willyt

Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)

And also ignoring British English (and probably other international Englishes too); writing ‘try put’, ‘go put’ or ‘go see’ for example would get a red mark and a correction from the teacher in the UK.

‘Try and’ is correct British English and the Register is a UK publication. If the author had written ‘to try make’ they would have gotten in trouble with their editor and ‘to try to make’ doesn’t flow as well, to my eyes at least.

But you would have your essay corrected if you wrote “go put” in any British school (and possibly other ‘commonwealth’ countries) but it’s fine to say it in informal speech; sometimes we hint at ‘and’ by saying the ‘n’ and sometimes we don’t in regional dialects. In the US you would have “go and put” corrected if you wrote it in an essay. So there is a meaningful difference.

In written British English it would be correct grammar to say “try and” or “go and”. In speech it would be said “go’n” with very little emphasis on the ‘n’ and some dialects drop the ‘n’ completely but would still write ‘and’. I suspect that this would also be true for other dialects of English from NZ, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, India etc but I stand to be corrected.

Yes, I would understand it and that’s probably what people naturally say informally where I live in Scotland and in other dialects it’s said more like ‘go’n put your shoes on’ where the ‘n’ is very soft. But especially if I saw it in writing I would assume that they were not a native British English speaker. It’s interesting. In America I presume it’s not grammatically correct to say ‘the police officer went got his gun and shot killed the suspect’ so why does US English drop the ‘and’ from go (and) or try (and)? Curious. (Edit with some observations about dropping letters from and)

‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.

That is a common usage in British English as well. E.g “I will update the draft document and revert back to you”.

One of the most annoying things about Duolingo is that they haven’t spared a week of an intern’s time to come up with a way of substituting the British/Indian/Irish/Austrailian/New Zealand/South African… word for the American English word. OK there’s a lot of slang out there and you could really go down a rabbit hole but when the usage is well documented in e.g. Collins-Robert there’s no excuse really.

I’ve been learning french and for the most part once you learn that you just start but don’t finish saying the last letter of any word and you understand which letters you don’t pronounce on the end of the verb that change between je/il/elle/on (usually the last one) and ils/elles (usually the last 3) it’s not that hard. To test my pronunciation I can read a french word I’ve never heard before and have a pretty good chance that the apple speech recognition in notes will get it or conversly I can hear it and have a good chance of spelling it correctly. By contrast I am a native British English speaker, I have two postgraduate degrees, I can read the ‘dearest creature in creation’ poem perfectly and still there are words I would avoid saying in a professional or academic context for fear of saying them wrong and looking ignorant. And good luck pronouncing the name of any UK town or village correctly. What is hard about french is remembering if something is masculine or feminine.

I got an electric shock plugging in a zip drive once. They used to arc when you plugged the mains cord into the back of the drive or the power brick, I forget which.

Couldn't you have an exam room with raspberry pi's flashed with a fresh install of debian (or whatever) and no internet and just say you are allowed to lookup anything that's preinstalled on the system plus a PDF of the go to reference for whatever language you are asking them to program in.

Yes. I would say it probably makes more sense that whoever designed the chatbot system for the airline will need indemnity insurance. Then the airline has somewhere to go if it starts giving out free plane tickets willy nilly.

Static site with Jekyll?

I was quite surprised to discover that I couldn’t interact at all with my home battery without internet. I wanted to see how much power is left in it during a power cut but because in a power cut there’s no internet the app didn’t work. Interestingly the cell tower goes out after about two hours of power out and the landline goes after about 9 hours so I didn’t realise until quite far in that this would happen.

The ones recorded in the US probably are legal to listen to and the ones in the UK probably are not. I think I remember reading somewhere that it’s not legal to record ATC in the UK. IANAL SIUKRTCL