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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • That’s almost exactly the problem. English uses helper words exclusively for future tense, and indeed, helper words like ‘to’ to form an infinitive. ‘Will’ is the helper word to show that something is a fact, that it is definite - grammatically, it is indicative. (The sun will rise tomorrow.) ‘Would’ is the helper word to show that something is an opinion, or dependent on something else - grammatically, it is subjunctive. (If you push that, it would fall; if it was cheaper, I would buy it.)

    Spanish has both helper words for future tense (conjugations of ‘ir’, analogous to ‘going to’, often used in speech) and straight-up conjugations for future tense (doesn’t exist in English; often used in writing). It also conjugates verbs differently if they’re indicative, subjunctive, or imperative (asking or telling someone to do something). This is how Spanish manages to have fifty-odd ways to conjugate every verb, which is very confusing to English speakers who make do with three ways and helper words.

    Translating a ‘future tense sentence’ for Duolingo requires you to have psychic powers about whether something is fact or opinion, which helper words are wanted, and so on, and it usually comes down to guessing between multiple ‘correct’ answers, which Duo will reject all but one of.


  • Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:

    • Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
    • Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
    • Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)

    Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.





  • I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their ‘tech demos’ looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.





  • I remember the days when laptops used to have infrared ports, so that you could connect to the infrared port on your mobile phone for tethered internet. And it was atrocious - always dropping out, even when you’d moved either item. Bluetooth tethering / USB cable tethering is just so much more robust.

    I realise that our tech has moved on a lot in the last twenty-or-so years, but I’m struggling to see the use cases that this ‘new tech’ (as described by PC Gamer) would enable. Mobile data and wifi are both fast and reliable, and wired connections are very fast and much more reliable. A 224 GB/s link speed is absurdly faster than most consumer hardware can read or write to disk; if you were hoping to reduce ‘gaming latency’ by holding your phone or laptop at just the right angle, then the benefit would be overshadowed by other delays in the general internet. Providing a ‘secure link’ at this speed (‘quicker and safer than wifi’) would only make sense if you’ve two mainframes in the same room, but for some reason you don’t want to make your data centre look untidy by running fibre optic connections between them.



  • Another vote for Python. It’s quick to learn the basics, and there are libraries available to let you achieve most anything. You can program it in a procedural, functional or object-oriented way, and if you understand those, you’ll be well set-up to learn any other language. You may not need to learn any other languages - Python is both comprehensive and available in most places, and you can make a career out of it.

    My primary problem with Python is that its unstructured nature causes bigger projects to collapse into a big ball of mud after a while - any function being able to accept any argument is more of a curse than a blessing. And I wouldn’t want to code collaboratively in it - Java, for all it gets shit, is blessfully limited in what nonsense my coworkers can get up to.

    It’s also not ‘fast’, although it’s made great strides. I did Advent Of Code in Python this year; a simple rewrite in C++ only acheived about a 4× speed-up, when it used to be 10× a few years ago, and that’s for some very algorithm-heavy code. Python multithreading is still pretty terrible, though, so if you’re really wanting to get the best out of your computer you’ll want to use a native-code library like NumPy, or use some other language.