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Apparently there is a de facto conspiracy among Latin teachers to not criticize the quality of Latin learning resources they create? Seems not great. foundinantiquity.com/2024/04/1…
in reply to Daniel Filan



Good night, friends
🎨Xuan Loc Xuan
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1850266583052284260


Okamoto Hiroki
Something Forgotten by the Waves
From https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1850261113545404666/photo/1


Ulyana Tomkevych "Crucifixion Blossoming Cross", 2021
From https://x.com/solas_na_greine/status/1850257226495127706




Latin practice day 2


Liber meus latīnus adest. Habeō liberum.
Cūr is nōn in mēnsā est? Quia mēnsa abest.
Liber bonus est.
Numerus vocābulārum liberī magnus est.

#latinpractice



Matt Gumbley reshared this.



It's kinda weird that they bring up slavery as early as chapter 2 in Lingua Latīna per se Illustrata, ngl.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

@Ben Weinstein-Raun I kinda agree but at the same time, IDK, I guess I feel like it's treated the same way as "having employees". Like the story talks about this family and drops that they have a hundred slaves, which seems like a lot?
in reply to Daniel Filan

@Ben Weinstein-Raun a comment on a YouTube video reading out the chapters, which only slightly exaggerates


Start-up Idea: Content Recommendation Systems as the Product




Current Latin stack:
- Lingua Latīna per se Illustrata (w/ Scorpio Martianus reading it out loud)
- Colloquia Persōnārum (not sure if the vowel lengths are right here) (w/ Scorpio Martianus reading it out loud)
- Fābellae Latīnae
- Lingua Latīna per Pokémon Illustrata
- Minecraftium
- Exercitia Latīna

This is probably many enough that not all will survive, but we will see.

in reply to Daniel Filan

And I guess my Latin practice is "In Superstimulō multī amīcī sunt". Looking forward to having a few more words to play with - I would say I have parva vocābula but there's probably an accusative inflection or something.



child is 15 weeks old today

that is almost 1% of being 30 years old, which is approximately how old I am

... weeks as a unit of time are weird because they feel so short but you only get like 4000 of them total



So there's this mystery about why so many intellectual greats are in the past, back when the population was much lower. I wonder if part of it is this: maybe if you're one of the top ~5 people at what you do, you try much harder than if you aren't. So maybe in the past someone of some talent level was one of the top 5 at philosophy (or whatever), and that meant they tried harder to excel than a modern who's at the same talent level but who is sure that they're not the greatest modern philosopher because of all the competition.
in reply to Daniel Filan

A potential problem with this explanation is that extreme self assuredness to the point of delusion, seems pretty common even among highly competent people.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

A potential patch: it might be that the effects aren't purely internal / psychological, but also due to the way others treat you
in reply to Daniel Filan

maybe the bar for being an intellectual great was just lower in the past? you seem to be taking "the past was smart" as a given but I need a little persuading on that I think
in reply to Ben Millwood

I guess I'm deferring to our culture's evaluation of them, which IDK seems basically right to me.
in reply to Ben Millwood

I kind of had the opposite reaction, which is 'the intellectual greats of the past do deserve their reputation, but are we sure there aren't proportionate amounts of intellectual greats today also?'

I wonder if it's more that there's a fixed quota of fame for being an intellectual great, or something? Like it's easier for someone to become famous and go down in history if they're the one best philosopher/scientist/writer/inventor/whatever in their region. Whereas if there are 1000 such ones, even if they are producing equally good work to the people of the past, people don't have like a 'famous people Dunbar number' that could absorb knowing about that many people, so the culture gravitates to making just a few famous (either the best, or maybe people who are intellectual but also charismatic/notorious/good at marketing themselves).



After watching Frieren for 3 episodes I claim it is fine but not great. Am I missing something? Does it get better? Have I merely lost my sense of joy?
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think the very first episode is a little weird, but if you've gotten to three then yeah maybe the joy thing! I don't like almost any anime (...or actually shows at all) but I really loved this series.


Vegan French toast recipe


I'm quite pleased with myself because I just came up with a pretty decent (imo) recipe for vEggy Bread or French Fauxst:

Ingredients:
-silken tofu
-soy milk
-cornflour
-cinnamon
-salt
-pepper
-frying oil
-chonky bread
-syrup

Whisk the silken tofu and soy milk together with an electric whisk til it's more liquid than solid.

Heat some oil.

When the oil is hot, dip the bread in the Soy Concoction on both sides

Put some cornflour on both sides (I'm still not sure of the best way to do this, perhaps sprinkle some on a plate/chopping board and put the bread down on it, renewing for each slice because it gets tofu-y)

Fry the bread for a couple minutes on both sides.

Eat with syrup (or whatever else).

It's not exactly the same as eggs ofc but it did tick the boxes on vibes, imo (gloopy oily sweet proteiny). And looked very similar to conventional French toast!



A Cloud of Outrageous Blue
a book by Vesper Stamper
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1848778943329145061


Demonstrating attributes and competencies is hard?


Whenever I have to do a job application that's like "describe a time when you [demonstrated attribute]", it always feels incredibly difficult. Often, I can't think of a suitable instance. Do people relate? I wonder which of the following are true:

Maybe I just don't have these attributes/competencies, the apps are hard because I'm actually a bad fit?
-- But: sometimes I feel like I do have the attributes but I just can't think of a specific work-related time they came up.

Maybe most other people are better at remembering stuff that has happened during their lives?

Maybe these questions are calibrated for "you've had a 9-to-5 office job" and less so for my mixture of work/academic experiences?


A big part of this is that it feels a bit bullshitty somehow. like it's a very fake form of self-description.

in reply to Amber Dawn

I don't remember ever filling out a job application that asked questions like this, though I've been asked them in interviews. I obviously don't know much about your circumstances, but tbh I'd take this as a slightly bad sign about the place you're applying? Like, this question seems to me like the kind of thing that selects good liars (who can come up with / "adjust" an anecdote trivially) over people who have the property they're looking for (who have to actually sift through their history for something that matches). And so if the org is relying on this question at all, that's a slightly bad indicator about the kind of people who are likely to work there?
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Hmm that's interesting! The most recent one was for a social work program (I'm exploring the idea rather than 'definitely want to do it'), and I've heard that the UK civil service also uses questions like this (I do not know if this is evidence for or against your point XD)

I guess for jobs that involve working with people, they have to resort to questions like this because it's harder to test your people skills/soft skills in thte application process? Although, maybe there are ways to ask for written answers that capture some bits (e.g. 'here's a difficult scenario, imagine you're a social worker/civil servant and write an imaginary email to the people involved'. They actually already had a multiple choice quiz a bit like this!)

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Isn't it such a common type of question that if you filter out all such interviewers, you have no jobs left to apply to?
in reply to David Mears

Well, not in my experience? But also I didn't say you should filter them out, just that I think it's a slightly bad sign.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

tbc an individual interviewer asking a question like this feels different to me than if it's enshrined on the standard application form. Interviewers often have a lot of leeway in what they ask; it seems worse if the person in charge of hiring is like, "yes, this question is how we will determine who to hire".
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I see.

In British culture at least, I’m taught to expect and prepare for this genre of difficult (because memory-taxing) so called ‘time when’ question, and rehearse little anecdotes that answer “tell me about a time you did [a team work]”. And one is ‘supposed’ to answer this standard formula with another standard formula: the so called STAR format: Situation, Task, Action, Result. That’s the game people have aligned on. (Not that hiring managers should _want_ to have predictable questions…)



Guess what language has the second-largest Wikipedia, behind English.


Latin practice day 1


Ego in ¿Superstimulūs? sum - is that how that goes? probably not.
Ego nōn valeō - had a slightly rough time with a flu+covid shot today after coming off of a cold.

#latinpractice

in reply to Daniel Filan

Hmm, at least with comments, you can hover over the time marker to see the date. Not sure if that works for the top level post


Another cool #hamradio fact is that, since right now we're near a maximum in the solar cycle, around dusk and dawn you can basically communicate directly with any place on the planet. To communicate with daytime places, you use the 10m band, and to communicate with nighttime places, you use the 40m band. The pink speech bubbles on this map show people who reported hearing my 10m signal in the last hour. If I switched to transmitting on 40m, you'd see a similar set of speech bubbles but going east instead of west.

When the solar cycle is in a trough, only the nighttime signals get through.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

It's really a fantastic time to be on the air. The day after the CME hit us last week I found 10m to be wall to wall CW, digital, phone... you name it.


A slightly horrifying / cool thing I learned from doing #hamradio and in particular the FT8 mode:

Every 15 seconds, thousands of computers let out a wavering, wailing tone into the void. Then there's 2 seconds of silence. And then they do it again. Since they're doing this by sort-of "pretending" to be sending audio signals, you can listen to it: soundcloud.com/vartchcodpiece/…

It sounds kinda like a mashup of whalesong and digital ghostly wailing. Wailsong, I guess.

What are they saying to each other, you ask? They're basically having the same conversation over and over again. I'll tell you how it goes:

"Hi, anybody there? I'm Alice and I live in Appalachia."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I live in Bermuda."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and I hear you really clearly."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I hear you not-so-clearly."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and goodbye!"
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and goodbye!"



First human contact on #hamradio today! Set up a low-signal digital mode called JS8, that basically gives you an extremely long-distance but also extremely slow text chat box (~8wpm). After ~hours trying to get a contact, I ended up texting with a guy in Colorado Springs who's been a ham for 50+ years!
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Ah, sorry. Just a silly comment — if you're limited to 8 words per minute, you need to choose those 8 words with care.
in reply to JP Addison

oh yeah I see - I thought maybe I had said something that might get a "Phrasing!" on Archer 😅


Found here: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1848229979785671003/photo/1


David Gentelman, My Town 7
Found here: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1848230231288529300


From here: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1848239291043815904/photo/1


Feeling mixed on the slutty/poly culture I'm in




cat with newspaper meme

I should learn Latin

in reply to Daniel Filan

Current plan is to buy the Lingua Latina per se Illustrata books and go thru them also listening to scipio martianus' pronunciations of them, but only actually do that if continue to feel like it a few days from now.
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think this would also allow me to more forcefully assert my contention that "Italian" is a woke larp.


a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver 😅

Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?

in reply to Ben Millwood

They're popular enough among hacker-types that typical linux compat issues seem to be mostly ironed out (suspend/resume, graphics, wifi, etc.).

The main reason I'm not using one is because I want a silicon root of trust that can attest to the integrity of the whole effective TCB of the platform, and only their chromebook variant has a plausible story of even attempting to (TPMs don't normally cover the embedded controller firmware), but last I checked the chromebook variants has pretty limited max specs (not enough ram for comfortably compartmentalizing desktop workloads into VMs with the desired granularity). This is understandable, since chromebooks are thought to be a low-end market segment, but still unfortunate.

in reply to Ben Millwood

I bought a Framework several months ago and I love it. I installed Debian. I was also worried about whether there were practical downsides, but to me the problems have been indistinguishable from the other laptops I've used.



I've had a pretty fun first week of actually using my #hamradio license! My computer has now talked directly to computers in fifteen countries on four continents! Still working my way up to talking to other humans 😅


Recorded a podcast with Divia while I was staying at her house but there was a glitch and the audio is not recoverable, so you all are never going to know which denomination is right about Christianity.


Early 90's NYT crosswords are built different. I've been working through the earliest Saturday puzzles that are available in the app, and I finally solved one with no assistance, after trying 9 others. I can ~always solve modern Saturdays; I wonder if the difference is more in the cultural context or in the absolute difficulty.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I'm now pretty sure they're harder. I've switched to doing Mondays, which take me twice as long as modern Mondays. I think roughly three to five clues are notably dated in a given Monday puzzle; the rest are basically the same kind of clue as in a modern puzzle, just usually later in the week.


At ProgressCon. Had to help explain to another attendee what a "soyboy" is. I guess that's a good sign?


new #hamradio development: I'm pretty sure that this screenshot indicates that my computer successfully talked to a computer in Japan:


I wonder if I should modify my policy of arriving at airports one hour before departure for domestic flights, shaving down that margin to 50 min or so. I feel like I never brush with missing a flight and I tend to spend a bunch of time waiting around.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Then yeah, seems reasonable – the biggest variance on wait times is typically security, TSA pre cuts that down a lot in most airports, and the rare cases that cause a significant delay there are likely to delay a lot of people, which means a good chance the flight will be delayed as well. And domestic flights are typically pretty easy to reschedule if you miss them, unlike international.

There are caveats if you're at an unfamiliar airport or checking bags, but I imagine you're accounting for those already.

in reply to Daniel Filan

I recently had the unfortunate experience of an unreasonably long pre-check line at Newark airport. There was a lot of "wait, *this* is the pre-check line??” There were even signs advertising that you could skip this line if you get "pre-check clear." Everyone has a fastpass, so they invented a fasterpass.

(I think it would've been ~30-50 minutes of total waiting in the line if I hadn't apologeticly wormed my way up the line, explaining to people that I was about to miss my flight)




I made it to the finals of the Fog of War Chess Championship!




Midnight Sun - Yoshitaka Amano: Icon Aloft (1990)
From this tweet: https://x.com/xe0_xeo/status/1847019755355439221


A Thousand Cranes (full moon detail)
by Kayama Matazō (1927–2004)
Found at this tweet: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1846685050236244376


in reply to Sam FM

I think the thing that happened to my Stardew game is I ended up romancing an NPC because I felt like the game wanted me to, but I wasn't really into it, I just wanted to grow crops. Now I have a girlfriend but I felt bad for stringing her along so I stopped playing the game :P
in reply to Ben Millwood

don't date unless you want to: good advice for Stardew and life in general