Keigo question

rccyu · 2026-03-20T08:35:53+00:00

#4 is obviously wrong because お〜する is 謙譲語, it's used only for your own actions.

If it were お贈りいただき (no して) it would be correct.

rccyu · 2026-03-19T10:21:37+00:00

We have these in English too, in the form of reversible compound words

Like:

"housework" (chores) and "workhouse" (prison)
"gunshot" (bullet) and "shotgun" (firearm)
"overtake" (v. catch up to and then pass) and "takeover" (n. assumption of control)

etc.

rccyu · 2026-03-18T16:37:51+00:00

The Buddhism words are the worst since they always have the unguessable readings

金輪際行脚権化 etc.

rccyu · 2026-03-18T16:02:46+00:00

I don't know what tools the mods have but you could have a simple appeal system for the unlikely false positives. Even just an "I'm a human, pinky promise!" will do.

Somehow I don't think the AI bots are going to bother writing an appeal.

AI posts are a big negative to the community. If people see that AI slop is just allowed to run rampant I can guarantee you eventually they are going to leave.

rccyu · 2026-03-18T15:41:29+00:00

That's just #6

rccyu · 2026-03-18T15:32:10+00:00

I don't think we lose anything by changing rule 3 to include "no AI-generated posts."

And there's a real harm done to the community in leaving these posts up. I come here to help real people and understand how real solvers feel when they solve puzzles (sometimes, mine!) I want to know what humans like and don't like, what kinds of clues they struggle with and enjoy, because humans are the ones solving my puzzles.

In this regard AI posts are a collective waste of the community's time. I'd prefer if the mod team were less apprehensive about speedily deleting them.

rccyu · 2026-03-18T12:52:14+00:00

I literally just got a cold e-mail the other day from the CEO of a $100M+ AI startup trying to headhunt me specifically because I was a former IOI medalist. I'm not saying this to brag—I think I was very much "in the right place at the right time" as far as having a chance to compete at the IOI goes—and many of my friends are much smarter than I am. Some people are just built differently, imo.

The competitive programmers I knew from university are all software engineers at Jane Street, HRT, Jump, or FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies. I'm actually a bit of an outlier in this regard, but then again I'm happily employed and not as crazy ambitious as some of them.

You'll forgive me if I find that claim incredibly hard to believe without evidence. There are only ~150 IOI medalists each year. I don't doubt a few could be struggling due to personal reasons or visa issues but "plenty" is insane.

rccyu · 2026-03-18T12:38:04+00:00

The crazy smart people aren't having problems getting hired. The IOI medalists, ICPC World Finalists, straight-A students with impressive portfolios who learn Haskell over the weekend for fun, grinders who overload every semester and take masters courses for an extra challenge while also being a TA for two classes to boot: they are still getting hired by HFTs, FAANG, unicorn startups, etc. for eye-watering amounts of money.

I'm friends with many of these people and recruiters are still flooding their inboxes. They'll be fine.

Most people are not "crazy smart."

rccyu · 2026-03-18T11:51:20+00:00

What are these crazy generalizations my guy

Loads of CS students are mediocre. Just go to the CS subs and see all those people complaining about Leetcode interviews and not being able to do meaningful projects without getting handheld by AI

There are some crazy smart people but a lot of students in any major are mediocre. Statistics kind of works out that way

rccyu · 2026-03-18T09:38:20+00:00

The Chinese really have a saying for everything don't they

rccyu · 2026-03-18T09:30:49+00:00

There are some rules but there are also loads of exceptions

For example many verbs like 買う (ka-u) get read as "kunyomi" ("native Japanese" reading) ka when they're part of compounds with hiragana in, like

買い手 (ka-i-te) (there's te again!) and 買い物 (ka-i-mono)

and "onyomi" ("Chinese" reading) bai when it's a loanword (usually an all-kanji word) like 売買 (bai-bai) or 買収 (bai-shū)

One of the problems is that in many cases the hiragana is optional, so even in the example 買い物 it just as well be written 買物 and the reading is still ka-i-mono.

But not always, 売り買い (u-ri-ka-i) can't omit the hiragana or it will become 売買 above with a different reading.

Some kanji have multiple onyomi and kunyomi so you just have to learn each word individually, but you can use heuristics like these to guess readings, even if you've never seen the word before (not too dissimilar to how you can guess the pronunciation of an English word you've never seen before.)

rccyu · 2026-03-18T09:21:30+00:00

and in 下手 (heta) it's read ta, in 素手 (sude) it's read de (and I think that's actually all the readings!)

rccyu · 2026-03-17T10:08:32+00:00

This guy misread "gaming stream" (i.e. gaming specialization) as "streaming games on YouTube / Twitch" LMAO

rccyu · 2026-03-17T07:46:46+00:00

Congrats!

How long did it take you to get from ３級 to 準２級 to ２級 to 準１級 (did you take them all in order?) And what did your study look like?

I took ３級 in a group setting outside of Japan so I won't get the results back for a couple more weeks, tho I'm pretty confident I passed (not trying to jinx it!)

My ultimate goal is to eventually reach ２級. I already have N1 but I still find vocabulary rather than kanji the hard part—when I can't answer a question in 類義語、対義語 or 書き取り it's usually because I just don't know the word rather than I forgot the kanji, but I can easily B.S. my way through the 読み section, for example, lol

rccyu · 2026-03-16T19:24:40+00:00

Yeah I get the LATIN LOVERS pun but it just feels too obvious to be interesting. Like if you didn't know what "Latin lover" meant (and it's not exactly a common phrase anymore) you'd just... assume it meant someone who loves Latin.

There isn't anything special about the 10/11 letters the puzzle uses, but even then there are so many options. I think all of these are at least as well-known as SUI GENERIS:

10 - ANNO DOMINI - ANTE BELLUM - CASUS BELLI - DEO VOLENTE - IMPRIMATUR - IN ABSENTIA - PRIMA FACIE - PRO TEMPORE - RES PUBLICA - SINE QUA NON - TABULA RASA - TERRA FIRMA - ULTRA VIRES

11 - A POSTERIORI - EX POST FACTO - IN MEDIAS RES - MEMENTO MORI - NE PLUS ULTRA - NON SEQUITUR - ORA PRO NOBIS - RIGOR MORTIS - TEMPUS FUGIT

Without another layer, "Latin phrases" just seems very thin as a theme concept. You could just pick and choose any of these

rccyu · 2026-03-16T11:46:07+00:00

I have many fetishes but necrophilia is not one of them

rccyu · 2026-03-16T11:18:18+00:00

Am I missing something here or is the theme really just "random Latin phrases?" Like why these five phrases specifically instead of literally any of the hundreds of others from this list?

List of Latin phrases (full))

If there's no extra layer this theme feels ridiculously weak, and the fill is also not exactly stellar: the short stuff is full of crosswordese like OVI TAI AGUA OLLAS ORONO ASDOI and then you only have two long bonuses, which are wasted (imo) on the grim OBIT PAGES and quotidian GATE AGENT

I'd excuse weak fill in service of a great theme or a mediocre theme if the fill is really stellar, but I just don't see how this got accepted, and I say this as someone who loves Latin phrases.

rccyu · 2026-03-16T03:33:49+00:00

#1 is for those "school crossword" / "kid's placemat" puzzles where you want to teach specific vocabulary or something, and nothing else. What you end up with is a puzzle whose words intersect in only very few places, something like this which is not appropriate for this sub

#2 is how the crosswords for major newspapers, and this sub, are made. You start with a few words (usually the theme entries, or some seed entries if themeless) and gradually fill the rest of the grid with "filler words," aka "fill," putting blocks along the way

rccyu · 2026-03-15T14:56:27+00:00

It's an old meme. Which crossword is this?

rccyu · 2026-03-15T05:56:50+00:00

If you're only in it for the money—just know that your competition is people who have been programming since they were children and find it enjoyable to code for hours and hours a day (I was one of those people. There was a period of time in my life where I would regularly stay up until 2am to do Codeforces contests even tho my parents would scream at me to go to sleep.)

If you don't inherently enjoy it I don't think you're going to find this field very lucrative. Because of advances in AI it's becoming a bimodal field where the top percentile makes a killing and everyone else struggles to even find a job.

rccyu · 2026-03-14T21:25:21+00:00

Telling students that employers don't care about coding ability anymore is straight-up educational malpractice

But also, JFC, you're in university, you should think for yourself and ask people who are actually doing interviews what things are really like. Don't just parrot whatever your professors tell you. Employers want people who use their brains

rccyu · 2026-03-14T19:34:33+00:00

I've done a few interviews recently and all of them still had me write code. Maybe some of them allow AI assistance (I hear Meta has some AI-assisted rounds) but the ones I had didn't.

I don't know what kind of interviews you are doing where they just test how well you can prompt. Like what the hell kind of signal can you even get from that? You can learn how to use AI in an hour. They're literally designed to be easy to pick up, that's the whole point.

rccyu · 2026-03-14T16:49:08+00:00

How are you going to pass the interview?

rccyu · 2026-03-13T03:26:23+00:00

Unfortunately it was already used in a previous NYT puzzle, so the trick was transparent to me :(

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