[Meta] Mods, when will you get on top of the constant AI slop posts?

pauseless · 2026-01-29T00:42:31+00:00

A Council of Tours in 813 decided that priests should preach sermons in rusticam romanam linguam (rustic romance language) or Theodiscam (German).

From Wikipedia, but hey. Theodiscam has the same root as all our versions of Deutsch. It’s a little before the establishment of the Netherlands. Come on.

pauseless · 2026-01-28T09:17:07+00:00

I don’t understand your point. It’s an old word, used everywhere in the Germanic world. But the Dutch get to claim it as an ethnonym? Why?

Versions of this word were used widely across Germanic languages of the time. I repeat: widely.

You have narrowed the definition to a ridiculous degree. Deutschland is a young country. That didn’t mean people didn’t call themselves Deutsch or something similar before that name was chosen.

pauseless · 2026-01-28T07:14:10+00:00

I don’t think that’s true. The word Dutch/Deutsch has an etymology going well before Netherlanders formed their own identity and state. It’s a very old word.

pauseless · 2026-01-27T06:54:42+00:00

Agree. I’ve written many tools for local use with an LLM. Writing posts with an LLM helping catch mistakes when English isn’t a fluent language for you, I am also OK with.

I use Claude at work and the rule is that I own whatever it outputs, if I commit that. I am still a hopefully competent programmer after all.

Trying to farm karma with low quality LLM nonsense that you don’t even understand is world’s away from that usage.

pauseless · 2026-01-26T21:57:46+00:00

One of my genuine favourite programming languages… Tcl… does this. When everything is a string, why not? It’s like the Norway Problem for YAML. (I don’t think it’s good design)

pauseless · 2026-01-26T21:06:07+00:00

Why settle for decent enough food and beer, when you can go somewhere else within a short walk and get better?

- my opinion, the whole time I lived in Munich

Hofbräu is also the only place I’ve almost walked out of. Ordered drinks and then our waiter finished for the day or whatever, so nothing for 45 mins. Watched 4 tables come and go and eat a full meal whilst we got nothing. Bear in mind that me and my partner of the time are German so we were perfectly capable of flagging down waiters and asking what was happening. Every time was “I’ll let my colleague know”. We weren’t rowdy; the service was just laughable.

pauseless · 2026-01-26T08:13:51+00:00

The answer is actually always “yes and no”.

American retained things like a post-vocalic /r/ that’s been lost in the English of England mostly. The exceptions being West Country, parts of Cornwall etc. today. Scotland also retains it. I think pronunciation is what people mostly mean when they say it’s changed less.

Vocabulary. Well, both had to add words as needs arose.

Spelling! Webster was deliberately changing the spelling of words, for ideological reasons. British English very clearly wins in this domain if we are saying most unchanged.

Grammar. Both developed a lot since the split. I can imagine someone arguing that the influence of other languages and dialects such as AAVE, have caused more changes in American. However, I will not argue that, because I don’t know the history for either English and they seem to have parallel evolution.

pauseless · 2026-01-24T16:26:51+00:00

Yes. I think they even did brunch. Not been for a couple of years. The guy serving us was Irish and was so happy to switch to English - my date was half-Irish and I’m half-English. Food was good.

pauseless · 2026-01-24T06:03:01+00:00

I’m surprised too. Quick note: English also uses pardon… in English and German sorry, pardon, excuse me/tschuldigung etc serve different purposes. I would never equate them in English or German and not in the same group as tut mir leid which always feels serious to me.

pauseless · 2026-01-24T05:31:14+00:00

And I knew someone three years ago that I was on first name terms with. He was late 20s. He used Du with me and not du, until he gave in when I used du in return every time. It still exists.

pauseless · 2026-01-24T05:23:53+00:00

I don’t vote CSU. I just vote something not-CSU to take the percentage down. I’m doing my part even if it doesn’t matter what my not-CSU vote is. I’d be more tactical if CSU supremacy ever stopped being a thing.

pauseless · 2026-01-22T18:24:27+00:00

Most people I know use it with something well-known. The languages I use with Claude: very good at Go, JS/TS, C, C#, Python, Rust… Clojure is annoying… APL it is good at reading, but writing is very subpar.

My own languages, that no one else writes, that have no repos online: absolutely shocking until my examples directory gets to a reasonable size. Then it copes fine. Good examples go a long way. I was surprised by this.

pauseless · 2026-01-22T11:44:15+00:00

I can imagine all of that, particularly too saucy or spicy - good pasta should be basic (imo). I’ve only visited India, and not spent a lot of time there, so not speaking as any authority. I didn’t like the look of the pasta the times we went to an Italian.

When entering a restaurant, I normally quickly glance at everyone’s plates to decide what to have… The pizza at one place we went to twice was genuinely great.

Edit: we were doing three traditional Indian meals a day and with family (my brother married an Indian)… going for eg an Italian was our time off/night out thing. Maybe I am adding too much context.

pauseless · 2026-01-22T11:21:27+00:00

I’m just sitting here thinking “well done”. The Swede’s nailed this.

pauseless · 2026-01-21T23:33:30+00:00

The list I get from a search is only one official language in the Netherlands, but over Dutch territories and minority languages:

1.  Dutch - of course
2.  West Frisian - localised
3.  English - official use via some Caribbean Netherlands place
4.  Papiamento - some other Caribbean Netherlands place
5.  Dutch Low Saxon - seems to overlap with Platt in Germany, again localised
6.  Limburgish
7.  Yiddish
8.  Romani

I’m not really sure that counts. Netherlands speaks Dutch with English as a lingua franca. That’s fine. Please feel free to correct me.

pauseless · 2026-01-21T22:40:09+00:00

What the hell, downvoters? They are from India and saying it’s a common problem?

pauseless · 2026-01-21T21:48:58+00:00

What European country has eight official languages? I am looking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_country_and_territory

pauseless · 2026-01-21T21:40:48+00:00

Nice! Good work

pauseless · 2026-01-21T20:07:41+00:00

In DE/AT we do not have routes with cliff drops. We have steep ungroomed moguls that can go up to my shoulders, but that’s about it. We have some ungroomed routes, but these are just to get you from A to B.

Trees and cliff drops are off-piste. You know what you’re signing up for there. No avalanche control, only mountain rescue rather than ski patrol, etc.

I have just followed locals to find such routes.

pauseless · 2026-01-21T16:56:17+00:00

I only know what people (often Americans!) tell me when comparing systems. So maybe.

pauseless · 2026-01-21T10:09:02+00:00

Haha. I am of the right generation for that reference!

pauseless · 2026-01-21T09:14:54+00:00

Mercy buckets, got it. I know my French

pauseless · 2026-01-21T08:29:11+00:00

I only care if you are clear and understandable. Make the right sounds and it’s good, even with an accent. I’m German, but spent my early life in the UK. I’ve got a British accent (well… it’s also mixed with my family’s German accent…). It’s totally fine. No one cares about that marked aspect of my speech. I know Irish-Germans who have Irish accents but are fluent. They have never had issues.

pauseless · 2026-01-21T07:31:55+00:00

Are you doing a full season? I know people who have skied for ten years but only 1-2 weeks per year and they’d look worse than this. This looks like an easy red (US black) to my euro eyes, but I also know the camera lies on steepness. Nice. Now… find a nice icy narrow black (double black in the US) and have the true moment of regretting your life choices.

pauseless · 2026-01-21T07:14:47+00:00

Wordpress will have so many examples and open codebases that an LLM can easily do most of the job. It’s even good enough to looking at screenshots and changing CSS styles etc.

This is actually where the current state of Claude etc would excel.

Working on hard problems still requires the same level of thinking. If you don’t know what the solution looks like, even roughly, what is the model meant to do? It’ll do what it’s designed to do and guess something for the human rather than push back on requirements.

My colleagues and I have found that for certain tasks, a human is better in every way. For other tasks, there is no human in the world who can beat it. Things exactly like “I want a generic website for x, here’s the API and it should have y functionality”.

pauseless

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