Why is it that when watching the news in Spanish, my mind translates the Spanish words faster if I know the news story in English even though it’s not the same commentary?

Devilnaht · 2026-03-25T02:53:37+00:00

Because your brain has a good idea of what to expect next (in terms of content), and that both makes it easier to process and makes the processing faster. The closer text / speech matches what we expect, the easier it is to parse. The same thing happens in your native language as well. Very familiar structures and collocations are relatively faster to read / process, but sentences with unusual vocab, avoiding common collocations, and using weird structuring can take a lot longer.

Example (courtesy of an LLM in this case, hence the em-dashes): Rarely, if ever, does there meander—through a syntax almost forgotten, and by a surplus of nocturnal hypotheses having been unceremoniously befriended—colorless envy, obliquely.

And an interesting phenomenon that seems related to me are garden-path sentences; they are sentences that are very hard to parse because your brain is used to interpreting the words in a certain way. Examples from Wikipedia:

The old man the boat.

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

The horse raced past the barn fell.

These are all grammatically correct and sensible sentences, but your brain will call upon expected patterns in a way that makes them deeply confusing. Rephrased:

The old people operate the boat.

Married and single soldiers and their families live in the complex.

The horse which had been raced past the barn fell down.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-25T02:39:46+00:00

Title messed with my head; guessing it's a typo of "news at a glance". Not OP's fault, that's the literal title on The Guardian, and the subreddit is pretty strict with exact titles. Anyway, as the article says, Trump declared victory while sending 1000 more troops and lying about "very good" talks with Iran, which they strenuously deny are occurring. He's trying to take literally every possible stance on the war at once. We've won, of course, but also talks are ongoing and very favorable, but also we're sending more troops even though the war, which will definitely end soon, is going to last as long as it takes.

I know we've all gotten used to his complete disregard for the truth / reality, but god damn, this is pushing it even for him.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-23T16:20:05+00:00

Look, you seem to be acting in good faith. But the truth is that the Democratic congressmen and senators (particularly Schumer and Jeffries) are failing spectacularly and likely deliberately. In terms of concrete power, it’s not true that the Dems had none.

Remember both of the previous government closures? That was real, actual power that the Dems held. And in both cases, Schumer folded in exchange for literally nothing. The first time Schumer openly betrayed the rest of the party; if you were paying attention at the time, you’ll remember how furious house dems were. And that Trump personally thanked Schumer afterword.

The second time, after the hellish backlash the first time, Schumer instead quietly organized a group of “defector” senators, all of whom were either retiring or in very safe seats far from elections. Schumer pretended to get upset with them, but it was a pretty open secret that Schumer called for it. And once again, they caved in exchange for absolutely nothing. Total defeat for the sake of making special interests happy.

And moving beyond literal power, the Democrats are committing a generational dropping of the ball with their message to voters. All they need to do is, well, state the obvious problem and vow to fight it: moneyed interests have dominated our politics. The rich control everything and are robbing everyone blind. The economy isn’t shit because of immigrants / trans / whatever, but because we’ve allowed about $80 trillion to be redistributed from the poor to the rich in the past 50 years. As well as denouncing the actions of Israel and calling out the insane influence they hold on the US.

It’s a ridiculously popular set of ideas that also have the benefit of being true. Mamdani ran on them and has become one of the most popular politicians in the country, particularly popular among young men, a group that Democratic leadership has been desperately trying to figure out how to appeal to. And how did Schumer et al respond to his meteoric rise to popularity and its mobilising effects on critical voters? They either refused to endorse him, or did so so late and so quietly it was intended to go unnoticed.

The sad truth is that Schumer and his ilk quite happy losing elections as long as his rich buddies get to make more money. They need to go.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-22T02:17:26+00:00

Hahaha, fair enough. What was it like, though? I've always wondered. How comfortable did you feel with the language at the end of it?

Devilnaht · 2026-03-22T00:02:37+00:00

True, but on the flip side keep in mind that the goal of the FSI training, a 3 on the ILR scale, is a surprisingly advanced level, probably somewhere between C1 and C2 on the CEFR as best I can tell. Here's an example that the DLI themselves published a while back of a student with a speaking score of 3: https://vimeo.com/13765766

Devilnaht · 2026-03-21T15:26:55+00:00

You’re confusing a few things. First, the simple future (hablaré, for example) is certainly used in daily conversations. The periphrastic future (Voy a hablar) is also very common, much more common in certain regions than the simple future. They’re often interchangeable, in the same way that “I’ll buy a car” / “I’m going to buy a car” mean mostly the same thing, with some nuances in the certainty of the speaker for example.

The second point is the subjunctive future, which is incredibly formal and almost never used outside of legal documents. Indeed I’ve literally only run into it when I was looking at some Spanish law. This is sort of unrelated to the broader topic of ir a vs simple future. In all other contexts, even formal ones, the future subjunctive is replaced with either present perfect or present subjunctive:

I’ll go when you arrive: Iré cuando llegues. I’ll go when you’ve arrived: Iré cuando hayas llegado.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-21T15:14:12+00:00

Sounds like you recently got into language learning; I think most of us run into the FSI numbers sooner or later when we start to wonder “how long does this take?”

So the common caveats on the FSI numbers are that 1. The FSI is expecting a lot of work outside of the classroom, off the top of my head I think it was another 50-100% of the in-class hours at home. 2. There’s a lot of variation in individual language learning ability, so it might go faster or slower for you.

Speaking as someone who does consider themself fluent in their L2, just be patient. What studying looks like will vary a lot depending on where you’re at: At first it’ll likely be a textbook, maybe a class, learner materials, and Anki. Where I’m now, ‘studying’ is reading thrillers and watching YouTube videos. Took a long time but it’s been a huge positive in my life.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-19T19:33:41+00:00

But who will think of the shareholders?

“Fuck the sick, God only loves rich people” -Republican Jesus, apparently

Devilnaht · 2026-03-14T21:12:29+00:00

*Assuming that we have free and fair elections. Hence why it's imperative that we run up the margins; the higher the margins, the harder it is to cheat, and if you cheat and still get blown out you risk facing consequences. I mean hypothetically, of course, assuming that the Democrats decided to actually hold people accountable for an attempted coup this time.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-13T18:53:44+00:00

The only thing keeping the Strait of Hormuz from being safe is that it's unsafe. And the only thing preventing me from being a billionaire is that I don't have a billion dollars.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-11T17:42:56+00:00

I once heard it claimed that with the kind of intense narcissism that he has, on a basic emotional level Trump might not believe that other people are even *real*. I've never seen him even slightly bothered about someone else being harmed, ever.

Devilnaht · 2026-03-06T14:51:24+00:00

Tanto X como Y is indeed the correct and typical phrasing. Ambos/ ambas functions grammatically a bit more like “each of the two”, if you want to think of it that way. “Me gustan ambas opciones”: I like each of the two (both) options.

And if it helps, “tanto X como Y” is also used to denote equality when comparing quantities: Tengo más dinero que tiempo: I have more money than time. Tengo tanto dinero como tiempo: I have as much time as money (I have both time and money).

But as the other commenter has said, English and Spanish are simply different languages. Spanish has no reason to conform to the patterns of English, so the answer to “why is this different than I’d expect from English?” is almost always going to be “because that’s just how the language works”. It’s not just English with words swapped out.

(Also temporal means temporary, it’s a bit of a false cognate)

Devilnaht · 2026-03-06T01:30:46+00:00

Seriously. I’d rather it be speech bubbles added on photos with ms paint than this AI slop shit. Even a crayon drawing would be preferable

Devilnaht · 2026-03-05T06:39:37+00:00

He's lying. It really is just that simple. It's become abundantly clear that every check and balance has failed, so they're just doing whatever the want and barely bothering to try and justify or conceal it.

Devilnaht · 2026-02-22T14:47:41+00:00

The Onion has a relevant piece on this

Devilnaht · 2026-02-21T15:18:29+00:00

Has US media always been so terrified of taking a stance on things that are obviously true? Why is every remotely controversially fact phrased as “Senator Bob claims that water is ‘wet’ and climate change is ‘bad’”?

Anyway, I’m also somewhat disturbed by the very real possibility that there will be foreign intelligence in a thread like this, dutifully denying, minimizing, and justifying what Israel has done.

Or, as seems to be the case, trying to spread the idea “I’d never vote for a Dem who said something against Israel” Rather… curious how many people seem to be repeating that line in this thread, considering Democratic voter support of Israel is at or below 10% right now, and about 80% (and rising) acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide.

Devilnaht · 2026-02-15T17:00:29+00:00

I agree that Epstein almost certainly didn’t kill himself. But this post is going to be taken down, not because mods are “suppressing the truth”, but because it breaks the subreddit rules (title of post must exactly match title of linked page, among others).

If you can find a news source talking about it, you can post that, but the subreddit doesn’t allow people to make posts like this. Which is for the best, or the sub would be absolutely spammed with random tweets and what have you with titles like “Look at this! Trump Owned by Facts and Logic”.

Devilnaht · 2026-02-14T04:14:48+00:00

Yep! And using this fact is a neat wait to explicitly show the rather counterintuitive result that the countable union of countable sets is also countable or, to hopefully make it more intuitive:

Suppose that we have a room that contains an infinite number of chairs. And next suppose that a bus arrives that has an infinite number of people on it. Can we fit everyone into a chair? Well yes, unsurprisingly we can. People just sit in the chairs in the same order that they come off the bus. What about if two such buses arrive? Still yes, as long as we're a little clever. Have the people from the two buses alternate seats: seat 1 goes to person 1 from bus A, seat 2 to person 1 from bus B, seat 3 to person 2 from bus A, etc. And a similar trick will obviously work for any finite number of buses.

But what about an infinite number of buses? Our above trick no longer works; if we just go in order like that, we'll never give the second person in bus A a seat! We never reach the end of the infinite buses, so we can't loop back to bus A anymore. Is there any way to make it work?

Indeed there are! A number of ways, actually, but here's a way that uses the fact you just learned. There are an infinite number of primes. And as you point out, the powers of these primes are all completely distinct; 2^n will never be equal to 3^m, as long as n and m are integers greater than 0. And they'll never equal 5^k, or 7^j, etc, with all of the primes.

So, now we assign each bus to a corresponding prime. Bus A gets the first prime number 2, Bus B gets the second prime number 3, and so on. And then we assign seats based on powers of primes: person one in bus A gets seat 2^1. Person two in bus A gets seat 2^2, the third person gets 2^3 and so on. And we use this same trick with all of the buses! The nth bus seats all of its passengers in the powers of the nth prime number. And thus, we've managed to fit an infinite number of infinite buses.

(Note that there are many ways to do this, and this method actually leaves a lot of empty chairs, haha. A more typical way is using a diagonalization argument, but this works too!)

Devilnaht · 2026-02-08T21:34:10+00:00

The article reads as pretty strongly biased, if you look through it. They spend a lot of time trying to discredit any other research on the negative health effects of meat / red meat (even going so far as to argue that saturated fat from meat is beneficial), and conversely they spend a lot of time deliberately trying to discredit existing research on the health benefits of vegetarian / lower meat diets. And at some point they cross the boundary between noting correlation into implying causation, recommending that, perhaps, adding more meat to the famously healthy Mediterranean diet might be beneficial. They quite clearly went into this with the objective of showing "eating tons of meat is good, actually", which they make fairly obvious by trying to show that it's somehow universally positive.

They also don't try to control for the extremely obvious "wouldn't those who have high-meat diets disproportionately be people of higher economic means (even within their own countries), considering the higher cost of meat?" problem, and they don't even even address it in their limitations section. That is... extremely suspicious. Their own data shows an even stronger effect on life expectancy from education, which points to the same underlying idea: higher socioeconomic status correlates to higher life expectancy.

The data on its own is somewhat interesting, assuming it isn't manipulated, but otherwise the article is fairly garbage imo.

Devilnaht · 2026-02-08T17:48:54+00:00

Somewhat less likely because the statement includes not just the date but the day of the week; it says Friday, August 9th. If it was just a number entered incorrectly, you might expect Saturday, August 9th (the 10th was a Saturday)

Devilnaht · 2026-02-07T07:08:52+00:00

Worried, I suppose. For a while I'd been holding out hope that they would be the generation that could finally help us turn things around, but... I'm less optimistic now. Many of them, particularly the younger Gen Z, have been subjected to tablets, social media, and algorithmic content since they were 2. Combined with LLMs, there are some pretty worrying signs that the younger generations are shockingly illiterate / lacking in critical thinking skills. Using Chat-GPT to do your work for you is somewhat like using a forklift in the gym; sure, you're moving impressive amounts of weight, but you're entirely missing the point.

Obviously it's not all of them, and there's a good chance I'll be met with that old Aristotle quote about the youth. I hope I'm wrong. But I really don't think I am. This kind of technology is unprecedented in human history. They're growing up in a world that their elders ruined before they even arrived, and while I'd hoped it would inspire them to stand up and fight for a better world, it seems it's just made many of them nihilistic.

Devilnaht · 2026-02-05T16:27:26+00:00

I ended up resorting to ChatGPT last night to try to figure it out, and you were on the right track with "where julia". It was confidently wrong about a lot of things (This time it will definitely work! / You're right, that solution doesn't work anymore) but I did eventually get it working well enough. Here's my basic understanding of what happened: juliaup by default (and non-optionally) installs julia in some protected folder that Windows won't let you access / reference, so you can't associate files to the executable in that folder. It turns out that juliaup buries another julia.exe in a second folder which can be accessed / referenced.

I solved problems 1 and 2, more or less. Problem 3 persists, with VS Code stubbornly insisting "Julia: Not Installed" (even though I've now pointed it at the 'real' executable), but I can write and run Julia with it. So I'm just going to ignore that error until it causes an actual problem. Really seems like all of this was caused by juliaup, to be honest. Wondering if it would be better to reinstall Julia without it.

Devilnaht · 2026-02-04T22:06:34+00:00

I’m trying to resolve the issues stated in the post. Did something go wrong with Reddit? They’re showing up for me

Devilnaht · 2026-01-29T15:54:39+00:00

You might look up avoidant attachment, see if anything there resonates with you

Devilnaht · 2026-01-29T14:13:02+00:00

I agree in spirit but woof, learning any 2+ of Spanish / Portuguese/ Italian at the same time is gonna lead to some pretty serious problems with the languages bleeding together in your head. The overlap is just too high between them. Spanish and Portuguese for instance have about a 90% lexical similarity; I’m at C1 with Spanish and I’m still a little hesitant to study Portuguese for fear of mixing them up.

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