All good points and nothing I could disagree with. Well put. However, I was trying to provide reasons why it feels odd to Poles, 'cause it is honestly a bitch of a language to master. Passion for culture or language is admirable, but perhaps more counter-intuitive than flattering when expressed towards one's own?

By the way, I remember you asking stuff like 'how do you pronounce Ł' back in IRC days, so have some random trivia: you can guess with reasonable certainty someone's (and their parents) upbringing by noting if they can correctly pick tę vs tą (accusative and instrumental of 'this', respectively) because it's one of those rolls-off-the-tongue things that are difficult to correct later in life. I sound weird to most Poles due to aspirating 'ch', which is rather old-fashioned quality retained mostly by the elderly and folks from the rural South-East, and an artifact of being taught the language by my grandparents. Even hardcore philology students do declensions by the ear if they want to get it right, because the rules are like 3rd Latin (long list of rules and exceptions to stem endings and syllables) and Greek (consonant mutation) declension rolled into one, yet are somehow assumed to be understood by 4th graders :P.

Look, I'm not some snob who only goes to select operas, provided that the lead can sustain something above E-flat. Frankly, I prefer music without vocals most of the time, or sang in a language I don't understand, so that it can be in the background without distraction. My other on-and-off interest are 'misheard lyrics' and the like.

Send/post your stuff, please. Even if I won't like it, it's your fun and maybe I can help with The Algorithm :D.

btw am I wrong or is the most common answer from Polish peeps upon finding out a non-native/foreigner is trying to learn Polish: "...why?"?

Why would you want to learn a language that's only spoken by 38-ish million people who all live in a country where anyone halfway educated has some B1-level of competency in English? It's like learning Russian, if Russian was less influential on surrounding/related languages and had even more exception-driven grammar. It's a good starting point, 'cause I can kinda get at least the gist of all Slavic languages from Russian to Croatian, but that's after 20-some years of exposure.

Don't get me wrong, we have some dope literature, but the level of effort required to approach appreciation exceeds learning Archaic Greek to read the Iliad and Odyssey (and little else if anything, Archaic ain't the same beast as Attic/Ancient/Classical) or whichever sub-Saxon variant of Old English to read Beowulf (ditto). And, frankly, unless you plan to move to Poland, about as useful as either of those.

It's universally appreciated when tourists/workers learn some Polish, sure. Even little phrases go a long way. But, in general, we're understanding of difficulties and sheer phonetic complexity. The only time I felt anything resembling contempt to someone not bothering was with a Turkish co-worker who, after living here for 5 fucking years, couldn't even do groceries without relying on his pitiful grasp of English.

Are they this tight live?

Yes. They are well-developed technically, absolutely, and this is clearly their 'comfort' level. My beef was with the lyrics, which 9/10 times sound insightful until you spend two minutes thinking about them... hence a lot of that 'mindless' in my comment above. Good fun, good to sing, but there's no reason to pretend they're anything more, ya know? I think most people end up liking it in high school, propagate it through nostalgia, and I completely missed the window when it could have been impactful.

I loathed that band for a long time, because its fans seemed to shower it in mindless praise and/or listen only to it whilst ignoring any other music. Kinda like jazz hipsters, but with more bearable attitude. That said, I gave it an honest try after however many years, and it's been judged unfairly. Definitely not as cult as KULT's cult says, but there's a lot to appreciate.

Yeah, condensed matter is full of fraud stories. And it's almost always interesting, if disheartening, to read about them.

It's a shame showing a lack of successful measurement isn't rewarded or even encouraged. I end up hearing stuff through the grapevine how the idea I thought worth revisiting was already tried by some small team back in the '90s, and it's only mentioned at the back of the supplemental materials. There's a binder (and database) on my desk (laptop) that catalogues excerpts and mentions of such misses that may end up being my biggest contribution to the field.

So many grad students will run the labs for like 80 hours a week, gather the data sets they were told to, and then have no idea what any of it means.

To be fair, grad students span gamut from 'wait, why isn't B a constant?' out-of-their-depth beginners to the likes of you, who probably shake their head at visiting professors' inexperience with methodology. Not really trying to defend how some people run labs, but I know in my heart there were times when prof wasted his breath on explaining my role in the grand scheme of things.

If you're also paywalled.

Funny enough, I thought it's going to be about something a lot more #kleinbl00batshittery-y.

https://ossuaryrecords.bandcamp.com/album/popio-y-wiar

So, did the organizers try to scam some art subsidy? 'Cause, going blind, this gave me major The Producers vibe. Poor everyone, though.

For sure, the word of mouth is as crucial as earning a good reputation. That said, the course is gonna have only 15 seats by design. I'd rather be having 4-6 people who want to come rather than deal with a hundred who just want a pass.

Meetup reminder: March the 7th, 06:00 PM ETS, so about week from now.

After getting positive poll responses, I'm drafting an elective course. One of those 'proof writing for not just math majors' you have in the US. So much for doing less paperwork, but this one at least doesn't feel purposeless.

I wasn't in a hurry, it was nice to have front row seats for such a prescient demonstration.

When every foodhole in Warsaw connected with delivery service overnight, outgoing orders had much much higher priority. So, during pandemic, you had a crowd of deliverers, normal line that moved at snail's pace, and a nearby crowd of people who placed their orders in an app to game the system. This lead to a situation where people from the last group placed order to <restaurant's address> and added comments like "I'm the one wearing a brown hat with a gigantic pompom" or "I'm already behind you."

Insert something about follies of idiots with access technology. I don't know, I barely slept since Friday.

Correct me if I'm wrong

Dunno, probably not, but I think you could instantiate one that can when they can and freeze its learned ability, so the whole hoping it doesn't forget might go away.

But I have no idea. Don't write that much code or work with raw data these days, so bibliographic aid is just about all it can do for me in an hour of need. Otherwise, it's about as tangential to my goings-on as it can get.

When I tried that 'explain paper' site, it left enough of a distaste for me to roll eyes and move past. Between absolutely fucking insisting that some unrelated mathematical concept[0] is absolutely crucial to explain my question and rephrasing a circular argument until I got bored and left, I probably won't bother again for quite a while.

Unfortunately, the above experience mean I'm unlikely to trust LLMs with stuff I don't know a lot about. Also, I kinda regret writing anything in this thread and will probably just add more tags to my ignored list. Fun company notwithstanding - too much hassle, too few fucks left.

[0] - I wrote and deleted 900 word footnote of jargon about orbits of the coadjoint representation groups and operators in de Sitter space, so let's pretend I said Tits index and wiggled my eyebrows in an amusing way.

Philosophy deserves every burn. Sorry. But only a little.

Eh, I'm being my usual exaggerated dismissive, but it's sad that the two most visible to me camps are essentially "it's only so unbiasedly rational of us to consider how many AGI could dance on the needle's head" and "mathless/IFLS quantum vibes" types. It's not even that I don't see the merits of those two, let alone philosophy at large, but that I have absolutely no fucking interest in either yet they keep talking at me like I'm a lobotomite for not caring.

And no, wasoxygen, I'm not calling you out specifically, it's just how you Yudkowsky-ites communicate. We're cool, I hope.

Not sure why you'd want a middleman, either.

Well, ML/whatever excels at finding patterns, even if it can't/won't explain them. Having a tool that goes "exploring these parameter spaces is most likely worthless" or even "isn't it funny how second order solitons only form when this parameter is divisible by 17?" may be invaluable to a right person who can find context to those observations. That's the "(or something)" in my previous comment.

Tying this to "making sure conclusions are correct-ish is going to be hard to replicate." <- that's the bottleneck as far as I can see. First you have to separate seeds from chaff, and then make sure those seeds aren't blighty or cleverly disguised angry bears. I wouldn't mind science becoming (even more) akin to computer-assisted chess, though. Tools are tools, experts use tools better, so that checks out too.

Losing shits and meetups

Wasn't singling you out here, though I hope you take care of yourself and wife. And it's not like I don't understand or lack the presence of mind to understand why people are so agitated. I simply can't keep dealing with it. It's been two goddamned years, and I can't even force myself to go to Ukraine anymore. I haven't seen the worst, and it's too much. Focusing on what I can affect has to be enough for me right now.

As to meetups: no worries, I can make another one in April or May. They're about as informal as flip-flops anyway.

Meetup? Meetup. The 7th of March, 06:00 PM ETS, so two weeks from now-ish.

- But you have to fill in those forms yourself! By the day after tomorrow!

- Oh, not a problem. They follow the same schema as the ones I had completed last year, and only need my signature at the end, once the dates are updated.

- They still need to be filled. By hand.

- Say no more, you've been hereby deputized!

And thus I took about a half of papers back to my desk, since that's not my ass on the line if they're late. As someone who managed to out-pedant local civil servants for so long they gave up, I feel the thrill of battle once more.