violiner

Guess I'll get to see all those screenshots of my lock screen one last time.

Yeah I read it as "Astmally pdrtable echesmtable". People shouldn't do this.

OK, sure, it is possible to imagine a culture in which the principle of free speech is above and supersedes all other principles. That culture would be terrible. Suppose I'm at that bar and Nazi Bob starts spouting Nazi nonsense. Is there a social expectation that I stay and engage despite my desire to go somewhere else? If Nazi Bob hangs out at that bar all the time and I decide I don't want to go there because I don't like listening to him and calmly engaging with him is there a cultural stigma associated with that? If there's not, suppose I and a number of other patrons stop frequenting the bar. Is the bar tender then subject to some kind of social cost for saying "Hey Nazi Bob, I'm going to have to ask you to not come back because you're driving away other patrons?" I agree that the high school debate thing is bad, and in general I agree that people talking about ideas is good, but this idea that there should be no consequences whatsoever for what you say just doesn't survive even the briefest analysis. How would that even work? If you say some combination of words that elicits a reaction in me am I supposed to just not feel or think those things? Does that mean that I experience the consequences of your speech but you don't? Do I have freedom to not associate with you until you say something abhorrent? If I'm friends with someone and I say "Hey I think it would be really funny to flay your kids" or some other terrible thing do they have to just calmly debate that? Do they have to continue to associate with me because if they stopped being my friend that wouldn't be respecting my freedom to express my ideas? I'd argue that it's not only possible to respect freedom of speech as a principle balanced against other rights, it's _only_ possible to respect it as such, because otherwise the person with the loudest,most extreme, and most offensive ideas sets the tone of any conversation. If I don't have the option to get up and walk away, either literally or metaphorically, then my association with them and consequently my speech is coerced.

You've edited this at least twice since I started to write so who knows what this will by the time I hit 'reply', but this is really weird. If I can't choose not to associate with someone because of something they said then freedom of association just doesn't exist. If I can't kick someone out of my business because of something they've said then I just don't have control over whom I do business with. In a society with a cultural principle of free speech people would be able to exercise their right to say heinous things, and decent people would exercise their right to not have anything to do with those people, and the heinous thing saying people wouldn't whine about it, except disingenuously, because despite all their protestations they would actually understand that their right to free speech should not compel me to have them in my club, church, business, whatever.

I'm really, genuinely happy for you that the thing you're passionate about is something you're good at and is extremely lucrative, but if I tried to make a living doing what I'm passionate about I'd live in a cardboard box. The reality is that software eating the world (and admittedly a number of other things, but this is a big one) have made it much, much harder to make a living doing just about anything else. I got a job in software development because I was good enough at it and I needed to pay the loans from pursuing my passion. I continue doing software development because it's a way to eventually maybe escape capitalism without swallowing a bullet.

there's always room for optimism.

Bold claim.

Is it italki (https://www.italki.com/)? You can hire tutors there for online lessons.

The eastern mystery cults of the late B.C. era

I'd hesitate to categorically lump all of the ancient mystery religions in with the rest of your list. Some of them were pretty strange, even for the ancient world, but e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries and Mithraism were very mainstream for hundreds of years.

Never before has crypto looked so criminal, wasteful and useless.

That’s really saying something!

On the rare occasions when a friend will ask why I don't use Uber my reply is "Because I don't support organized crime."

a new developer could hit the ground flying.

Sounds like a plane crash. :)

I, for one, have embraced my negative partisanship. I'm not a Democrat. I'm an anti-Republican.

Not everyone can take a year off, the world is unfair, and some people will live better lives than others.

This is literally what privilege means. It's not an insult.

The work at Keep Silence is excellent.

Thank you for the recommendations.

Thank you for the recommendations. That's very helpful. I'm less bullish on bilingual editions (I know Ancient Greek well, and Latin a little less well, so I'm not totally uninformed) but I'm unlikely to ever be as proficient at Akkadian as I am at the languages I studied in college so I'm glad to know those exist.

What are you using to study Akkadian?

High fives none the less.

"King" is derived from Old English "cyning". Some similar words (Tsar and Kaiser, for example) derive from "Caesar", but "king" isn't one of them.

It would be sweet if you could configure the forms and meters that it would accept.

  It won't do what I want when I click it,
  So now I will open a ticket.
  It should do the right thing
  And not be a pain,
  Would you please help me out now and fix it?

That doesn't mean they should write prose in their reports.

I, too, would prefer bug reports written in verse.

a classics degree is the easiest option

You have clearly never studied Ancient Greek.

Serious question: You say that engaging with the least sophisticated form of the argument is beneath him, but if that's the form of the argument he chooses to engage in, is it?

That's fair, and I get the branding distinction. Maybe I just think it's played out and there needs some new way to communicate that. When I someone emails me about working at a startup I think "No, I don't want to humor your get rich quick scheme by working for lottery tickets. Nor do I want to work for organized crime like Uber, or commit fraud like Theranos, or destroy civilization itself like Facebook." To me the word communicates a kind of tech savvy used car salesman vibe. I understand that there are Enrons and cigarette companies, so "businesses" aren't immune to this either. Maybe I'm just skeptical of human endeavor.

Pretty much. When I hear someone call their project a "startup" instead of a "business" I assume they're trying to scam the world.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but this type of argument where I'm asked to care about someone's business model really unconvincing in general. Someone else telling me that they need something sketchy to make money isn't persuasive - it just makes them sketchy a business or person.

What I'm certain will never happen even though I think it would be great would be to ban any sort of emotional appeal whatsoever in advertising. It's just manipulative.

My Greek professor called them the Loebomenoi.

To read a text as you would one in a modern language - look up words when you need to in order to understand a passage, learn what you can from context, etc. Do your best to read instead of translating - those are fundamentally different activities.

I'd like to reiterate that using interlinear translations or Loeb editions wasn't a contraindicated practice, per se. There are just certain problems inherent in the practice that we were advised to look out for. It is certainly a useful tool sometimes.

I think what it all comes down to is what I mentioned above: reading a text and translating a text are fundamentally different. Both require you to interpret a text, but translating a text - particularly an ancient text - require you to interpret it in more and in different ways. So if you're relying heavily on a translation to understand a text you're using tools that mediate between you and the original more than, say, a reference grammar and a lexicon.

I was cautioned against using this approach too much when I studied Classical Greek and Latin in college.

There are two potential problems, as I understand it. First, learning a language, particularly an ancient language, involves learning ancient words for things that have no analog in modern life, whereas translation involves mapping those very things onto their closest equivalent in a modern language. It would be too easy using the interlinear method to start thinking that the Greek word 'krater' means a bowl or cup, when really it is a specific type of bowl used for mixing wine. That can really only be learned by consulting a dictionary, and probably a few pictures.

The second issue is only really a problem for people who are particularly familiar with the text in translation - it's very very easy to start mentally reciting the translation you're familiar with instead of actually parsing the original text. This is one reason that Attic Greek is preferred to Koine (New Testament), even though Koine is generally simpler. Even a secular person usually has enough familiarity with the Bible to make this an issue.

I certainly wouldn't say that this method can't be used profitably, but rather that one should be careful not to fall into those particular traps. The same criticisms could be made to relying on the Loeb editions.

Also, minor nitpick: The New Testament isn't really written in Classical Greek, it's in Koine. Going from Koine to any classical dialect is going to be much more difficult than going from any classical dialect to Koine, due to the simplified grammar and vocabulary of Koine Greek.