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What's not safe for you? They pay you the money, then you send the item to the address they ask. You already got the money! Cancelling the sale because the buyer wants to spend a bit less on shipping seems like an awful thing to do. International shipping gets ridiculously expensive, so combining multiple small packages into one shipment makes perfect sense.


Engines, not just steam engines.

Sure, but if you look at more complex picture of engine development you could just as easily support the proposition that programmers are currently not in any danger (by pointing out that the qualitative differences between IC and steam engines were decisive when it comes to replacing horses, and the correct analogy is that much like a steam engine could never replace a horse, a transformer model can never replace a human).

Not detracting from the article, I think it's a fun way to shake your brain into the entirely appropriate space of "rapid change is possible"!


How strange to give it the same name as an unrelated natural language spoken by millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catala

Not even unrelated, Catala (the law-language) seems to be a French project, supported by institutions in France, and Catalan seems to have a intertwined history with France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language#France

funnily enough, the relation comes from a french jurist's last name

from their repo: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala

> The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer database of law cases, Juris-Data.



Name that is almost certainly related to Catalonia as well.

Catala != Catalan

Try clicking my "Catala" link and looking at the first sentence. The Catalan word for Catalan is català.

Great. You would know that the accent can completely change the meaning of a word in that language as such an expert.

So we can just say that catala != català


That’s not correct, the accent is simply there to know how to pronounce the word, and while in some specific cases (diacritic accent) it is there to avoid confusion in words that are pronounced the same with different meaning, the presence or lack of accent does not as a rule change the meaning of a word.

In this case, catala and català mean the same thing, one is simply misspelled as all words with the strong syllable being last will always have an accent mark if they end in a vowel.


Your first paragraph insists that "the presence or lack of accent does not as a rule change the meaning of a word." While your second insists that "[the same word without an accent] is simply misspelled as all words with the strong syllable being last will always have an accent mark if they end in a vowel."

But your accent rule also isn't followed by the language you claim uses it as a hard and fast rule: in the case of the single syllable Catalan word ma (my, femenine) and mà (hand). Please square that with your declaration that " all words with the strong syllable being last will always have an accent mark if they end in a vowel." Seemingly ma is breaking your rules, as well as your assertion that missing the accent is only a spelling error. In this, and many other cases, the accent completely changes the meaning of the word which also contradicts your assertion I highlighted in paragraph 1. Maybe "as a rule" isn't the correct phrase given the multitude of words that can change meaning with an accent mark.

The broader thing you missed is that Catala is the last name of a person working on the project, and is not missing an accent. That is how the person's name is spelled. Even in Catalan. Català is a Catalan word refering to a different thing. In this case the accent is incredibly important since it helps us differentiate between a man's name and a language.

In both the figurative and spelling sense we must therefore conclude that, in reality:

Catala != Català


You clearly don’t even speak the language and are just fishing for an argument. I have already explained why your comment is incorrect, have nothing else to say to you on that subject if you insist that the accent mark will completely change the meaning without understanding that the accent in català follows the normal ortographical rules while the accent in mà is diacritic, a special rule that only applies to often monosyllabic words.

mà / ma does not break the general rule because the word does have an accent mark, it just also falls under the diacritic special rule.

On your point about the author’s last name, it’s fair, but also you’re ignoring that the last name comes from the same word and is thus a spelling variation from French/Occitan, further proving your assertion of Catala != Català as wrong.


> You clearly don’t even speak the language and are just fishing for an argument.

Please refrain from making negative assumptions about my language skills and motives. I am not a native speaker of the language, but I do read and understand it fine. This is not the place for passive or backhanded personal attacks.

> I have already explained why your comment is incorrect, have nothing else to say to you on that subject...

Since you made it personal, and then went on to say quite a bit on that subject I will provide my comments:

Thank you for acknowledging the validity of my points. I hear your argument, but it doesn't invalidate mine. Either an accent mark has no bearing on the meaning of a word or it does. I have demonstrated that it is absolutely and undeniably the case that an accent mark can change the meaning of a word in Catalan.

My original assertion is, verbatim: "...the accent can completely change the meaning of a word". You aren't arguing that ma and mà are the same word, despite your assertion that "the presence or lack of accent does not as a rule change the meaning of a word".

I don't address formal grammatical rules, and I am not arguing against your interpretation, it is correct AFAICT. I understand that there are rules for placing accent marks, which is why I asked you to explain the full rule when I was able to easily contradict the grammar rule. That doesn't contradict my argument.

The argument is simply that the placement of an accent changes the meaning of some words in Catalan. There was a side argument that if the last syllable is stressed it must have an accent on the vowel, which you asserted was true "as a rule". That was not true, as evidenced by you having to explain when it doesn't work "as a rule". It can be the case that accent marks have rules for when they are written, and also be the case that different words can have the same letters and differ only in the accent. Both of our arguments are correct.

In this exact case that is what is happening. Catala is a niche programming language named after a french man. Català is a language. The presence of the accent is distinguishing meanings between Catala and Català. I can write the following: "Parlo català, però no se res sobre el llenguage Catala", and the presence or absence of accents will mean the difference between that sentence being gibberish and that sentence meaning something. Likewise, Ma, si, dona, que, etc. can all have an accent added to them to give them a completely different meaning in Catalan. It is unequivocally true, and I don't know why you would assert otherwise.

Thanks for a great discussion.


Well, not in Catalan… (It is "català")

That's a 24 hour clock that skips some numbers and puts other numbers out of order.

> That depends what you mean by "literature". If you want it to be written down

That is what literature means: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/literature#Noun


Well, then poetry is not literature.

No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.

The person who hears that poem in circulation and records it in his notes has created literature; an anthology is literature but an original work isn't.


> No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.

Sure they have, by virtue of writing it down. It becomes literature when it hits the paper (or computer screen, as it were).

(Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing", in which case I guess we illustrate the overarching point of value in shared symbols and language and the waste of time in stating our original definitions for every statement we want to make)


> Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing"

You're close. I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

Here's a quote from the fantasy novel The Way of Kings that always appealed to me:

>> "Many of our nuatoma -- this thing, it is the same as your lighteyes, only their eyes are not light--"

>> "How can you be a lighteyes without light eyes?" Teft said with a scowl.

>> "By having dark eyes," Rock said, as if it were obvious. "We do not pick our leaders this way. Is complicated. But do not interrupt story."

For an example from reality, I am forced to tell people who ask me that the English translation of 姓 is "last name", despite the fact that the 姓 comes first.

Similarly, the word for writing a poem is "write", whether this creates a written artifact or not. And the poem is literature whether a written artifact currently exists, used to exist, or never existed.

(Though you've made me curious: if the Iliad wasn't literature until someone wrote it down, do you symmetrically believe that Sophocles' Sisyphus is no longer literature because it is no longer written down?)


> I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

Make, Create, Formulate.

> I am forced to tell people who ask me that the English translation of 姓 is "last name", despite the fact that the 姓 comes first.

"Family name" is availabe, commonly used and a better traslation than "last name" here, no?

> Similarly...

You're probably pretty alone in this thinking.

I don't think the metaphysical argument about Sisyhus is interestng or relevant.

I don't consider all movies to be literature. Do you consider all movies to be literature by definition?

I also write computer programs and banking checks. Does that make them literature to you?


> I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

You literally used another perfectly acceptable verb in modern English besides “writing” for the act of creating a poem in the very sentence making this claim, which somewhat undermines the claim.


If it’s not written down, then that’s true.

Once someone writes it down, it is.


Sure in the context that you mean it’s an oral tradition.

A single author, in a physics department. Seems unlikely to be groundbreaking or authoritative.

Welcome to the world of papers. Have a read and get back to us. Dismissing out of hand is rarely constructive.

took me a while but i read it. thought it was actually a pretty good and well researched paper that does a good job rationalizing its thesis. thanks for sharing

Ad hominem right out of the gate? Really?


235B-A22B is pretty big.

High resolution images, but they decided to disable zoom on mobile. I don't understand why anyone does that.

Even the high-res version (20 MB) of the Bremen image seems to be about 17-25m per pixel based on the 50m wide airport runway being about 2-3 pixels wide in the image.

Copernicus browser claims 10x10 meter pixels (which seems to be correct) but the actual resolution of the radar is supposed to be 5m-x-20m for the standard IW mode. I assume "high resolution" here means the data should have 5m x 5m resolution (Strip Map mode) which in Copernicus browser claims 3.5x3.5m pixels.


The images on the page are not the high resolution images, they are resized as the full res versions are over 20MB. If you take the image, you'll be taken to a download page where you can get the full res version.

They're not the highest resolution, but they're still high enough resolution that I can't see the details without zooming in.

All of modern web design is about removing as much freedom from html as possible. It's infuriating.

We had zoomable, downloadable images in the 90s, with bandwidth as the only constraint.

Now I've got 50x as many pixels and I'm forced to use a bookmarklet and 2 menus to be able to see it larger than my fingernail.


Also, I don't understand why browsers don't let me override that.

These replies prompted me to go looking. Firefox Android (which I'm using) does have an option in the settings under Accessibility called "Zoom on all websites". It works!

Chrome has a similar option, which also works on this site. I expect this might break a few pages, but Google Maps and OpenStreetMap work fine, with pinch zoom zooming the map when you do it on the map.


Awesome. Somehow I've missed them introducing that, as a long-time Firefox Android user.

And frankly it's in the wrong place if you ask me.


Opera Mobile has a force-allow-zoom option

If only Opera was still Norwegian...

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