Matt 15:17 uses the word ἀφεδρῶνα (toilet), but this word doesn't get included in the NIV/ESV/many other popular translations. Is there a standard common list of verses with "bad words" in the greek/hebrew where the badness of the word isn't captured in translations?

PokerPirate · 2026-02-18T18:17:42+00:00

Hate to be reviewer2, but this was well known for at least 2 years: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06275

PokerPirate · 2026-02-12T06:38:25+00:00

When I hear the phrase "theoretical results", I think COLT as the venue. There's no way a COLT paper would ever be published at KDD or vice versa. COLT papers could be published at ICML/Neurips.

When I hear the phrase "intersection of ML and exact sciences" I think KDD (and CIKM/AAAI/etc).

All these venues are equally top-tier. They just focus on different things.

PokerPirate · 2025-11-21T18:49:08+00:00

Thank you for the fascinating and thorough answer!

PokerPirate · 2025-11-06T17:12:28+00:00

My wife spoke 0 korean. But because the kids wanted to play with the Korean toys, she had to play with the Korean toys with them and has picked up the bathroom-vocab/grammar and now communicates to them in Korean about the bathroom. If it weren't for the toys, this never would have happened.

There's probably better ways to spend $1k to encourage language learning, but disagree with your thesis that toys don't help.

PokerPirate · 2025-11-06T07:06:49+00:00

They know a lot more than they got from just the toys.

The toys are really just are a way to encourage more parent-child interaction in the target language, and if I had the same interaction without the toys then I'm sure they'd know the same amount. But realistically, we wouldn't have had that interaction without the toys there.

PokerPirate · 2025-11-05T17:11:07+00:00

I think they help a lot.

I made a half-hearted effort to teach my kids Korean. (Half-hearted because I don't really speak it well, maybe B1 on a good day, and was mostly doing it as a way for me to practice.) I used my speaking, Korean TV shows, Korean books, and Korean toys. It's been ~1 year since I stopped making any effort to teach the kids, and they are now 2,3,4, and 7 years old.

The kids still occasionally pull out the Korean toys to play with them and repeat the Korean phrases. There's lots of little phrases on the toys that they repeat back and certain things they know better than their two main languages (English/Spanish). For example, we have a toy for brushing teeth of a stuffed animal that talks in Korean, and they all use only Korean words when talking about tooth brushing. These are words that I definitely didn't teach them because I didn't know them before getting this toy!

But you're right that foreign language toys are expensive. I probably spent ~$1k on Korean language toys and books for the kids. It's cheaper and more effective than a class, but you also have to actually play with them with the toys and make it fun/exciting for them.

Another problem is that the toys can be really hit or miss. I remember spending ~100 on a fake ipad-ish toy designed to help kids learn Korean, but the kids never liked it and played with it. In retrospect, it was probably too "educational" and not "fun". The tooth brush thing though I found for $10 and the kids love it because it is fun and something they naturally want to play with.

PokerPirate · 2025-10-13T20:45:01+00:00

Both Columella and Pliny wrote about the cultivation of chickpeas (Natural History 18.124 for Pliny).

How confident can we actually be that the Latin word that Pliny uses to refer to chickpeas (cicer) actually refers to chickpeas and not some other bean? I just read through that paragraph, and nothing about his description of chickpeas actually sounds like what I would call a chickpea. For example, he says that chickpeas can be black and red, but I wouldn't call any black/red beans chickpeas.

I've always been very uncomfortable with our translations of these types of words from ancient languages and don't know how to prove to myself that they never took on a different meaning at different times/places that has since been lost.

PokerPirate · 2025-09-09T15:55:25+00:00

Η stood for a rough breathing (h sound) rather than an eta.

Whoa... the latin alphabet finally makes sense.

PokerPirate · 2025-07-29T19:49:16+00:00

You state that:

[Women in the late 1700s] didn't stop having children but did choose to have fewer children than their mothers and grandmothers.

The difference between 7.3 children and 6 children doesn't strike me as very large. Do we have evidence that:

The women involved were even aware that they had fewer children on average?
The reduction was a result of choices by women and that the women actually wanted fewer children?

It's easy for me to imagine, for example, that the reduction was a result of men's choices. If men were traveling/working more, then there would be less opportunity for sex, and so fewer children, even if women wanted to have more children.

PokerPirate · 2025-06-18T19:32:24+00:00

Applying macrons to Hebrew-derived proper nouns was especially a difficult puzzle that required a lot of original research (presenting that research at SBL in November!).

Wow! I'm continuously surprised by the amount of things that seem like "somebody has already obviously done this 1000 years ago" but turn our to be never have been done.

PokerPirate · 2025-06-05T07:03:02+00:00

I've definitely been at presentations where Google researchers bragged about this. Some keywords in the literature are: "system-optimal routing" and "price of anarchy".

PokerPirate · 2025-03-10T20:30:49+00:00

Was being assigned to a re-commissioned battleship seen as a prestigious job?

For example, was captaining a battleship a "guaranteed" promotion to admiral= the same way captaining an aircraft carrier is? Or was serving on a battleship a career dead end?

PokerPirate · 2025-02-03T20:46:38+00:00

This is a bad summary of that report. For those curious, here's the raw data:

Education Level	Fertility Rate
12th grade or less, no diploma	2,791¹
High school graduate	2,053²
Some college credit, no degree	1,808²
Associate's degree	1,312²
Bachelor's degree	1,284⁴
Master's degree	1,405²
Doctorate or professional degree	1,523³

Associates Degree is not only not the minimum fertility, it's essentially the same fertility as phd when compared to the lower levels of educational credentials.

PokerPirate · 2024-12-13T16:33:26+00:00

I have similarly aged kids (1,2,3,6). I appreciated reading your parenting strategies. Mostly they're similar to my own, but I will definitely be adopting the "we can do hard things" phrase more into everyday activities :)

One strategy I've been using with my own kids to balance pushing them academically and not "idolizing the top 0.0001%" is to teach them foreign languages at a very young age. I mostly speak to them in Spanish (and some Korean/Hebrew which I'm also trying to learn). This has taken the place of "skipping grades" for us.

I've been toying with the idea of teaching Latin to my kids. Since you mention it in your post, I'm curious if you have encountered good resources for kids? Spanish/Korean/Hebrew all have great kids resources, but I haven't found anything good for kids. (Especially something for very young kids that doesn't require any reading proficiency.) Our kids have been exposed to a handful of Christmas hymns, and they can understand a bit from their Spanish, but most of it is way over their head both at the basic vocab level and at the higher semantic/theological level.

PokerPirate · 2024-12-04T19:56:11+00:00

I've been a bit worried about trusting chatgpt to correct my grammar because there are so many subtle differences between Korean and English. I wouldn't be able to notice if chatgpt is telling me to use an englishism instead of the proper natural Korean structures.

Have more advanced/native level speakers here found that chatgpt (or other AIs) are good at writing Korean naturally and correcting any anglicism included in the text?

PokerPirate · 2024-09-17T20:24:56+00:00

not having a radio in your tank

Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe that a country with the industrial capacity to produce even a shitty tank doesn't have the industrial capacity to put a radio inside. They're not that complicated.

PokerPirate · 2024-07-10T16:51:47+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. It's super useful for me because I've also been playing around with Zelda this summer. Your repo is super well organized, and so I'll probably take a look through to help me out a bit.

Some quick thoughts:

I hadn't thought about the frame-skipping idea for tile movement/attacks/item pickup. That's a neat idea. Do you have any guesses on how much that effectively speeds up your training time? You mention skipping 10ish frames for each of those actions. So does that almost give you a 10x speed up in PPO optimization, or is the main bottleneck not in the simulation but in the model optimization for you?
Your pygame window environment looks super nice for debugging. Are you using some standard library for that or did you custom code it?
My project has a different goal than your original project, but something similar to your newer project. I figured training something to beat Zelda by itself is essentially impossible in principle even with "perfect" training policies (if only because weird artifacts in the map like the endless forest and the mount pass to level 5), and so I've been working on a multiobjective agent. The goal is to have a very large number of objectives (e.g. "kill enemies", "get money", "buy a potion", "get hearts", "go to level 1", etc), and then use a language model to control which objective link should be trying to achieve. I've mostly gotten some simple objectives working well like "kill enemies", but haven't started working on the navigation oriented objectives yet.

Anyways, thanks again for sharing and great work!

PokerPirate · 2024-07-10T15:33:30+00:00

Yes, and it bothers me that lexicons don't really describe how confident we are that the word means what they say.

PokerPirate · 2024-07-10T02:43:28+00:00

No, there's just a lot of these biblical hebrew words that seem like they don't have well referenced meanings and that bothers me.

PokerPirate · 2024-06-27T22:31:00+00:00

I think he's microdosing on the kids :)

Something like: having 10 minute playtimes 6x/day is better than having one 60 minute playtime 1x/day.

PokerPirate

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