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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/28/24 in Posts
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Why is NVIDIA stock going nuts? NVIDIA will likely be the highest valued company in the USA within the year. Nvidia stock surged 15.1% last week to a record 1,064.19, blasting past 1,000. The chip giant increased its market cap by $338 billion to $2.661 trillion as of May 24. That's just behind Apple ($2.913 trillion) and not far from Microsoft ($3.196 trillion). We will need fusion reactors just to power these new AI ‘gigafactories’. Or another alternative energy source…1 point
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AI cost, energy expense, and opportunity
Vort reacted to NeuroTypical for a topic
Go nuclear go nuclear go nuclear go!!! Molten salt! Small modular! Thorium reactors! Yucca mountain waste repository! Recycling spent nuclear fuel! Go democrat party finally joining the 21st century and not being anti-nuclear any more! Go democrats only about 50 years behind! Go go go the cleanest, greenest, lowest emission, safest, least deadly form of power out there! Go US energy independence and a lucrative industry where ppl without a college degree can make upwards of $100k/year! It's hellaciously expensive, and at risk of politicians following fear votes by drumming up fear. Everything else is a no-brainer.1 point -
Finnish
Vort reacted to Carborendum for a topic
I wonder if that is a requirement, as they say, it is one of the hardest languages for foreigners to learn. "Only babies and missionairies can learn to speak Finnish." This nephew of mine is one of the smartest people I know. I always knew his father was one of the smartest men I've ever met. My other BIL may be smarter than he is. The other day I was in a conversation where this came up. And I realized that of all the people that I know, this nephew & his older brother, as well as my oldest son are probably the smartest people I've ever met. I can only keep up with them because I have 30 years of education and life experience on them. But this BIL of mine is at another level beyond. And I believe my son and the older nephew will surpass my BIL at some point.1 point -
What did I just eat? (Part 2)
zil2 reacted to Carborendum for a topic
There is already a word for "little taco" (taquito). But that dish has been commandeered to become the a.k.a. "flautas". So, we can't use it to describe what you're doing. You could also look at the gordita or chalupa for something larger.1 point -
Tiawan is a problem. I have spent some time working there. The people are wonderful – perhaps one of the kindest cultures I have encountered. The Church there is very young, experience-wise but growing. There are a lot of people on the island, and they all want to be reunited with friends and family on the mainland but none of them want to live under communism. They know communism much better than it is known in this country and they would rather die than be ruled by communism. The problem is that the people of China and Tiawan are one people that should be one country. I think we need to understand history – I will try to make this short (most difficult). When Marco Polo established relations between Europe and China, trade brought lots of new things to Europe. But China thought and was far superior to Europe both with products and knowledge in general. The only thing that Europe had to trade of value to Chima was gold and silver (and other precious elements). After a couple of years of trade China was accumulating the wealth (gold, silver and precious elements) of Europe. China acquired all the reserves Europe had taken from their colonies and then some. Something had to be done or the western civilizations would all go bankrupt. 20 western families from Europe (one with ties to the USA) formed an alliance to create an international drug cartel. Afghanistan was targeted as a source of opium and the drug and it addictions was introduced into China to recover the gold and silver reserves. The drug trade devested China resulting in what is known in China as the 100 years of shame. China began to fight back against the drug trade. Eventually (end of the 1800’s) China attacked an island off the coast of China where the opium (heroin) was manufactured in a desperate attempt to stop the drug from destroying China. All of Europe and the USA sent their military to end the China rebellion. There is a movie titled “55 days in Peking” (or something like that starring Charlton Heston). The reason I brought up this movie is to establish the blatant attitude of the West to this drug trade problem. The war against China was over quite quickly resolved and China surrendered. As punishment the West took Hong Kong and Tiawan away from China for 100 years. Hong Kong was given to the UK and Tiawan was given to Japan with the promise that they would be returned to China after the 100 years. As a side note, the British turned Hong Kong into a trading center and Japan turned Tiawan into a hell hole (a reason that China and Japan currently do not get along very well). The result of this China completely imploded and the Quin Dynasty that ruled China (including its economy) collapsed. Eventually communism started to take hold in China. Two world wars and China had gone from a superpower to a 3rd world economy (though technically, by definition, is became a 2nd world economy). At the end of WWII Tiawan was taken away from Japan. With the collapse of government and everything else in China, communism rose to power in a brutal dispute with western backed efforts of a fledgling democracy. The little fledging democracy was given the island of Tiawan. When the 100 years of occupation of Hong Kong and Tiawan was over and with communism in control of mainland China – The communist government of China demanded that Hong Kong and Tiawan be returned as promised to China. Britain quickly caved and gave up Hong Kong to establish a president of returning these assets to China. So now we have the problem of Tiawan. According to international law we have no leg to stand on, beyond the fact that the people living in Tiawan do not want to be taken over by the communists. But we did not do anything for the citizens of Hong Kong that wanted a say (mostly we can thank the UK for that). Is China sympathetic towards the fentanyl problem in the USA? – probably no more than we were with China when China was having their problem with heroin to which we contributed and were very unsympathetic. I do not think China wants a war with the USA. But I also think China sees an opportunity to make a move because of a weak administration in the USA. I also believe that China has leverage with many of our elected officials (more so with democrats than republicans). I think that Trump is a wild card that China does not want to deal with. I am concerned that China will make a move before the upcoming election. I do not know if they will invade Tiawan (I hope not) but I think they will try something – soon. Perhaps China thinks the fentanyl trade is enough for now. I question if our elected officials will oppose the flow of fentanyl, beyond border rhetoric. The Traveler1 point
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Thanks very much, and thanks to your nephew too. I really appreciate this. They call this "agglutination" (a word I learned only recently). From what I've read, Finnish is famous for its levels of agglutination. The individual word elements they call "lemmas". I recently found an interesting paper (A. Corral, G. Boleda, R. Ferrer-i-Cancho, Zipf’s Law for Word Frequencies: Word Forms versus Lemmas in Long Texts | PLOS ONE) where they have compared the Zipf laws for several languages including English and Finnish. My own code only looks at complete wordforms - theirs automatically splits words into their individual elements to study the frequencies of those elements, and does this for multiple languages! (I fear that may be beyond my abilities - though maybe I could persuade them to share their code!) To give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm looking at, here is one of my graphs: What I call the "beta index" is the log-log slope of the numbers of unique words exhibiting a particular frequency plotted against that frequency (e.g. 10,000 words appear once, 5,000 appear twice, 1000 appear 3 times etc.). The "alpha index" is the log-log slope of the frequency of a word plotted against its "rank" (rank 1 being the most frequent word, 2 being the second, 3 the third etc.) The Finnish cluster is more compact than the English (even accounting for the fact that far fewer Finnish items appear) suggesting there is less diversity in the alpha index, and also the beta indices are significantly higher. Corral et al. found similar results for their wordforms, and to some extent their lemmas too (though oddly their beta indices for English are significantly higher than mine - though their study is based on only 3 English and 3 Finnish texts). Plenty of room for investigation here - just so little time to spare though 😒1 point
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What did I just eat? (Part 2)
Carborendum reacted to zil2 for a topic
The "c" should probably change to a "k" or maybe qu - realized that after I wrote it and couldn't be bothered to go search and correct... -ito / -ita at the end of the word turns it into a term of endearment - niñito instead of just niño - or emphasizes "little" (I assume you know this). Apparently a taquito, instead of being a little taco is a rolled taco. While the implications are good (taco, carne), there's too little of burrito for what is ultimately a burrito. Still, it's growing on me...1 point -
Finnish
Jamie123 reacted to Carborendum for a topic
My conversation with my nephew was a lot longer than I expected. He took a long time to simply say "yes." So, I separated your request into three categories: Synonyms. Usage of a single word for different meanings. Type of words one would use when speaking to different audiences. The answer eventually ended up being "Yes." The only difference is that they just don't do it in the same way. For instance, your example of "Head" is not used in Finnish. But they do similar things with other words which we would not. While there are synonyms, they have a limited vocabulary. So, there are not anywhere near as many synonyms as in English. But to add nuances, they make up a compound word, very much like they do in German. A similar issue comes up in speaking with children vs adults, formal and informal, etc. While they do have it, their limited vocabulary makes their methods a little different. Bottom line, yes. But they do it differently than we do.1 point -
Life as we know it
askandanswer reacted to Phoenix_person for a topic
Pharm-to-Table is the way of the future.0 points -
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