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“I just chose words carefully”

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Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#151

Post by iaaan »

defrost wrote: post #126
bluefirebrand wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the writing quality, genius or otherwise, have to do with the boom mic though?

Bugger all - particularly given the boom mic operator and other framing "gaffs" are (as I recall) all part of the "wide screen" 16:9 later release on BluRay etc that were somewhat rushed out the door. A number of shows of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post producti…

There's a famous example of this in Malcolm in the Middle where the camera cuts to a different shot and a stand-in for Dewey is visible in the 16:9 release, but was not visible in the original 4:3 broadcast. So in one shot you have Dewey's normal actor, then in the next there is some random kid.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#153

Post by SyneRyder »

cyphar wrote: post #89
kibwen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles" I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.

And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i". It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").

The term for this is a "shibboleth", if it's of interest:

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

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#154

Post by citizen428 »

iLemming wrote: post #99

Almost irrelevant to the story itself, but here's what it feels like to use Emacs these days. The story talks about monospace fonts and how unappealing they could be for reading prose. It is a fascinating post on itself, but here's what happened - it caught my eye while I was busy, I clicked the link, it opened the page, I kept it hanging around and forgot about it. Then HN page got buried in my browser history. Afte…

This is why so many of us are so much into Emacs. In a time where pretty much all software around us gets progressively enshittified, there’s this 50 year old Lisp interpreter masquerading as an editor that you can make truly and uniquely yours.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#155

Post by mb2100 »

pmontra wrote: post #131
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #109

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

Ah, but I use a normal proportional font in my editor so same and diff have different widths. That was the fun comment. The serious ones: 1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience. 2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is a = 1 ab = 2 abc = 3 instead of a = 1 ab = 2 abc = 3 3. No tables or diagrams in comments of course but I think that I could…

2. You must have never written Haskell.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#156

Post by lloeki »

Kootle wrote: post #148
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #109

In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.

In Japan they have the abbreviation “NG” (“not good”) that’s often used as the opposite of “OK”. I always liked how, when I worked for a Japanese machine learning company, classifiers would be between “OK” and “NG”. Maybe semantically “okay” and “not good” are not great opposites, but I always liked how having textual alignment makes the contrast immediately obvious

Log levels have me screaming internally

https://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.4.0/libdoc/logger/rdoc/Logger....

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#157

Post by likis »

cyphar wrote: post #89
kibwen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles" I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.

And are British, at least in Australia (and the US, I guess?) we pronounce the second "i". It is always fun when you notice where someone is from based on secondary clues like that -- my favourite is the choice of "a" or "an" where it is ambiguous (for instance, I recently ran across "an HTTP request" where I would've said "a HTTP request").

I thought the rules were clear and it depends on how the word is pronounced, with a vowel or consonant sound.

I have only heard people say H T T P, as specific letters when pronouncing HTTP, and thus the a or an should be based on how one would pronounce the letter "H". And H would be pronounced as "aitch". Starts with an a -> vowel sound -> should be "an".

But I'm a non native english speaker, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#158

Post by ZeroGravitas »

iaaan wrote: post #151
defrost wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bugger all - particularly given the boom mic operator and other framing "gaffs" are (as I recall) all part of the "wide screen" 16:9 later release on BluRay etc that were somewhat rushed out the door. A number of shows of that era were filmed wide (16:9) and post processed / coloured / reframed and broadcast on TV in a box 4:3 aspect ratio No visible boom mic operators, etc - careful eyes in the initial post producti…

There's a famous example of this in Malcolm in the Middle where the camera cuts to a different shot and a stand-in for Dewey is visible in the 16:9 release, but was not visible in the original 4:3 broadcast. So in one shot you have Dewey's normal actor, then in the next there is some random kid.

A recent similar example was Mad Men rerelease in 4k where the VFX weren't redone properly after a rescan of the film and you can see the man operating the machine with the pipe that spews sick out of a characters mouth.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#160

Post by traes »

crackalamoo wrote: post #105
someguyiguess wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots would excel at writing that sort of copy I’d assume. (I haven’t tested it but doubt an LLM couldn’t handle that)

An raw LLM no, but given code execution it can do a good job. I had my Claude Sonnet write a sonnet in this form after 14 rounds of iteration with Python: The autumn wind moves slow across the field, and every falling leaf now yields its fight. The summer gold at last has ceased to yield, and short days now give way to longer night. I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream, and watch it slowly carry every fallen l…

For clarity:

  The autumn wind moves slow across the field,
  and every falling leaf now yields its fight.
  The summer gold at last has ceased to yield,
  and short days now give way to longer night.
  I walk alone beside a calm and quiet stream,
  and watch it slowly carry every fallen leaf.
  I think of you as some half-forgotten dream,
  and taste again that same old, bitter grief.
  The silent stars come out to watch it still,
  and pale moonlight falls gently on the hill.
  A lonesome owl calls out from past the mill,
  and time moves on, unhurried and calm, until
  the dawn returns to paint the sky brand new,
  and I still recall the love I lost with you.
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