zerb | 7 years ago | on: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company
zerb's comments
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: A Rust macro that parses Java-like syntax and runs it as a Rust program
I was actually just toying with a similar thing myself. I'm experimenting with a system that generates abilities for a game within certain design parameters, then tests the games' balance by running lots of example games. I figured compiling a DSL via macro compiled down would be worth the upfront cost given how much testing I planned on giving each generated variant. Thanks for laying some groundwork in this part!
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Algorithm recovers speech from a potato-chip bag filmed through glass (2014)
I guess I stand corrected. But the practicality, as others note, still seems limited.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Algorithm recovers speech from a potato-chip bag filmed through glass (2014)
That would only be useful if everyone were outside, and you wanted a split second of many different people's conversations. Satellites move rather quickly relative to the Earth's surface.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Show HN: I made a tool that made me faster at Git
It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling
Privacy, other people putting things in your can, previous tenants and perhaps other flaws exist. That's why I think it best it be automated and take more than one offense.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling
I'm wondering how possible it would be to have garbage trucks identify valuable materials in trash as they enter the truck, so the city can fine someone who doesn't separate.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Trash piles up in US as China closes door to recycling
I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks of food on it, but I'm also not operating a chemistry lab here. I'm just curious what kind of process goes into repurification.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: The Bullshit Web
Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
What do you think of Wiktionary? That's been my go-to for a long time.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
Ah, thanks.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between.
There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?
In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.
Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious.
Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example.
I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
It seems there's a general trend in the development of English to remove tenses and moods in favor of instead more-strictly prescribing word order.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
They were saying each is tolerant of loss.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.
As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.
zerb | 7 years ago | on: First Successful Test of General Relativity Near Supermassive Black Hole
The more I think of it, while it's disappointing from a pure-science point of view, doesn't the lack of our ability to determine whether it's QM or GR that is flawed imply that each is already sufficiently powerful to probe any practical realm we'd care about?
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Also, this is an old issue, Google in China.
I'm sure they won't start caring what a few outspoken individuals think by this point.