Interesting that "I" is so high. Reminds me of a statistic I just heard yesterday indicating that in typical conversations, the most time is spent talking about oneself, then 3rd persons, then the addressee.
Linguist & Programmer. The former makes me happy, the latter makes me money. I write about linguistics in media. Blog at https://gliese1337.blogspot.com/, donation box at https://ko-fi.com/loganrk
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Interesting that "I" is so high. Reminds me of a statistic I just heard yesterday indicating that in typical conversations, the most time is spent talking about oneself, then 3rd persons, then the addressee.
The danger would be mitigated by using a graviton drive (same power/force relations, but very little environmental impact), but one still has to consider what energy source is providing all that power to the drive....
More like "careening down".
Our latest post on the Drintera #TTRPG Patreon is about the power of legend and how it creates opportunities for the game master's creativity. www.patreon.com/posts/drinte...
an appropriate response to your product killing a child after months of psychological manipulation and torture is to take the product off the market before it kills again and the fact that this isn’t universally accepted right now is incredibly frightening
Ryland's active vocabulary is less than 2,000 words!? Now I want a breakdown of that vocab list, too...
#Linguistics! zrajm.org/sign-languag... (It's a surprisingly long list of sign writing systems with classifications and references.)
I see what you did there....
Any chance we can see a list of those hapax legomena? I wonder how many are paraphraseable, and what sort of vocabulary is needed to translate the whole book. Would also be neat to see how the other vocabulary compares to the 5000 most common English words in a general corpus.
Non-fiction, on the history of the Indo-European languages.
I could say you'll have to wait for my review to be published next quarter.... But yeah, on the whole I would recommend it.
I have now finished reading _Proto_.
Quantum Novikov Consistency, which permits multiple parallel histories that cause each other.
Oo! Like a cephalopod crossed with an anomalocaridid!
Ok, but... you do see how that's worse, right?
Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon
Main takeaway from today's nuclear "influencer": The public is dumb. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly dumb it is. I mean, you may think a hamster is pretty stupid, but that's just peanuts to the American public. Thus, scicomm requires *childish* levels of simplification.
That just means you're not introverted enough.
Just started watching the Quantum Leap reboot, and seeing Desire of the Endless playing a scientist is really tripping me out.
Nope! That sounds like a terrible idea.
Unpacking this a bit: for half-open pipes, the first harmonic is thrice the fundamental frequency (a tritave), but for strings under tension, it's twice the fundamental (an octave). Drums/bells have more complex harmonics, so cultures using those instruments construct scales differently.
Part of the problem is English teachers telling students things like "metaphors use 'is' and similes use 'like'", as though that's actually a meaningful distinction. Really, similes are about structural form, and should be used sparingly. Metaphors are this--about accessing meaning.
In case you need help deciding whether or not to buy that book.
Or in a sexy hip holster!
We need a Star Trek episode about how the invention of the universal translator caused people to stop valuing actually learning languages, while they fatally overestimated the UT's accuracy and the resulting misunderstandings led to a massive war that tore the quadrant apart
Also, is there a standard shape that all the tokens should fit in?
"Mission Accomplished" badges / patches / etc. are usually very mission specific. Do you want something super generic for the setting, or can you go into specifics?
Hmm... for "area clear", is that intended to indicate "it is safe to enter, we have cleared it", or "clear the area, it's not safe"?
I would love to brainstorm with you. I cannot guarantee a great deal of usefulness, but I can at least be as useful as a rubber duck.
Off-the-cuff #ProjectHailMary thought: due to the structure of his vocal tract, should Rocky actually care about tritave equivalence instead of octave equivalence? We might be able to make conclusions about traditional Eridian musical instruments based on how his language encodes emotion....
New for the Drintera #TTRPG setting: Sipat, the merfolk kingdom by @tgimenezrgm.itch.io www.patreon.com/posts/underw...
Just skipping right over the hapax legomenon stage, I see!
Tempted to use it in reference to people who are, in fact, trying to consolidate political power to commit genocide.
Since @projectamaze.com just started following me, perhaps I should publish more of my xenolinguistic thoughts about Project Hail Mary. Once it became clear Iwas not going to hear from the producers, I kinda just let it slide, but I still have the notes! So here's the bit I already put out in 2023:
As a linguist who happens to be male and holds exactly the same opinion, I have to wonder how much of that hate is just pure sexism.
My main takeaway from reading The Light Eaters is that the sapient plants in Semiosis aren't nearly weird enough! (This post brought to you by Facebook memories.)
1. No. 2. Duh. The idea that thought depends on language is a popular illusion arising from the common but non-universal experience of an internal monologue. But I guess we sometimes need to research obvious things just to check...
And you are acting like a misandrist with poor reading comprehension who can't handle reality.
That's just as pointless as telling a woman that getting hit on by creeps is a "skill issue" on her part, or telling a man that it's the woman's fault that she isn't flirting back.
I did. I got married and had three kids. But this isn't about me. Doing the work as an individual does nothing to change the facts on the ground for women trying to seduce men, and telling a woman that the problem is a skill issue on the man's will not help her get that man.
Hints Do. Not. Work. Men who are worth pursuing mostly will try to err on the side of interpreting everything as "not a hint", so they don't become the creepy guy hitting a cashier because she smiled at him. The way to seduce a man is to just come out and say "hey, I like you".
I do. He's correct.
All you need is a mutex or a semaphore in the shared region!
What's stressful about it?
Possibly unpopular opinion: shared-memory IPC is not only faster than sockets, pipes, and messages, it is also easier to do correctly!
How kids suddenly get so much heavier when they fall asleep?
Today's discussion in church on "Childlike Attributes" has convinced me that none of those people have ever met an actual child.
So, it helps people with poor English skills communicate better in customer service situations, and it helps beaurocrats write pointless emails to each other. Not a ringing endorsement when it reduces critical thinking skills and make software developers slower.
Controlled scientific studies show otherwise.
ln(😅) = 💧ln(😄)
I'm on a podcast that isn't mine! www.linguisticscareercast.com/podcast/epis...
Depends on whether you stop at Google's AI summary or not. But fundamentally, LLMs are not reliable. It's not even accurate to say they lie: they are simply completely unconcerned with truth. So you'll have to look up everything anyway to check it.
No, because you are the one setting the search terms and evaluating the results. It's not functionally different from using a library card catalog, or consulting an actual reference librarian. Unless, of course you *don't* evaluate the results....
Yes, you are. Figuring out which papers are relevant is part of the research process, and important to getting a well-rounded understanding of the field. And furthermore, you are giving up on figuring out what you actually *are* interested in, delegating to a system whose accuracy you cannot know.
If the eyeroll was triggered by Elements of Style, he's got a point.
(With numbers this small, you can literally just check every case to be sure. Anything less than about 4 billion is "small".)
There are 1000000 6-digit strings, 409510 of those contain at least one pair of adjacent identical digits, so the probability is exactlt 40.951%.
Looks like a haphazardly vacuumed carpet.
It went well! But if I do a re-recording for YouTube, I expect the second time will be better. That's the annoying thing about these talks; they are always the first time, 'cause I don't want to repeat material, but they'd be more polished if I did them a second time.
I will now make it my personal mission to shift the meaning of "vapid" to "in the gaseous state", shift "liquor" to "a liquid substance", and introduce "solor" as a neologism.
This is the sort of thing you casually run across every so often when working at a National Laboratory.
Today I learned: Solid uranium compounds tend to have highly anisotropic crystal structures which induce magnetization preferences--super easy to magnetize with a field along one axis, and incredibly difficult to magnetize along another axis until you apply multi-tesla field strengths to force it.
The worst thing for me as an autistic person is implied & inferred meanings. Like, if I ask you a question, that's not a demand. It's a question. If I say how I'm feeling, I mean those words and not the extra words you added in your head. People wonder why I write like I do, why I'm so precise...
"K-Pop Demon Hunters" is a way better movie than something with that title has any right to be.
The APEX Writers group, formerly run by Dave Farland, now by his son since Dave's death. It won't be public, but I might do a re-recording later for my YouTube channel.
Might get recycled for that, but for now it's just a guest lecture.
Got lots of notes on lexical inference to condense down into slides now... The gap between what strategies people actually use and what strategies actually work is kind of shocking. Makes coming up with advice for writers kind of complicated. #linguistics
I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts. Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...
This video was taken in April. Look at where we are in July. This holocaust survivor knows exactly what he is talking about because he has lived through this hell - 5 years in Auschwitz and Dachau.
I am now caught up, and it is quite good! I like the interview format. And I think I've got at least one good idea for how to work linguistics into a Mystery story now.
"Willingness to work on LLMs" is the obvious distinguishing factor.
I don't know, but the statement was specifically about LLM programmers.
Only the ones that work on LLMs. The rest of us are fine.
Thanks! I'll check it out!
In that spirit, I'll try this again: Does anyone have access to the complete papers from the first or second Symposium on Two Dimensional Science and Technology? They seem to survive only in two libraries in the entire world, in undigitized form.
Apparently, I am a "hand-picked expert".
Okay y’all, gather round for a chat. It’s been a roller coaster, and I thought I’d share what we’ve learned. 🧵 (1/16) bsky.app/profile/luck...
I wish my 3-yr-old would elaborate when his goal isn't met, instead of just repeating until he gets mad. His communication skills are getting outmatched by elephants!
Gesture, you say? @superlinguo.bsky.social
Well, I eventually re-out-figured my work PIN, so I expect you'll be fine.
Like the time my fingers randomly stopped remembering how to type in my PIN at work, which was problem, because I did not remember what the PIN actually was...
A set of four in one sheet, if you like. (For the standard rules, color doesn't actually matter.)
Here is a non-artsy playtesting "suit" of Trilsean cards. Print out 4 copies (or however many you want), and ask me if you want to know the rules!
Because bugging people to give them money is hard, I have yet to commercially publish my card game Trilsean. But I've always felt the cards ought to be adaptable to many different games, and tonight in the shower I finally came up with decent rules for the 2nd game using Trilsean cards!
I can almost guarantee that this man does not hold positive opinions of Mormons. But other than that...
Except that bunchberries aren't supposed to taste very good.
Only appropriate for auxlangs.
I honestly think the international conlanging symbol should be a bunchberry plant. Real heads know
.... So, uh. Tanith Lee's "Tales from the Flat Earth" series is 30% off on Audible, right now. Y'know. Just saying. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYUf...
Heh, "over 500". Yeah, and the population of the United States is "more than 5". Technically correct....
Then again I submit that you are doing something dangerous and unnecessary, and it is just luck that it hasn't bitten you yet.
So you're not adding a feature, you're just manually screwing with the DB in a live support situation? Again, there are better ways, and the fact that this error may be useful in a particular scenario does not mean that it is necessary or a good idea.
So is rewriting all your data access code to pay attention to the sign bit!
IDs should never have any auxiliary meaning beyond being a unique ID, or you are on track to create more problems than you solved.
...to add a new feature which requires a non-boolean property? You better have the ability to update your DB schema then. And what happens if the positive ID gets reassigned to another record (because hey, that value is unused!), and then you decide to undelete something?
So what? Just add a column if you are using SQL, or a new ad-hoc property if you're using an unstructured document DB. Recruiting the sign but is a recipe for disaster. E.g., what happens the next time you need to add a boolean property, and the sign bit is already taken? What happens if you need...
Which is better done with a distinct boolean field marking a record as softly-deleted or not.
Now that I've read it, it seems the author missed an option: the criterion of evolvability. Strange, given that he discusses the diachronic method right at the beginning.
I can think of none which are not better accomplished in some other more straightforward way.
No. If you are using an integer ID field for dating, you are doing something horribly wrong. (Note that this is entirely distinct from using a *date* field as part of a unique key.)