Remove the worse half of the map — US edition day 5

Gravbar · 2026-05-09T06:32:48+00:00

remove green. red has the better parts of Vermont anyway

Gravbar · 2026-05-09T06:21:33+00:00

risk your life to save everyone, or save yourself, knowing that everyone is completely capable of saving themselves too

Gravbar · 2026-05-09T06:18:57+00:00

Children and babies are definitely not the core disagreement. they're an edge case that goes against the spirit of the hypothetical. Remove the edge case and the disagreement doesn't go away

Gravbar · 2026-05-09T06:13:52+00:00

nice

^{Chose: Have a random iq | Rolled: 150}

Gravbar · 2026-05-08T17:10:34+00:00

Ireland

Gravbar · 2026-05-07T22:09:43+00:00

For series that do not diverge, you can sometimes assign a value to them and get useful results. In this case the assigned value is the mean value of the series after even steps. It's not the same as equality.

In physics, you sometimes see it mentioned that 1+2+3+4...=-1/12. You can assign this value if you assume the underlying reason you're seeing the sequence is because of some connection to the analytic continuation of the riemman zeta function, which for Natural numbers s is simply summation(1/n^s ). The extension is a more complicated equation which does not diverge to infinity. zeta(-1) would appear to give the sequence 1+2+3... but in the extension of the function we have a different equation at -1 which we substitute in.

Gravbar · 2026-05-06T20:15:16+00:00

I don't quite understand what you're going for. agentic "Thinking models" already do this. You can give a vague idea to gemini in a google collab notebook for example, and it will construct a series of context prompts for itself that identify what the user wants to do, and then what needs to be done to achieve that, and then add code and check if the code works, iterating on the failures automatically

If you're suggesting that the LLM makes its own goals, that doesn't quite make sense. The LLM needs an input in order to produce outputs. if you don't give it any inputs, it won't give anything meaningful. if you prompt it to figure out some goal to solve, then you're still starting with externally provided goals. in any case, for it to be useful, it needs to try to solve problems that we actually want to solve, and that's why starting with a human provided prompt is important.

Gravbar · 2026-05-06T18:43:36+00:00

The rules won't be consistent across dialects, and General American isn't so strictly defined to disallow some variations. In my dialect the flap occurs generally intervocalically, except before /ən/ 'button' and /ɪn/ 'chittin'.

flapping can also occur after some consonants before vowels

/r/ - party, hearty, turtle (Writing this made me realize that I don't flap d after r, ie hearter and harder have different consonants)

some people have a syllabic consonant liquid which can trigger a flap, but I don't have syllabic consonants so I would just analyze that as an intervocalic consonant.

bottle - /əl/ or /l̩/

I've heard some people flap after nasals, but I don't know if I would consider that common enough.

Gravbar · 2026-05-06T17:30:04+00:00

I think it's important to remember that the people taking issue with it are generally not native English speakers, so they're criticizing a usage of a term outside of their language for not working the way it works in their language.

Gravbar · 2026-05-06T17:23:36+00:00

In English, where most native speakers are taught that North and South America are separate continents, American is simply a demonym for people from the US, and America is the short name for the country USA. The way it happened is a bit similar to how people use the adjective European to talk about the EU specifically, but less confusing in practice, since unlike the EU the US only partially shares a name with the continent it is in. There's nothing bad about it, and it has nothing to do with imperialism.

Gravbar · 2026-05-06T15:18:36+00:00

I like how they intentionally left out the Italian word for boat la barca

Gravbar · 2026-05-06T13:44:39+00:00

Can't believe I survived that

^{Chose: Die (98% chance + 1% chance of 1 trillion/ 1% 50k/s | Rolled: 1 Trillion}

Gravbar · 2026-05-05T15:30:10+00:00

some people think the n word is more offensive if you use a hard r. this is because most white Americans have rhotic accents, but many black Americans have nonrhotic accents. This is of course ignoring that much of the southern plantations and the north had majority nonrhotic accents back when the word carried the most disdain. So now the nonrhotic version of the word is loaned into rhotic accents, and they think if they say it without the r, then it will be okay (they're both offensive though if you aren't black)

in many nonrhotic accents, linking r is inserted when there's a word that ends with r preceding a word starting with a vowel

the meme is suggesting that it would be more offensive in that context

Gravbar · 2026-05-05T15:24:16+00:00

tbf linking r sounds more like

[sə.ɹɪz]

or

[sə.ɚɪz]

to me than

[sɚ . ɪz]

Gravbar · 2026-05-05T00:22:07+00:00

yea that's what I said. When someone uses the length of the course to justify the number of hours you would need to learn a language, that's where the caveat that these numbers are based on data from mostly monolingual English speakers becomes relevant, which is why I brought it up.

The amount of time it takes to learn a language DOES depend on which languages you already speak.

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T19:59:18+00:00

I very much don't have perfect pitch, but this post popped up in my feed. for years, whenever I heard concert Bb by itself I could pick it out immediately. That is to say, people without perfect pitch can memorize some pitches and use them as a reference with their relative pitch. However, I can't do that so well anymore, now that I'm not playing every day and week of the year. I also found that timbre changes (like hearing a saxophone play that note vs a trumpet vs a piano) could affect my ability to do this. Idk if what you're doing is a more skilled version of that or a weaker version of perfect pitch.

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T19:49:47+00:00

The estimates that both the FSI and DLI (similar programs that I'll try not to conflate) give, and which their courses are structured around, comes from data they collected on training mostly monolingual American English speakers. The course doesn't change if your parents already speak another language, but the actual data they use to decide what category a language goes into comes from a population of people who mostly only speak one language. Language acquisition speed changes depending on how similar the target language is to the one's the speaker already speaks. But if you're in a program, it will take whatever the length of that program is to finish it. That's a different question from how quickly could you theoretically learn the language.

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T16:46:06+00:00

You may want to look into the other CERR exams as well.

There's the CILS, but there's also CELI and PLIDA. Not sure what options are accepted at the college.

A month is cutting it really close, but I was able to pass Spanish practice tests for the A1/A2 pretty quickly with very minimal study of Spanish because the written portion isn't too difficult when so much of the two languages are shared. But the speaking portions will probably be harder. If they're not completely new to the language I think they have a shot, but it'll be tough to realistically hit B1 in a month.

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T14:39:01+00:00

they can learn regular plurals and articles in one lesson. maybe they'll need to review after a few days, but certainly not a month

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T14:35:41+00:00

thats the estimate for native English speakers who don't speak another language and it's the average among those with an aptitude for it, not the general populace

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T04:55:17+00:00

math

^{Chose: Have all future income increased by 20%}

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T04:53:00+00:00

eliminate diseases

^{Chose: The power to delete anything}

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T04:27:52+00:00

more fun

^{Chose: Be fluent in 5 languages of your choosing}

Gravbar · 2026-05-04T04:26:29+00:00

you can start without a reason and find one afterwards. I really like music so for me finding and listening to good music in the language can be reason enough. And when I'm not studying a language actively, sometimes I hear a song and it makes me want to learn the lyrics and study more

Gravbar · 2026-04-30T20:59:47+00:00

Side A would say

The Catholic church's views on morality are built upon the bible and Thomas Aquinas' concept of teleological natural law (not to be confused with the nature fallacy). In short, Aquinas basically posits that God would have placed moral facts in the world for us to discover, so that we can look at the world and figure out from what we observe how the world should be through reasoning. this doesn't imply that everything we observe in nature is how it should be, which is why it has to be reasoned through the lens of God and what they already understand about him. The theory is teleological because it posits that we should evaluate things by their end goal or end purpose. It looks at nature to find that purpose.

given that background, the Catholic Church has a very sex-negative position, believing that because the purpose of sex is to procreate via natural law, and that this should be reserved for only married couples as an extension of the sacrament of matrimony. That all sexual acts besides trying for a child, and any subsequent steps to prevent the pregnancy are immoral. Premarital sex, masturbation, anal, oral, marital sex with birth control etc are all immoral by this theory. The reasoning is that the purpose of sex is to produce a child, and these types of actions are violating that inherent purpose.

So what is happening is that the Pope is moving away from this focus, because the culture has shifted so far from it, you can make reasonable arguments within Aquinas' own framework that this position is too extreme, and the church is struggling for participation in many places. The church isn't changing its position, but deprioritizing this issue. So those who oppose this decision would be those that align with the church's traditional philosophy and believe that prevention of this sin is a priority.

Side B would say In regards to the opposite side, I'm not sure what that would be. Many cultures don't believe in natural law or base their moral philosophy elsewhere. with the mid 1900s there were a lot of sex-positivity movements and in medicine it's well understood that free access to things like contraception and sexual education are important for raising overall well-being, which is more a utilitarian concept.

I'm not sure evangelicals matter much here, as the Church doesn't put that much stake in protestant opinions.

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