The New ZBB Quote Thread

[Raphael]

All programming languages allow you to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ puts a loaded gun in your hand and paints a target on your shoe.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

different kinds of moral danger

Es gibt sehr viele Arten von moralische Gefahren .
There's many kinds of moral dangers .

[WeepingElf]

I hate it when platforms implement "upgrades" without ways to revert or get rid of them.

Software updates are a useful reminder that we're all living in the personal pleasure gardens of about ten rich psychopaths.

[Raphael]

Is "melodramatic" an English word? Back in school, I once used it in English class, and the teacher, who was an exchange teacher from the USA, thought it wasn't.

LOL. It absolutely is. Did you you accent the wrong sylláble or something?

(I only now noticed the "á".)

[Raphael]

Generally you can't words from a sentence, because then won't understand.

[bradrn]

There’s been some good ones lately:

This sounds like a variation of the popular "Semitic substratum in Insular Celtic" hogwash - and while I don't have it at hand now, I remember that the list of "Semitic" features in Insular Celtic claimed by those scholars contained exactly 17 items. Most of them have since been falsified, and the remaining ones revealed to be typological correlates of VSO word order, found in places as obviously former Semitic-speaking as Mesoamerica or the Philippines.

The difference in party squabbling is: the Democrats are a bunch of people who should obviously be allies but act like enemies, while the Republicans are a bunch of people who should obviously be enemies. It's a miracle that a party full of hungry tigers and large hunks of meat doesn't have more in-fighting than it does.

[Man in Space]

I saw someone ask ChatGPT to make an IAL, and it simply started describing Esperanto in Esperanto...

[Zju]

I once worked at a university that basically existed to hold a bucket under Chinese grad students and collect the patents that fall out, for resale.

[Raphael]

alice, about the chances of a specific idea gaining widespread acceptance:

Given that the idea can be easily disproved in many, many ways, I'd say the chances are quite high.

[Raphael]

This could be parsing rules favoring a more parsimonious genitive.

[foxcatdog]

2) It was 6 am before coffee.

[bradrn]

It is hardly an overstatement that in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, all verbs are irregular.

[Raphael]

As Alex Harrowell once put it in a review of some book about the Soviet Union, Soviet officials who were relying on the state as their pension scheme generally weren't that keen on the idea of their state actually withering away...

I was about to say this, but to its credit, the Soviet Union really did abolish itself eventually.

[Raphael]

On a positive note, decision-making currently requires a huge amount of work sorting bullshit or non-bullshit. Academic papers, political science, economics, philosophy... We all suspect a lot of it is bullshit that happens to sound deep, but we can't be sure, so we spend a lot of time doing the triage. ChatGPT provides an easy test. If ChatGPT can produce something similar; it's bullshit.

[Raphael]

The accident was less terrible than it could have been because the crew had two people in it, something the railroads have been trying to change for years.

[hwhatting]

we have Latin and Latin languages,

Ummm,,,, those are usually called Romance languages.

well except for romanian, which is generally classified under the sci-fi/fantasy genre instead

Thread win for Emily

[Raphael]

And therein lies the nub of the gist, the root of the problem, the heart of the matter, nay, even the crux of the debate.

[Raphael]

"French anti-tobacco advocate" is the most depressing, Sisyphean job title I can think of.

[Travis B.]

Another gem from the same post:

EDIT EDIT: OK, apparently French consumption is only 1% higher than the global average, mostly due to the fact that the average Russian is 43% tobacco by volume.

[Linguoboy]

Fun fact: Justin B. Rye, who's politically very far to the Left, but also very much interested in Linguistics, once expressed his opinion that "Chomsky should stick to politics".

Funny that; I have almost opposite views

I unite the two in the view that Chomsky should probably stick to something outside of both of those areas.