brettp

4 ms·

1.
by brettp 1y ago
Australian here, like the author. Apple Pay (and equivalents) work _everywhere_ here, including at the tiniest market stalls, and for the smallest purchases. I stopped carrying my wallet the moment my driver licence was available on my phon
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by brettp 1y ago
I've never understood the argument "humans only use vision and hearing so self driving cars should too". We don't constrain what we do with machines to what humans do. Humans don't have wheels either. Is Tesla plann
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by brettp 2y ago
The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary. Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you
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by brettp 2y ago
That's not grammatical gender. Most people can distinguish between persons and nonpersons and map that onto the correct pronoun or relativizer to use. But in German the girl you met yesterday is neuter, and the burger you ate yesterday
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by brettp 2y ago
If you're arguing from simplicity, Mandarin actually has very simple grammar - much simpler than any of the other languages you mention (no gender, no inflections, no declensions at all), and learning to speak it is not as difficult as
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by brettp 2y ago
Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France an
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by brettp 2y ago
Celtic languages like Gaulish or Germanic ones like Frankish.
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by brettp 2y ago
It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English). However, it's much more difficult to guess the
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by brettp 2y ago
... and if you think that German is "orderly and precise" then you've obviously never had to learn its plurals.
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by brettp 2y ago
Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.) Look at the international languages befo
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by brettp 2y ago
English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from
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by brettp 2y ago
So many things wrong in this article it makes me doubt the rest of the (undeniably interesting) content. - English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak and counting diphthongs it has about 20 - "phenology&quo
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by brettp 2y ago
If we’re going for ecclesiastical humour then we absolutely cannot go without mentioning Umberto Eco’s piece on Mac vs DOS: https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html
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by brettp 2y ago
This does not explain a cat's ability to choose the thing to knock over that is most likely to annoy you and therefore most likely to get your attention.
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by brettp 2y ago
Australian here. When you have the world’s most venomous spider which - has fangs that can go through boots - hides in holes in the ground - is aggressive - is common in the most populous part of the country (east coast around Sydney) you w
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by brettp 3y ago
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention which I think is the most obvious reason for commission on outside purchases: if Apple did not charge a commission on purchases made outside the app, it would leave a huge loophole - developers
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by brettp 3y ago
The title is lifted verbatim from the abstract: > Those trends, in addition to decreasing diagnoses in foreign-born persons, contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States. and the paper i
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by brettp 3y ago
I wonder where that statistic came from too. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... the number of L2 speakers of English is ~1b or 12.5% of the world population (~8b). But one thin
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by brettp 12y ago
1. Awful summary 0.6% recurrent event rate does not mean it was 99.4% effective. You need to know what the recurrent event rate would have been if everything else was the same and they hadn't followed the diet. Hint: if the normal recu
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by brettp 15y ago
What a load of bollocks. And I think they misspelt his surname.
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by brettp 15y ago
So in response to a vague and ambiguous query, you got highly relevant results including the one you wanted on the first page. And you're complaining about that? Incidentally, the R Programming Language manual contains stuff like this: