> People can drown on dry land from about a tablespoon of water getting into their lungs.
Well, I don't think there's such a big risk of that. Falling into a pool is something most of us have probably done. Being pushed by a friend as a kid for example. The risk of drowning is probably pretty comparable to the risk from the radiation (negligible).
I didn't expect this level of unfounded ignorant hysteria here. Have you really never gone swimming and inhaled some water? Did you go to the hospital?
> In the past, these terms were used to try to explain that some fatal drowning victims had very little water in their lungs at autopsy. Now it is understood that little water enters the lungs during drowning. Moreover, when water enters the lungs, it is rapidly absorbed when breathing starts again. The amount of water that enters the lung does not determine the amount of injury or determine the treatment of drowning. The amount of injury from drowning is due to how long the victim is without oxygen.
Even a tiny amount of water in your lungs is a trip to the hospital.
The amount of radiation that guy was exposed to is roughly the same as eating a banana, or driving through the middle of Aberdeen with your car windows down inhaling all the radon off the granite.
If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
My water rescue course is up to date. When's yours due for renewal?
As the saying goes, "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing". Your "water rescue course" taught you something that's clearly wrong, as we see with the sibling comment, while my common sense and just everyday life experience led me to the correct conclusion.
> If there's a bit of water in your lungs, a surprisingly small amount, it causes massive inflammation and your lungs start to fill with fluid. It's called "secondary drowning", and it happens a couple of hours after.
> Secondary drowning, sometimes called delayed drowning, is another term that is not medically accepted. The historical use of this term reflects the reality that some patients may worsen due to pulmonary edema after aspirating small amounts of water.
> Drowning starts with aspiration, and few or only mild symptoms may be present as soon as the person is removed from the water. Either the small amount of water in the lungs is absorbed and causes no complications or, rarely, the patient’s condition becomes progressively worse over the next few hours as the alveoli become inflamed and the alveolar-capillary membrane is disrupted. But people do not unexpectedly die of drowning days or weeks later with no preceding symptoms. The lungs and heart do not “fill up with water,” and water does not need to be pumped out of the lungs.
> There has never been a case published in the medical literature of a patient who underwent clinical evaluation, was initially without symptoms, and later deteriorated and died more than 8 hours after the incident. People who have drowned and have minimal symptoms get better (usually) or worse (rarely) within 4 to 8 hours. In a study of more than 41,000 lifeguard rescues, only 0.5% of symptomatic patients died.
Maybe don't set too much store by what some random "water rescue course" instructor tells you, especially if it sounds like complete bovine excrement.
> all the experts you know use it in slightly different ways
What? Knowing that a git repo is just a folder is nowhere near "expert" level. That's basic knowledge, just like knowing that the commits are nodes of a DAG. Sadly, most git users have no idea how the tool works. It's a strange situation, it'd be like if a majority of drivers didn't know how to change gears.
> It's a strange situation, it'd be like if a majority of drivers didn't know how to change gears.
If you literally can't change gears then your choices are a) go nowhere (neutral), b) burn out your clutch (higher gears), or c) burn out your engine (1st gear). All are bad things. Even having an expert come along to put you in the correct gear once, twice, or even ten times won't improve things.
If a programmer doesn't know that git is a folder or that the commits are nodes of a DAG, nothing bad will happen in the short term. And if they have a git expert who can get them unstuck say, five times total, they can probably make it to the end of their career without having to learn those two details of git.
It's an analogy, there's no need to analyze it literally. And no, I've worked with some devs who don't understand git (thankfully I don't anymore) and it was quite a bit more than "five times" they got stuck or messed up the repo on the remote in an annoying way. Sure, if you regularly write code using a bunch of evals or gotos "nothing bad will happen" but it's a very suboptimal way of doing things.
"Expert level knowledge" implies something more to me than simply few people knowing about it. It's ridiculous to say that knowing how to change gears makes you an expert driver, even if a minority know how to do it (such as in the US e.g.)
My point is only that the understanding is uneven. I'm ready to debate the merits of subtrees vs submodules but I didn't know the folder thing. Am I weird? Yes, but here is a place where weird is commonplace.
> just like knowing that the commits are nodes of a DAG
Hello gatekeeping! I have used Git for more than 10 years. I could not explain all of the ins-and-outs of commits, especially that they are "nodes of a DAG". I do just fine, and Git is wonderful to me. Another related example: I would say that 90%+ of .NET and Java users don't intimately understand their virtual machine that runs their code. Hot take: That is fine in 2025; they are still very productive and add lots of value.
"Intimately understand the VM" is not the same as knowing what data structure you're using. It'd be comparable to not knowing the difference between an array and a linked list. Sure you may call it gatekeeping but likewise I may call your style willful ignorance of the basics of the tools you're using. Have you never used rebase or cherry-pick?
I mean, if you actually think there's a pool of "lava" that's dangerously radioactive at the surface, while people are walking right next to it, you might be a bit "stoopid". The whole reason water is used is that it shields from radioactivity pretty well
That's exactly my point, people are clueless about the basics of nuclear power. Why would they know it? I mean, why would the average person know what a linear equation is or what year the first world war started?
I feel like you’re citing the primary source material for the vast majority of us. Like, “let me find the thing that original taught me how to think about radiation pools. Ah yes, this xkcd. Yep, here’s the manual.”
Or maybe people just don’t that water mitigates radiation really well? You can be very pro-nuclear and still be concerned about radioactive contamination if you don’t know that radioactivity is dramatically reduced by just a few feet of water.
According to Randall Munroe, you'd actually experience less radiation about a metre under the water in a spent fuel pool then you do walking down the street.
On a tangent, I kinda love the fact that I've learned more about nuclear physics, orbital mechanics, and relativistic speeds from a poorly drawn webcomic than I have from any other source. (Ok KSP might actually have xkcd beat on orbital mechanics)
A lot of us grew up in the time of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Combined with a lot of media about radioactivity's dangers (https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/06/nyregion/babies-teeth-and...). I think that has strongly affected people's perception of risk.
I think for the general population we also have The Simpsons to blame. Ask anyone on the street what "nuclear waste" actually is and I'd wager at least half would say "a barrel with glowing green goo leaking out of it."
You know the article that people love around around here, ‘Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail’… well it does, and most people don’t realize how little of it they’re even aware of.
As a person who knows way too much about way too many things. I am fully aware of this myself, however, the headline was shifted in a way that makes you perceive there's a problem caused by said person falling into water. So yes, logic tells you no problem but haven't recognition tells you they're trying to announce a problem. At the same time there was no problem.
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. They literally wrote up a safety report and transported them off-site.
Wow, people are really clueless about how to avoid reacting angrily. It's funny to append "they were wearing a life vest" to "they had a nuclear safety accident"
The fuel is (almost) harmless, it's the fission products that make reactors dangerous. Many of those are water-soluble. Of course the fuel elements should be encased, but drinking pool water is probably not a great idea anyway.
> `nato bar` returns Bravo Alfa Romeo. I use this most often when talking to customer service and need to read out a long alphanumeric string, which has only happened a couple of times in my whole life. But it’s sometimes useful!
Even more useful is just learning the ICAO Spelling Alphabet (aka NATO Phonetic Alphabet, of which it is neither). It takes like an afternoon and is useful in many situations, even if the receiver does not know it.
Some time ago I tried to tell my email address to someone in Japan over the phone who did not speak English very well. It turned out to be basically impossible. I realized later one could probably come up with a phonetic alphabet of English words most Japanese know!
I guess it depends on what you understand "learn" to mean.
But in my mind, if I tell the LLM to do something, and it did it wrong, then I ask it to fix it, and if in the future I ask the same thing and it avoids the mistake it did first, then I'd say it had learned to avoid that same pitfall, although I know very well it hasn't "learned" like a human would, I just added it to the right place, but for all intents and purposes, it "learned" how to avoid the same mistake.
LLMs don't do this. They can't think. If you just one for like five minutes it's obvious that just because the text on the screen says "Sorry, I made I mistake, there are actually 5 r's in strawberry", doesn't mean there's any thought behind it.
I mean, you can literally watch their thought process. They try to figure out reasons why something went wrong, and then identify solutions. Often in ways that require real deduction and creativity. And have quite a high success rate.
If that's not thinking, then I don't know what is.
What? LLMs don't think nor learn in the sense humans do. They have absolutely no resemblance to a human being. This must be the most ridiculous statement I've read this year
I disagree, but your opinion may come from your ignorance (sorry, lack of knowledge perhaps) of Vietnamese. First, it's not a transliteration, it's their native alphabet. And the diacritics mark tones, which is a very important part of the language. An example from the article itself:
> In the case of Hỏa Lò Prison, for example, “hỏa” means “fire,” and “lò” means “furnace”: the Burning Furnace Prison. Without the marks, “hoa” means “flowers,” and “lo” means “worry,” rendering the term “Hoa Lo” meaningless.
Your example doesn't work because (a) it's an address, not text meant for reading and (b) turning ș into s only alters the pronunciation, while the meaning is still intelligible.
> First, it's not a transliteration, it's their native alphabet.
Then what the New York Times is doing is correct. If they write "Hanoi" instead of "Hà Nội", they are not writing "Hanoi" using the Vietnamese alphabet incorrectly. They are writing "Hanoi" using the English alphabet correctly and idiomatically. The fact that those two alphabets happen to share some glyphs is coincidental.
One can write "shchi" in English and all of those letterforms also happen to exist in Cyrillic. But that is not how a Russian would spell their word for cabbage soup. It's a coincidence that the letterforms exist in both alphabets.
If your argument is that the New York Times should use the native alphabet for words related to that region, then it would be a fair criticism. But I don't think most English readers would expect an article about Moscow to say "Москва", or an article about Tokyo to say "東京" or even "Tōkyō". By that same logic, an article about Hanoi should say "Hanoi" not "Hà Nội".
The term is actually a Chinese loanword, 火爐. One could then argue that without writing it with characters it just becomes meaningless sounds, which could have originated from any number of characters, if given no context. So therefore, your example doesn’t work so well either.
I would argue that the loss of characters work for the Vietnamese because the intelligibility is “good enough”, in the same way that writing Vietnamese completely without diacritics for an English-language newspaper is also “good enough”.
That is nonsensical. You could make the same argument by taking any English word, tracing its origins to Greek or Latin, calling it a loan word, and therefore arguing that it doesn't matter if you spell it correctly or not. Clearly misspelled words are "good enough" to be understood, but wouldn't you be disappointed if a newspaper contained a bunch of misspellings?
Perhaps I am also ignorant, but I thought the Latin+diacritics system was invented by a Frenchman in modern times, rather than being native to Vietnam.
Almost every writing system was imported from somewhere else, including something like half a dozen evolutions of the one we're using now (which was Latin, which was Greek, before that Phoenician, before that Egyptian).
What matters is that the Vietnamese use the script to write their own language, which is not the case for (say) romanized Chinese.
So you're saying that because the country was once colonized, their writing system is not "real" enough for you, and you only consider it a transliteration? That seems extremely disrespectful.
That is a really dumb point. Then Finnish has no writing system either, because it was created by a swede in the 16th century. Strange how there exist languages without writing systems, yet people write them?
it's the only official writing system that we have. The non latin scripts have practically disappeared from modern life.
We had centuries of Chinese scripts, which is definitely not native, then a short lived Chinese-like writing system that is the closest thing to "native", (it's not, see "Chinese-like"). Even that was not used as official system for as long as the current latin alphabet.
As a Viet, I am just speechless to you, someone brought up the topic of respecting the language as it's used today, and you wanna dilute the conversation by arguing what is native and what is not?
Sorry, I mean no disrespect. For my own language, Latin isn't native to English and English isn't native to Britain. These facts are nothing to get upset about.
I didn't know this is the official writing system of Vietnam. This explains why they have so many diacritics then, if it's their only writing system.
Even so, I don't think that changes my point. Sure, diacritics serve an important purpose in a language. Many words in Romanian are only differentiated in writing by diacritics (for example, "în" means in, inside, while "in" means linseed; "să" means "to", while "sa" means his/her).
However, this is only relevant for a Romanian audience: an international audience will not understand the words either way, and will usually not even be able to differentiate them from a list based on the presence or absence of the marks. If Hanoi had both a Hỏa Lò Prison and a Hoa Lo Prison, non-Vietnamese speakers will have no idea which to go to. Even less so if they had a Hòa Lỏ Prison in addition to the others.
As a fellow Romanian, I don’t see how Vietnamese is that different from Romanian in its writing system. They both overlay information onto the Latin alphabet, Vietnamese merely does a lot more of it.
It's not, that's my point. And yet, I don't often use Romanian diacrtics when writing English, and I certainly don't feel an international audience loses something if we talk about driving down the Transfagarasan instead of the Transfăgărășan.
I feel differently, I always write the diacritics. There are fewer ambiguities than in Vietnamese, but enough to matter. And everything has Unicode support now.
Handwriting definitely doesn't have Unicode support. And neither does people's reading. It may even be easier to guess what someone is mispronouncing if you see exactly what they read (i.e. the letters without diacritics) than if you see the diacritics and forget they mean nothing to the other person.
So first, almost all words in vietnamese are only differentiated by diacritics, it's just not a case of one word here and there, removing them makes vietnamese text mostly unreadable. So they are necessary even if you don't know the language, just to translate it, even with a computer.
And then no, diacritics are also relevant outside of Vietnam, Vietnam isn't the only tonal language in the world, some other nearby countries like China or Thailand might get a better (but imperfect of course) idea on how to pronounce these words.
Diacritics are not just tone markers, and half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers, so I doubt Chinese language speakers would get much from seeing these diacritics either. The Thai script tone markers are even more distinct, and it seems that the Latin transcription of Thai script used in Thailand tends to not include any tone markers at all - so again, I doubt that Thai speakers would recognize the Vietnamese diacritics and be better able to distinguish Hỏa Lò from Hòa Lỏ.
> I'm not 100% fluent but I don't know a single word which isn't pronounced like it's phonetic writing. If these words do exist, they must be very rare.
I'm saying that even if people familiar with pinyin recognized the (very approximate) correspondnce between Vietnamese tone markers and pinyin tone markers, they would still not understand all of the other diacritics that do other phonetic things that have no correspondent in pinyin.
> At a first glance probably not but it should be very easy to teach them that.
The same argument applies to anything that is teachable. The NYT could start throwing in a few Chinese characters in every article, to get people more familiar with Chinese writing. Would that be nice? Sure. Does it make any sense to wonder why they don't do it? I don't think so.
I still don't get your point, we use Chinese pinyin because they give a somewhat spoken version of words, vietnamese sentences without diacritics are 100% useless, they are useless to foreigners, useless to vietnamese people and even more importantly, useless even for machine translation and search. Who are they intended for, I've no idea.
The western equivalent maybe would be removing all the vowels of a sentence, yes you can do it but I'm not sure how it's useful in any way to any audience.
I only talked about pinyin because Chinese familiarity with tones was brought up as a reason why some non-Vietnamese speakers might still recognize the diacritics and get some value from them.
But even beyond that, I highly doubt that the article is really ambiguous without diacritics. I somehow doubt that if the NYT talks about a Hoa Lo prison somewhere in Hanoi, there is any real ambiguity about the actual place they are talking about. Sure, the words in themselves are ambiguous, but the context makes them very clear. This is not about writing Vietnamese without diacritics, which I'm sure is extremely ambiguous. It's only about some place names with very clear context about where and what they are.
> half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers
Yeah, they are different languages. What'd you expect? First you didn't even know that the Vietnamese alphabet was their actual alphabet, and now you're criticizing it for not being similar enough to some other random alphabet. Whatever your point is, you're failing at making it terribly.
The person I was responding to here claimed that the diacritics, even if they don't help people in the USA or Europe to get a better idea of the pronunciation, should help speakers of other tonal languages to do so.
So, I investigated what a Chinese speaker who is not familiar with Vietnamese writing might make of the diacrtics, specifically the tone markers since this is what I was replying about. Since the regular Chinese writing system doesn't include tone markers, I looked at Pinyin, which sometimes does. The conclusion was that no: even a Chinese speaker would not recognize the meaning of the Vietnamese diacritics, so even for them, it would not be useful.
This was just intended as a refutation of the previous poster's point, not anything broader.
Also, none of what I am saying is in any way a criticism of the Vietnamese writing system or language. The only thing I'm criticizing is the idea that it helps in any way for a non-Vietnamese audience to include language-specific diacrtics in a non-Vietnamese article (and I have the exact same opinion for my own language's diacritics, and for any other - Vietnamese just happens to be the topic here).
I still don't understand this attitude of "I can't be bothered to try to understand it so it's useless". Vietnamese is actually one of the more easy tonal languages for westerners to understand, given that the tone marks are literally pictograms of the pitch (and it's not a transliteration like 你好 -> nǐ hǎo). Why are you so allergic to actually making use of that feature?
I think the argument here is that Vietnamese script is so extremely reliant on diacritics that it cannot possibly make sense without them, despite looking legible to non-speakers. Similar argument could be made about Chinese or Japanese, but phonetic transcripts of those languages are actual gibberish to everybody that nobody cares. Vietnamese is on a such marginal point that frustrations can be expressed.
Even if this is true, it is irrelevant. The reality is that the vast majority of the NYT's audience will not get any extra information from including those diacritics than excluding them. If the article is not intelligible without diacritics, then it won't be intelligible with diacritics either, because people who don't know the language, nor any similar language, can't see a difference between Hoa Lo and Hỏa Lò and Hòa Lỏ.
The reality is that the vast majority of the NYT's audience will not lose any information from including those diacritics, and some people will gain quite a bit.
There's another angle here as well: I doubt NYT editors are familiar with Vietnamese spelling. If there are errors in the diacritics, they will not be able to spot them, and may end up with a text that appears more precise than it actually is. If they just remove all diacritics, no reader will be confused they avoid this potential for errors altogether.
"We need to remove information from the text because perhaps the author (who clearly speaks Vietnamese) may have made a mistake". Do you also think that we should remove all algebraic symbols from mathematics papers, because perhaps the author has made a mistake, and the audience may contain people that won't spot it?
The vast majority of readers won't get any information from anything in the article. Why not pseudonymize everything and scramble the place names? I at least appreciate that in principle, I could research the people mentioned. Romanian happens to be intelligible with diacritics removed, but I bet you'd feel differently if you read an article about Mr Ccsrtr and Em Cnr.
My point is that, I think, if you frame the diacritics-stripped Vietnamese as a language transcribed in a different script, than half measured attempt at representing Vietnamese script, it solves the question of whether it's useful as half measure Vietnamese.
"Huawei is written and read huawei in Chinese" is not so useful, and it's okay, because it's obvious. "Vietnam is actually written and pronounced Viet Nam" is less okay, because it's not as obvious.
And, I think, frankly, it's justifiable to consider Vietnamese script(both Chinese based and Latin based) as scripts of their own rather than derivatives of something else, as there never were meaningful synergies in pretending otherwise. Vietnamese appears to have been always phonetic and nothing made sense unless you were a speaker. That's quite unlike how everyone knows what entrepreneurship is regardless of languages in use or whether diacritical marks are supported.
I dislike this general trend of rejecting the need for adaptation/transliteration and pretending that it's a moral failing or a rejection of diversity.
Like people who insist it's a good idea for a European website of a European business to accept any Unicode input for names, as if an employee who speaks Italian and English could be expected to know how to process a request for a customer named 田中 who claims their correspondence was mistakenly sent to 東京 instead of 京都.
There is generally too much linguistic diversity in the world to be able to expect people to know even the most basic facts about some other culture's language. There's nothing wrong with adapting your message to your audience, even if it loses a lot of nuance that they could theoretically get if they spent just a little bit of time on studying, say, Vietnamese writing.
And I want to emphasize that I'm saying this who is neither American nor English, and who is personally fascinated by language, and who has taken the time to study a little bit about quite a few languages. But I'm also someone who has understood that you can't expect people to be able to, say, pronounce your name correctly, or spell it correctly, and that there's nothing offensive about that.
I've stopped saying “hi mom” to my mother when I visit her. After all, my mother /knows/ that I love her. Hence, it's just so much more practical not to greet her every time, no? Surely no one can dispute this incorruptible logic.
Well, I don't think there's such a big risk of that. Falling into a pool is something most of us have probably done. Being pushed by a friend as a kid for example. The risk of drowning is probably pretty comparable to the risk from the radiation (negligible).