• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 9 days ago
cake
Cake day: April 10th, 2025

help-circle
  • I remember a few more terms and phrases…

    But… ok so this may also sound ridiculous, but basically, when I speak in Japanese, I find my tone just naturally shifts to be lower, bassier.

    I am decently good at singing in English, and am a baritone.

    But when I just normally speak in English, its usually a bit higher pitched than the middle point of my singing range.

    … But when I speak in Japanese, it is either at or lower than the middle point of my English singing range.

    I do not do this intentionally and am not sure why… I do this, lol.

    Maybe it is again trained into me from associating shouting out numbers and osu in Japanese with very intentional diapraghm/breathing control from Karate?





  • I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).

    I can … read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level… very much out of practice.

    I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it … basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.

    The first time I dated … a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it…

    She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question…

    And I responded ‘Osu!’… and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for ‘yes’, that would be ‘Hai’, and that Osu … basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.

    Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners… but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.

    EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf… I later encountered a man who told me he was … a yakuza, specifically a yakushi… we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.

    He explained to me that… there had been a fuckup on his part, but his… direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side… and then exiled him.

    Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.

    Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why… most Japanese say ‘yon’ instead of ‘shi’ to mean ‘4’ … is because ‘shi’ is also the character/sound that… basically means ‘death’.

    Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a ‘yakushi’.

    As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.

    … I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza… but he did tell me these things and seemed very serious about them.


  • It is astonishingly easy to get basically any LLM to output a simple iteration from one to ten function in all of those languages, and more.

    Here’s Assembly:

        newline db 0xA  ; Newline character
    
    section .bss
        number resb 1  ; Reserve a byte for the number
    
    section .text
        global _start
    
    _start:
        mov ecx, 1  ; Start with 1
        mov edx, 10 ; End with 10
    
    loop_start:
        cmp ecx, edx  ; Compare ecx with edx
        jg loop_end   ; If ecx > edx, jump to loop_end
    
        ; Convert number to ASCII
        add ecx, '0'  ; Convert number to ASCII
        mov [number], ecx  ; Store the ASCII value in number
    
        ; Print the number
        mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
        mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
        mov ecx, number   ; Pointer to the number
        mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
        int 0x80          ; Call kernel
    
        ; Print newline
        mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
        mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
        mov ecx, newline  ; Pointer to the newline character
        mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
        int 0x80          ; Call kernel
    
        sub ecx, '0'  ; Convert ASCII back to number
        inc ecx        ; Increment the number
        jmp loop_start  ; Jump back to the start of the loop
    
    loop_end:
        ; Exit the program
        mov eax, 1        ; sys_exit system call
        xor ebx, ebx      ; Exit code 0
        int 0x80          ; Call kernel
    

    Here’s FORTRAN

    program iterate_from_one_to_ten
        implicit none
        integer :: i
    
        ! Loop from 1 to 10
        do i = 1, 10
            print *, i
        end do
    end program iterate_from_one_to_ten
    

    Here’s COBOL

    PROGRAM-ID. IterateFromOneToTen.
    
    ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
    
    DATA DIVISION.
    WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
        01  WS-Counter PIC 9(2) VALUE 1.
    
    PROCEDURE DIVISION.
        PERFORM VARYING WS-Counter FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL WS-Counter > 10
            DISPLAY WS-Counter
        END-PERFORM.
    
        STOP RUN.
    

  • A foot like this is a blend of decorative and functional, imo.

    You end up with more surface area than if you had just gone with a straight column, and that helps with stability, slightly lessens the pressure.

    Many modern tables or desks have… much less ornate footpad type structures, if the thing itself is quite heavy, or intended to hold a decent amount of weight.

    Of course… I have no way of knowing if this old… desk? table? whatever it is, was intentionally designed with that in mind, but the function is still there, at least to some degree.


  • Not only are they water soluble and easily washed out… the vast majority of them are also non toxic.

    If you get paint on your mask, and it splatters through to your mouth… non toxic. Tastes terrible, but its not gonna harm you via ingestion. Much of the ‘paint’ is … basically just food dye.

    … Also… a whole lot of police… just use paint markers (they are technically, legally classed as ‘markers’ because they aren’t firearms thus are not ‘guns’)… they use markers with pepper balls.

    They just shoot miniature tear gas / skin irritant /eye irritant ‘paintballs’ as a less lethal weapon.

    You can put a whole lot of different liquids inside what is basically a semi rigid gel/plastic capsule.

    The old devious trick I remember was people would freeze their paintballs the night before a match.

    Nowadays, I’m fairly sure if you are caught doing that, you don’t just get banned from that field/course… you probably get prosecuted.





  • Do you know if there are significant differences between the Korean language of North Korea, and the Korean language of South Korea?

    Or are they still very similar?

    I only really know one word in Korean… I would sound it out as ’ gam zeh hah mee da '.

    I asked some local, older aged, shop owners of South Korean descent how to say ‘thank you’ in Korean so I could thank them with more respect when I shop at their stores… I may be pronouncing or spelling my pronunciation wrong.

    Apoarently it is 감사합니다 in Korean… but that is likely South Korean, and it seems that South Korean and North Korean use different words, or pronounciations, for at least some terms…

    It would be interesting to learn if there are more differences between the two forms of Korean. :D


  • American here:

    About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

    The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

    These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

    Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

    And this will get worse.

    Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.