Category: Uncategorized

About as little as it is doing to stop it on Upwork, of which Quora is an enterprise client (they’re still recruiting question writers there):

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is Quora just a site where shills ask questions anonymously so they can answer them and promote themselves and/or their companies?

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Has Quora ever hired people to ask questions on a particular topic?

And it looks like 50c an answer is the rate there too:

I’m looking for someone to search for questions about how to play/train on Baseball/Basketball/Golf/Swimming on Quora and to post answers related to the questions by referring to what a company’s online solutions can offer. A Quora account and sample of answers shall be provided. Pay Rate: 20 answers for $10. NOTE: You should be familiar with the sports as in how to play/train or coach a sport, not the spectator part of it (news, teams, views, etc). We’re looking for those that know the following sports.

50c?! Cf. John L. Miller’s answer to Will (and should) Quora ever pay its content creators?

If I give you a computer because I like giving people computers, that makes me happy. If I give you a computer because you’re paying me $50, I no longer have the joy of giving AND it is worth more to me than $50 (even if no one else will pay anything for it), so I’m losing money and unhappy.

50c… is not going to motivate me to do the kind of answer I do for free. FFS.

I read with some… puzzlement the following answer:

It’s a win win (x2) for all the parties involved.

A freelance writer gets money.

A company gets exposure.

Quora establishes itself as the go-to place for quality content.

Users get their answers from a professional and get to discover companies related to their interests. Maybe they can even get their problems solved.

Does that 50c an answer question sound like it’ll be quality content? Does it sound like anything but spam?

One would think, at any rate, that spam prevention would be better than spam cure. Then again, one would think that Quora would take a dimmer perspective on Do My Homework questions too.

Upwork is awash with people paying freelancers to do their homework, btw. Behold: the programmers of the future. And weep for the species…

Erica Friedman’s answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

I was able to get there a little early and meet some of the Quora Staff and speak with them. It’s very easy when one is removed from the gears of a community to imagine that nothing is being done when, in fact, a great deal is being done, just not all of it working the way we want. I came away from those talks excited and energized about the direction Quora is taking.

Wonder Woman’s Shield says that the quote OP gives is on the shield. However, The Badass Quote That’s Engraved On Wonder Woman’s Sword says that it is on her sword:

In the “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Tech Manual” (via Digital Spy), it’s revealed that director Zack Snyder wanted inscriptions on the sword and shield. After coming up with a “hybrid extinct language,” the team inscribed the sword with a quote from Joseph Campbell’s collection “Goddess: Mystery of the Feminine Divine.” Here’s the quote translated into English:

“Life is killing all the time and so the goddess kills herself in the sacrifice of her own animal.”

What is Written on Wonder Woman’s Shield in BATMAN V SUPERMAN? | Nerdist links to a transliteration of the inscription on the sword (it says shield, but the closeup of the sword has the same text), done by Vince Tomasso: The “Greek” on Wonder Woman’s Equipment in ‘Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice’

The Greek makes no sense, and it has random digammas and a letter that Tomasso did not recognise, and that I’m proud that I did: Sampi (in its arrow variant). It looks like they made up the language for the quote, and I would not be surprised if they just made up a bunch of random letters, rather than a fully-fledged language. But Greek it isn’t. The archaic letters do indicate this is supposed to be some sort of fictional pre-Greek…

Thank you for the A2A, Jelle Zijlstra, and why do I suspect that you’ve read my page Astral Planes?

There’s 17 * 65536 characters in Unicode. Each 65536 characters is called a Plane. The first plane, the BMP, is the plane that most characters you will ever encounter are in. Only two other planes are used (or indeed likely to be used), and they contain obsolete, archaic scripts or characters in scripts that won’t get used much at all, and that most people will rarely encounter.

Or, per Plane (Unicode) – Wikipedia

In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (= [math]2^{16}[/math]) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16 decimal, which corresponds with the possible values 00–10 hexadecimal of the first two positions in six position format (hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly-used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called “supplementary planes”, or humorously “astral planes“.

Thank you Wikipedia.

[citation needed]

Actually, you know what? I’ll cite me. Astral Planes

So as of Unicode 3.0.1 (August 2000), Unicode is organised into 16 planes, each of 64K; this gives over a million codepoints, which should be enough for all needs, past present and future. The Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), or Plane 0, is the first 64K, which is what was in use until 2000, and where just about everything useful will still reside. The other planes are termed Supplementary.

The supplementary planes are an innovation in how characters are internally represented—programmers have to assume a character can have a million possible values, not just 64K, which means they often have to change their existing code. Furthermore, they are not drastically common in use: most ‘real’ scripts (though not all) are ensconced in the BMP. […]

The informal name for the supplementary planes of Unicode is “astral planes”, since (especially in the late ’90s) their use seemed to be as remote as the theosophical “great beyond”. There has been objection to this jocular usage (see “string vs. char” and subsequent discussion on Unicode list); and as Planes 1 and 2 spread in use there will be less occasion to feel that the planes really are ‘astral’. But the jocular reference is harmless, and it serves as a reminder that we’re not quite there yet.

Astral plane is a joke on Astral plane: they’re “planes” of characters, but they were inaccessible and immaterial, you’d never get to them, your software would never get to them, and you’d never need to get to them: they were abstruse and obscure. The joke was coined on the Unicode mailing list.

The term is still in use; e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/i… . And the term still means something: legacy products still fail to support them (such as… oh, the Quora text editor).

There’s a simple reason why those planes aren’t particularly astral any more. In amongst the Deseret and Nabataean and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there is one set of characters in the supplementary planes that sees a *lot* of usage now, and that users have come to expect all their platforms to support. Those characters weren’t in Unicode when I wrote my page in 2003, but they’re there in the Astral Planes now.

Those characters are, of course, Emoji.

Do read this in conjunction with:

Stefan Hill’s answer to Why didn’t the Byzantine Empire have ethnic conflicts like the Ottoman Empire did?

Ethnicity was not important in the Medieval world. Common people did not have to communicate with the state. They were supposted to work and pay taxes. The best they could hope for was to be left alone.

In the 19th century that changed.

The flashpoints in the Early Byzantine Empire were religious and doctrinal, but those often ended up being closely correlated with ethnicity—particularly with dyophysitism vs monophysitism (to use each side’s pejoratives). The bulk of the peoples lost by the Empire to the Caliphate were not native speakers of Greek, after all.

After Chalcedonian Christianity, “heresies” remained a flashpoint, but you do also start seeing more clearly ethnic-based conflict. I don’t know what else to call the Uprising of Asen and Peter, for instance:

The Uprising of Asen and Peter (Bulgarian: Въстание на Асен и Петър) was a revolt of Bulgarians and Vlachs living in the theme of Paristrion of the Byzantine Empire, caused by a tax increase. It began on 26 October 1185, the feast day of St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, and ended with the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire, ruled by the Asen dynasty.

In fact, the victorious brothers raised a church to the same St Demetrius whose cult site was in Salonica; in other words, they asserted religious continuity with the Empire, but not political allegiance:

After their return, many of the protesters were unwilling to join the rebellion. The brothers Peter and Asen built the Church of St Demetrius of Thessaloniki in Tarnovo, dedicated to Saint Demetrius, who was traditionally considered a patron of the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki, and claimed that the Saint had ceased to favour the Byzantines: “God had decided to free the Bulgarians and the Vlach people and to lift the yoke that they had borne for so long”.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Can you write an English sentence, phonetically, in another script without changing the language?

Oh, we Aussies, we’re a defensive lot. Not the first time I’ve seen this on Quora. And I did appreciate Alap Arslan’s answer.

Lemme have a go.

casual swearing (cursing)

Yes. I don’t think it’s uniquely Australian, but we certainly pride ourselves in swearing; the subreddit Straya • r/straya seems to use cunt as every third word. We have defined ourselves (mythologically) in opposition to British moralising, and we find American avoidance of profanity ridiculous. (I was astonished, living in California, when two delivery guys said they were looking for a restroom. No delivery guy in Australia would say anything more genteel than toilet.)

Is this uncivilised? Well, it certainly is not genteel, and it prioritises egalitarianism over respect (positive over negative politeness—in this regard; compared to Southern Mediterraneans, Aussies are still a bunch of emotionally unforthcoming Poms). And there is a special boorishness in the business elite, with none of the noblesse oblige you might see elsewhere. But as others have said on this thread, we find scepticism about deference a healthy thing. Just like Israelis do.

excessive drinking

Yes, one of our less helpful inheritances from the UK. An outbreak of drunken violence in Sydney has led to an early curfew there—and to Melbourne gloating about it.

informal culture

Much more so now than thirty years ago. People used to dress up for classical concerts or dinner; they rock up to both in jeans now. Can be seen, again, as egalitarian rather than uncivilised, but it does mean that there is less of a sense of occasion or solemnity. Australians don’t do solemnity. In fact, when I tried to solemnly launch my departmental working papers as a postgrad, I was heckled.

… Well, rephrase that. They don’t do solemnity, unless it’s one of their sacred cows. A Muslim activist raised the plight of detained refugees during Anzac Day, and got attacked for it universally.

disrespect toward or suspicious of authority figures and authority generally

Overstated. Yes, people are contemptuous of politicians, and routinely vote informal. Yes, people are suspicious of ceremony, and are reluctant to offer deference. Something they again are quite proud of, as you’ll have seen here.

On the other hand, their obedience of laws and norms is distressingly reflexive. I had a friend from Eastern Germany, who was aghast at how unquestioningly Australians obey the law; “social consensus” happens very quickly here, and the nanny state finds fertile ground among the citizenry.

sports obsessed

Yes, there is a big sports culture, and sports chews up a disproportionate amount of public discourse. Australia isn’t really unique in that; and Australia does at least have a culture of public participation in sport, which is rather healthier than just collecting stats about it on the couch.

arrogant

Well, yes. Australia is compensating now for generations of cultural inferiority complex and tugging the forelock to The Mother Country, by truly believing they are the best country on earth, and deflecting criticism. (As again you will have noted in this thread.) The post-Howard brand of nationalism is much more po-faced and prickly than the understated wisecracking about God’s Own Country that went on before Howard. And I don’t think most Australians really believe that they have anything to learn from any other countries.

A close companion to What in your opinion is the ugliest/most unappealing script?

Cultural familiarity is going to defuse anyone’s opinion; so you won’t get many responses nominating Latin, or anything originating on the same continent as Latin.

Is it Lontara alphabet, optimised to be written on palm leaves? Is it Vai syllabary, which aesthetically occupies a middle ground between a syllabary (which it is) and hieroglyphics? Is it Ogham, which reduces letters to tally strokes?

I’m going to go with Duployan. Duployan is a French shorthand system, and Duployan was used to write down Chinook Jargon. That’s why it has been added to Unicode: Duployan (Unicode block).

As a shorthand, Duployan was designed for easy and fluent joining together of characters. What it was not designed for was straightforward rendering in either print or a computer screen. Read the rules for rendering the script in the 2009 proposal to include Duployan in Unicode, or the Unicode Technical Note Duployan Shorthand, and wince.

Like this kibbitzing site says: Crazy On Tap – Unicode 7

That Duployan by the way is an obscure form of shorthand that was proposed for a small number of weird languages, but which actually never caught on. All those languages use different orthographies now. Duployan is impossible to render using standard font engines because the shapes can combine in infinite combinations, and do stuff like the end of one segment connects to the start of the next, and they can rotate. It would be easier to implement rendering of fancy calligraphy or handwriting that looks totally real.

“Duployan orienting vowels are written by rotating the vowel to match the incoming angle of the preceding character, then mirrored along the axis of that character to avoid the following character crossing.”

Good luck updating your font renderer to handle this character range.

Let us now praise Australian hypocoristics. Or Diminutives in Australian English. I’ve seen hypocoristic used here, because the Australian forms aren’t used like normal diminutives, to indicate that something is cute or small; hence bikie “member of a motorcycle club, with a connotation of involved in criminal activity”. Of course, hypocoristic is just Greek for baby-talk (‘under child do’), which these aren’t either; but whatevs.

Have a look at that list linked above. Yes, we really do talk like that. It’s not just about throwing a shrimp on the barbie (and we call them prawns anyway).

We really do get aggro when cut off by some drongo in traffic, unless it’s an ambo or a firie; and sometimes that can end up in a biffo, especially if it’s some truckie in a semi from Tassie or Newie or Rocky. We really do like to have a bikkie or a sanger in the arvo with a cuppa, and a smashed avo toast with mushies for brekkie. And sometimes we head out to pick some grog up at the bottlo to chuck in the esky; we’d be devo if there’s no Crownies there. My wife has just got a job with the Salvos, but she does not deal directly with deros or povvos or housos [that last one is not in the Wikipedia list]. Tracey Bryan talks like that in Brissie; it’s a shame I didn’t catch up with her for Chrissie, but I had to stick around with the relos.

Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi.

Gotta get back to work from my (non-smoking) smoko; we got fined for not paying our rego last week, on the way to the servo, and I gotta pay it off. It’s enough to make you put on your sunnies and chuck a sickie, I tell ya. The pollies upped the rego price for revenue; that’s what the journos say. The Seppos would never fine you like that, tell you what.

(This is actually not that exaggerated. And I don’t see what the fuss is about with Crown Lager; I’ll take Cab Sav over that any day.)

Vote #1 Kim Huynh’s answer to What are the pros and cons of living in Australia specifically in Melbourne? This will be rather more superficial.

Pro Melbourne:

• Lots of parkland.
• Good public transport system (so long as you’re commuting to and from the CBD)
• Critical mass of culture in general
• Excellent foodie culture
• Excellent sporting culture
• Low crime rate
• Peaceable population, for the most part
• Pleasant surrounding countryside
• I live here. And really, what more do you need.

Contra Melbourne:

• The weather. Way too volatile, and searing hot or raining (or both within hours).
• Far away from anywhere (except Geelong, I guess). Even Sydney is an hour flight away.
• Cost of living is high
• Real estate is unaffordable
• Infrastructure is starting not to keep pace with the population
• Allied with both: emerging have and have-not geographical divide; it’s not as bad as Sydney yet, but it will be
• Not as many high-powered jobs going as in Sydney
• Like most coastal cities, a lot of it is going to be underwater in a few decades