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• Post #4496673

  A boy who is waiting to see some hardcore classic Fire Emblem action

• Post #4494479

  Here is a translation note I wrote just now while working on the Annals of Yanzi, because it's informative on its own: “Three thousand servants, three girlfriends and four ministers” isn’t necessarily meant to be taken as those exact numbers, but can stand for “a few thousand, a few, several” in the same way that we say “a couple” to mean not necessarily exactly two but definitely more than one. This is because there is no grammatical singular/plural distinction in Classical Chinese, so y...

• Post #4491686

  Two things: 1) those “Dobby’s Grave” headlines were ragebait that vastly exaggerated the issue. You are not immune to propaganda meant to get you yelling at Kids These Days as if they’re the problem 2) “read another book” I have an explicitly trans-positive suggestion https://0xabad1dea.itch.io/glory-in-the-thunder-act-1

• Post #4486158

  there's a new German Shepherd puppy in the building named Ace. The plan is to slowly acclimate Ace to Odin so that he knows Odin also just lives here and nobody needs to be protected from him They've yet to make nose contact, but Odin was a very good boy about sitting still and wagging his tail while a puppy barked at him from one meter away

• Post #4464624

  what would YOU prefer I focus my Classical Chinese translation time on? (Anything I translate will be free to read and in a modern, non-hyper-literal style) 1) finish the Analects of Confucius, of which there are already three chapters; there are already many translations of this, mine is just, well, internet-flavored https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/analects/ 2) the Salt and Iron Concords - a transcript of a bunch of guys around a table arguing economic policy over 2000 years ago, becaus...

• Post #4444988

  The Local Homeless Guy offered Odin a paper cup of water. His tongue barely even fit, but Odin was overwhelmed with joy to be offered a gift by a friend

• Post #4435575

  thinking about how much I love my tiny baby, Odin, who is so very small and in need of my protection

• Post #4427789

  I just recalled the interesting tidbit that the idea of writing "(he/him)" and "(she/her)" was invented many thousands of years ago by the Sumerians, who often used written symbols you weren't meant to pronounce out loud to help you visually parse the structure of cuneiform, and this included he/she markers for personal names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative

• Post #4415020

  just had a random flashback of some American Lifestyle Trauma I lived in the suburbs of Boston before I moved to the Netherlands. It had gotten vastly more crowded in recent years with absolutely horrifically inadequate urban planning to compensate. I worked in this huge cluster of office buildings, like easily ten thousand employees, that were an isolated island along a busy stroad; down the stroad was an equally isolated mall complex with plenty to eat. But there were no sidewalks whatsoever...

• Post #4411087

  Rhyming translation of the little song of an unlucky woman in the Book of Han: [context: there is a succession dispute over two princes with different mothers, because the son with less rank is considered a stronger leader. The mother with more power, the Empress Dowager, is abusing the other one, a concubine, while the sons aren’t home to see] Madame Qi sang while she was husking rice: “My son is a king, his mother a slave; oh how his comfort do I crave! Husk, husk, from dawn until dusk, W...

• Post #4410418

  I wish there weren't a far-right extremist manly-man statue avatar philosopher who calls himself Bronze Age Pervert, because it makes it a lot harder for me, someone intensely interested in the lives of women, children, minorities and queers in ancient cultures, to proudly call myself a Bronze Age freak

• Post #4397602

  life is hard, Odin is soft

• Post #4382521

  @sela@social.nihil.gay I personally find having voluntarily accepted responsibility for the well-being of a Creature to be very good for my motivation to function

• Post #4381449

  I got another North Korean IT scam with a business logo that just says "Logo".

• Post #4381012

  Today, the nonverbal autism therapist who works on the corner messaged us and asked us to bring Odin downstairs because one of her students said he wanted the big black dog and (I know firsthand, because I have seen this child several times) that's just about the most communicative he's ever been He was very excited and Odin was very excited (but well behaved) that someone was excited to see him.

• Post #4374321

  I said to someone that Steve Yegge's recent blog posts about AI read like a digital tablet that holds exactly one text file left strewn around a destroyed lab between piles of skulls. Here is my artistic vision of the vibe his vibe coding obsession gives me. This is made with gamedev assets by Limezu adapted to my personal color palette.

• Post #4371699

  The Gas Town Guy is charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for consulting sessions on his infamously expensive multi-model AI techniques, and all that money… “helps with” paying the hydra AI to take over making his old passion project video game for him. jesus fucking christ. like seriously, jesus fucking christ what the hell that is so fucked up. my dude. my dude, the passionate young programmer in you who started with a janky compiler and a dream in the 90s is drowning in abject misery. T...

• Post #4351152

  HAPPY WEEWOO, FOR ONE MINUTE PRANKING TOURISTS IS LEGAL #netherlands

• Post #4347813

  a concrete example of why Classical Chinese is an unintelligble nightmare when spoken aloud by modern dictionary rules: 何 "why?" (one syllable) 何不 "why not?" (two syllables) 盍 a one-syllable contraction for casually saying "why not?" In ancient pronunciation, roughly: "ha, ha pu, hap." But Modern Mandarin has lost final -p in all words. Which leaves you with...? With Classical "何 why?" and "盍 why not?" being pronounced exactly th...

• Post #4328652

  Okay so to be clear, I’m not mad at anyone, no-one needs to apologize, etc, but: I get a really surprising number of requests to bring Odin to the city center while someone’s in Amsterdam. As much as I enjoy a nice little outing with him, the reality is that I am a very sickly person, it takes a lot out of me, and takes a lot of time. I’ve ended up just… not replying most of the time, because I feel bad explicitly turning people down. So I ask to please not ask this of me if we’re strangers/...

• Post #4327013

  I think I just got my first North Korean IT scam "I'm a poor innocent programmer in China bro, my nonspecific access got nonspecifically cut off bro, just give me your account and access to your computer bro, I'll give you a share of the earnings bro, please I need to launder my identity soooooo bad"

• Post #4323463

  I basically didn’t think about Chinese at all for a month for hieroglyphics related reasons, but I got back to crackin’ today and I’m pleased to report yes, I still know most of these words Here’s a little translation if you’d like to challenge notoriously cold-hearted legalist Han Feizi: “Nobody can draw squares with their left hand and circles with their right.” (At the same time, loopholers.) #classicalchinese

• Post #4283515

  OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have th...

• Post #4270416

  my husband started going on a rant about how people misunderstand what the International Criminal Court does and doesn't do; he said something like "for example, if I went and did a terrorism here in the Netherlands, I wouldn't end up in the Hague, I'd end up in..." and he realized his mistake in using himself as the specific example, who'd go to the local court which is in, well, the Hague

• Post #4245644

  a Hugs Criminal moments after being arrested for overwhelming mommy while she was trying to refill his water bowl #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

• Post #4245638

  We brought water when we took Odin out since it’s so warm, but he perhaps did not make the most efficient use of resources #dogs #dogsofmastodon

• Post #4244909

  oh, I passed sixteen thousand followers 🥳 I’m actually wildly ill at the moment but this has sparked some token amount of joy

• Post #4206683

  Rare sighting of the silliest of beans

• Post #4187681

  @mario@don.tbully.me 🫩

• Post #4187552

  Okay, we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen 1) July 25th: someone messes around with an LLM and posts a proof of the Collatz conjecture that does, in fact, verify in the theorem prover. (The AI use is not disclosed on the github page) https://github.com/xrchz/CollatzLean 2) July 26th: several serious bugs are posted in the theorem provers, that in principle could allow a false statement to be "proven" true. They're serious, yes, but no need for panic, because...