Trying to figure something out about some words in Mandarin
Mandarin speakers: mind saying 这么, 什么, 怎么样 in a natural way (fit it in a sentence?) to yourself, and then answering the questions in the next tweets? Don't look at the questions before saying the words
Was there an "n" sound between the characters in 这么?
(feel free to reply with specifics)
Was there an "n" between the characters in 什么? How would you transcribe it?
Was there an "n" between 怎么?
The reason I ask is that I seem to hear a variety of pronunciations here, and I'm kinda interested in what the evolution is here -- it seems like these similar sounding words are all affecting each others' pronunciations
i've even heard what sounds like a tone shift in 这么 that sounds like what you would expect after inserting an -n and then skipping it
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a recent conversation amongst friends reminded me of my thoughts on expertise, magic, and mental models, and while this probably should be a blog post I'm lazy so I might as well thread it
the context of this was advanced borrow checking in rust, but most of the thoughts are more general and apply to a lot of learning paths, at least in programming
for example, with lifetime elision / explicit lifetimes in rust, i've heard the learning process described as:
1. Beginners: Rely on the "magic" (elision), and use it exclusively. They're lost the moment they need to step out of it, until they learn the underlying workings.
a thing i've said a couple times now is that the marginal benefit of someone getting their vaccine a bit earlier is nothing compared to the huge benefit of us reaching herd immunity
yes, you getting the vaccine now may make someone you feel "deserves it more" get it a little later. that's fine, overall everyone rushing to use up available vaccines as fast as possible moves us significantly closer to herd immunity.
Folks have the same attitudes around vaccines as they did around masks a year ago
masks are not usually a scarce resource, they were temporarily scarce, and that remedied itself
Sometimes you set up a process just before you need it and look back and feel so grateful someone had that idea
@ca_covid has a way to report errors with the data, since sometimes we don't get all the info, sometimes vaccines run out, etc
until a few days ago, we just had a feed into a discord channel of these, and folks could triage and fix them
then we added the "oh no ping", a special ping to various people that would happen whenever an entry had 2+ unhandled errors
most of the errors are minor, but if you get two for a site it's definitely something that should be prioritized, even if the actual error is not a big deal
today we started getting many more of these, and because of this ping we were able to triage and fix them quickly
this made folks wonder: "hey surely that's not the only place with this problem? maybe we can tell them to make sure they're in the system!"
we then could just call a bunch of pharmacies of the same chain in the same county (we have a list!) and tell them to do this. It worked!
a cool thing we could have done, but didn't in this case, would have been to go a step further and retarget our phone banking efforts to that county, with a broadcasted change to the script. We have that tooling.
so @ethanhs is new to Mathematica and was wondering why array indexing starts at 1
and the reason behind it is actually pretty weird and due to some interesting language design choices. i thought y'all would enjoy it
Mathematica has a wonderfully quirky functional language that does a lot of things really well. I enjoy using it a lot, though I don't get to use it much these days
so first, some basics. arrays ("lists") in Mathematica are declared with curly braces, and are indexed with double square brackets
they have to be double square brackets because single square brackets are function application (e.g. `Sin[x]`), and parentheses are for grouping
So I'm seeing a lot of misunderstandings around voting systems, especially when it pertains to voting machines. It occurs to me that people may not have a clear idea about how they actually work, and what properties they try to uphold, and how they try to be fraud-resilient.
So systems like these interest me for the same reasons cryptography does -- they're interesting constraint sets with complex dynamics, and are kinda fun to roll around in your head with various situations.
This year I signed up as a poll worker to help, and to learn more.
This thread will mostly be about how voting in Alameda County, CA works. I'll try to highlight properties considered important more broadly, but the exact dynamics of what I describe are county-specific.