I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.
> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.
That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.
(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.
But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.
You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
It's actually the other way around; the Saudis are only able to sell their oil because the oil money is flowing into US treasuries and other financial instruments, and it has been like this since the 70s.
A self inflicted wound.
Europe keeps entering into spot gas supply contracts and paying through the nose instead of signing longer-term contracts for lower prices. The Russians have always been reliable suppliers even after sanctions took place, and calls from some hotheads to use gas as leverage was never seriously followed through by the real decision makers.
And Habeck is an idiot. Lately Germany has not been buying enough summer gas to keep the storage full, and of course the storage gets emptied during the winter - people need to keep warm. To imply that Gazprom is somehow stealing gas from these facilities to exert political pressure is ludicrous, expecially since Gazprom has not even owned these facilities since 2022.
Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US).
But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.
Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing.
CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.
I am not sure how US manufacturing activity contracting implies that Europe is not losing its manufacturing to the US. There are lots of news of European companies expanding in the US (one example would be Airbus in Alabama, lots of others). You are absolutely right about LNG exports, and it's unfortunate because it also pushed residential gas prices up, but just look at the benchmark prices in the US vs. Europe (TTF vs Henry), they are different by a whopping factor of 2 at the moment, and it has been worse in the previous years. Notice that the US manufacturing that tends to concentrate next the the source will get its gas even cheaper.
Volkswagen CEO recently stated that manufacturing in Germany no longer makes sense.
I believe Europe will adapt eventually, but the cost in terms of lost manufacturing and quality of life will be high.
There is another way to go about it - ignoring the phone completely while enjoying biking or jogging. Or leaving it at home.
Unless I am on a call duty, all my notifications can wait.
My notification volume is relatively low, but there is one kind of notification, involving a certain significant other (we have high-needs kids) that requires action. So if the phone rings or there is a text message, for example, seeing at a glance (no button presses) what number it is from definitely allows stop/continue decision. I wish I did have a life where I can leave the electronic leash at home, or at least on mute.
On iOS, and probably on Android though I haven't checked, you can choose to only be notified of messages from certain contacts (in iOS it's in Focus Modes). This may help.
My original Pebble purchase decision was made thinking "This will be great, I can use it while commuting to see who's calling or messaging my phone, so I can decide whether to pull over to respond or not!" I had a 35-40 minute each commute where I rode a motorcycle every day back then.
Turns out, the number of times I pulled over to return a call or message was precisely never. There was nothing so important that I could do anything about it by the side of the road, or that couldn't wait half an hour till I got to work/home.
An interesting idea, but I look at it as yet another thing to make my life more complicated than it needs to be.
A pen and paper, plus a mechanical watch have served me well so far.
I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.
To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?
Interesting, even though I personally learned a very different lesson. You are right about the icecream though, I have never managed to find a better one in the US.
It's a fair question. No, no desire to curb anything because of who is going to do the curbing. Any regulating entity (government or private) will use subjective judgement and will invariably devolve into censorship.
The concern of course is that humans as a crowd are dumb, but on the other hand I think you give individuals too little credit. A smart person won't get his/her political views from random X posts.
The problem is that most americans do not know first hand how the real censorship looks like. In the context of the previous discussion in that thread, chinese and russian firewalls block any discussion of gay rights issues. Do you think the US will be any different? We are all humans with the same deficiencies.
Any "firewall", however it is implemented, will be a double edged sword that will eventually start cutting one way, and you won't like the result.
To sum it up, yes, it's the least of all evils.
If you would like to deride the answer, I assure you I am quite immune to the effort.
I agree with your concerns but I am not sure that it is all or nothing, in the way that encryption security is, for example.
I think that agitprop campaigns are identifiable by the organizations on which they operate, and that site operators should consider that akin to spam and delete it.
Of course I do not advocate an actual firewall. We saw Instagram and the US try to censor the carnage in Gaza, and "allies" like Israel have acknowledged their desire to control the information space to suit their narrative.
I think what you are saying is still on a shaky ground if I understood you correctly. Site operators will have a political bias that will skew the decisions. And of course there is pay to play and kickbacks... integrity was for sale ever since humans existed.
Think in terms of what the internet gave us instead of what it has taken away. In my youth, I had to listen to shortwave to find the other side of the story.
The current AMD64 specification only uses 48-bits of pointer space, coming from 40-bits. So we still have 16 bits remaining. I'm sure we can use 1 for a sign.
In C/C++ there are no true unsigned integers (true unsigned integers do overflow, generating errors in such cases or they generate carry/borrow on certain operations).
The so-called unsigned integers of C/C++ are in fact modular integers, i.e. where the arithmetic operations wrap around and where you can interpret any 64-bit number greater than 2^63-1 as you please, as either a positive integer or as a negative integer. For instance you can interpret 2^63 as either -2^63 or as +2^63.
So using 64-bit "unsigned" integers for indices does not create any problems if you are careful how you interpret them.
However, as another poster has already said, in all popular ISAs the addressable space is actually smaller than 2^64 and in x86-64 the addresses are interpreted as signed integers, not as unsigned integers, so your problem can never appear.
Some operating systems use this interpretation of the addresses as signed integers in order to reserve the negative addresses for themselves and use only positive addresses for the non-privileged programs.
The reason why the addressable space is smaller than afforded by 64 bits is that covering the complete space with page translation tables would require too many table levels. x86-64 has increased the number of page table levels to 4, in order to enable a 48-bit address space, while some recent Intel/AMD CPUs have increased the number of page table levels to 5, in order to increase the virtual address size to 57 bits.
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