The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
The problem is that Ubuntu overuses snaps, even when there are completely acceptable .deb alternatives, that will perform consistently better; typically distros using appimage and flatpak don’t do the same.
That said if this isn’t a big deal for you Ubuntu might be still an option. As the saying goes, better the devil that we know.
Since your main priority is stability, I’d suggest either Debian Stable or Mint. Debian Stable is rock solid, but the software is ancient; Mint is a good compromise. They both have a nice package selection.
The reason why I don’t recommend Ubuntu itself is snaps. Huge downloads with lots of wasted disk space, wasted memory, less user control, mismatching themes, larger loading times… urgh.
Desktop environment is such a personal matter that it’s hard to say which one would be the best for you. I’m a big fan of MATE - it’s small, it’s nice, you can reasonably customise it without new extensions or applets. Xfce would be also a good performance-focused choice.
And that’s why means matter, not just the ends. If Twitter was banned under the premise of being a Nazi nest (as it is), it would be still banned. But for that you’d need solid legislation to force platforms to identify and kick out the Nazi. Not just an “ackshyually you need a representative, you don’t have one so Twitter isn’t operating here any more”.
“A poor person’s happiness never lasts” - local saying.
I’m a big fan of keeping it simple:
Since Contramuffin answered most of it, I’ll focus on the diacritics.
The acute in *ḱ *ǵ *ǵʰ shows that they aren’t the same as *k *g *gʰ. Odds are that the ones with an acute were pronounced with the tongue a bit fronted (palatalised).
The acute over other consonants, plus in *é *ó, is something else entirely. It’s the accent - you’re supposed to pronounce those consonants with a higher pitch. “Yay, consistency” /s
The macron over *ē *ō is to show that the vowel is loooong.
Those floating ⟨ʰ⟩ refer to aspiration. Aspiration is that “puff” of air that you release when you say ⟨pill, till, kill⟩ but not when you say ⟨spill, still, skill⟩. In English this is not distinctive, but in a lot of other Indo-European languages it is, and the mainstream hypothesis is that it was distinctive in PIE itself.
In the meantime, a floating ⟨ʷ⟩ means that the consonant is pronounced with rounded lips. The difference between something like *kʷ and *kw is mostly that the first one behaves like a single consonant, the other as two.
That ring under some consonants is to highlight that they’re syllabic, as if they were LARPing as vowels. It’s a lot like writing “button” as “buttn̥”.
If you ever see *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ etc., pretend that that “ə” is “h₁”. It’s simply different ways to annotate the same stuff.
*H means “this is *h₁ or *h₂ or *h₃, but we have no clue on which”.
four *kʷetwóres == french “quatorze”… 🤔
Close: it’s French quatre (4), not “quatorze” (14). It goes like this: PIE *kʷetwóres → Latin ⟨quattuor⟩ /kʷattuor/ → Old French ⟨quatre, catre⟩ /kʷatɾə/~/katɾə/ → contemporary French ⟨quatre⟩ /katʁ(ə)/.
French ⟨quatorze⟩ does contain that *kʷetwóres, but it’s only the “quator-”. The “-ze” is from Proto-Indo-European *déḱm̥ (10). This gets easier to see in Latin, as the word for 14 was ⟨quattuordecim⟩ (literally four-ten).
Note that almost all English words that you used to translate the PIE words are also examples of those PIE words being still in use nowadays - they’re direct descendants, for example *kʷis → who, *éǵh₂ → I, etc. In English, German, Swedish and other Germanic languages, this gets a bit obscured due to some old sound change called Grimm’s Law. (EDIT: the only exception is the second line - *túh, *te became “thou, thee”.)
This is mostly correct so I’ll focus on small specific details, OK?
Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you’ll also see them before things that you don’t expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example *me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn’t use it.
It is kind of “guesswork” but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an “anything goes”.
The sounds represented as *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, *h₄ and *H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they’re simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that *h₁ was [ʔ], it’s more like the sound in “oh-oh” than like [h]. And some argue that they aren’t even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).
[Shameless advertisement: we have a linguistics community, !linguistics@mander.xyz . I’m the mod there; I apologise for the relative lack of activity nowadays, but everyone is welcome to post this sort of stuff there.]
What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don’t speak them.
I’m not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; “Swadesh list” became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.
Zagorath explained the terms way better than I could.
It’s relevant to note that, while shipping (focused on romantic pairing) fanfic (derivative fiction written by fans) is really popular, you see fanfics about almost everything, depending on the media. For example some give redemption to a tragic villain, showing them by a different view; some seek to fill some plot hole left by the original author of the work; some explore the afterstory; and some are simply weird.
You did share your lemon fanfics with him, right? Right???
Jokes aside I can relate to that - myself was explaining some anime stuff to my mum, not too long ago. Mostly a few references to youkai in Spirited Away, the concept of the four demographics, genres (or “why my nephew and me barely watch anime together, even if we’re both into anime”), etc.
Brandolini’s Law is great to keep in mind when discussing online - because as you’re busy refuting a piece of bullshit, the bullshitter is pumping out nine other bullshits in its place, so discussing with obvious bullshitters is a lost cause.
On a lighter side pointing the bullshit out is considerably easier/faster than to refute it, but still useful - as whoever is reading the discussion will notice it. As such, when you see clear signs of bullshit*, a good strategy is to point it out and then explicitly disengage.
*such as distorting what others say, assuming, using certain obvious fallacies/stupidities, screeching when someone points out a fallacy, etc.
But the point is not the ‘to be’ part but the ‘feels like’.
I neither said nor implied that the point is that “to be”. I highlighted that, no matter how you interpret it (because it’s vague and meaningless), the conclusion is the same because of the rest - because experiences do not exist in the physical = real = material sense.
It’s quite undeniable that what ever this existence is feels like something.
“Experiences” includes what we feel (in both senses). What exists is that bloody mess of matter and energy, that’s it.
[NB: I’m no programmer. I can write some few lines of bash because Linux, I’m just relaying what I’ve read. I do use those bots but for something else - translation aid.]
The reasons that I’ve seen programmers complaining about LLM chatbots are:
In my opinion the first one is babble, the third one is complicated, but the other three are sensible.
A kid hugging a kid is always a nice thing to see.
I’m not changing definitions. I’m stating that what he defined does not exist.
To go a bit deeper: regardless of whatever that “to be” is supposed to mean, the “subjective experience of what it feels like to be” is still an experience. And experiences do not exist in the physical = real = material sense; they’re solely abstractions. Like valence holes, software, or so many other things that are not real but convenient to explain the behaviour of real things.
The same applies to concepts like “mind”, “soul”, “spirit” and similar.
[No idea on why people are downvoting your comment though.]
Consciousness is as a convenient abstraction to explain the behaviour of human beings, but it doesn’t really refer to anything real. As such, I think that the claim “consciousness is not an illusion” is technically correct but misleading, since it implies that consciousness exists.
Nagel’s quote is extremely vague, since that ontological “to be” that he uses doesn’t really mean anything.
Just the two cents of some materialistic nobody.
The one that I tasted was the red piranha, the same as in the video. The taste is… okay, not delectable but not awful; it’s simply a bit too strong. It goes great on soups/stews though.
I love how they managed to make something that likely plays very differently from biters, requiring different strategies, but still keeping up with the same “bug” theme. It might be a work in progress but so far it looks exciting.
In addition to what you’re saying (as I fully agree with it):
Even when both sides are being honest, relationships that work at distance don’t necessarily work IRL. It’s hard to deeply know someone through the internet, even with VR; and in this sort of situation we tend to fill the gaps with idealised crap, instead of reality. Then as you meet the person IRL you discover that they aren’t anything remotely similar to what you hoped for.
The good news is that all distros are pretty much similar to each other, so you can transpose most of those two decades of experience to any other distro that you might want to use. Typically the key differences are