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“I just chose words carefully”

unsung.aresluna.org

191–200 of 374 posts

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". Since the "l" sound is last and preceded by a schwa, "truffle" (or "missle") obviously cannot be considered phonetic.

> They pronounce these words as if the e and the l were reversed, if "truffle" was written in a phonetic manner it would be written "truffel". You can just look this up. The usual way to write "truffle" in a phonetic manner is of course /tɹʌfl̩/. You'll note that there is no vowel in the second syllable at all; it consists of just the L. (And that's what the small mark below the L means - "syllabic".) This is the sta…

Well I know what you mean, it's phonetic in the same way that a silent "ent" and "p" in "comptent" are "phonetic" in French, or the silent "n"s in "pannenkoeken" are in Dutch. In common language though we call that "not phonetic". But that's not what the person you were responding to was talking about, and it also has nothing to do with IPA notation: we were obviously not writing IPA here.

However to come back to IPA and "truffle", Wiktionary (not a definitive source I know, but there is no definitive source whatsoever about anything regarding the English language) does that say "truffle" rymes with /-ʌfəl/ with a schwa right there between the f and the l. The pronunciation of the word itself in Wiktionary is indicated with a syllable break rather than a schwa, which I would absolutely dispute, and indeed it looks like Cambridge dictionary[1] puts a schwa there in addition to the syllable break.

It's also written "truffel" in Dutch for what it's worth.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/truffle [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/truff...

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#195
post #148

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

Seems like “not okay” would be the cleanest antonym. I can’t see anything that could go wrong with using it.

> Meeting at 4 pm today?

> NO

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#196
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or terraform.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series. “And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me w…

Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog. I've sometimes he…

> Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

We're going to see more of this once diffusion language models mature. They won't match the exact length but will sure choose words to fix the set number of tokens.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#199

this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting

I guess in printed material it’s more space efficient, which is why it has historically been used. Justified text can be made look nice but it requires hyphenation and a non-greedy linebreaking algorithm, which unfortunately is not implemented in browsers or Microsoft Word.

Re: “I just chose words carefully”

#200
If you're submitting an eight page conference paper you're very often hunting runts (short lines ending paragraphs) and rewording for better justification, especially on the first page and even more so in the abstract.

First-page space is at a premium because you want the reviewer to scan the introduction well, and it's great if you can fit a key figure that explains the concept on the first page.

The game's probably very different now that there's such a flood of submissions but when I was reviewing I always saw messy alignment on the first page as a sign the paper was probably rushed, and usually I could see that elsewhere in the paper too.

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