> Does Pixel somehow have a good keyboard? I use GBoard and find it atrocious

I use Google Pinyin Input. Since it was discontinued in favor of (the much worse) GBoard, I have to keep a backup of the apk and sideload it onto new phones.

Google does not appear to think of input methods as something that should be convenient for the user to use. Not sure why.

> Austronesian language family is wild. How could a language family be spoken both in New Zealand and Madagascar blows my mind.

Why? I assume you're familiar with the idea of the same language being spoken in New Zealand and England?

There's a significant difference between intentional colonization in the era of large ocean-crossing ships and languages spreading in an era of smaller craft without a central goal of expansion.

So? Both examples under discussion are intentional colonization in dedicated ocean-crossing ships.

It's true that Polynesian ships are smaller than English ones. But that makes no difference to... anything.

I don't know. I kinda assume most language families are somewhat land contiguous and I take indo-european as the exception that confirms the rule. That's why austronesian is so interesting.

I consider the languages of Western European colonial powers to have achieved a sort of heightened mobility when they more or less mastered extensive sea travel.

Something that I've always found interesting is how the two large Polynesian areas of Hawaii and New Zealand and currently dominated by the English language, but this domination came to New Zealand from the British Empire as it traveled east, while it arrived in Hawaii from the United States traveling west.

The English language capturing the world is unlike anything else.

You can throw Samoa in there. All of it.

Tahiti and the Marquesas fell to French, and Rapa Nui/Easter Island, to Spanish.

> the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row)

I don't think that's the comparison you want to draw? The rows appear to hold very similar amounts of text.

But the rows on the left, in Times New Roman, are shorter than the rows on the right. So even though "one row" holds the same amount of text, one column-inch of Times New Roman holds more rows.

The Times New Roman looks more readable to me because it has thicker strokes. This isn't really an issue in a digital font; you can't accidentally apply a thin layer of black to a pixel and let the color underneath show through.

> For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning more wars.

That's almost 100% backwards. The Republic expanded. The Empire, not so much.

Isn't that burying the lede on a technicality?

GP appears to be using "empire" as in "imperalistic" instead of as in "emperor".

This is a very strange titling choice; the essay does not use the existing concept of a "bag of words".

If you want to see how well text generation works on unrehearsed questions, you can ask about what happens in a comic strip.

I found commentary about searching Google for "dark legacy comics who wants some bamboo", and posted results for that search on HN in response to a comment saying "I work at Google on the 'AI Mode' search option, check it out!" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609275 )

And... a few days later, Google stopped automatically including an AI overview when you made that specific search.

But it turns out there are other comics on the internet. So just now I searched for "YAFGC comic 2230" (without the quotes). This is actually a search that makes a lot of sense, because the archive page for the comic is broken and it's impossible to guess the URL of a comic if all you know is the number.

So the goal here is really to find a link to comic 2230. But here's what the AI overview provides:

----- Italics represent original bolding -----

YAFGC comic #2230, titled "You Want It When?", was published on July 17, 2012.

The single-panel comic depicts a conversation at a blacksmith's shop, featuring characters Glon Smitharm/Bloodhand and the Cyclops Bros. The dialogue centers on the unrealistic expectations for custom-made magical items:

- Glon (a half-orc) asks the cyclopes if they can forge a new weapon for him.

- The Cyclops Bros reply with questions about the desired properties of the item (e.g., "enchanted," "plus three") and the required timeframe.

- Glon gives a deadline of "Tuesday," leading the cyclopes to express disbelief at the short notice for such a powerful item.

You can view the comic directly on the official website via this link:

- YAFGC Comic 2230: You Want It When?

----------

(It may look like I've left out a link at the end. That is not the case. The answer ends by saying "you can view the comic directly via this link", in reference to some bold text that includes no link.)

However, I have left out a link from near the beginning. The sentence "The dialogue centers on the unrealistic expectations for custom-made magical items:" is accompanied by a citation to the URL https://www.yafgc.net/comic/2030-insidiously-involved/ , which is a comic that does feature Glon Smitharm/Bloodhand and Ray the Cyclops, but otherwise does not match the description and which is comic 2030 ("Insidiously Involved"), not comic 2230.

The supporting links also include a link to comic 2200 (for no good reason), and that's close enough to 2230 that I was able to navigate there manually. Here it is: https://www.yafgc.net/comic/2230-clover-nabs-her-a-goldie/

You might notice that the AI overview got the link, the date, the title, the appearing characters, the theme, and the dialog wrong.

----- postscript -----

As a bonus comic search, searching for "wow dark legacy 500" got this response from Google's AI Overview:

> Dark Legacy Comic #500 is titled "The Game," a single-panel comic released on June 18, 2015. It features the main characters sitting around a table playing a physical board game, with Keydar remarking that the in-game action has gotten "so realistic lately."

> You can view the comic and its commentary on the official Dark Legacy Comics website. [link]

Compare https://darklegacycomics.com/500 .

That [link] following "the official Dark Legacy Comics website" goes to https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Legacy_Comics , by the way.

Citations are a key part of the paper. If the paper isn’t supported by the citations, it’s not a good paper.

Have you ever followed citations before? In my experience, they don't support what is being citated, saying the opposite or not even related. It's probably only 60%-ish that actually cite something relevant.

I follow them a lot. I’ve also had cases where they don’t support the paper.

This doesn’t make it okay. Bad human writer and reviewer practices are also bad.

Well yes, but just because that’s bad doesn’t mean this isn’t far worse.

How is it a good paper if the info in it cant be trusted lmao

Whether the information in the paper can be trusted is an entirely separate concern.

Old Chinese mathematics texts are difficult to date because they often purport to be older than they are. But the contents are unaffected by this. There is a history-of-math problem, but there's no math problem.

You are totally correct that hallucinated citations do not invalidate the paper. The paper sans citations might be great too (I mean the LLM could generate great stuff, it's possible).

But the author(s) of the paper is almost by definition a bad scientist (or whatever field they are in). When a researcher writes a paper for publication, if they're not expected to write the thing themselves, at least they should be responsible for checking the accuracy of the contents, and citations are part of the paper...

Problem is that most ML papers today are not independently verifiable proofs - in most, you have to trust the scientist didn't fraudulently produce their results.

There is so much BS being submitted to conferences and decreasing the amount of BS they see would result in less skimpy reviews and also less apathy

Not really true nowadays. Stuff in whitepapers needs to be verifiable which is kinda difficult with hallucinations.

Whether the students directly used LLMs or just read content online that was produced with them and cited after just shows how difficult these things made gathering information that's verifiable.

> Stuff in whitepapers needs to be verifiable which is kinda difficult with hallucinations.

That's... gibberish.

Anything you can do to verify a paper, you can do to verify the same paper with all citations scrubbed.

Whether the citations support the paper, or whether they exist at all, just doesn't have anything to do with what the paper says.

I dont think you know how whitepapers work then

> what does "else: do after a while loop in python? Only people who know python know what it does (and I suspect most don't).

OK, I had never heard of the syntax, but in its own defense it does exactly what you'd guess, the same thing it does after an "if".

These are equivalent statements:

    preloop:
      if condition:
        do_more_stuff()
        goto preloop

    while condition:
      do_more_stuff()

and these are also equivalent:

    preloop:
      if condition:
        do_more_stuff()
        goto preloop
      else:
        wrap_it_ip()

    while condition:
      do_more_stuff()
    else:
      wrap_it_up()

It could've easily been defined that the else branch runs if the while condition never had a true value at all. In fact, I think that's more intuitive.

What are you trying to say? It is defined that way. And the example I provided above makes that completely explicit.

But here, from the official documentation:

> if the expression is false (which may be the first time it is tested) the suite of the else clause, if present, is executed and the loop terminates.

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/compound_stmts.html#the-...

> It’s such an academic word.

It's not even an early academic word; by its construction you can see that it postdates the period when scientists would have been expected to know Greek or Latin. etymonline dates it to 1909.

There are some interesting mentions in the "history" section of the wikipedia article:

> In 1920, the American zoologist E. Newton Harvey published a monograph, The Nature of Animal Light, summarizing early work on bioluminescence. Harvey notes that Aristotle mentions light produced by dead fish and flesh, and that both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History) mention light from damp wood.

> He records that Robert Boyle experimented on these light sources, and showed that both they and the glowworm require air for light to be produced. Harvey notes that in 1753, J. Baker identified the flagellate Noctiluca "as a luminous animal" "just visible to the naked eye", and in 1854 Johann Florian Heller (1813–1871) identified strands (hyphae) of fungi as the source of light in dead wood.

Had there been a term in common use, it probably would have been adopted for scientific use too. But if for some reason that didn't happen, it looks like The Nature of Animal Light would be your best bet for finding out what peasants called it.

I suspect that Aristotle and Pliny the Elder both called it "light", and that would be my first guess for what English miners and fishermen called it too.