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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Only a little.

    Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.

    The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.

    This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.

    Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
    So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.

    Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.


  • There are many subcultures around food. It’s not like the world is split between vegans and junk food addicts.

    The Cheeto and McDonalds eating crowd may have crappy nutrition but they’re an extreme. The other extreme is meal-preppers. They know exactly how much chicken, rice and broccoli they’re eating.

    There are huge communities of people who are very health conscious. Some of them focus their consciousness on science, some of them on other methods. Some of those people are vegans. Some aren’t.






  • When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.

    That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

    The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.

    If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.









  • The reports I’ve read claim that around 1,000 Hamas terrorist entered Israel. The IDF claims to have recovered the bodies of about 1,500 terrorists inside Israel. Given that this is an active conflict, it’s not surprising that the numbers don’t line up but they’re of the same order of magnitude.

    Since Hamas has hostages it’s clear that at least some of those terrorists made it back to Gaza. It’s also clear that the IDF has, by now, killed the vast majority of the terrorists who carried out these acts.

    So who is currently being targeted by IDF ordinance?