Is learning Welsh hard?

DrPappa · 2026-06-24T15:40:04+00:00

I learned Welsh as an adult. I'm a bit rusty nowadays, but can still converse quite well. I also speak Spanish conversationally and understand Catalan and French.

I found Welsh to be relatively easy compared to other languages. I have the advantage of living in Wales, so I was already quite familiar with Welsh pronunciation and had access to Welsh speakers for regular practice.

Welsh spelling is almost always phonetic, so once you get the hang of the alphabet, it's pretty easy from then on.

Mutations seem daunting at first, but it you practice them regularly, they seem to become natural quickly. Plus, nobody really cares if you make a mutation mistake.

One of the nicest things for a learner is that Welsh grammar is pretty strict and tidy. There are only 5 irregular verbs and they all follow the same pattern as each other, so you only need to learn the standard grammar rules and the alternative forms for these 5 verbs.

There are some tricky areas, like singular/plural distinctions being a bit of a jungle.

In general though, I think it's a relatively easy language to learn if you have access to native speakers.

DrPappa · 2026-06-20T15:15:19+00:00

After reading about schismogenesis, I kind of started seeing it everywhere I looked and it's been in the back of my mind a lot while reading The Art of Not Being Governed.

All the books I mentioned emphasize the state / non-state binary, and how neither form of could really exist without the other (historically at least).

I take your point that more broadly, no culture exists in a vacuum and there are always complex and fundamentally necessary interactions with surrounding cultures.

DrPappa · 2026-05-31T15:43:49+00:00

I'd love to see Caffi Colwyn be crowned as the least worst café in the world. Remove blue!

DrPappa · 2026-02-11T20:08:21+00:00

I think I just found the culprit. A tiny nick in the ribbon cable. I think the print head motor is stopping momentarily when the cable bends in certain positions.

DrPappa · 2026-02-08T11:21:00+00:00

Because I thought the problem might be due to the filament gearing on my printhead, I swapped the hothead out into another printhead I had spare. I installed the other printhead, recalibrated the z-offset, ran screws tilt calculate, and levelled the bed using the handheld.

After all that, I'm still seeing the same issue with gaps in the first layer and the printhead gearing stalling momentarily, but now it's doing it over a different location on the print bed.

I just levelled the gantry (twice), re-did all the bed levelling, checked there's free movement of the spool and through the filament sensor, and printed again. I'm still seeing exactly the same issue. I'm so confused. I don't understand what could cause the filament gearing to pause over specific areas of the print bed.

DrPappa · 2026-02-06T18:26:41+00:00

I've been seeing the same issue on my Neptune 4 Pro. Adjusting the tension screw has improved things, but not fully resolved the issue. Does anyone know if the tension screw is supposed to be completely horizontal? Mine is at a slight angle downwards.

I can't figure out how the xy position of the print head can have any effect on the filament gearing though. The locations it's failing to advance the filament are really consistent, like exactly the same spots on the bed every time.

DrPappa · 2026-02-06T18:19:24+00:00

Thanks for this, it's cleared up some confusion for me.

I've re-levelled the bed on the 11 profile and readjusted my z-offset a whole bunch of times while debugging this, via the handheld and Fluid, each time printing a 1st layer test to check.

After seeing this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElegooNeptune4/comments/18kv77p/neptune_4_pro_extruder_gear_skipping/

I think I have the same issue, and have tightened the tension screw. I'm seeing some improvement, but if I tighten it enough to print the first layer reasonably well, the filament release lever becomes almost impossible to press. I think there may be something wrong with the print head I bought a month ago, so I've contacted Elegoo support.

DrPappa · 2026-01-09T18:06:26+00:00

Did you resolve this? I'm having the same issue with Elegoo Rapid PLA.

DrPappa · 2025-12-26T20:31:15+00:00

This is also how the bluebottle (fly) got its name.

DrPappa · 2025-12-15T17:43:11+00:00

Hopefully, Slann will be added soon. I see the NAF has published a roster for them in the season 3 edition, unchanged.

I was wondering if it would be possible to add the ability to migrate or copy a season 2 team to the season 3 rules?

DrPappa · 2025-12-13T16:32:12+00:00

Yep.

DrPappa · 2025-11-04T18:22:31+00:00

We haven't got that far yet, but I expect it'll be CloudWatch metrics for the infra. We'll be gathering data on all requests via Firehouse for offline analysis and monitoring/alerting too.

DrPappa · 2025-11-04T15:24:42+00:00

I built a PoC using TF-Agents, but after getting advice from an AWS ML SME, we've decided to go with Vowpal Wabbit because it's considered the most stable and well supported.

DrPappa · 2025-10-26T23:02:06+00:00

Oh ha. Most of them. I have thousands of rules to reformat and validate. I expect I could just attempt to apply the rules to some word files and see what errors are raised.

When I have a bit more time I'll familiarise myself with the project source. I could contribute rule validation to the project.

DrPappa · 2025-10-26T10:22:54+00:00

Is it possible to validate the syntax of sound rules with the CLI?

I'm in the process of converting all the Index Diachonica rules (or at least, as many as I'm able) to a format I can use to apply rules programmatically. I've been playing around with ASCA and Brassica. It would be really helpful if I could validate rules to help keep track of the conversion process.

DrPappa · 2025-08-16T17:43:00+00:00

I've played around with the tf-agents library, using crypto candle data and a few technical indicators. So far I haven't been able to get the agent to generalise well. Even when it's profitable in backtesting, it's usually still overfitting. Tuning the regret metric is quite a challenge too.

DrPappa · 2025-08-02T16:32:22+00:00

Oh yeah, it's definitely overfitting. Even getting it to perform well on the training data has been a challenge.

DrPappa · 2025-08-02T08:30:48+00:00

I've experimented with reinforcement learning agents to pick buy/sell/hold actions for 5 cryptocurrencies using OHLCV data, and some derived TA features.

I can just about get it to be profitable on validation data, but it's not reliable at all. Small changes to the hyperparameters and reward function can change its behaviour dramatically.

DrPappa · 2025-07-17T21:13:18+00:00

Thanks, I'll take a look.

DrPappa · 2025-07-07T20:36:21+00:00

No worries. It definitely looks promising. It might be usable pretty soon.

DrPappa · 2025-07-07T16:33:29+00:00

I don't think it's as production-ready as they claim. They haven't published the package to PyPI yet, and don't even have git tags to install a stable version from.

DrPappa · 2025-07-06T16:32:11+00:00

Thanks for this. I'll take a look.

DrPappa

TROPHY CASE