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> the case isn't charged, or something won't connect

I wish there were wired earbuds with ANC compared in quality to my AirPods Pro 2.


There it is.

It’s not that their M-cones (middle, i.e. green) don’t work at all, their M-cones responsivity curve is just shifted to be less distinguishable from their L-cones curve, so they effectively have double (or more) the “red sensors”.

Afaiu, there are different levels of sleep and Linux doesn’t support all of them fully on Macs at the moment.

Interesting topic to see on HN. However, I’m not sure lots of people here will be able to help you. I think literature search and direct emails to relevant authors would be more fruitful.

Valid point. I'm reaching out to academia too. I posted here because my theory treats spacetime as a computational substrate, and HN has the best mix of physicists and engineers to critique that specific angle.

> You can, and should, speak Russian with a permanent broad smile

Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.


In contrast, see “Why Russians never smile”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27317859

Unfortunately, the URL referenced in the link does not point to the original article.

Here is what I assume was referenced:

https://chicagomaroon.com/5454/viewpoints/op-ed/why-russians...


Thank you for that, I only dug out the HN discussion, having read the article back when it was on the front page. Weird that the link changed like that!

Not a problem!

It took an embarrassing long time reading through the article, waiting for the pivot to ‘Russian Smiling’, only to realize by almost the very end, that clearly, I had been hoodwinked.

Linking the proper article after this endeavor seemed appropriate to save others the same grief.


On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.


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Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.

I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.


Forcing people to move to another country en masse sounds like the failures wouldn't be caused by a culture clash so much as more fundamental issues around being forced to move to another country.

I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.

The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.

McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.


More or less... I used to have the Radio Garden app where I could listen to stations across the world until bureaucracy intervened.

It was an eyeopener (earopener?) to hear most stations in South America, Asia and Australia playing the same crappy pop songs. Not even very good ones either. Some stations played local music as well which was of far more interest to me than hearing more or less the same pap.


Interesting -- that doesn't match my experience with South America at all! Everywhere you go, the venues mainly play local music, except maybe in Chile.

There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.

There are plenty. Hollywood has massive dominance in the international film industry as does the American music industry. The USA has spent a lot of time and money promoting its culture. It is partly a consequence of the Cold War.

But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".


"we are one" is not equal to "we are exactly the same"

Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.

There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them


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LGBT propaganda... Funny how people who have been gobbling up propaganda about something, always think "the other side" is the one producing the actual propaganda

And yes, i see the irony of this statement

But some dudes kissing in a movie is not propaganda


Isn’t whether or not something is propaganda determined by the intent of those producing or distributing it?

If the intent of someone including two men kissing in a movie is to promote approval of homosexual relationships, OR is to promote the idea that men kissing doesn’t imply homosexuality, then that’s propoganda, but if the intent is just “the movie sells better if there’s a scene pandering to yaoi fangirls”, or “the screenwriter found something that happened with two guys they know to be compelling”, then it isn’t propaganda,

right?


You're probably right, but my main point was that it's funny that people who have been spoon fed propaganda about something always think the opposite of what they now believe is the actual propaganda

Honestly, pretty impressive by the russian government how they are able to do that

Then again, in many cultures (even in more tolerant ones like here in the netherlands) there's always somewhere a latent hatred and/or disgust towards LGBT. So maybe it's nit that hard to bring that back to the surface after all


> But some dudes kissing in a movie is not propaganda

Overrepresentation in mass media is a form of propaganda.


Would you believe that in some countries it never happens at all! Overrepresentation compared to what?

So you believe in quotas in "mass media", so that homosexuals aren't over-represented?

Or you just think it's a conspiracy to turn everyone gay?

Trying to control the free market of ideas seems a bit oppressive.


Systematic overrepresentation in media is already a control. Which also make it oppressive.

OK so you think it's a conspiracy.

But how do you know it's "overrepresentation"? It's media not a strict reflection of population.

Anyway, so you don't like gay people, but tough luck. Just like you can like or dislike whoever you want, people can like and talk about whoever they want. Sorry to break it to you but its not a conspiracy it's just modern society.


Wow. Interesting. I just mentioned overrepresentation, which is a fact that even you can't deny, and you go to such lengths to frame me as a conspiracy theorist and gay hater. I can even read hate in your writing tone.

Why? What makes you so aggressive? What makes you hate someone who points out obvious facts? What is the reason for your denial and hate?


You're doing the old Soviet thing of accusing people of the thing you're doing. Did you use to live in that environment?

Everything you say is unfounded and makes little sense. You seem to be read things that are not there.

I'm just saying that what you think is an acceptable amount of gay "representation" does matter and that it merely reflects your own biases. Your views don't matter in this respect because if you live in a free country the media can "represent" anything it likes and if you don't like it you can turn it off. And complain about it I guess.

That's what it's all about freedom. Preserving freedom. Trying to take away other people's freedom to express themselves is not what its about.


Overrepresentation is when something appears in media way more often than in the real life.

Gay behaviour is overrepresented in the media.

You can frame it with Soviet union, freedom of any kind, human right, democracy, religion, right to consume or not. You can try to make it about me or you and call me whatever.

What you can't do is deny overrepresentation. Because it's the fact, whether you like it or not. And that's the only thing I said, everything else is your projection and false accusation.


You being uncomfortable with people different than you does not mean there's a conspiracy.

You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.

Specifically, it's Metcalfe's Law.

While you might have a few global super stars (Lady Gaga, Black Pink, ...) everywhere, the average pop radio station in the USA, Russia, China will be very different from each other.

What does "forced" mean in this context?

Yeah, that's the point - you shouldn't really smile, it's about relaxing your mouth

I learned it on my own... always imagined it as "speaking without letting the heat out"

Are we trying to make psychopaths? That’s sounds very unsettling for conversation.

Americans are regularly ribbed for smiling way too much during conversations with strangers. Apparently we can be rather unsettling lol

Some Americans do grin all the time.

In the context of a foreigner clumsily trying to speak your language, the smile might be interpreted differently.

Well, just as Nabokov said: Russians have an impression that foreign languages are simpler than Russian.

It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.

But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians. And just in case, most russians != every russian.


I was surprised as well living in Hong Kong that many kids grow up never learning Cantonese being born there (Non Chinese heritage). Their parents spoke their native language, and they learned English in a private school.

You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.


I don't think I've ever seen this in my life from a Russian. I do see a lot of Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants with no interest in learning English though.

it's a thing. there are russians that think that they have superior culture and learning some other barbaric language is beneath them.

so they either don't learn native language of the country where they live or learn it to bare minimum


I realized, I don't know many cases of Spanish or Chinese people not learning the language.

My hypothesis: I understand russian and register cases like this easily. Otoh, I don't understand Chinese, so the ones with whom I have ever had any communication, are the ones who learned any of the languages I understand. Similar story with Spanish, my level is ~A2, so there's bias here too, although slightly less prominent.

Do you understand russian?


I have my own sample set as I presented.

Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.


Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.

Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.

A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.


Hebrew wasn’t “literally synthesised” and wasn’t dead. Jews have continuously been writing and publishing works in Hebrew for the past 2,000 years.

It has evolved naturally to some extent over that time, but much less than other languages - a modern Hebrew speaker can more easily understand medieval Hebrew than an English speaker Medieval English.

What has been synthesised a century ago is additional vocabulary for modern concepts, and this is ongoing for Hebrew as it is for every other language.


Yeah, the story is quite a bit more involved than that.

I don't know much beyond the story of Perelman consolidating Hebrew grammar and dictionary, and having problems with popularizing the old-new language initially.

The point was that other modern languages never had a chance to get this kind of clean up.


>Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago.

I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?

Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.


I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.

The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.

The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).

The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.

The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").

It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.

Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.

My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.


No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.

No idea. But vocabulary and grammar are mostly orthogonal.

>Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.

Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.


> Russian is seriously messed up language.

Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.


I have just watched a video about Hebrew spelling which suggests it is a lot more complicated than people realise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_h541RkCTI


overblown. there is no need in vowels beyond first couple of classes of elementary school and first couple of months when you learn hebrew as Nth language.

the rest of complaints can be equally applied to any given language i guess.


A considerable number of Israeli citizens arrive in adulthood, maybe with bar mitzvah level Hebrew and sometimes not even that.

i know. its applicable to them as well.

hebrew is learned in ulpans with teachers that speak only hebrew. vowels (nikud) will be used only for first month or two when people figure out basics of the language.

given the way that hebrew structured, it's trivial to figure out words even if you don't know them.

the really hard problem is borrowed words that are written without nikud. for example something like: _nvrst .


For what it's worth, I do think English is horrific when it comes to spelling too, but what is effectively happening with both English and Hebrew words is that people are often memorising the whole word as a symbol rather than as a set of units.

Because Hebrew has been revived artificially.

it doesn't really diminishes my point

Well, it does a bit. Imagine me saying: “I think Russian is messed up because I’ve learned Esperanto and it’s so much simpler!”

this is how comparations work. or reference points.

i'll give you another example: "after wearing flip-flops i realized how heavy my rubber boots"


Don't we all?

I hope EU subdues Apple fully, and one day I can run Linux on my iPad. At least virtualised.

Although I too dislike upside down “2” because it looks too much like “5”.

My hot take on that was "upside down 2? Nah, must be a really stylized 7"

The upside down 6 to represent nine is really dumb. Those decimal evangelists are so lazy!

Yeah, that's bad enough.

And don’t forget that fusion is just 20 years away!

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