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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • One way of classifying languages is grouping them into stress-timed, syllable-timed and “mora”-timed languages.

    Stress timed languages (like English) are ones where the time between stressed syllables is roughly the same. Take the phrase “I went to the store with my friend John”. Most native English speakers will stress “went”, “store”, “friend” and “John”. It might not be a big difference, but you’ll notice the “to the” between “went” and “store” is rushed, and that there’s a sort of gap between “friend” and “John” since both are stressed. (Also, if you were to modify that slightly and say “I went to the store with my friend named John”, the time between “friend” and “John” wouldn’t change much at all, you’d just slip “named” into that gap.)

    Many Romance languages are seen as syllable-timed, where each syllable takes the same amount of time. In French that phrase is “Je suis allé au magasin avec mon ami John”, that’s 14 syllables, all roughly the same timing. In Spanish it’s “Fui a la tienda con mi amigo John”, 12 syllables. Unless you’re really drawing attention to one of the words, every syllable there gets roughly the same timing.

    Japanese is mora timed, which is pretty similar to being syllable timed, except that when you encounter double-letters they double the length of the syllable. So, “Just a moment please” is “Chottomatte kudasai”, where the syllables with double-t letters take twice as long. The cities Tōkyō (two syllables), Ōsaka (three syllables) and Kawasaki (four syllables) all take the same amount of time to say because the “ō” symbol means that letter gets double the length of the standard “o”.

    The 4 most widely spoken languages in India are Hindi (way out in front with 44% of the population speaking it as a first language), followed by Bengali, Marathi and Telugu (with about 6-8% each) The first 3 are all Indo-Aryan languages, and Telugu is a Dravidian language. The 3 Indo-Aryan languages are considered to be syllable-timed and Telugu is considered to be mora-timed.

    IMO, what makes Indian-inflected English seem fast is that they’re adopting the syllable / mora timing from their primary language and using it in English. That means they spend less time on syllables / words that English speakers would stress and more time on the un-stressed syllables. The overall timing of what they say is probably similar, but in evening out the length of the syllables, they take time away from the syllables that other English speakers naturally slow down to stress. Since you tend to notice the stressed words more, since they’re rushed it seems like the entire sentence is rushed.


  • When I first code something up, I think of it as a first draft, and I expect maybe 5ish typos / brainos per 100 lines. Only a few times in my life have I finished writing a few hundred lines of code, tried to compile / run it, and not seen at least a few errors.

    When I don’t see errors, it’s almost always because somehow I managed to not compile / run the code at all. Like, one of my typos / brainos managed to cause it to skip that entire new block of code. Only once or twice has it happened because I actually wrote error-free code the first time. And, let me tell you, that perfect code sucked up so much more time than the more typical bad code.

    With the bad code, I see the various errors, quickly fix them, and those errors convince me that the compiler / interpreter has actually seen all the new stuff and judged it. But, with perfect-from-the-start code, I now have to go in and throw in print statements, or step through a debugger to convince myself that yes, the system actually made it into that function and actually did execute those statements.






  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlC++ Moment
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    4 months ago

    but you can follow any exception down to the exact line of code (or JNI call, I guess) where the problem occurs.

    But, it’s not really where the problem occurred. How often do you get a stack trace and the bug fix is at the line referenced by the stack trace? Almost never. It’s more that it takes you down to the exact line of code where the effects of the problem are bad enough to affect the running of the program. But, the actual problem happened earlier, sometimes much earlier.

    For example, NullPointerException isn’t actually the problem, it’s a symptom of the problem. Something didn’t get initialized properly, and nobody noticed for a while, until we tried to use it, and got a null pointer. Sometimes it’s easy to go from the effect (null pointer) to the cause (uninitialized thing). But, other times that “thing” was passed in, so you have to work backwards to try to figure out where that thing comes from, and why it’s in that broken state.

    Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it’s still frustrating.





  • merc@sh.itjust.worksto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    4 months ago

    So, what happens if you resurrect an 80 year old human. If they’re an amputee, they get their limbs back… but is it the limb as it would appear on their 80 year old body? Or, the limb as it was when it disappeared?

    Imagine an 80 year old with a 20 year old’s forearm.

    Also, how healthy does it make you? Are you as healthy as you were before you died? Or, are you returned to perfect health? Or very good health for your age?

    How does it affect dementia? Dementia is eventually fatal, but I don’t think it counts as a mortal wound.

    Also, if it closes all mortal wounds, what about non-mortal wounds? Say Bob died by falling off a cliff. He’s resurrected, and he gets back the arm that he lost decades ago. Meanwhile his other arm is completely shattered, but not in a mortal way. The rock that was piercing his chest disappears and his massive chest wound is gone, however he’s still bleeding from a dozen small cuts, none of which are mortal on their own, but taken together will cause him to bleed out in a few minutes.


  • merc@sh.itjust.worksto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    4 months ago

    The typical TV / movie / videogame answer to that is that any foreign objects are pushed out of the body as part of the resurrection. I don’t know how that wold work if you resurrected someone who’s currently locked inside an iron maiden.




  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlCome on Barbie lets go Party
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    4 months ago

    Socialism is not when the government does stuff

    Socialism is when the “means of production” are owned by the people as a whole rather than individuals. Capitalism is when the “means of production” are owned by individuals. Every modern state contains a mix of both.

    If the US is 100% capitalist, then explain how the fire department is a capitalist institution.


  • merc@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlCome on Barbie lets go Party
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    4 months ago

    Of course they are. How can you be so confused. Countries like the US are a mix of socialist and capitalist systems. Some things are owned and run by the government (socialism), other things are owned and run by private individuals (capitalism). No society has ever worked where it was 100% socialist or 100% capitalist.