liamdgray

I'm trying to combat disruptive chatter in K-12 classrooms.

How about putting an electric terrarium heater mat under your keyboard? Might that help?

Indeed that is what I understood to be one of the most common origins of surnames in the Western world generally. Given that, it was the intentional sarcasm in surname choice among some Dutch families in occupied Netherlands, circa 1811, that I found novel, humorous, and interesting.

The Wikipedia entry on the person in question makes it clear that his parents were born in the Netherlands and already had the Monster surname there. But since a town there has that name, I'm happy to assume that the family took the name from the town, as is very common in the West, rather than by an intentionally sarcastic choice.

Thanks for correcting me. Apparently, I was too quick to accept the first translation proposed by https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=nl&text=monster&op=tr...

And thanks to your Latin lesson, now I know that monster in English means specimen too! (I prefer to understand words in terms of their roots.)

What does Monster mean in Dutch? It means the same, right?

Once, I worked with a guy whose surname was Den Beste. When I asked him about it, he told me that the Dutch didn't have surnames until the occupying French did a census that required each person to have a surname. He said that, to mock the occupiers, many of the Dutch chose their new surnames sarcastically, as did his ancestors, whose name means "the best." He told me "but that is nothing. Another Dutch name means something like 'little pieces of poop.'" This article lists a few more such: https://netherlandsbynumbers.com/2013/06/05/14-dutch-surname...

Not to discount your point. There's a whole world, indeed!

Why? Well, I'm considering using a LLM API to generate per-user custom code at runtime -- like a query builder that accepts plain English. The application involves filtering a data stream by the user's custom criteria.

I'm not yet committed to this because I know that many (most?) people cannot express their intentions in plain English concisely and precisely enough to be implemented as an algorithm. As my first formal instructor of programming taught me, a lot of programming just that: thinking through what one wants, with sufficient rigor. Support for such a feature could be a nightmare, making it more trouble than it is worth. However, I may offer it as an experiment. It might work well enough to, say, draft Google Sheets formulas that power users could tweak.

Thank you for explaining. But also: Many NPR stations air Radiolab, and that is where I, and probably GP, hear it.

If you like this, you may love the two season series /Patriot/ on Amazon Prime Video.

If you mean better, why not just say better? Using the word advanced implies that "progress" is monotonic, but you just gave an example of how it isn't. Some regressions may have seemed like advances at the time. We should probably just refer to "changes."

If I am a US citizen with negligible assets and a plan to move abroad and renounce my US citizenship, and I plan to found a software startup, how should I go about it to minimize the taxes I eventually pay to my soon to be former government, whose unjust practices I'm trying to stop funding?

I could potentially wait until my US citizenship is a thing of the past before I even build anything, let alone create a new legal entity. But ideally I would find a way to start this now.

Are you equating "advanced" with "fairer?" Reminds me of what someone called "chronological chauvinism."