In English particularly, people associate "thou" with the King James Bible and similar Christian texts ("Our Father, thou art in Heaven…") and might reasonably assume that if "thou" was used to address the literal God, it must have been the formal pronoun – but the familial, informal one was used exactly because of the "father" association! (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where children were expected to "vous" their own parents – not sure how much of a thing it is these days).
Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.
> (OTOH there certainly are languages with a tu/vous distinction where children were expected to "vous" their own parents – not sure how much of a thing it is these days).
It's interesting that in Viennese German (my German is terrible but I do at least try) it seems like the informal form is the default, in a shop I get asked "Braucht du hilfe?" rather than the formal "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?".
Maybe this is what they mean when they say people in Vienna are rude, but coming from Scotland using informal language even in fairly serious settings just seems comfortable and normal.
This can also change with the times —as in, within living memory.
My grandma used the formal address when reminiscing about going to the bakery when she was young but in the present she would use the familiar form and even the clerks would use a fake formal at best if they were feeling particularly grateful for having a job that day.
It depends a lot on where you were brought up, and the language you were exposed to. My first association would be a very Yorkshire, “Thou knowest,” rather than the king james.
Well, it's certainly not going to get better given that most of new Web code is by now probably written by LLMs. Which definitely aren't trained to write performance-oriented JS/TS.
A cow must have been pregnant to produce milk. So it's artificially inseminated and the calf separated (so as not to steal valuable milk) which is arguably traumatic to both the mother and the calf. Most modern people, if they've ever even thought about it at all, likely think that cows are bred to (or naturally do) produce milk without pregnancy being involved, like sheep are bred to grow wool around the year.
> Most people think that cows are simply bred to produce milk without pregnancy
Am I misinterpreting you here? You're saying most people think cows are bred (you know, what causes pregnancy), and presumably think that that calves are born — I've never met anyone who didn't know what a calf is, but somehow don't realize that pregnancy happens inbetween?
Yes, you're misinterpreting me. Breeding involves making calves, obviously. But once you get the hypothetical continuously-milk-producing cows, they don't have to make calves. Making more cows can be delegated to cows specialized to making more cows, so cows producing milk for humans can do that without inconvenient pregnancies.
But that's not how it works. Every single milk-producing cow must have been pregnant at least once, and typically several times in its life to keep producing desired amounts of milk. And the calves are an unwanted byproduct that must be taken away. At least they're not shredded in a big blender like the male chicks of egg-laying chicken breeds are.
Where else are you going to get them from? A calf factory?
> And the calves are an unwanted byproduct
Am I misinterpreting you again? Heifer calves are the prized possession that ensures that your dairy continues into the future. Cows don't last forever (or even all that long).
You maybe had a stronger case for bull calves, but now that modern breeding can select for heifers with ~90% confidence, that's hardly an issue anymore. And, I mean, in this day of age of high-priced beef, even if you get the occasional bull you're not exactly complaining either.
> modern breeding can select for heifers with ~90% confidence
May you expend on this? I know we kinda have selection techniques for eggs to crush them before hatch but I guess that’s not what’s happening with milk caws as the diary is the main target and the cow need to give birth to start lactation. Or perhaps it’s the impregnating technique or some hormone therapy that tricks the odds?
> in this day of age of high-priced beef, even if you get the occasional bull you're not exactly complaining either.
I depends on the breed: in this days of high volume diary and meat consumption, most of what people eat comes from specialised breeds that hare very good at producing milk OR muscle. The non-desired sexed are not so valuable. Switzerland (and others countries I can’t remembers) recently passed a calves handling low to require farmers caring them for a minimum days in response to industrial sloped into unethical territories.
That documentary shows another practice in India : some invaluable calve are just roped to a fence and forget until dehydration. https://christspiracy.com
Huh? A holstein bull calf is selling for around $3,000 right now. That's... insane.
I remember from what doesn't seem all that long ago when fats didn't even fetch half that much. Beef has gone wild. If that's not valuable, what do you consider valuable?
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same data. Here’s the price evolution of lived calves in EU. They happen to be very high since 2025 (300€/500€ for diary/meat) but if you click « select all » on the top left you can see they use to be around 100€/200€ in the previous 10 years, going as low as 60€/head during covid.
Fair point, I didn’t express it well: I don't think calves “have no value” in general, they’re sentient beings. However, as you pointed out and shown ahead, they are also part of a market and in some places their value is not high enough to care them well [0]. Some of them happen to be euthanized very shortly after birth:
> In one survey of Canadian farmers, an average of 19% of calves were euthanised at birth and of those respondents that euthanised calves, 34% reported using blunt force trauma (sharp blow from a solid object to the head) [1]
There’s also the "bob veal" (2–3 days to 1 month) [2], I guess the goal is to have a different taste but I’m not sure about that.
side note: I found the technique used to "select for heifers" you mentioned: the process is called flow cytometer and it sorts the sperm with a laser.
To have a better understanding, one could suggest to search for the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize
Exactly. From my point of view the strongest plausible interpretation of "in this day of age of high-priced beef" is that it recognizes that the current situation is a historical anomaly.
But that isn't how it was interpreted. We saw the weakest plausible interpretation + silly criticism transpire instead. However, I trust in good faith that it wasn't intentionally interpreted in the weakest way, but rather that it simply failed to communicate its intent.
Which is where I seek an understanding of where it broke down so that I can be clearer in the future.
Indeed I didn’t read "in this day of age of high-priced beef" as a few month (or 1-2 years) situation for beef only and more like "in this days of inflation", like since a few decades.
The communication breakdown also comes from me as we are two in the thread. I should probably re-read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", a best seller that truly changed my relation to others 15 years ago.
As I said, I doubt most people think about this at all. But if they do, I find it an entirely reasonable assumption that, as I said, if cows could make milk without making calves, in modern industrial farming the calves would be made by individuals that only make calves, and milk would be made by individuals that only make milk, for efficiency reasons. That's what I would assume, probably.
Very slow on Firefox (both wrt frame rate and actual game speed) and gets down to single digits FPS after a while.
But the slow speed and weak acceleration (did you forget that v = v + a*dt and not just v = v + a? :)) feels actually nice and meditative, if only the FPS were smoother. Tried it on Chrome and it's a much more dynamic and fast-paced experience on it.
Problem is that this kind of code often is brittle, full of bugs and unhandled edge cases, and evolution and maintenance is horror. But if it’s all you know you might never question it.
Often but not always, and if they're a solo developer then maintenance might not be too bad as they might be able to keep all the logic in their head. I'm not advocating for that kind of approach, but if it lets people focus on things that the player will actually notice like the gameplay, graphics, sound, story or art then hey, what's a little shortcut?
More nuanced than what? It’s just impossible to read the article as claiming "LLMs are idiots". Its whole point is that LLMs are simultaneously astonishingly smart and utterly stupid, and critically the boundary between those is complex and unintuitive which makes trusting their output so precarious.
Crop variety was decreased by the original farming revolution, about 10k years before the industrial revolution. Rather than eating whatever was available, the large majority of the caloric input of an agricultural society comes from a few staple crops optimized for overwinter storability and producing large yields and thus supporting a large number of people.
The industrial revolution didn’t qualitatively change farming. It just made it possible to have more of it thanks to machine labor. The same goes for the later agricultural revolutions.
This is particularly evident if you had been around rural villages in eastern Europe in the late 00s, particularly those inhabited by elderly people at 70 years old and above.
They were still doing subsistence agriculture to supplement their own income well into the 21th century. Of course they didn't grow enough calorie heavy crops like corn, potatoes or wheat to live entirely off the land, but they had enough food that a bi-monthly shopping trip with their children was enough to get by.
No, they totally grew enough calories for themselves. My grandparents lived like that. They farmed around 15 hectares, which was actually quite a lot. You can easily grew enough calories for your family on 5 hectares, or even less if you have access to modern cultivars and artificial fertilizer. It’s just even poor people like variety, and will trade some of their crops for stuff they cannot make at home efficiently, like sugar, fish, or candy.
Animal cruelty, what an awesome hobby. Biohack yourself all you want, but playing mad scientist on test subjects that cannot give informed consent is evil.
Many may find it unintuitive, but one of the best things you can do for the actual security of a neighborhood is to design it for pedestrian and "loitering" friendliness.
This is extremely salient. Check out Phoenix, AZ sometime in street view. It's a brutalist grid of wide roads (even in "residential zones") where every property is lined in a six-foot block wall. As a result, sight lines are excellent for drivers (encouraging high speeds) but terrible for homeowners. Kids can't reasonably roam free, neighbors rarely meet, and everyone is viewed with suspicion. Most of my neighbors are really decent people, but I see them so rarely we might as live in different cities.
Another fun thing is that calling someone you don't know "thou" used to be an intentional insult ("you're not worthy of being called 'you'"), something that might be missed by a modern reader of Shakespeare or other EME texts.
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