Zompist Bboard Again

i don't think this is determined (i.e. if inflectional language speakers come up with programming languages, they'll be more this whereas if agglutinative language speakers come up with them they'll look like that) but i do think there are some paths, conventions etcetera that English made somewhat ...

the more specific the vibe one has in one's mind the harder it is to stumble upon an algorithm that will generate words with that vibe, but i feel as if it is probably true that for any vibe one has in mind there is at least one such algorithm that will generate words that will fit said vibe. Ancie...

the more specific the vibe one has in one's mind the harder it is to stumble upon an algorithm that will generate words with that vibe, but i feel as if it is probably true that for any vibe one has in mind there is at least one such algorithm that will generate words that will fit said vibe.

I'm not sure i get it... all languages are going to have a certain frequency of each phoneme in general, however you calculate it (what percentage of phoneme X in a given reference corpus, what percentage of phoneme X in a given wordlist, how often it appears in some sample of natural speech, whatev...

A fair guess is that, if you know a king is coming, or an authoritarian strongman which is similar enough, it's in your own best interest to not be seen to oppose him: kings tend to be unkind towards those that publicly announce their disloyalty to the king.

yeah, shadow president implies that he has more power than the real president (or that the real president isn't etcetera) and that's almost certainly false: but it's pretty clear that heading a government agency that closes (or at least hamstrings) other government agencies qualifies as more power t...

So what does everyone think about Trump's efforts to acquire Canada, Greenland and Panama canal? I called it: he will meaningfully hurt the US's reputation as a trustworthy and stable hegemon in the eyes of us allies. (https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW170308012025RP1/) but I don't think he w...

only talking to, and listening to, people who already agree with you is indeed a problem within the left, that much is for sure. i share your enjoyment of arguing stuff, but to be honest as of late i've been loosing a lot of that enjoyment. maybe it's me becoming older and thus having seen more stuf...

maybe the point is that sex-age-income-region of residence are probably not the only things we should be controlling for in research of a scientific character? and like, yeah, there's probably all sorts of other confounding variables that might be at play. but then again, you can't control for 33 di...

your point is not absurd, but mathematically, it ends up being very similar to have a sample of 1k and 10k people. you only start getting significant gains at the double digits percentage of people, and that's WAAAY too many people, WWWAY too expensive.

okay sure, it'd be better to perform a census of the whole population, but you have any idea how expensive those are? nah, for most purposes picking people as randomly as you can is the way to go. see this is basically how the logic goes: whatever traits we can think of in a population, whatever cha...

Sure but it was hardly that long ago when the far right was taboo instead of winning pretty much every election where it has appeared on the ballot. Right now pretty much every country in the world has either embraced some form of reactionary authoritarian politics or will in their next election. T...

what do you mean *re*open? there's two million people in one. we know which one it is, but let's not say it lest we get explained why god gave them that land or whatever. and various assorted other millions in various other camps or similar conditions. coltan mines, yemen, sudan... they never closed...

It always feels like me and everyone I know have never have been asked to do these kinds of surveys and it is true! if you want to change this, i'd suggest joining an online panel. netquest is one of the big ones, but there's a bunch. most surveys are done in this way, at least where i live. which ...

Except for the small difference that one actively orchestrated violent deaths and the other allowed them through bog standard corporate greed and malice. agreed, the difference is small. What is surprising is that, with the ready availability of guns in this country that this had not happened soone...

damn! a richter 7 is no small thing. stay safe peeps in that region.

an american CEO of a health insurance company, one of the ones that most reject people's insurance claims over there, got gunned down in the middle of a street. apparently three of the shells had the words depose, deny and defend each, which is probably a reference to a book on why insurance compani...

To summarize, the problem is that: 1. The various interests in society will hire fancy lawyers to argue that helping them is the moral position. To your surprise, they will convince people. 2. As long as you keep capitalism around, the argument put forward by capitalists that raising profits is nec...

The whole reason for the new Democrat enthusiasm for laissez-faire international trade is that it is Economics 101 that costs introduced by tariffs are practically always passed onto consumers. Trump's tariffs will not benefit the average American at all. Also, they are a massive opportunity for gr...

I love how every mention of the objectively true fact that capitalism leads to irrationalities results in mentions of stalin. this is exactly the reason why it's easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism. stalin was a hundred years ago, or close enough. there are other options than neol...