ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
ToaKraka
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3hr ago
Quote from By This Axe (a sourcebook for ACKS (the Adventurer Conqueror King System), whose author prides himself on thorough historical research):
Throughout Europe during classical and late antiquity, and well into the modern age in many places worldwide, most mines were worked by slaves. However, there is some archaeological evidence that some mines were worked by paid laborers. For instance: There are over a thousand ancient graves at the Hallstatt salt mines, and all of the bodies are interred with valuable grave goods that suggest care and respect for the dead. These might be the graves of miners, and if so that would suggest paid labor.
My cursory Internet searching did not find anything super-helpful, but here are some articles about slavery in Scotland.
ToaKraka
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8hr ago
ToaKraka
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8hr ago
It's a bit confusing to engage in evidence-free raging in one thread but then point to the evidence in a different thread.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Middle Easterners are counted as white
Note that in 2024 Middle Easterners and North Africans were officially separated out from whites. This change will be implemented in the 2027 American Community Survey and the 2030 census.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
ToaKraka
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2d ago
ToaKraka
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2d ago
Hilarious excerpt from the URL Standard:
The
application/x-www-form-urlencodedformat is in many ways an aberrant monstrosity, the result of many years of implementation accidents and compromises leading to a set of requirements necessary for interoperability, but in no way representing good design practices. In particular, readers are cautioned to pay close attention to the twisted details involving repeated (and in some cases nested) conversions between character encodings and byte sequences. Unfortunately, the format is in widespread use due to the prevalence of HTML forms.
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These two lines are real list items…
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…using HTML's "li" element.
• These two lines are fake list items…
• …using HTML's "p" element.
Which is better?
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Notice that, if you try to select the bullets preceding the real list items, you will fail. This is because the bullets are generated by CSS, not actually in the HTML. In contrast, the fake list items have real, selectable bullet characters that were typed manually.
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On the other hand, the fake list items do not have the proper "listitem" accessibility role, while the real list items do. In the context of Markdown on this website, this problem cannot be fixed. In the context of raw HTML, it can be fixed by adding the role manually.
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We can also consider parallelism. Every "section" element has a selectable "h" heading element. Shouldn't a list item's bullet character serve as an analogous pseudo-heading? The fake list items can satisfy this criterion if typed in raw HTML (not if filtered through Markdown), while the real list items cannot.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
ToaKraka
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2d ago
That word choice actually is justifiable, since the penny historically evolved from the denarius. Likewise, it would be reasonable to translate "solidus" as "shilling" and "libra" as "pound". In contrast, the French écu (3 livres) and the English crown (1/4 pound) do not appear to be cognate descendants of the same Carolingian or Roman coin.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
I kind of assume men looking for Asian porn specifically want women who look more... stereotypically Asiatic. It's probably a fetish. Otherwise why would they look for Asian porn?
It's important to note that "stereotypically Asian" is more than just weirdly-shaped eyes and <del>yellow</del><ins>slightly-less-red</ins> skin. I think it's far from impossible that many Asian fetishists are just into skinny women, but they find that searching for Asian porn is a more surefire way to find skinny women than trying to use the search term "skinny".
This is a perfectly legitimate translation.
No, it's a confusing localization—or, in Nabokov's words, a paraphrase.
A "shield" is not a unit of currency. It would be distracting to talk about people paying so many "shields" for something.
If "shield" sounds wrong to Anglophone ears, that's their fault for failing to acknowledge the validity of French currency units. And there are zillions of fantasy stories that use outlandish-seeming currency units with which readers quickly become comfortable.
"Crown" is not only British currency: Merriam-Webster has it as "any of several old gold coins with a crown as part of the device".
It doesn't matter. There is no good reason to falsely insert the French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. shields into the ranks of the English/British, Scandinavian, Czech, etc. crowns, and thereby erase a meaningful distinction between two categories.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
News article:
AI pilot program in Los Angeles County courts will help judges craft rulings
The program, which launched last month, gave half a dozen Los Angeles County civil court judges access to AI software called Learned Hand [named after a famous federal judge]. Although it could prove critical in a shorthanded court system that is facing a workload crisis on many fronts, the announcement has also drawn concern from some members of the county’s legal community who fear the technology could create errors and erode public trust in the legal system.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
ToaKraka
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4d ago
According to the Wikipedia article (citing a 1978 bibliography of Dumas's works), the misspelling "Monte Christo" was used as the title of several non-translated French editions.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
I expect that the typical person (1) has not assigned and recorded enough attractiveness ratings that he can construct a coherent normal distribution from them (I assume that dozens of data points would be required at the very least), and rather (2) assigns ratings (and does not bother to record them) on a purely ad-hoc basis without reference to any distribution.
(Also, obligatory reminder that rating out of ten is unreasonably granular, and rating out of five is better.)
Links instead of just citations:
Note that headings are omitted from the two paragraph-by-paragraph English versions that I looked at. In a Latin version that is not split up by paragraphs, 2270–2275 has the heading "Abortion", 2276–2279 "Euthanasia", 2280–2283 "Suicide", and 2288–2291 "Respect for Health".
Quotes:
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2270: "Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person—among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life."
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2273: "The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation: 'As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child's rights.'"
ToaKraka
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4d ago
ToaKraka
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4d ago
At this point, Eugene Volokh has spotlighted many dozens of legal filings containing "AI hallucinations" (or "LLM shameless guesses"). See also this database of over a thousand such filings.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
I am in my early 30s and have always been a boring teetotaler. I see no reason to become addicted to alcohol on top of sugar.
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