cwnyth

This is right. AI is using human speech, but just doing so in a consistently peculiar way. The em-dash in particular is frustrating, because it's all over high-quality, pre-2022 academic work. But now instead of proper and erudite it's seen as AI-slop. Well, maybe if they didn't use it — all — time — ! It's even an auto-replacement in Word and can be (by one's choice) in LibreOffice, replacing three dashes (and two is replaced by an en-dash).

But when I submit a novel with em-dashes, will sloppy agents and sloppy editors be able to tell that em-dash was deliberately put there by me?

He wouldn't be the first reckless CEO...

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Pretty sure they mean zip files, not drives.

It's not my email that has an unbearable spam issue. I can't take all the incessant phone spam anymore, though. Even setting it to go straight to voicemail, the calls are relentless. They've switched to texts now, too.

Miserable lot that serves no purpose in life.

Hey, fair enough. To each their own. If Anki is fine for you, great! Do what works.

Because I was too brief while at work before, let me be fuller now: if you were to go back a thousand years and ask about the national characteristic of the emperor of Constantinople, they'd look at you crazy because you spoke English. But your question is laden with several assumptions that are completely foreign to their minds. First, Byzantine is an adjective from Byzantium, the original name of Constantinople. First and foremost, when its used in Classical and Late Antique historiography, it's describing an empire, culture, polity, etc. that centers on Constantinople, rather than other cities of the empire. It is not an ethnic marker. The people at the time would have called themselves Greek, Romans, or Syrians. Second, whether "Romaioi" or "Hellenes" is preferred waxes and wanes depending on what's en vogue at the time. Contrary to the meme, the citizens of Athens did not uniformly call themselves "Romans" (Romaioi) from the 320s onward. Some were, some weren't. What language did they speak? What ethnos, genos were they of? What does Romaioi even really mean? That will yield better answers, but again, it differs based on fashion. Lastly, the very idea of a defined "empire" would be very confusing for the ancients. What is that word? It looks like imperium, but that means domain of rule. It's not limited to those at the helm, who might call themselves imperatores, but also Augusti. It's not like a kingdom encompassing other kingdoms. It's just a modern term given to an ancient reality, with no difference at all to names like Byzantine or even Roman.

See e.g. Lintott on the problems of this terminology:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/greece-and-rome/arti...

This whole "debate" is a charade provided by people who once complained they had to take a humanities class and thereafter were clueless about what real modern historians and philologists were discussing about this period.

Separately, your facts are wrong, because it was centuries before that the word Byzantine was first used to describe this era of the latter eastern Roman empire. Oops, might want to read a book instead of looking at memes.

I'd love to see that! I can't take credit for the term. There are some people who are extreme fans of the Byzantine empire and defend it at every turn. I can kind of get recent history, but being a fanatic about an ancient polity strikes this trained historian as utterly bizarre.

There are a lot of people who only learned about history through memes or online talking points, but this is one of those things that is passed around that way.

Well, I should have qualified my statement: Anki is inefficient compared to better methods, but more efficient than haphazardly trying to memorize things. Yes, it's better than nothing, but there are better SRS implementations, including most readers.

I saw a lot of this from personal experience. I had to learn not only Latin and Greek, but also French and German just for my doctorate, and I learned Russian, Thai, and Swedish separately. And then I taught Latin and Greek for years, inquiring often how my students were learning. Anki (vel sim.) is fine, but there are better ways (and none of those ways start with the letter D and end with the letters lingo).

That's why I used the word varied. But at the end of the day, you're still memorizing sentences, rather than how the word actually functions. It's inelastic.

Tell me, do you call people from China Chinese? Japan Japanese? Germany German? If so, you're a hypocrite.

You're also arguing against a strawman. I never said they weren't Roman. I only said there's nothing wrong with Byzantine.

Maybe if you weren't so smugly self-righteous, you'd have better reading comprehension.

You've missed the point.

They actually called themselves Ῥωμαῖοι, not Romani, and not every description needs to be emic. There's nothing wrong with the label "Byzantine" except to Byzaboos.

My problem with Anki is that it's very, very inefficient. It will take much more time and effort to memorize the vocabulary words you learn, and losing those words is very quick. It's much better to use SRS with actual and varied sentences.

LinuxForums has been going strong for decades. My account there dates to 2004.

Even there, though, a lot of the forums are dead or decayed or have disappeared. It's not like it was even 10 years ago.

Except that most people just go with best. Tons of new comments are shouted into the void, never to be heard by anyone except for a handful of the curious.

There is no reason to lump forums and IRC/Discord together here. If anything, the latter is closer to places like here or Reddit, where the discussions are ephemeral regardless of topicality, whereas with forums a single topic can go on for years.

What's wrong with MariaDB?

We Japanese importers also knew it as Pang.

I still have two, a Trinitron and an RCE. For a while, you couldn't give these away.

I sadly had to part with a 52" projector TV that had s-video inputs. Classics games on that was a thing to behold.

I disagree. Time and time again, it's been shown that people are more moved by a single emotional instance, not the broader statistics. Not everyone has a mind for numbers or scale. What can actually inspire change in them if not a single representation of the problem? Classically, effective rhetoric needed pathos in addition to logos. There is no problem in zooming in on this one instance (especially if it's effective in fixing the larger problem).

Fair! Chronologically, at least, Diocletian's time is closer to us, though not technologically or population-wise. And by Diocletian's time, inflation was already out of control. If anything, the political stability that came with Diocletian's reforms actually helped bolster the economy, though it wouldn't last, as soon the center moved to Byzantium, leaving Rome (and Italy) to whither and die over the next century.

Everyone points to Ea-nasir, but that's a meme. Meanwhile, Diocletian outlawed price gouging and standardized prices across a variety of goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices

From Polanyi, Finley, and Weber to Austin and Malkin, we've come a long way in recognizing the sophistication of ancient economic thought.

Yeah, this is the same in the US. If you tell them ahead of time, there's no issue in splitting the bill. I was doing that 20 years ago when I was a waiter at both higher-end and mid-range restaurants.

Europe is a continent. In all the countries I've been to in Europe, the service was indistinguishable from that in the US, where the bill is brought to the table and paid there. Can you be more specific as to what country's restaurants do people normally walk up to a register after eating?

The unfortunate part is the lack of anything else therein, not that it's Epicurean philosophy.

Not all machine learning is generative AI.