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Why I'm Learning Sumerian

mindthenerd.com

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Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#71

Post by yakkomajuri »

I applaud this, and I'm a big advocate of every person finding out what's best for themselves.

I also admire the author because I derive a lot of joy from learning languages (should get back to it) but wouldn't ever undertake this.

The one comment I have here is that this feels a bit like trying to have a lot of control ("no client can cancel it") and what I've personally found for myself is that the answer to having been shattered by lack of control is learning to let go of control and flow rather than seeking more control.

But again, this is my own realization for my own mental health process! Irrespective of anything this is really cool and thanks for sharing.

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#72

Post by Tade0 »

Lio wrote: post #34
komali2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two weeks before launch, they pulled the plug > It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout. This idea I think about a lot, and I believe another way to describe it is "alienation from labor," or, in the doing of labor, alienation from purpose or meaning. Marx wr…

Alienation from labour is a perfect description. I once worked for a start up that got taken over. In the process all retained staff lost their options. I don’t think the options were really worth that much so I guess we were supposed to just be happy we still had our jobs. The pettiness of it though just sucked the life out of the work for me. I found it very hard to concentrate and very hard to give a shit about an…

> In the process all retained staff lost their options.

For nothing in return? I don't know the first thing about startup operations, but that sounds deeply unfair.

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#74

Post by stared »

alex_young wrote: post #29

…Sumerian, written in cuneiform, was humanity's first writing system. A language that hasn't been spoken in four thousand years. The same question circles again: Why am I doing this? Why am I trying to learn Sumerian, a language that hasn't been spoken for five thousand years?… Watch out reader, by the end it maybe indeed turn out that Sumerian hasn’t been spoken for 10, 20, or 30 thousand years. The LLM just doesn’t…

It reminds me of David from Prometheus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRfx05qKVxg.

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#75

Post by lukan »

simsla wrote: post #70
androng wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPTZero says its 44% AI generated

Those models are terrible. I tried one of the "best" ones and it told me the US Constitution was AI generated.

Maybe it was?

(I am reminded of a Fallout side quest, where you help a Museum retrieve artefacts and they talk about how the constitutions was moved around, maybe by airplane .. point being, history will be fun to reconstruct after a robot nuclear apocalypse)

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#76

Post by wongarsu »

jackhalford wrote: post #30
alex_young wrote: post #29

…Sumerian, written in cuneiform, was humanity's first writing system. A language that hasn't been spoken in four thousand years. The same question circles again: Why am I doing this? Why am I trying to learn Sumerian, a language that hasn't been spoken for five thousand years?… Watch out reader, by the end it maybe indeed turn out that Sumerian hasn’t been spoken for 10, 20, or 30 thousand years. The LLM just doesn’t…

From wikipedia > Attested from c. 2900 BC. Went out of vernacular use around 1700 BC; used as a classical language until about 100 AD. So vernacular use stopped roughly 3725 years ago

And it hasn't been spoken for almost 2000 years

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#77

Post by feintruled »

I dunno, man. You get to work for months to completion on a deeply fulfilling project, get well compensated, and then the plug gets pulled before it goes to production? That's living the software engineering dream!

Jokes aside, the article resonated with me (before the LLM vibes got overpowering) as I am learning Irish as my own personal challenge, which as a minority language is similarly derided by some as useless (there is essentialy no Irish speaker that does not also speak English) but which I have found tremendously intellectually invigorating and the most pumped I have been for a project in a long while. So it rang true for me before half way through a distinct "linkedin parable" nature started to come to fore. So alas I rather doubt the author is learning Sumerian at all. Cynical perhaps.

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#78

Post by [deleted] »

oytis wrote: post #45
curtisblaine wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one. reply Did you just respond to yourself but forgot to switch your handle?

Damn, I start feeling like a granny who believes everything Facebook feed shows her

[deleted]

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#79

Post by shiomiru »

4ndrewl wrote: post #31
yde_java wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the entire post, very well written, and didn't suffer from that impression that it was written by an LLM

It uses words. A lot of words. And punctuation. And spacing. To say what? Very little.

Yeah it's so sparse on actual details of Sumerian or cuneiform that after reading the article I remain unconvinced the "author" either cares for or knows anything about the topic.

(To be clear I know nothing about it either, but as a human with some similarly "pointless" hobbies, I can't imagine posting a writeup with so much motivational bullshit but so little about the actual thing I'm interested in.)

Re: Why I'm Learning Sumerian

#80

Post by probably_wrong »

fsloth wrote: post #61

"Doing hard things that don't need to matter" Do people in general have the illusion that hobbies "should matter" or be meaningful in any way to any other human being?

I can't speak for "people in general" but I know someone who only likes expensive, competitive hobbies. And since this person is not rich, they refuse to start any of them because they think there's no point in trying if you can't be the best at it.

I would argue that this sounds more like a job than a hobby, but then again, I also stopped playing MtG because I got tired of losing against people with deeper pockets than mine.

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