> The "non-phonetic alphabet" is the biggest non-issue I see people raise a stink about
Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft).
Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”
The bureaucratization of language is more problematic in my view, where things are seen as wrong and right and we try to cram the beauty of of natural language into a restricted box that can be cleanly and easily defined and worked with universally. I quite literally have nothing but detest for this conception of language, that it must bend to the whims of rigidity when it's very clearly a natural, highly chaotic dynamic system constantly undergoing evolution in unexpected ways.
How would you account for the fact that for many words, there isn't a consistent pronunciation rule for it at all? For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic.
Same way other dialect continuums account for it: you standardize spelling on some variant, or several variants if that is non-viable (which, yes, does mean that e.g. American and British English spellings would diverge somewhat).
To be clear, I'm not particularly advocating for making english a phonetic language. I'm just saying it being non-phonetic does cause issues (and makes it frustrating, but also shows a very interesting history).
Assuming we wanted to make English a phonetic language, then your question is kind of moot: phonetic means we need to pick the pronunciation rules for phonemes, which would make other ways to pronounce these phonemes incorrect. Some of currently-correct english would become incorrect english.
> For example, I would guess that 50% of English speakers are non-rhotic
Note that accent isn't really what people talk about when they complain about pronunciation. The problem is that there's no mapping from letters to phoneme in any english accent: laughter/slaughter, draught/draught, G(a)vin/D(a)vid...
All those examples follow the linguistic patterns of the languages they come from. They aren't arbitrary, they just don't teach us the context when we're learning as children.
Of course there’s always reasons. Teaching it to children isn’t really a solution: you’d need to know where words come from before reading them correctly, and also many people don’t learn English as children.
Phonetic languages do borrow words from other languages too, they adapt them to their own language keeping the pronunciation (the only example coming to mind right now is the Czech for sandwich, sendvič). English could do that just fine being phonetic was a goal
Does relate to the point that English still doesn't have a central linguistics authority (and likely won't ever). Just various reformers that have been more or less successful and in how distributed their reforms have been. Draught versus draft was indeed one of Noah Webster's proposed reforms that influenced a lot of American spellings and in turn is still influencing UK spellings. It's not as obvious as color versus colour, but there is a bit of US versus UK in draft versus draught.
(Webster also went on to suggest dawter over daughter, to remove more of these vestigial augh spellings, but that one still hasn't caught on even in the US. Just as the cot/caught split is its own weird remaining reform discussion.)
> Accents in french are pretty irrelevant, you can totally ignore them and master the language. Most french people ignore them while chatting/mailing/texting online.
“Master” would definitely not be correct, but you could write intelligibly enough indeed. It will cause you issues here and there (not being taken seriously, having some miscommunications when the diacritic disambiguates the word…)
If you can’t read the diacritics though, you’ll pronounce words very incorrectly and French is a very unforgiving language for mispronunciation: you will simply not be understood
I feel not being understood when pronunciation is off is more of a France french issue.
You will be understood eitherway in Canada (given you speak with french Canadians). But I sometime have difficulty being understood by frenchmans, less so with other french speaking cultures
It would be like a speaker who can’t distinguish the uh sound in “but” with the ih sound in “bit”. Is it really the native English speaker’s fault if he can’t understand that personal dialect?
France’s vowel inventory is bigger than (or just as big as) English’s, and it has a lot more homophones. I imagine all the context goes toward disambiguating the actual homophones and not the arbitrary sets of words foreigners can’t pronounce because they don’t want to learn the accents (the system is not that hard and completely predictable).
Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities!
Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.
> Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.
Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.
this is also why cooking advice shifted from "don't wash mushrooms" to "wash mushrooms". If you're cooking your mushrooms properly you'll boil off all the water anyways, so it doesn't matter. It's only if you *don't* cook your mushrooms properly that washing mushrooms makes everything more watery than you'd like.
I don’t wash mushroom because that makes them slimy, making them much more annoying to cut (and also it takes more time than not doing it). I can take a little dirt!
I was an avid non-washer until experts like Kenji [1] started weighing in. You definitely have to hold off washing them until the last moment to avoid sliminess. Although I don't find the time added to be all that consequential in the grand scheme of things. Obviously you're correct that it'd be *more* time, however.
It's a common mistake. Just this weekend I followed a recipe from a well known cooking website for beef stroganoff that said to brown the beef in batches together with batches of onion. That's not a good idea, the onion will release liquid which prevents the beef from browning and once that cooks off the heat required to brown the meat will burn the onion. So I cooked the beef and onion separately instead. The onion can easily be cooked in one big batch, and if you take care not to burn the fond built up by the beef you can deglaze it with the onion. It's a good way to add extra flavor to the finished dish.
I also had a discussion with a roommate once, he criticized my way of cooking pasta. I keep it just barely boiling, but he insisted I should crank it up to max. I explained that it doesn't matter, the water won't get any hotter. I'll just waste electricity making steam. He didn't believe me so I got a thermometer and proved it.
If you want liquid water to go above 100C you need a pressure cooker.
I’ve always used the rolling boil for stirring when making macaroni or other noodles. Maybe a minute of agitation in the beginning to get it going but it lets me set and forget. Maybe add a teaspoon or two of an oil to knock any bubbles out to avoid spill over / foam.
A single good stir at 1-2min of cooking is enough to avoid all sticking (although I still do it a couple more time just in case tbh, the stirring feel tells me how close to cooked they are anyway)
I've thought about that but it's not a problem for me. I throw the pasta in, give it a stir, then leave it until the timer rings. Never have any sticky clumps.
I watched a cook (America’s Test Kitchen?) where they explored different ways of thinking of heat management in pasta. The unbelievable one that worked: boil water, add pasta, turn off heat. The water retains the heat and will still penetrate the pasta. I have never actually tried it myself, but it makes sense.
I think about these things every time I cook, but it never occurred to me to just try it. I always assumed that the "reaction rate doubles for 10C change" rule of thumb meant it would take much longer, plus presumably cooking is endothermic.
It's not really that unbelievable. The pasta just has to be in hot water, whether it's 99.9C or 95C doesn't make much of a difference. I use this technique to boil eggs - boil water, turn off heat, add eggs. It seems to help avoid cracked eggs.
I also hadn't thought to boil pasta that way though.
FWIW, I boil my eggs in steam: 5mm-1cm of water in the pot, put the egg in, put the lid on it, heat it up until the water starts boiling, and then turn it off, and wait, the steam will continue boiling the egg, and the residual heat will continue producing steam for a while.
eggs in cold water, bring to boil, boil for 3 mins, remove from heat. never cracks, eggs never overcook no matter how long until you remove them from the water.
That's hilarious. Reminds me of another person in my life who just burns everything. I keep telling her to calm down with the heat and she keeps putting her induction top on boost then just going to do something else while things burn. She goes through teflon(or whatever they replaced it with) frying pans on a monthly basis, she has like 4 of them right now and they're all flaking off because she overheats them. Like properly destroyed. All her plastic utensils are messed up, molten and broken because she just leaves them on these 1000 degree frying pans.
I tried buying a carbon steel pan for her thinking it can take the heat but after a month it was rusty and caked with carbonized food that she never took the time to scrub off. In hindsight a stainless steel pan would probably have been better but I'm sure she would have found a way to destroy that too.
You're right for "serious" learning. But for most people, the alternative is not learning anything at all! The best technique is the one that'll actually make you play the piano
Bad technique on unserious learning can still lead to serious injuries like RSI.
Proper technique is also important so that playing is actually fun and not painful. Even just a few lessons on how to properly sit, how to avoid tension in your hands and so on can go a long way. There are video lessons that explain that stuff as well but you need to be very disciplined and really repeat these lessons over and over.
You can absolutely self-learn the piano. People that genuinely don't have the money for a teacher shouldn't let that stop them but it absolutely is harder. Set yourself up for success if you can.
There is no such thing as serious/non-serious learning.
I take weekly music lessons and have been doing that for a decade. After every lesson -- since the very first one -- I am amazed by how many simple things that I get wrong, and how many different areas where I could improve. The teacher just sees/hears that immediately, when you have no idea what you did wrong. And the music just sounds different.
Not only that, the teacher discusses the piece with you, tells you the efficient way to practice (a specific piece or specific passage) etc.
You would probably sound ok to a random stranger, but you quickly hit a bottleneck. You spend a lot of time doing incorrect/inefficient things without knowing it.
Not possible. It’s explicitly a non-goal, sub-optimal plans are considered a bug to be fixed, you can’t even force the use of an index.
To their credit, the Postgres query planner is amazing and does generally work very well that you don’t need forcing indexes or plans. But that’s little comfort when it does not and you have a production incident on your hands
Edit: I think RDS Aurora Postgres does let you have managed query plans
It's not really true. There are many session-scoped flags you can set which influence planner behavior, and sometimes toggling them for a specific query is what gets you through. More often, judicious use of CTEs as an optimization barrier (materialized CTE in moderrn versions) is useful to force execution order.
I like that Postgres has a lot of tools at its disposal for executing queries. But you can't rely on it for data even with modest scale. It's rare that it does a good job with interesting queries.
I think we’re saying the same thing: you can’t force PG to a plan or an index, you can only change your query in hope it gets the hint.
Even session scoped flags are a really coarse tool, don’t guarantee you’ll get the plan you want and it might unexpectedly impact other queries in the session.
Materialised CTE are one of the only tools that give real control, but an optimisation barrier is often the opposite of what you want
We don’t entirely disagree tbh. But having to work with MySQL now, I find I’m more surprised by how bad it is than I am by Postgres being too smart for its own good. I dont love everything about Postgres at all, but I always end up thinking it’s the least bad option
When a dynamic web app is needed, the general trend is to build SPAs, which in turn require managing state on the client, which is complex and thus redux et al were invented.
Anything beats next and react server components for me. It’s a mess of lock-in and complexity that brings very little. It also changes all the time, the maintenance cost is _crazy_ compared to almost all other mainstream options, the ROI is super low.
Next.js and similar are surprisingly complicated. You pay a hefty price for the optimization of SPA + data on the first request (which is a cool optimization).
I think one of the reasons it's so popular is less about the niche optimization and more about how it seems simpler, especially to beginners, than running an API server that your frontend app connects to.
None of the incentive structures of our societies are set up to go on this direction. None of the people in power (politically or privately) are trying to make this happen. As you’d expect, we see in practice that this isn’t the direction in which we’re going.
I see no reason to expect this technology to save us. We don’t even need AI to save ourselves from dystopia, it’s not been about lack of technology for decades, we need to change our societies structurally _somehow_
You don’t support read-your-own-write and your cache data might be stale for arbitrarily long. These relaxed consistency constraints make caching a lot easier. If that’s acceptable to your use cases then you’re in a great place! If not… well, at scale you often need to find a way for it to be acceptable anyway
Myself and many friends who aren’t native have struggled with speaking fluently because of it. Most of us still mispronounce some words (my friend pronounced “draught beer” like the lack of rain, instead of like draft).
Doesn’t mean things should change, but it’s certainly not a “non-issue”
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