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japanoise

It's all narrative. Abstract strategy games with perfect information (like chess and go) look at a casual glance like they should be difficult for computers, but in fact they're rather ideal. Before AlphaGo, belligerent go players used to smugly dismiss chess as a 'solved game' (not what that means) because chess engines have been better than the best humans for years.
I would think of using 'Frenchie' to refer to a person as being affectionate banter. Like 'Yank' for Americans or 'Canuck' for Canadians. It's not incorrect, but would be inappropriate outside of an informal context.

French people have 'rosbif' to refer to the English and Australians have 'pom' or 'pommie'. You wouldn't call the prime minister that at a diplomatic event, but it's not offensive to call your friends that.

I'm using the words 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' in a linguistic sense; human languages are subtle and fluid, and one doesn't have to be far along the sliding scale between 'doesn't speak a word' and 'well-educated native speaker' to be understood. We speak of 'broken' English when somebody is able to be understood but hasn't fully grasped the language yet; using demonyms incorrectly is a subtler flavor of the same thing. For example 'no come here' -> 'no entering' -> 'no entry'
It's not completely wrong, it will be understood, but it is ungrammatical and a clear marker that the speaker is not native, similar to getting adjectives in the 'wrong' order ('a big tasty sandwich' sounds more natural to a native speaker than 'a tasty big sandwich', even though the latter makes sense and will be understood).

Demonyms for historical neighbours of England have irregular forms when speaking of a particular person from there. Scotland has 'Scot' and 'Scotsman'; Wales has 'Welshman'; Spain has 'Spaniard'. Other countries indeed need a second word, such as 'person' or 'citizen' ('a Chinese' sounds offensive to me; I would say 'a Chinese person' in all cases). The only country I can think of where using a bare demonym is grammatical when speaking of a single person from there is Germany with 'a German' - probably because it has the suffix -man.

Edit: A sibling comment pointed out that 'an American' is grammatical, and thinking about it, I think the suffix -an is what makes bare demonyms grammatical - you can say 'an Angolan', 'a Laotian', 'a Peruvian', 'a Moroccan', etc, but wouldn't say 'a Thai', 'a Swedish', 'a Sudanese', etc.

Re:Pandoc – A universal document converter on Saturday October 24, 2020 @09:51PM (#24883281)
Either pandoc or shellcheck, for sure. Both of them are sensible choices to use Haskell for
Oh, right, I see it now. It wasn't visible straight away on my phone.
My first result was a Chinese porn website. Thank goodness I'm at home and not at work right now. You may wish to add a disclaimer about that.
Re:Fast Typing: Keyboard Layouts on Saturday September 05, 2020 @06:48AM (#24382696)
Switching to dvorak definitely helped me. I did as the author suggests, learned dvorak and switched to Emacs. Ever since, I've never struggled with RSI
Re:Backbone Cabal on Saturday August 22, 2020 @05:21PM (#24247353)
There is no Cabal.
Re:Haskell In New Clothes on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:30AM (#24098616)
Contrary to the other commenters, I see this as a huge improvement. Maybe I'm more used to languages like C rather than what, ml, python, pascal?
Pinetrees are eco fascists (mostly admirers of the unabomber) who use the pinetree emoji in their names.

Trad-cath-leninist is more straightforward: traditional (I.e. Reactionary/fundamentalist) Catholic (as in the church) + marxist-leninist.

My impression of twitter was of an insular bizzaro-world where communities that are essentially invisible in meatspace become enormous and have outsized influence; k-pop fans are huge on twitter and almost always trending, but are barely known outside of their own circles elsewhere, not to mention all the incredibly granular political groups (the long and bloody trad-cath-leninist vs pinetree-eco-fash wars are so drawn out you'd be forgiven for not realising it's only 20 people per side, posting 24/7)

It always amazes me that normal people like journalists still use such a strange website.

With the topic of this thread being slate star codex, it saddens and discourages me that use of a pseudonym is not allowed on letter.wiki.
Re:Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (2003) on Friday June 19, 2020 @06:58AM (#23573135)
> If you must do religion, why not Christianity or Islam?

I'm amazed this aside isn't getting you downvoted. Have you been under a rock for the last 2000 years? The horrors of Abrahamic religion far outstrip anything Buddhism is responsible for.

Re:Collapse OS – Why Forth? on Sunday June 07, 2020 @06:46PM (#23451707)
A Forth shibboleth is that you have to implement your own in order to understand it. Try reading the assembly, then forth source, for jonesforth: https://github.com/AlexandreAbreu/jonesforth

This is how I learned.

Re:Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:38PM (#23356422)
Maybe I'm showing my power level a bit here. To me it means "tweaking something's aesthetics in a way that doesn't improve, perhaps even degrades, performance".
Re:Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third on Friday May 29, 2020 @06:30AM (#23348340)
To use computing slang to talk about music: this is just ricing. At best you'll sound out of tune with the rest of the band, at worst you'll run into wolf intervals and other issues with just intonation.

This touches on the biggest reason we stick with 12-tone equal temparament in the West: social reasons. Having a standard means we can play together, in groups or at jams, without having to negotiate which tuning system we use (an argument most working musicians I've met see as utter wank and a waste of time).

Re:For Roleplayers Who Start Writing on Sunday May 10, 2020 @05:30AM (#23131376)
Could you tell me about your method for this?
It's a varying question and depends what you mean by an all-in-one experience. There's no one perfect language.

My answer would probably be Python, though.

I don't think it's ever been meant to listen to per se, more to dance to; hence why it used to be called dance music.

Which is funny because I find a lot of edm listenable outside of a dance context, especially hardcore.

Re:Better C – A subset of D Programming Language on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @06:47AM (#23005662)
What's the best way for an experienced C programmer who doesn't know C++ to learn D?

What's the story in terms of using existing C (or C++) code with BetterC or D in general?

As another developer: stop being lazy. It was much worse back in the day in terms of browser differences.
Re:Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run? on Sunday April 12, 2020 @03:50PM (#22850598)
Disagree. Learning a codebase from scratch is tricky; it's better if you have someone to teach you. So if the one contributor gets bus'd, then it'll take time (=money) to get up to speed.
Re:How to program a text adventure in C (2016) on Sunday March 22, 2020 @03:57AM (#22653448)
I like this, very creative!

The code generation looks interesting. I'll have to take another look later; can it not be done with the preprocessor?

It's pretty notable on the left - for example, tankies, who are almost nonexistant irl, flood that website.
Re:Learn Awk by Example (2019) on Sunday March 01, 2020 @04:29AM (#22456034)
And have the same dpi as whatever's used to print them!
Re:SuperDisk on Saturday January 18, 2020 @05:42PM (#22087890)
Technology Connections is great. I love all those old-tech youtubers like 8-bit Guy, Techmoan, Perifractic and co. It feels like there's been a real explosion in that scene in the last few years.
Re:How to start a blog using Hugo on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @07:38AM (#21979363)
It's a mess, and evokes abject horror in some people, but I'll continue to defend the merit of just writing a shell script. I moved it to hugo years ago (ironically) but my old site worked like that: https://github.com/japanoise/website/blob/cdf728d4ebea75cbc9...

It's not pretty to look at, but it can be read, understood, and maintained by one person.

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