Poor timing? You bought at the absolute peak of something known as The United States Housing Bubble. Your experience is not typical. You’re one of the unlucky people who had the absolute worst timing possible.

The idea of using a home as part of your retirement should be a lie, but unfortunately for the vast majority of people it isn’t. The world would be much better off if people only got what they paid back when they sold their houses. But, the reality is that most people have been absurdly lucky and their homes have been going up faster than all but the best stocks on the stock market. You just happened to be someone who jumped on the ride at exactly the wrong time.

What about the reed instruments where you have to give your instrument oral, and it’s your tongue and lip control which determines the note you produce?

You also make music nose by beating animal hide with sticks.

I also remember hearing how the Japanese word “ramen” is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.

It’s cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.

Who was born in 1961 making him…

I don’t know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it’s a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying “I’m hungry”, they just say “hungry!” Presumably though, they do use “I” when it’s needed for disambiguation.

For, example, if you’re with a friend and someone asks “are you guys college students?” The response would probably be something like “He is but I’m not”, right?

Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.

I’ve heard, and I don’t know if this is true, that voice actors who specialize in narrating books have to be superstars at this. Not only are they expected to be able to sight-read an entire book without making mistakes, they also need to do the required acting so exciting scenes are exciting, happy scenes are happy, gloomy scenes are gloomy, etc. Plus, as they come across new characters in the book, they’re supposed to be able to give them distinct voices and remember and recreate those voices as they show up later in the book.

Of course, a blockbuster book with a big budget for the audio version won’t have an actor wing it. They’ll be able to pay to have an actor and a director read the book first, and then have the director work with the actor to tease out the best possible performance. But, for a smaller budget, you have to deal with tighter margins so every second in the voice over booth counts.

One thing I love doing is to learn to say “I don’t speak <language>” as well as possible in a language I don’t speak. If you’re good enough at it, people will assume it’s a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don’t actually know. Apparently I’m pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn’t know.

I always read emphasis as “em-FASS-is” just for fun.

On? Don’t you mean in?

Silent but violent.

The really bad experiences I’ve had with straws is at movie theatres. In that case you’re given a pretty big drink in a flimsy cup, and you’re slowly drinking it over a couple of hours.

There’s no way that the paper straw holds up in those circumstances. You also don’t want to drink without the straw, because the cup is so flimsy that if you try to drink from it like a regular cup/glass it’s likely to collapse. I have permanent metal / rubber straws at home, but of course I never remember to bring them with me when I go to a movie, since I only go a couple of times a year.

The only solution I’ve found is to take 3-4 paper straws with me, and change them out over the course of the movie.

In the show Clarkson’s Farm, Jeremy Clarkson is looking around, trying to buy a pub. At one point they talk about wanting to have a pub with a little grocery store attached. Clarkson’s girlfriend explained why that was common at one point in Ireland. It was because in the past men would get paid, go immediately to the pub, and drink until their paycheck was gone. If there was a shop attached to the pub, they could hand in an order at the shop before they started drinking. And then, even if they drank away the rest of their paycheck, they’d still be handed a bag of groceries before they were kicked out and had to stumble home.

I like that in the US, New England (NE) is in the North East (NE).

I’m seeing reality, you’re seeing what you want to see.

That’s what’s in the tiny text at the bottom, but the actual argument as presented is “it’s the way things were done in the past, so it’s bad”.

So closer to average human intelligence than it would appear

No, zero intelligence.

It’s like how people are fooled by optical illusions. It doesn’t mean optical illusions are smart, it just means that they tickle a part of the brain that sees patterns.

a paper on a new architecture they developed that has serious promise

Oooh, a new architecture and serious promise? Wow! You should invest!

The metric is the code. We can look at the code, see what kind of mistakes it’s making

No, we can’t. That’s the whole point. If that were possible, then companies could objectively determine who their best programmers were, and that’s a holy grail they’ve been chasing for decades. It’s just not possible.

and then alter the model to try to be better

Nobody knows how to alter the model to try to be better. That’s why multi-billion dollar companies are releasing new models that are worse than their previous models.

Maybe it’s next month

It’s definitely not next month, or next year, or next century. Nobody has any idea how to get to actual intelligence, and despite the hype progress is as slow as ever.

Every new development could be the big one

Keep drinking that kool-aid.

I don’t care about lawns, I care about the bad argument claiming that if things were done a certain way 300 years ago, they’re necessarily bad.

Then say that, instead of saying “do you dress like this?”