If you love language, etymology, or just plain collecting interesting words, where do you look to feed your interest? I’ve seen many RobWords (YouTube) posts here, and I really like his content. I also love the traditional word hunt through reading authors like Dickens.

In addition to “where do you look?”, what does your hobby look like? Do you keep lists of words that you review and learn about? Do you make effort to include your newly found words in writing or conversation? I have the (probably very annoying) habit of interrupting a conversation to say, “you know, there is an interesting word for that!”. What else do you do?

I am reading Never Split the Difference right now, and while the book has a few stereotypical "salesman self-help" moments, I have found some of the strategies to be genuinely incredible.

The biggest game changer for me has been mirroring what the other person says to avoid conflict and gather more information.

Real life example: My wife has a bad habit of poorly explaining what she wants and where it's located. Then, I get her flustered when I rapid-fire follow up questions. Here is an exchange we have frequently which leaves us both frustrated as hell.

She will ask something like, "Can you get the box out of the drawer please?"

I usually reply, "What box?"

"The box. The red box."

"Okay...what drawer?"

"The drawer, you know, the drawer. Come on."

"DUDE. Can you at least tell me which room you're even talking about?"

"Nevermind, I'll get it."

Lately I've been trying mirroring to help both of us and it's awesome.

"Can you get the box please?"

"Get the box?"

"Yeah, the red box. It has a paper in it that I need."

"Okay, you want the red box with the paper in it?"

"Yeah it's in the kitchen drawer next to the sink."

It's so weird when you first start doing this intentionally, but people don't even notice. I have no idea why it works so much better but it's amazing.

So, this got me thinking, what other little human psychology tricks work? Are there other books that genuinely changed the way you approach people or situations?

I'm a teacher and my job is to teach students who mostly have behavioral problems, so I am always on the look out for more of these things.

I have been a metalhead for over 20 years but I seem to still mostly listen to the bands I found back then. So mostly bands that started in the 80s or 90s. By the mid 2000s metalcore and its various derivatives got very popular and that wasn't for me, so I kind of stopped paying much attention to new stuff for many years. The only newer band I have been really excited about is the Finnish black metal band Havukruunu, and to some extent Uada and Spectral Wound.

Would love to get some recommendations for new names that have appeared in the last 10 or so years.

I've copied the full tweet below (it's from August, I missed this news somehow):

We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser , and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶

Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!

Why do we like Swift?

First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics.

Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.

The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.

Strong ties to Apple?

Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example).

Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.

What happens next?

We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!

No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.

I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞

Nitter link:

https://nitter.poast.org/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

Original post:

https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

Some of Kling's replies in that thread are also pretty interesting:

My general thoughts on Rust:
- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B
- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs
- Really impressive ecosystem
- Toxic community

In the end it came down to Swift vs Rust, and Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop.

The September monthly report for Ladybird released the day after I posted this. It provides basically the same information:

This Month in Ladybird September 2024

The section about Swift:

Successor language search progress

Over the past year, our core contributors have been exploring potential safe languages to complement or succeed C++. We evaluated several options, including Rust, Swift, Fil-C, and others. While some languages offered compelling features, many fell short in either C++ interoperability or providing the level of memory safety we needed.

After extensive testing and discussion, Swift emerged as the top choice among our core developers, thanks to the new Swift 6 interoperability features and its growing cross-platform support. As a result, we’ve decided to adopt Swift as our C++ successor language.

That said, this will be an incremental shift. The existing C++ codebase is deeply embedded in the project, and a complete rewrite would be impractical. Instead, we’ll be gradually introducing new components in Swift, carefully integrating them with our existing C++ code over time. Look forward to a dedicated blog post on the topic soon.

Hi, I'm looking for a touchscreen desktop computer solution that is in the affordable range and capable of running Windows or Linux. Whether that is a touchscreen monitor and a standalone computer, or an all in one solution, do you guys have any recommendations? It will be used to run a marine charting program on a boat.

It's that time of year again: October, spooky month! The perfect time to share creepy/spooky/unexplainable stories! I asked last year and we got some neat stories, so figured I'd ask again. Anything goes from creepy experiences with creepy people, to hauntings, to weird memories you just can't explain.

A pretty quick work trip has been planned. I will fly into Heathrow Saturday morning. I'll have until Sunday evening to get to Warwick. I'll be in Warwick for 5 days before flying back out the next Saturday.

I'm looking for any general advice but also if there is anything specific to the following:

• I'm going to book my own hotel in London the Saturday night I fly in. Saturday and Sunday are essentially my "tourist" days. Where is good to stay? Not too concerned with price.
• I'm taking a train to Warwick and mostly have that figured out but is there an app or pass that I should add to my Apple wallet for transit around London?
• I like museums of all types. Are there any in particular I should check out?
• Any classic pubs or restaurants I should try to get to?
• Once the week starts I don't think I'll have much time to do touristy stuff and I won't have a car. Any recommendations on things around Warwick/Birmingham that I can get to some evenings via train or bus?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I hope this question will become clear by the following example:

When I state "Mother's Cooking," As a native English speaker, to me the sentence fragment is read kind of "in order" so to speak, each word being read in the order it is presented for me to understand the sentence.

However, when this sentence fragment is translated to Chinese, it becomes:

妈妈 做 的 菜
māma zuò de cài

Which I literally translate to:

"Mother's cooking of Dish"

and in practice I begin to learn to look for the phrase after "de" then "go back" to the "māma zuò" to figure out the whole sentence. Does this make sense? I have to go to the end of the sentence and then refer back to the part "in front" of it so to speak?

What is going on here, and is this perceived as such by native speakers? Do all native speakers feel like their language flows linearly ? I think I read somewhere that some languages start their sentences with the verbs at the front of the sentence (Arabic?)

I'm hoping that a linguist will be able to explain to me what phenomenon I'm experiencing.

Thanks in advance!

Source for sentence/grammar

Hey all,

We're working on a press-freedom / anti-censorship project and we're testing a variety of scenarios in which a journalist's internet traffic is being monitored by a hostile state. We'd like to simulate an ISP's access to the journalist's traffic so we can run some packet collection and other tests to see what it looks like.

What's the best way to do this? Put a few routers in series and collect on the last one?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

October 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

New Thread

Server host: tildes.nore.gg
Dynmap: https://tildes.nore.gg
Playtime Tracker: https://tildes.nore.gg/playtimes.html
Tildes website extension (shows online status & location): Firefox (Desktop and Android) - Chrome
Verification site: https://verify.tildes.nore.gg
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TildesMC

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

New Thread

From their Discord:

"Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of. While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is. Rather than leave you with only panic and speculation, I decided to write this short message to give some closure.

These words are my own. I don't want to speak for anyone else here, so just remember that while reading.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed code, documentation or issue reports to the project. Thank you all for following us throughout the development. I was able to learn a lot of really neat things about games that I love, enjoy them with renewed qualities and in unique circumstances, and I'm sure you all have experiences that are similarly special. I'm extending my own massive thanks to our moderation team, who have been here through some rough circumstances and always found ways to make light of it."

As of this post, the GitHub is closed and their downloads page is blank.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.