So if you want to remember how to spell "phone", you first have to remember "puh-hon-eh"? I'm not sure that'd be an improvement. How do you even make a phonetic word out of something like "rough"?
The problem will always be that that English has a lot more phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn Esperanto instead.[1]
Not that hard. Not perfect either (hs are difficult to pronounce) but still helpful. It could easily become a game for children to talk to each other in this "secret language". And by doing so, they would be memorising the correct spelling of the words.
See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.
This is all absolutely correct. To amplify this point for people unfamiliar with it, the two creation stories are:
1. God separates the light from the darkness, the earth from the water, and creates all the plants and animals and peoples of the world.
2. The LORD God creates the garden of Eden, makes Adam from mud and Eve from his rib, plants a tree of knowledge and tree of life, etc.
Already there's a divergence: Adam is supposedly the first man in the second story, but in the first story, all the peoples of the world have already been created. But the more interesting divergence is in the name of the responsible God. This often flies over the head of readers in English, but notice that the first story isn't the "LORD God", just "God". This is because in Hebrew, the name of God in the first story is "Elohim", while in the second, it's "YHVH" -- a name too holy for Jews to pronounce, so they just say "Hashem" ("the name"), although if you're naughty you can say "Yahweh" or "Jehovah" or whatever. Why the difference?
A clue is that "Elohim" is a pluralised word in Hebrew. Once Judaism became fully monotheistic, this became interpreted as something like "The Wings of God" -- a sort of abstract all-encompassing Godly aura, rather than the pointed and personified manifestation of the divine, which is YHVH. But this is a bit of a tortured post-rationalisation, and isn't explicitly supported by the text. It's much more straightforward to read "Elohim" as simply "the gods", which is probably how it was read when the text was first assembled, with a henotheistic YHVH text being appended to an earlier polytheistic text.
Even the first commandment -- "I am YHVH, your God, and you shall have no other Gods before me" -- reads better as a henotheistic rather than a monotheistic text. It doesn't say there are no other gods. It pretty strongly implies the opposite. It just says that the other gods aren't for you.
Indeed. At 3C in London, the humidity seeps into every pore and settles into your bones. Riding a bike at 3C, unless you're wearing a balaclava and a ski mask, is an exercise in pure pain, as the wetness sublimating off your face has approximately the same effect on your facial nerves as being flayed.
Ok the other hand, -2C in London is crisp and invigorating and entirely preferable in every possible way.
Not a truck guy, but I like it. What I like the most is that it's not batshit fucking insane.
I recently visited America after a couple of years away, and spent a couple of weeks in California, driving from SF to LA. The thing which I found the most striking was the sheer insanity of the pickup trucks that were absolutely everywhere. These things were true Idiocracy-class monster trucks, which are clearly lethal to operate in any environment which includes pedestrians. In some cases, my five-year-old's head barely reached the bumper, and my wife's head didn't clear the hood. And these were highly-polished, un-dented behemoths that had clearly never seen a dirt road in their lives. The whole thing is clearly all about aesthetics and identity politics. Absolutely revolting.
(If you haven't visited the US recently, I think it's almost impossible to appreciate how obscene the phenomena is. 10 years ago, trucks were far more restrained, but could still do everything they needed to do. 30 years ago, trucks were fully half the size, but could still carry the same-size loads and do honest work. There's honestly no possible justification for their corpulent growth.)
Anyhow, this thing looks like it can do honest work without killing everyone who crosses its path. I really appreciate that. I hope it starts a trend.
I've been doing AI-assisted coding for several months now, and have found a good balance that works for me. I'm working in Typescript and React, neither of which I know particularly well (although I know ES6 very well). In most cases, AI is excellent at tasks which involve writing quasi-custom boilerplate (eg. tests which require a lot of mocking), and at answering questions of how I should do _X_ in TS/React. For the latter, those are undoubtedly questions I could eventually find the answers on Stack Overflow and deduce how to apply those answers to my specific context -- but it's orders of magnitude faster to get the AI to do that for me.
Where the AI fails is in doing anything which requires having a model of the world. I'm writing a simulator which involves agents moving through an environment. A small change in agent behaviour may take many steps of the simulator to produce consequential effects, and thinking through how that happens -- or the reverse: reasoning about the possible upstream causes of some emergent macroscopic behaviour -- requires a mental model of the simulation process, and AI absolutely does _not_ have that. It doesn't know that it doesn't have that, and will therefore hallucinate wildly as it grasps at an answer. Sometimes those hallucinations will even hit the mark. But on the whole, if a mental model is required to arrive at the answer, AI wastes more time than it saves.
> AI is excellent at tasks which involve writing quasi-custom boilerplate (eg. tests which require a lot of mocking)
I wonder if anyone has compared how well the AI auto-generating approach works compared to meta programming approaches (like Lisp macros) meant to address the same kind of issues with repetitive code.
That's not how applied math works. Sure, two variables may cancel out when set to specific values and multiplied or divided together... however that certainly does not mean that the variables are meaningless in the overall equation!
My theory is the tariffs have simply been set by relative trade deficit and after Trump has announced them and been ridiculed someone tasked economists with finding an explanation for the rates. This formula kind of just works out if you estimate the elasticities for all import from all countries conveniently at 2.
The problem will always be that that English has a lot more phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn Esperanto instead.[1]
1: Joking.[2]
2: Well, mostly joking.