If people change their own personal habits (i.e. stop driving) that makes a small dent in the problem. But, it also motivates them to try to campaign, run for office and vote for other people who will make that kind of a change. If you stop driving you realize how much cities are geared around driving. How many hidden subsidies drivers get, etc. If you keep driving but just vote for candidates who talk a good game about carbon taxes, when they back down on those promises you sigh but you aren’t highly motivated to keep pushing.
- Comment on fossil fuels 2 weeks ago:
Let me just buy some locally grown bananas, in the north…
That’s my point. You can’t. If you want to not be responsible for those CO2 emissions you have to eat something else.
It is totally up to the governments to regulate emissions, with regulations.
Sure, but you also have personal agency. You can choose to eat beets instead of bananas. You can choose to pay to have an old monitor fixed by a local repair shop instead of buying a new one. Instead, people use the lack of government rules as an excuse to continue to live the way they want to live. They choose to blame corporations for polluting instead of their own choices as consumers.
If I want a banana, I’ll get a banana. I will have no idea or information whether it’s shipped with the shittiest fuel burning ship, or an electric locomotive.
Yes, because you don’t want to know. You will never do that research. Admittedly, the research is hard to do. It’s hard to do a complete calculation of all the CO2 costs of the entire chain of events that results in a banana on sale at a local supermarket vs. a locally grown beet.
People could choose to try to do that research, but they don’t. It’s hard, and it’s depressing. Instead they’ll feel good about recycling an aluminum can, and never think about the environmental impact of driving around the city in a car.
And will people vote for stricter emissions laws and/or carbon taxes? Some people will, many people will vote against it. Many of the supporters will also not make it a priority. And, if the party that promised carbon taxes and/or stricter emissions wins but then gets lobbied and doesn’t enact those new laws, very few people are going to go out and protest.
The government’s lack of action and the idea that corporations are really to blame for CO2 emissions is a convenient way for people to continue to live their massive energy footprint lives, while shifting the blame to someone else.
- Comment on fossil fuels 2 weeks ago:
why aren’t these companies having to pay for the damage they cause?
Because it’s too difficult to measure, and it affects the entire world in a diffuse way, instead of affecting a small group of people in a really concentrated way.
If a factory’s process resulted in extremely loud noise for their neighbors, the neighbors would try to get the factory shut down. They’d get involved in local politics. They’d show up to town meetings, etc.
If a factory’s process resulted in a river getting polluted, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, but in a way that is hard to measure and tough to notice, they might get away with it. It would be hard to figure out exactly what damage is being done. Maybe cancer rates in the area are slightly higher than usual, but it takes scientists and doctors to notice that. Maybe that gets people outraged enough that some of them try to get the place shut down, but other people are going to be out there saying the factory is a source of jobs, and that maybe it wasn’t actually pollution that caused the cancers.
With CO2 emissions, the effect is global, and any one factory’s emissions are extremely tough to nail down. The affected people mostly aren’t local, they’re around the entire world. Even if they want a factory to be shut down, they have no leverage because they might not even be in the same country as the factory. And, since every factory does it, you can’t easily narrow the focus down on one individual factory. Plus, that factory employs people, and if you shut it down they lose their jobs.
So, that’s the problem with trying to focus on a form of pollution that is diffuse and worldwide.
The other issue is how would you determine the “true price”. The price of something being sold is based on the cost of the goods needed to produce it, any fees, fines or taxes the company needs to pay, what they think people will spend, etc. So, maybe you think the price should be higher. How do you arrange that? You could increase the price of the items the company is buying. But, that just shifts the problem to a different company. You could add fees or fines, but a lot of people hate the idea of carbon taxes, and when governments threaten them, companies threaten to move somewhere else where those taxes don’t exist.
It seems like you haven’t really thought this through.
- Comment on fossil fuels 2 weeks ago:
Exactly. If you eat bananas that arrive in a port on a ship, that ship spewed out a lot of CO2. If everybody changed their habits and ate something locally grown instead, those emissions would not happen (but other emissions might happen instead). Every CO2 emission by a profit-driven company is going to be the result of a person buying one of their products.
We live in a society, and the amount of difference one person can make is pretty small. Often all of the options available to us are bad. But, this meme is worse.
The ridiculous aspect of this meme is that it shifts the blame onto companies, and allows people to pretend that their lifestyles and choices deserve none of the blame, and instead it’s just some evil companies that are ruining the world. The unfortunate fact is that in this modern society, if you’re living like a typical European or North American, even if you think of yourself as an environmentalist, your lifestyle probably results in a ton of CO2 emissions.
- Comment on degree in bamf 1 month ago:
Take for example, here is a map of active fires around the globe, right now:
By “fires” do they mean fores fires? Controlled fires to burn crops, or burn land to clear it for crops? House fires? Bonfires? Campfires? Fires in fireplaces?
Ignition is a fundamental for fire to happen, and humans cause WAY more ignition events than nature does.
A car causes hundreds of ignition effects per minute. But, I’m guessing you mean a certain kind of ignition?
The timing and frequency of these events directly influence the frequency of fires.
The timing and frequency of things like lighting a fire directly influence the frequency of fires? Do you mean the frequency of out-of-control fires? Because otherwise that seems like a pretty obvious conclusion.
- Comment on degree in bamf 1 month ago:
The nodes are features
I think the fact every car is white is a feature.
- Comment on degree in bamf 1 month ago:
human drivers of fire is exactly what it sounds like
Dudes who drive flaming cars in stunt shows?
- Comment on Don't let it stop you from eating your egg salad sandwich, Karen! 1 month ago:
Whoever wrote that note isn’t great at communication.
“The refrigerator is currently heating items.” Ok… does this mean it is broken? Or is the heating intentional and this is just a warning not to put things in it that you don’t want heated up? Is this heating up phase meant to stop anytime soon?
“Thank you for your time and consideration,” for what? Reading the note? Is this a request that the refrigerator be fixed? Or is it merely a warning to other people? If we’re meant to assume that the fridge is broken, has someone in charge been informed?
- Comment on Please Stop 1 month ago:
It’s not an asset. A bubble doesn’t prove anything. Tulips were once as valuable as houses… until they weren’t.
The theory of money is a theory. The fact is that money has always been associated with a state.
- Comment on Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts 1 month ago:
I used to post nasty things when they allowed that. Then I used to downvote them. Then the ad blocker I used blocked them so I never saw them. Then I stopped posting on Reddit.
- Comment on Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts 1 month ago:
Yeah, I remember those fun times. See an ad post, look up their scandals on Wikipedia, post about those scandals in the comments…
There’s no way this will work unless they lock down those posts. If they want something that looks like organic engagement with comments that don’t ruin the brand, it can’t work anything like the rest of Reddit. They’ll have to have corporate moderators who remove any post that is even slightly challenging to the brand, because otherwise those will be the ones getting upvotes.
- Comment on Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts 1 month ago:
Fuck using his Reddit username and letting him hide behind it.
- Comment on Reddit's new paid ads look exactly like user posts 1 month ago:
And doesn’t bother Steve Huffman because you’re using his Reddit username, and by doing that you’re talking about Reddit, effectively promoting it. Stop using “spez” and start making it so Steve Huffman has trouble giving his real name to a real hotel, restaurant, etc. because they say “oh, that asshole?”.
- Comment on Amazon's Hidden Chatbot Recommends Nazi Books and Lies About Amazon Working Conditions 1 month ago:
rewrite stuff for you real good
I guess this is one way of proving you’re not a chatbot…
- Comment on 1 already gone 1 month ago:
Pretty good, but a bit busy for my tastes. I do support the cause though.
- Comment on Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B 1 month ago:
More traffic than Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Amazon, etc? That seems unlikely. Maybe they’re not counting any traffic from apps? If so, that isn’t all that useful.
- Comment on Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B 1 month ago:
It’s almost certainly going to do well enough that the VCs and insiders will be able to cash out. The founders will be centi-millionaires. But, people who buy in at the IPO price, I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose a lot of money.
- Comment on Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B 1 month ago:
I don’t know about “insanely”.
It’s not in the top 10 globally. It gets less traffic than Yahoo or Yandex.
www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
Compared to other social media it’s below Facebook, Instagram and even the dying Twitter. It might get more traffic than TikTok (which seems off to me) but unlike Reddit and Twitter, TikTok knows how to make money. Reddit has never made money, but the pitch to investors is apparently “as soon as we go public, we’ll be in the black, trust me bro”.