Accents exist, you know.

“are” is a perfectly valid pronunciation of “our” I think, at least in some accents. Writing it as “are”, on the other hand does feel wrong.

I have a bunch of smart devices - light bulbs, wall plugs, etc. They all connect to Home Assistant running on my own server and I don’t need to pay any subscriptions.

IoT is not the problem, corporate greed is.

Well I did clarify I agree that the overarching point of this paper is probably fine…

widely accepted linguistic standard

I am not a linguist so apologise for my ignorance about how things are usually done. (Also, thanks for educating me.) But on the other hand just because it is the accepted way doesn’t mean it is right in this case. Especially when you consider the information rate is also calculated from syllables.

syllable bigrams

Ultimately this just measures how quickly the speaker can produce different combinations of sounds, which is definitely not what most people would envision when they hear “information in language”. For linguists who are familiar with the methodology, this might be useful data. But the general public will just get the wrong idea and make baseless generalisations - as evidenced by comments under this post. All in all, this is bad science communication.

So I did a quick pass through the paper, and I think it’s more or less bullshit. To clarify, I think the general conclusion (different languages have similar information densities) is probably fine. But the specific bits/s numbers for each language are pretty much garbage/meaningless.

First of all, speech rates is measured in number of canonical syllables, which is a) unfair to non-syllabic languages (e.g. (arguably) Japanese), b) favours (in terms of speech rate) languages that omit syllables a lot. (like you won’t say “probably” in full, you would just say something like “prolly”, which still counts as 3 syllables according to this paper).

And the way they calculate bits of information is by counting syllable bigrams, which is just… dumb and ridiculous.

I am pretty skeptical about these results in general. I would like to see the original research paper, but they usually

1. write the text to be read in English, then translate them into the target languages.
2. recurit test participants from US western university campuses.

And then there’s the question of how do you measure the amount of information conveyed in natural languages using bits…

Yeah, the results are mostly likely very skewed.

Yeah this Tesla owner is dumb. wdym “we just need to train the AI to know what deer butts look like”? Tesla had radar and sonar, it didn’t need to know what a deer’s butt looks like because radar would’ve told it something was there! But they took it away because Musk had the genius idea of only using cameras for whatever reason.

Why am I so cross? Because I am stripped my working people status by Starmer despite me working all my adult life and still can’t start buying a house, for putting a bit of my savings into stock, just so he can claim he “didn’t raise working people’s taxes”.

That’s just peak slimey politician behaviour.

Do I think people who own a lot of stocks and assets should be taxed. Hell yes, let’s tax those motherfuckers. But just don’t lie and stop twisting the definition of working people.

Edit: typo

Read the news please.

When asked by Sky News if someone who works but also gets income from shares or property is a working person, Starmer said “they wouldn’t come within my definition.”

I agree with you, but that’s not what Keir Starmer said. His spokesperson recanted it, but what he said originally was stupid.

That’s not what Keir said originally, he said people who own any stock should be excluded from “working people”. Then people got (rightfully) mad and his spokesperson had to recant for him.

What are you talking about? This is exactly what Keir Starmer is saying and is what I am calling stupid.

Okay, so (hypothetically) I can be working for 50 hours a week to make ends meet. If I put any little savings I have from time to time into stock, I am not working people anymore? Just because I want to be financially responsible?

When Linus becomes entertaining is when he is not doing his job properly.

That’s why what Linus said was stupid when he brought WWII into this conversation…

Well, I never argued for not sanctioning them. I just think it’s kind of fucked either way - if sanctions work, they start hating sanction imposers and band behind the dictator; if sanctions don’t work, then obviously they are going to praise the dictator for his good work. It’s lose-lose.

And I don’t know if you have noticed or not, unfortunately, the sanctions aren’t working that well… Maybe the answer is more sanctions? idk

Where should they move to? Countries that aren’t sanctioning Russia right now are likely to be… problematic? in other ways. But I am also pretty ignorant about which countries are on that list, and I would like to know more.

Maybe they need to become pirates on international water…

Not as much as living in Palestine or Ukraine.

Yeah, did US added more sanctions?

Sure… Their anger will be directed at Putin, not at who actually imposed those sanctions.

I am worried that these sanctions will make them band together and support Putin even more.