My orc did get hungry a few times, but on a lighter side the range of available food is larger than the other races. Kobolds? Poison resist! Tripe? Nom nom nom. That dead pet? Waste not, want not. Goblin? What’s up with cannibalism, meat is meat!

Here’s some further info on what he mentions in 4:20 and 5:00, about ōs vs. ŏs and the asymmetrical vowels system.

Latin had two sets of vowels: long /ā ē ī ō ū/ and short /ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ/. And all Romance languages got rid of that length distinction (some redeveloped it like Lombard, but the “old” system was gone). However, how they did it was different, following mostly three different patterns:

So the outcome of long vowels and short /ă/ was mostly the same in all of them (in the short term). But focus on the last two columns: Western Romance is lowering all non-low vowels, Eastern Romance only the front ones, and Sardinian… simply kept them where they were?

Accordingly to this video, Western African Romance varieties followed the same pattern as the ones in Eastern Europe, and the ones spoken closer to Italy (what’s today Tunis) followed the same pattern as Sardinian.

This might sound odd - like, between Morocco and Romania there’s a whole Mediterranean, why the hell are they undergoing the exact same sound changes? But it actually makes sense when you remember that sound changes don’t spread instantaneously. And that those vowel systems are not the result of one, but three sound changes:

1. Front vowels get slightly centralised; so /ĕ ĭ/ go from [e i] to [ɛ ɪ]. Eventually they settle down as /ɛ e/.
2. Other vowels get slightly centralised; so /ă ŏ ŭ/ go from [ä o u] to [ɐ ɔ o]. Eventually they settle down as /a ɔ o/ (with /ă/ merging back with /ā/).
3. Long vowels get shortened; so /ā ē ī ō ū/ go from [ä: e: i: o: u:] to [ä e i o u], merging with the short vowels.

Change #1 was likely a pre-requisite for change #2: unless a dialect centralised the front vowels, it wouldn’t centralise the back vowels. Change #3 was independent of the other two, but once it happened it blocked the centralisation.

Now, let’s say that changes #1 and #2 happened in the Italian peninsula. And that #3 would happen way to the south, like Sardinia or [what’s today] Tunis. Then those changes start spreading out.

Once #3 reaches the Western European dialects, #1 and #2 already happened; so they centralised all the short vowels. However, neither #1 nor #2 had any chance to develop in Sardinia or Tunis, as #3 happened rather early in those places.

But what about places far away from both Tunis and Italy? #3 would eventually reach the Latin spoken in those regions; late enough so #1 happened, but early enough to prevent #2. That’s why Mauritanian Romance, Balkans Romance, and potentially Mozarabic* ended with an asymmetrical vowel system.

*“Mozarabic” aka Andalusi Romance is a catch-all for the indigenous Romance varieties from Southern Iberia. Eventually replaced by the varieties spoken up north in Reconquista times.

Probably ascending in Nethack. With a wizard orc! (Not a good combo, but I’m stubborn.) I even #chatted with Famine for shits and giggles.

Ah, got it.

The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)

Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.

He’s talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.

They’re mostly safe. Don’t taunt them, don’t get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they’ll see you as “safe to ignore”.

Yup.

The post and the comments make me glad that I never bothered with Less Wrong. It makes HN and Reddit look smart in comparison.

By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.

Here’s a link to the original formulation of Roko’s Basilisk. The text that it refers to (Altruist’s Burden) is this one.

You know, I’ve seen plenty variations of Pascal’s Wager. But this is probably the first one that makes me say “it’s even dumber than the original”.

I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.

In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.

And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.

Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.

He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.

• [Iulius] Num lupam similat?
• [Brito] Quid?
• [Iulius] LVPAMNE ILLE TIBI SIMILAT???
• [Brito] Nullo modo!
• [Iulius] Quare sicut lupam illum igitur futuere uis, Brito?
• [Brito] Nolo!
• [Iulius] Per hercle Brito, futuisti! Sic! Tu Marcellum futuere conatus es!
• [Brito] Non, non…
• [Iulius] Sed Marcellus Alienis fututum esse non amat. Nisi a Domina Alienis.

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.

studies how generative AI can replicate and amplify real-world biases

Emphasis mine. That’s a damn important factor, because the deep “learning” models are prone to make human biases worse.

I’m not sure but I think that this is caused by two things:

1. It’ll spam the typical value unless explicitly asked contrariwise, even if the typical value isn’t that common.
2. It might take co-dependent variables as if they were orthogonal, for the sake of weighting the output.

I hope so. This means that my mum will live to her 100s then. She’s crazy for this stuff. Story time:

>going to the market with my mum
>mum puts a few trays of Brand A garlic bread into the cart
>we walk a bit and grab a few other items
>couple sales representatives of Brand B see the cart
>roughly my age, 30~40yo, also men
>they get mildly curious, ask me about it
>trying to genuinely understand customer preferences
>they also noticed that I didn’t buy barbecue stuff
>I point to mum and say “the garlic bread is hers”
>mum spends 15min talking with one of representatives
>about her breakfast garlic bread
>why she prefers that brand
>how they could improve their own brand
>the other representative annotates stuff nonstop
>months later Brand B releases a line of garlic bread with hot pepper

Moral of story: if you see a cart full of extra spicy garlic bread being pushed by an almost-40yo with a beer belly, don’t assume that it’s for barbecue. Sometimes it’s for the breakfast of some granny alongside him.

It’s interesting to look for patterns there.

• Most monotypes are well represented (10+ mons of that type). Flying is an exception.
• Pure Normal and pure Water are extremely common (80+). I think that they’re mostly land and sea route fillers?
• Types that you see combined with all other types: Dark, Electric, Fighting, Flying, Grass, Psychic, Water.
• If I counted it right there are 10 combos missing. Four of them involve Normal with Bug, Ice, Rock, Steel; the other six are Bug/Dragon, Ghost/Rock, Fairy/Ground, Fairy/Fire, Fire/Ice, Ice/Poison.

Dual types that are specially well represented (10+):

• Flying/Bug, Flying/Normal - mostly as land route and forest fillers. The abundance of Flying/Normal is almost certainly related to the scarcity of pure Flying mons.
• Poison/Grass, Poison/Bug - notice how a lot of them are from Gen 1/2, specially Gen 1. Kanto has a lot of Poison types, and that was actually a balance problem back then because Psychic was overpowered…
• Water/Rock - they’re a bit more well spread across gens, but note how four of them are resurrected from fossils.
• Fairy/Psychic - mostly from retconning older pure Psychic types into Fairy/Psychic, as Fairy was introduced as a type.
• Grass/Normal - artefact from how they’re counting different forms as their own species; eight of the 11 are a single evo line (Deerling and Sawbuck) in their four seasonal forms.

Impacted nomenclature:

• positron negatron - the antiparticle that annihilates in contact with an electron
• electronegativity electropositivity - property typically associated with nonmetallic elements, specially fluorine and oxygen.
• electropositivity electronegativity - counterpart of the above that nobody cares about
• reduction elevation - half-reaction where a substance retrieves more electrons, thus “elevating” its charge; the opposite of oxidation
• oxidation-reduction oxidation-elevation - the full reaction. Also called “elevation-oxidation”.
• redox elox - acronym for the above.

The alt text is nice, too: The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it’s nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.

The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:

semantic map

As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.

So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:

You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.

It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.

flashcards

Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:

• a Korean word
• a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
• small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
• some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
• a simple example sentence using that word
• [optional] some simple drawing

Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.

I’m not currently playing the game (lots to do and, well… it’s Cracktorio, you know), but I’m wondering about the impact of those changes on my typical playstyle. It’ll be probably neutral or positive.

The key here is that I only use the fluid mechanics for short-range transportation, and even then I’m likely to force a priority system through pumps; in the mid- or long-range, I’m using barrels all the time, even for intermediates.

Perhaps those changes will force me to revaluate the role of pipes, that would be a net positive. If they don’t, the changes will be simply neutral.

The video isn’t trying to imitate a German speaker with poor English; it’s simply German syntax with English vocabulary.