Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting. For one the amount of nicotine, especially in the US where 5% is the standard, is easily 5-10x the amount from a pack of cigarettes a day.

Second, its much easier to take a puff than it is to find a suitable place to light up a cigarette and smoke for 5-10 minutes. You can very easily end up becoming psychologically conditioned to taking a puff litteraly once every 20 seconds, all day long from waking up to going to bed.

I too have considered picking up smoking to quit vaping. I remember of the times I did, I could smoke 3-4 a day and be fine. I don't know the long term effects of vaping physically, but just mentally the amount of nicotine is absolutely draining and at this point I rather do some damage to my lungs than keep this going.

>Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting.

Sure, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I disagree that "degree of addictiveness" is the metric that's wise to use when choosing a nicotine delivery method. Obviously the #1 choice should be NULL, not smoking at all, but if one is already addicted to nicotine and not ready to quit it at the moment, smoking cigarettes is, as far as we know, the worst option. Even intermittent smoking, or low-volume (like your 3-4 a day) causes non-linear harm. See this paper for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.9... .

Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Also nicotine itself is not without harm. I always thought these drugs only affect the brain, but they're metabolized by the whole body and have consequences on all your cells https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4363846/ Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me

>Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Not that I know of, and I grant that this is an unknown, and we could end up learning about extremely bad 20-/30-/40-year effects in the future. That said, there are very clear, very significant, and very well studied harms of cigarette smoking. Research is being done on vaping, and so far all harms identified are significantly lower than smoking.

>Also nicotine itself is not without harm.

Sure, and thanks for the paper. I'm not well versed in bio enough to tell the significance of everything in there, but, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part this is showing there exist harms, but they're not particularly well quantified yet, especially in terms of human subjects? For this to really matter, you'd need to quantify the surplus of nicotine you get from vaping vs. smoking, and then compare the relative harms of those two doses. Could be that 5x the dose causes 5x the harm, or could be that the smoking dose passes some threshold, and 5x the dose from vaping is just marginal additional harm on top of that. And then still compare that to the other differences between smoking and vaping in terms of harm.

Keep in mind 5x the dose is relative to being a pack a day smoker. We're talking 20x if it means smoking 4-5x a day.

Then there is the negative effects of I dunno how many multiples of volume of vape in your throat and lungs, which I assume is non-zero even though I personally believe its 100x better than burning tobacco.

Then there is the question of what that much nicotine does to you mentally, which is equally, if not more important. To put it in perspective, I usually wake up feeling pretty good, with some hopes and dreams of what Ill be doing that day, and Ill take a puff and immediately want to go back to bed for another hour. I cant sit in meetings for more than 5 mins or have conversations with people if it means I cant be vaping. Its like basing your whole life based on whether you get your fix of nicotine or not. Work from office? I don't think so buddy...every ten minutes Id have to go to the bathroom/outside. I seriously wonder where my life would have been if I never picked up this habit.

We'll see in another 10-20 years I suppose.

> Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Even when we don't have the numbers for everyday long-term use we already know the chemical and biological mechanisms that make smoking so harmful and carcinogen and we can measure that these substances are almost entirely absent in vapor during normal use of a vape because almost all of the problems with smoking come from burning tabacco and inhaling the fumes and vaping is simply way cooler and there is no fume but vapor (hence the name) and we know that the potential of vapor to do harm is way lower than fume. We never have any long-term data for anything new. But to make an argument for not consuming something you would at least have some reasonable mechanism through which it could be harmful and a lot of those known to be harmful mechanisms are present when smoking but absent when vaping. Even the British National Health Service agrees that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking and this is a reasonable position.

> Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me

This is just black rhetoric that is not evidence-based. How do you know the amount of nicotine is "insane" during normal use?

All available evidence points to vaping being at least one magnitude less harmful than smoking and this is backed by what we know about chemical and biological processes of the chemicals involved and through medical reports about people who replaced smoking with vaping. It would be irresponsible to deny smokers who can't quit a way to harm reduction just by claiming we don't have any long-term data. We know enough about combustion, vapor and the chemical and biological implications to be quite confident that vaping is much less harmful than smoking.

That doesn't mean we should promote it to anybody who is not already a smoker. But as a means to reduce harm for someone who seems unable to quit smoking it should be considered.

I think you read my comments as some self assured statement or argument whereas I was genuinely asking questions.

I dont doubt given an equal amount of vaping to equal amount of smoking, vaping is far healthier. But to what end? Is smoking 1 cigarette a day worse than vaping 2-3ml of 50mg/ml nicotine? How about 3-4?

As far as I know the academic consensus is that taking in more nicotine, even a lot more, doesn't turn vaping into something as harmful as smoking. Addiction is the main established "harm". Nicotine, even very much of it, is not considered a carcinogen. There are studies that suggest it could promote tumour growth but it hasn't been shown in humans. There is also decades of data from nicotine replacement therapy and Swedish snus users and it shows little to no increase in heart attacks or strokes in otherwise healthy people. Another risk is accute poisoning, i.e. swallowing large quantities of liquid by children. As far as I know even the more alarming voices regarding nicotine do not regard it as harmful as inhaling fumes from combustion.

Also I don't think that there are many people that overdose nicotine regularily because it causes nausea and dizziness so people are normally self-regulating the nicotine dose automatically. So the scenario you are proposing doesn't seem to be something we can actually observe as a common consumption pattern.

Too much nicotine is far closer to drinking too much coffee than to smoking and has similar acute effects which is why almost nobody does it on a regular basis.

Vaping definitely isnt healthy for you.

It's not really the nicotine that causes the obvious damage though. Studies have shown that the vape smoke stimulates the vagus nerve which causes changes in the cardiovascular system that could likely cause heart disease

On top of that it’s obvious that what goes into the lungs generally stays in the lungs, and vapes are full of all sorts of weird flavours and e numbers

But the truth is even if you were vaping water all day it would likely still damage your cardiovascular system

> Vaping definitely isnt healthy for you

nobody claimed otherwise

> Studies have shown that the vape smoke stimulates the vagus nerve which causes changes in the cardiovascular system that could likely cause heart disease

Can you name this study? Are you talking about "E-cigarettes and their lone constituents induce cardiac arrhythmia and conduction defects in mice"? This study did not find what you claim. All it found is that in mice the heart rhythm during and right after exposure increased. This is far from claiming that it "could likely cause heart disease" in humans. Also human switching studies point the other way. smokers who move to vaping show improvements in blood vessel function within weeks. I don't know why people really need to twist study results to depict vaping more harmful than it is. Yes, it is not healthy and you shouldn't do it. But all scientific evidence conclusively points to vaping, even heavy vaping, still being way less harmful than smoking because we already know that basically all harm comes from inhaling the residues of combustion, not from the nicotine. Condeming vaping as being equally bad as smoking is irresponsible and unscientific and prevents proven harm reduction for heavy smokers.

> Condeming vaping as being equally bad as smoking is irresponsible and unscientific and prevents proven harm reduction for heavy smokers.

I never said this did I.

Also you’re talking about smokers moving to vaping, whereas at the moment plenty of people are going straight to vaping due to people over arguing how harmless it is compared to smoking.

Addiction is a disease, not a "choice"

And "not ready to quit it at the moment" is such a wildly inappropriate dichotomy I really wonder what experience you have which informs your decision to discuss this topic.

Also I want to mention, I feel like there is too much emphasis put on length of life and not enough on quality of life.

If smoking 3-4 a day is far worse on my body BUT it means Im not a nicotine fiend with a brain fog all day every day with zero motivation, Ill take it.

But smoking cigarettes shortens life. Why would you want to promote vaping as improvement on the quality of life? Also, why do you write nicotine fiend - you are aware that tobacco plants contain nicotine? Vaping may be less damaging than smoking. I fail to see how it is healthy anywhere at all. Why do people here on this sub promote either thing as an exclusive or? That makes no sense. People need to stop sugar-coating crap. I also noticed this with weed. Weed users always say how weed is no problem, but it ALSO is a problem. Their brain tricks them into becoming a promo-individual for weed suddenly. Weed changes the brain pattern too.

I think you misread. I am saying vaping 5x the amount of nicotine is far worse mentally. Even if smoking 3-4 a day is worse physically, if I am going to do one or the other, I rather smoke 3-4 a day.

But in general I am saying, even for the quitting smoking/vaping ad campaigns there is not enough emphasis put on how dramatically it reduces your quality of life. Its always about dying of cancer or heart disease and living shorter amount of time 20-40 years down the line. I mean shit in a lot of cases I rather die at 70 than live to 80. Youll feel better EVERY day in a month is a muucch stronger motivation for me.

I was tempted to just start smoking again, but I found that if I was distracted or my hands were busy I could go without vaping for hours at a time.

It took a few tries, but once I really decided to quit I was able to get past the worst cravings in a few days and now it's been almost a year.

Have you tried nic pouches like zyn's instead?

They are also absolutely addictive as fuck, BUT I will say because they come in different strengths I found it relatively straight forward to quit them via tapering.

I was using 20 x 10mg per day and then bought strength 9mg, 6mg, 3mg, 1mg quit.

It was much much easier than trying to cold turkey which I also tried.

> where 5% is the standard

What? 50mg/ml is the standard? Or am I miscalculating something here? When I switched from cigs to vaping (back in 2012, not really comparable to now, but still), I went with very high nicotine levels of 36mg/ml which was pretty harsh on the throat, and within a year I was at 3mg/ml. Nowadays I’m at zero.

For the disposable vapes, yes it is. 5% salt nic, in the US youd be hard pressed to find lower. Most countries Ive been to limit to 2%, which the US absolutely should do. Its criminal 5% is sold with no alternative.

Im not going to link you 500 products but heres a pretty standard vape sold. You can check the rest of the products, theyre almost all 5% with no other option https://vapordna.com/products/flum-melo-20000-puffs-disposab...

15ml at 50mg/ml is 750mg of nicotine. That thing would last me a week. A pack if cigs is ~25mg. Per week ~170mg versus 750. Insane

I used to vape the box mods 3mg. It was great, but now I cant go back to it after trying these damn things because the 3mg is almost a joke. Even cigarettes feel like nothing to me compared to these things

Yes, but a market with only 5% is more likely to generate addicts, err, I mean, higher ARR.

For context, I vape because nicotine helps me focus. There's a lot more to it than that but I'm not going to elaborate because if I do, I'll get about a zillion replies from preachy, argumentative people who don't know anything about me and I just don't have the time for that today.

Anyway, one of those big 5% disposables lasts me about 6 weeks at the rate I use them. I deliberately seek out the high nic content because I don't want to ingest more glycol or whatever than is necessary. Nor do I want to sit there and chain vape all day like I used to back when freebase liquids were all you could get. I can limit my intake to 2-3 puffs every 1-2 hours and that's what works for me.

Of course it helps you focus. Thats a known fact. Its incredible you can do only few puffs every hour or two. No judgement from me.

... Huh, I had no idea of this. Yeah, limit in Europe is 20mg/ml, and practical limit on what you can buy, at least in Ireland, is 18mg/ml (I suspect this is manufacturers giving themselves a safety margin, but seems to be pretty standard).

Good dude, good ole days. These modern vapes are all from the same tobacco companies, hence the craziness. Cant fight em? Join em.

Instead of having to sell cigarettes with throat cancer on the label, they get to make all this colorful brands with an even more insane nicotine delivery system with the "health benefit" of quitting smoking...

Dont ever ever try this crap.

Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.

I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering

> I am really confused as to how it ever developed

Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists):

First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative.

So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself".

Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly).

Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither").

After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period.

Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.

Interestingly my language has both genders and (reduced but present) animate-inanimate distinction. It also used to have singular, plural and "double" declination. As far as I understand this all was originally "invented" in proto-indo-european. Man, PIE was wild.

My language has male/female/neuter in singular and male-person/everything-else in plural (e.g. singular dog is male and declines like boy, but plural dogs is non-male-person and declines like girls).

It used to have dual number, now it's just singular and plural. There are, however, exactly three words that use the dual number rules for its plural, even for N>2: hands, eyes and ears.

> plural inanimate abstract words ... "feminine"

A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations, languages, and complex machines (especially ships). While usually people ascribe the pronoun "it" to these, occasionally they use a gendered pronoun, and if so, it's always "she", never "he". Two churches or organizations or even ideas might be "sisters" or in a "mother/daughter" relationship. The common theme through all these examples is plurality and abstractness.

Decades ago I was at a party where some people were gathered around a rather nice table, and someone said "This is a lovely table". A french person said (in English) "Yes, she is, isn't she".

It's the first and only time I've had the sense of what it probably sounds like to speakers of gendered languages when an English (or other) speaker gets the gender wrong.

This would explain why German singular feminine and plural everything use the same article (in most cases).

one thing that doesn't fit is that I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split. but from my (not so vast) knowledge, the split is either (mostly) the last letter of the word, or a list of suffixes

> I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split

Well, as I understand, the actual animate/inanimate split was there at least 10 000 years ago (or more)! And the language has gradually changed over the years until it's barely recognizable. For half of the period that passed we didn't even have written languages, and can only approximately deduce the words by tracing their common origins in related languages.

See how modern English has changed in 500 years from the earlier Middle English — as a non-native English speaker, I can barely recognize a few things, and it's otherwise completely unintelligible for me. Now multiply that change by at least 20x.

So how words are split between genders in modern languages - has very little relation to how they were before. For example, in modern Spanish, masculine gender is a fusion of Latin masculine and neuter genders. So technically if we say that in Classical Latin there was still a statistically significant animate/inanimate split between masculine and neuter genders - nowadays it's the same single gender in Spanish.

As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex if you're a native speaker (basically nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender when speaking/writing). As for their role, I think they may work as a simple error correction code (if genders in the sentence don't match, you misheard something)

FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.

> nobody ever makes grammar errors related to gender

For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...

In (European) Portuguese some people (I've seen this more in older people) use feminine for hamburgers (like in Spanish, afaik), but most people use masculine. I guess it would make sense to be feminine because it's a sandwich, and sandwich is feminine.

In Russian it's quite common too. Car can be feminine (машина), masculine (авто/автомобиль), and neuter (транспортное средство).

And different car brands usually have their own gender too: for example Mercedes is usually masculine even though named after founder's daughter, and Honda is isually feminine.

The brand gender is really interesting. We will usually use the gender of the type of vehicle. So for saying "My Honda" we will use masculine if it's a car (O meu [carro] Honda), but feminine if it's a van (A minha [carrinha] Honda).

As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, today I learnt that "sanduíche" is feminine in Portugal. I had no idea!

And I learned that it's masculine in Brazil! :)

> As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex

Said every native speaker I suppose.

Why abridge (and misrepresent) my quote?

>it's not complex if you're a native speaker

Of course this is very complex and not intuitive if you're a language learner. My point was that while there are parts of grammar that native speakers struggle with, and kids drill them for good grades in school, this is not one of that parts. And my broader point was that "needlessly pointless part of the language" is subjective and something language users should judge.

Oh it seems you took it personally, whereas I mentioned "every native speaker". My intention was not to rule you, just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

I didn't read it as something being taken personally, just as a clarification. A misquote is a misquote no matter whose it was

> My intention was [...] just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

Fwiw, that was not at all clear to me from a sarcastic few words

No sarcasm intended, I was being literal. Me and my wife have different mother tongues. What's natural to her isn't to me and vice versa and we keep telling each other that it's easy.

Huh, I'm in the same situation but not sure I've ever considered an aspect of my language easy just because I speak it, and my partner's country is known for saying "deutsche sprache, schwere sprache" (german language, difficult language) so the entire country seems to realise it. I'll poke fun at "we only have like half the genders you do" but it's always clearly in jest; from learning a language as an adult myself the difficulty is very clear. Interesting to hear the different perspective

s/rule/rile/g

> Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.

Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.

Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’.

Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.

But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”

Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get:

> Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet.

Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.

Sounds logical; I'd like such a system.

Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better

Yep. Languages would be much better if they followed an RFC process.

English has these options, too.

> “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.”

'The former was delighted to meet the latter.'

There's also other languages which have different ways to class nouns. Have a look at eg Chinese.

How does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?

For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.

Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense.

In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit

Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.

FR: « J'ai transporté le canapé (M) et la table (F), mais il (M) s'est cassé. » -> the canapé/sofa is broken.

EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”

In languages with genders you need fewer unique words for gender-related concepts. For example English (genderless) has "boy" and "girl", while Spanish (male and female) has "niño" and "niña".

But that doesn't help you understand why "chair" might be feminine while "book" might be masculine.

Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine.

Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).

Er, that sounds backwards to me. I thought you put the a on the word because it is feminine. You're saying the word is feminine because there's an a on it?

Strictly speaking there's no causality in either direction. A word's gender determines what it takes for other words to agree with it, while the form of the word itself can be anything. A word can always be irregular.

But not every word can be irregular. Mostly the words that belong to a gender will match a set of patterns, and the words belonging to another gender will match a different set of patterns. If you're lucky, you can learn a word from some usage that makes its gender explicit (and for irregular words, this is the only way you can learn about their irregularity). But often all you have to go on is the word, and in that case, when you want to use it, you have to make a choice. You'll do that based on the form of the word.

-----

If you want some examples of how gender irregularity in nouns works, here are a few different phenomena in Latin:

- An adjective in the first/second declensions has masculine (singular) endings -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō, -e and feminine endings -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -a. If you see one of these endings, and you know the adjective is first/second declension¹, then you've fully specified the gender of the adjective. There are no exceptions.

- First and second declension nouns mostly follow this pattern. Lana means wool and, as the -a suffix would lead you to expect, it's feminine. Campus means field as, as the -us suffix would lead you to expect, it's masculine. What this means is that "white wool" is lana alba and "a white field" is campus albus.

- Trees are weird. They are second declension (or sometimes fourth; pretend that's not true), appearing to be masculine, but instead they're feminine. So you'd have pinus alba, a white pine tree, or quercus alba, a white oak tree.

- There's a short list of profession terms that are first declension, appearing to be feminine, but that are nevertheless masculine. So it'd be agricola albus, a white farmer, or nauta albus, a white sailor.

- What about corpus? Well, it's neuter. Corpus album, a white body. Corpus is a third declension noun, and the third declension works completely differently. The apparent -us ending is misleading; the root of this noun is actually corpor- and the suffixes, of course, belong to the third declension.

- What do you do if you run into a word you don't know how to deal with? Pretend it's normal. Manus is a Latin word that means "hand"; it appears to be masculine, but it's feminine. It turns out that referring to hands is common enough that Spanish speakers today still remember that this masculine-looking word, now mano, is actually feminine. But we may compare Biblia, which is feminine in Spanish today despite the fact that in Latin it was neuter. It's feminine now because of that -a ending.

¹ That isn't actually true; the neuter suffixes are mostly just masculine suffixes except for one that is feminine. There are no distinctive second-declension neuter suffixes. But the suffixes by themselves are sufficient to distinguish masculine gender from feminine.

> “a árvore”

I'm glad that Portuguese doesn't try to trip up foreigners on purpose here, like Spanish does with "el agua" (which is still a feminine word, but takes the masculine article because "la agua" is too hard to pronounce).

French does this too: "mon" is masculine, "ma" is feminine, "ami" is masculine (so "mon ami" is correct), "amie" is feminine, but you have to say "mon amie". Some things contract (like "n'est", "c'est", "l'homme"), but not "ma."

Except words ending in "ma" that came from Greek (o problema, o estigma) which are masculine, while those from Latin (a alma) are feminine as expected. In Spanish it's basically the same. A Spanish teacher gave me a nice mnemonic: "-ma is masculine, like your mother." I've never forgotten that.

This is often apparent from the sound or spelling of a word, rather than any genderedness in its concept. A chair is une chaise (feminine), and it would be weird for chaise to be masculine. It’s not because the chair is feminine, it’s because the word is. There are some rules that help you figure out the gender based on the word (often what sound the word ends with), but there are exceptions to those rules.

Livre (book) is actually an example of where the gender creates a different meaning: un livre is a book, while une livre is a pound (the unit of weight).

If you ever feel inclined to learn Hindi there is more to grapple with. The verb gender is sometimes set by the gender of the object, sometimes by the gender of the object. Which way this will go loosely depends on tense.

On one hand I agree genders are pointless for chair and book. On the other hand, many nouns are the female or augmentative version of the base word. From your examples: "silla" (f, chair) vs "sillón" (m, sofa), and "libro" (m, book) vs "libreta" (f, notebook).

Nevertheless, embedding gender into the language grammar enables many very elegant expressions of phrases as seem in many Latin and Greek poets.

It's like everything else, natural languages have some redundancy so you can understand the other party even when you failed to catch ~10% of they were saying. A binary gender, like in French, is one more bit of information. German also has neutral, so one more trit.

There's an active gender distinction in English between people (using the relativizer who) and everything else (using the relativizer which).

It is an area of current dispute whether the pronoun it can be applied to people or not.

None of this really means anything. For one if you test enough strategies one by luck will be killer. Second, past performance != future.

One AI might consist of some convulated strategy of who knows what, but all it takes in the end is for it to say...hold more tech stocks than not, or buying more call options or leveraged positions in a bull market, being more out of the market during a bearish market, etc. But that same strategy will fail miserably as soon as the market conditions change

yeah the alternative test is to arm a toddler with an account and just have it randomly guess what to do. Even it might outperform the best fund managers over a given timeframe but that's just how the markets work. Over the long run, the toddler will go bankrupt.

I mean it would be ridiculously easy to make up any number of incorrect proofs.

It would have to show something new and interesting.

I do what the person you're replying to and for me its just one voice or a faint imagination of them speaking. Its me roleplaying as the other person, not like there is a different entity in my brain.

I mean what's the big deal? I use --dangeorusly-skip-permissions on every single interaction in the last 6 months. Worst case it deletes my files that are all on git? It fucks up my local DB? Cool.

I save way more time not babying it than the occasional fuck up I have to salvage.

Worst case it gets access to gmail. And Github. And the Internet. I'm increasingly appreciating the importance of a physical finger-press on Yubikey to trigger the FIDO2 + OIDC Auth. I don't think there is an easy way for it to hack a new session.

How is it going to get access to gmail or github? In any case, whats the probability of it going to so completely off the rails that it does something horrendous with gmail/github? Whats it going to do? Email my coworkers nudes on my computer? Make my github profile public?

I am most worried about something gaining access to my email and then using the password reset flow to steal hundred hundreds of other accounts.

2FA makes me a little less nervous than I used to be, but not everything has good 2FA.

Claude typically recommends .env files for storing secrets. You use one to store a refresh token for the Gmail API or IMAP connection details. Your agent uses an MCP server you configured during a session, but the MCP server has been compromised and directs the agent to do nasty stuff with env dotfiles.

> How is it going to get access to gmail or github?

Did you even read the article? Claude was opening he browser and iterating through the tabs.

I presume you are logged in to your github account? Your gmail?

> Whats it going to do? Email my coworkers nudes on my computer? Make my github profile public?

Reset access to services using your email? MITM your 2FA?

Or perhaps you have 1Password/Bitwarden running with a generous unlock policy?

> Did you even read the article? Claude was opening he browser and iterating through the tabs.

It would have been somewhat ironic if it had been hit by a prompt injection attack via one of all those open random websites ...

This is one of the things I found so interesting: it was using my system browsers but it wasn't exposing itself to any content from them.

Even when it iterated through all visible windows to find the one it wanted to screenshot it was searching for titles in Python code and returning only the integer window ID.

The sites it opened and screenshotted were sites under its own control - either test pages it had created or development servers it was running.

When it did run code that analyzed an open web page (by injecting JavaScript into a template it controlled before loading that in a browser window) that code only returned JSON with measurements from the page.

It's making me wonder if Fable has been trained to take additional steps to avoid accidental exposure to untrusted content.

It should run as a separate user account with its own home directory. Not with access to your personal browser profile.

What does setting this up look like? Qemu vm and run there? How do you interface with version control and deployment?

What happens if it gets manipulated into npm installing a malicious package, which compromises your machine and any systems it has access to or becomes part of a botnet?

Why do people argue so hard on semantics? Its social media in some ways and its not in others

And then when almost every person says that, it turns out to be good advice. But we have statistics on this!

I am very risk averse person and I won't ride a bike in LA. In a city with proper infrastructure I would love to.