--- Log opened Fri Dec 17 00:00:03 2021
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04:00 < TMA> muurkha: patents are marketed as an incentive to publish by their proponents; in effect the progress is suspended until the patent expires (see for example the industrial revolution and the steam engine: the real boom started only with Watt's patent expiration reportedly)
04:00 < TMA> muurkha: so, I am a bit sceptical as well
04:10 < TMA> maaku: supplating $natlang with $natlang2 was done previously; it comes naturally with conquest; supplanting it with $auxlang is probably infeasible, unless you conquer a substantial part of the world and install a bureaucracy/government system that would exclusively use the $auxlang
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10:42 < maaku> TMA: I don't see it ever happening that way
10:43 < maaku> but there are unique circumstances around space settlement that make it possible, if there was a concerted effort from the top
10:45 < maaku> realistically if you want to immigrate to mars, it would involve selling your possessions and moving to a training center in the carribean for 6mo - 2yr of training before flight
10:47 < maaku> if a majority of people don't come from an English speaking background, what will develop is a creole culture among settlers, like the belter language in The Expanse
10:49 < maaku> If this were planned for, you could provide a simplified creole-like but engineered logical language and do the immersive training programs in that.
10:50 < maaku> I don't see this being  priority though, and probably won't happen.
10:57 < fenn> what i dislike about lojban is the pronunciation. loglan was better in that regard
10:58 < fenn> lojban is a sloppy salad of random phonemes
10:58 < fenn> an improved english grammar would probably do what you want
11:02 < fenn> natural languages have a vast history to their etymology, with meaningful links between related words on many levels. a conlang has to try very hard to replicate that
11:03 < fenn> you're really baking in an ontology from the start. what happens when your ontology turns out to be wrong?
11:05 < maaku> fenn: I don't think that question makes sense to be honest. natlang ontologies are already wrong. a designed ontology would be better, just maybe not perfect
11:06 < maaku> fenn: regardless I share your critique of lojban. Mini is a lot better in that regard: https://minilanguage.medium.com/mini-the-minimal-language-3f3710e28166
11:07 < maaku> the worst part of lojban is memorizing all the place structure of its thousands of words that are all phonetically indistinguishable from each other. what a clusterfuck of fail
11:11 < fenn> let's resurrect proto indo european
11:12 < fenn> the wooly mammoth of linguistics
11:35 < jrayhawk> can we resurrect the wooly mammoth first? i am hungry
11:43  * fenn orders take-out proto indo european with a side of mammoth
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12:13 < darsie> Were Neanderthals humans?
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12:24 < fenn> were peccaries pigs?
13:38 < jrayhawk> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.471005v2 https://www.youtube.com/embed/9ksLuRoEq6A
13:38 < jrayhawk> .title
13:38 < saxo> In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world | bioRxiv
13:43 < muurkha> fenn: it's interesting that language structure can create incentives to use a useful skill like mental compasses so much more often
13:43 < muurkha> maaku: what's wrong with Lojban?  as I understand it, the "raise the bar of rationality" thing was the objective of the Loglan founder
13:47 < muurkha> TMA: to some extent I agree about patents.  I think they have some interesting secondary effects.  one is that, if you invent a patentable thing as part of employment, the employer owns it; if you switch jobs you can't practice the invention at the new employer.  so employers who pay employees to invent things are accumulating capital for themselves, not enriching their employees in the way that 
13:47 < muurkha> they are when they pay the employees to learn non-patented skills
13:48 < muurkha> plausibly this has resulted in a lot of inventions being done in labs with more resources that would otherwise have been done as someone's hobby with, probably, less resources
13:50 < muurkha> another is that it has created a small class of independent inventors and small companies that can live on patent royalties; sometimes they become angel investors, sometimes they keep inventing things (using the royalties), and sometimes they do neither
13:51 < muurkha> MicroUnity is, I think, a failure case here: as far as anyone can tell they stopped inventing things as soon as they had royalties.  Intellectual Ventures is even worse
13:52 < muurkha> but you also have things like Chuck Moore's explorations of minimalistic CPU architecture, which (as I understand it) were funded by his patent raids on Intel and AMD
13:52 < muurkha> I wonder what Satoshi is providing seed funding for
14:33 < L29Ah> 22:11:30]<fenn> let's resurrect proto indo european
14:33 < L29Ah> esperanto is post-proto-indo-european
14:34 < L29Ah> a simplified mishmash of modern european languages
15:02 < muurkha> aye
15:03 < muurkha> maaku: oh, I see you already elaborated on what you don't like about lojban
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17:14 < maaku> muurkha: oh no I only scratched the surface
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17:16 < maaku> beyond its UX issues it makes the more grevious error of only carring about syntactic ambiguity, not semantics
17:17 < muurkha> oh?
17:18 < maaku> every lojban utterance maps to a single predicate expression, yes, but that exactness doesn't go as far as morphology
17:18 < maaku> so you can't really say anything about what a compound word means without consulting a dictionary
17:19 < muurkha> it only extends down the level of words, you mean?
17:19 < maaku> yes
17:19 < maaku> and what semantic defintions exist for the predicate logic are not rigerously defined, instead often just with casual english equivalents that could have multiple meanings
17:20 < muurkha> well, that is a problem with lexicons in general; what do you define them in terms of?
17:21 < maaku> basically the founders of loglan/lojban thought that the hard problem of NLP would be syntactic parsing of sentences. turns out we can build ML today which does a better job of this than humans. the semantics is hard
17:22 < muurkha> it's pretty common for people to make logical errors due to structural ambiguity though
17:22 < muurkha> .t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse
17:22 < saxo> "When a white horse is not a horse (Chinese: 白馬非馬; pinyin: báimǎ fēi mǎ; Wade–Giles: pai-ma fei ma; lit. 'white horse is not horse') is a paradox in Chinese philosophy." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_a_white_horse_is_not_a_horse
17:22 < maaku> muurkha: most other engineered languages nowadays are more rigid about word derivation, e.g. being strictly head-final or having root word inflection rules which specify relationships between components
17:22 < muurkha> that would be useful
17:29 < maaku> to use this example, is 白馬 a white horse or a horse-like shade of white? in this case it's pretty obvious but neither chinese nor lojban would be clear on that
17:30 < muurkha> in Chinese I think it's clearly "white horse"; a horse-like shade of white would be 馬白.  but maybe your Chinese is better than mine and I'm wrong about that
17:30 < muurkha> all the noun-noun compounds I'm familiar with in Chinese are head-final though
17:31 < muurkha> what's unclear (apparently) is whether it means "a white horse", "the white horse", "some white horses", or "all white horses"
17:31 < maaku> it is head-final-default, like lojban, but with exceptions. so when machine parsing a sentence you must ask "is this one of the exceptions?"
17:31 < muurkha> and it is clearly true that white horses are not all horses
17:31 < muurkha> aha, thanks
17:32 < muurkha> (and the argument is specifically about how it is legitimate to interpret 白馬非馬 as being the true proposition that white horses are not all horses)
17:34 < maaku> yeah i recognize the article is about something else
17:35 < maaku> natlangs get a pass on this, but if you're going through the trouble of inventing a language from scratch and you still make this mistake...?
17:35 < maaku> lojban is full of these inattentive mistakes with respect to semantics
17:35 < maaku> especially in the many community-added features that have come since specification
17:37 < muurkha> doesn't lojban avoid that particular ambiguity, as well as other ambiguities that stem from multiple possible parsings?
17:38 < muurkha> it seems like avoiding structural ambiguity is a potentially useful thing to do for clear reasoning
17:38 < muurkha> even if some other ambiguities still remain
17:39 < muurkha> and eliminating ambiguity isn't always free; there's a sort of Pareto-optimality curve trading off between brevity and unambiguity
17:42 < muurkha> "báimǎ fēi mǎ" or "zhǐlùwéimǎ" '指鹿為馬' is very brief
17:50 < muurkha> (there's a certain amount of Ithkuil in that apparent brevity, though; I think people normally speak Mandarin at fewer syllables per second than they speak English or Spanish)
17:56 < muurkha> aha, I was trying to find 三人成虎, three men makes a tiger
18:04 < maaku> muurkha: those four-character phrases are brief because they're just references to classical chinese literature and common idioms, no?
18:05 < maaku> ithkuil gets its brevity by being actually compact
18:06 < maaku> I can assure you my mother-in-law speaks chinese faster than most people speak english ;)
18:07 < muurkha> haha
18:07 < muurkha> somewhat, maybe, but I think 白馬非馬 is literally the sentence they're talking about in the classical literature
18:08 < maaku> muurkha: lojban avoids sentence-level parsing errors, but at rather high pareto cost. you have to keep track of stack frames, defined variables, etc.
18:08 < muurkha> and I think 三人成虎 is also a grammatically correct and complete sentence; it's just that its literal meaning is obvious nonsense
18:10 < maaku> anyway lojban seems to be dying out now, and has been for about 10 years now
18:10 < muurkha> it requires the context of the story from the Warring States Records to connect it to a meaningful proposition
18:10 < muurkha> I think that is true, but it's not clear that anything is replacing it :(
18:10 < maaku> Toaq is far more active and has many improvements over Lojban, albeit it has all the difficulties which come from a highly tonal language
18:10 < maaku> .t https://toaq.net
18:10 < saxo> Toaq - A tonal logical language
18:11 < muurkha> heh
18:11 < maaku> it's still a place-structure language (sigh), but the reliance on place structure is highly reduced
18:12 < muurkha> what's the alternative to place-structure languages?  defined variables, I'd think?
18:13 < maaku> using particle markers, like Japanese does
18:14 < maaku> my ideal language would have a dozen or so thematic particle markers
18:14 < muurkha> that only gets rid of one level of nesting, doesn't it?
18:14 < maaku> not sure what this has to do with nesting?
18:16 < muurkha> I thought your complaint about place-structure languages was that you have to keep track of stack frames?
18:16 < muurkha> maybe I'm misunderstanding
18:17 < maaku> no, separate complaints. sorry.
18:18 < maaku> lojban's argument place structure seems to be a significant hurdle for beginning learners, and is a strictly unnecessary copying of mathematical notation
18:18 < muurkha> because to parse something like if 1 < 2 + 3 * 4 ** 5: f(x) you need to maintain some stack frames, and the same is true if we put it in Lojbanish Polish notation
18:18 < maaku> my complaint: don't burden users of the language with that. have a handful of thematic markers instead
18:19 < muurkha> if < 1 + 2 * 3 ** 4 5 f x
18:20 < muurkha> thematic marker particles are pretty much the same as case marking in Hindi, Latin, or Esperanto, aren't they?
18:20 < maaku> yeah ok so my place structure complaint is about the selbri specifically.
18:20 < muurkha> just more regular
18:20 < maaku> yes
18:21 < maaku> and i have no strong preference for particles vs cases actually, either would be fine. people seem to have an easier time learning particles though
18:21 < muurkha> I guess actually Lojban selbri are actually infix, I'd forgotten that
18:24 < muurkha> an interesting thing about Bicicleta is that you can see the difference between the λ-calculus and the ς-calculus as being closely analogous to the difference between place structure and thematic-marker particles
18:24 < muurkha> in the λ-calculus you might say if a b c
18:24 < muurkha> and in the ς-calculus Bicicleta is based on you would say if(when=a, then=b, else=c)
18:25 < muurkha> well, that's in Bicicleta itself.  in the pure ς-calculus you would say if{when=ς_.a, then=ς_.b, else=ς_.c}.value
18:25 < muurkha> but the former is syntactic sugar for the latter
18:26 < muurkha> part of my reason for preferring this in Bicicleta is that I find complex λ-calculus expressions unreadable
18:26 < maaku> googling Bicicleta gets me a song Carlos Vives
18:31 < muurkha> sorry, I meant http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/bicicleta/
18:33 < muurkha> and Cardelli's ς-calculus, since googling [ς-calculus] is also useless
18:42 < maaku> seems like a good calculus to apply to a tutorial-D like data language
18:44 < muurkha> how so?
18:56 < maaku> well its concepts of objects are not too distant from relational tuples
18:56 < maaku> i've often wondered what a homoiconic data language would look like
18:56 < maaku> and it looks like ς-calculus is a good chunk of the way there
18:57 < muurkha> hmm, I think they are very different indeed
18:58 < muurkha> I mean certainly the types of the ς-calculus (which are not used in Bicicleta, but are what Abadí and Cardelli developed it for) are sort of like relational tuples in that they have a set of field names, and each field name has a type
18:59 < muurkha> but the types of fields of relational tuples are atomic types, while the types in the ς-calculus are recursive structural types
19:00 < muurkha> and the *terms* of the ς-calculus express arbitrary (potentially nonterminating) computations
20:34 < muurkha> heh, hopefully it isn't too flamebaity to post this here with reference to H+:
20:35 < muurkha> “With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to creating a mind-made body. From this body he creates another body, endowed with form, made of the mind, complete in all its parts, not inferior in its faculties. Just as if a man were to draw a reed from its sheath. The 
20:35 < muurkha> thought would occur to him: ‘This is the sheath, this is the reed. The sheath is one thing, the reed another, but the reed has been drawn out from the sheath.’ Or as if a man were to draw a sword from its scabbard. The thought would occur to him: ‘This is the sword, this is the scabbard. The sword is one thing, the scabbard another, but the sword has been drawn out from the scabbard.’ Or as 
20:35 < muurkha> if a man were to pull a snake out from its slough. The thought would occur to him: ‘This is the snake, this is the slough. The snake is one thing, the slough another, but the snake has been pulled out from the slough.’ In the same way—with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, the monk 
20:35 < muurkha> directs and inclines it to creating a mind-made body. From this body he creates another body, endowed with form, made of the mind, complete in all its parts, not inferior in its faculties. This, too, great king, is a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here & now, more excellent than the previous ones and more sublime.”
20:35 < muurkha> from the Tripitaka: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/DN/DN02.html
20:37 < muurkha> for what is a computer into which you have uploaded your mind if not a mind-made body, endowed with form, made of the mind, complete in all its parts, not inferior in its faculties?
--- Log closed Sat Dec 18 00:00:04 2021