Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2016/grammar.html <comment><USER3> >> the feud between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett

That "feud" is as much a feud as the "controversy" over climate change. Daniel Everett is very obviously a complete and utter crank, who has made absolutely ridiculous claims about Piraha the language and Piraha the people (e.g. that they can't learn basic arithmetic skills, like 1 + 1), to which he claims to be the sole authority.

To give an account of his "feud" with Chomsky, Chomsky claims that recursion (in the sense of embedding sentences into sentences) is the defining characteristic of human language that sets it apart from other animal languages. Everett claims that the Piraha language doesn't display recursion and _therefore Chomsky 's claim is wrong_.

Stop for a moment and consider this. It's like claiming that, only Europeans have pale skin, but if we find one European population with brown skin, then it's not true that only Europeans have pale skin. What Everett is claiming is exactly that wrong.

Everett has only risen to prominence because he's a big old troll, and there are lots of people in cognitive science and linguistics who are very frustrated with the inability of both fields to make any progress on natural language, despite everyone's best efforts- and who have somehow singled out Chomsky as the culprit, because he had the audacity to hold on to a theory that hasn't really been comprehensively disputed yet.

Far from a feud, this is just a case of shoot-the-messenger. Shoot him with sour grapes that is.

<comment><USER4> The other side isn't exactly a bunch of careful scientists either [0].

Other people have visited the Pirahã and done experiments with them. It is true that they do not understand counting, for example [1][2], though I'm sure they could learn it if they had to.

Other linguists have also independently claimed that other languages lack recursive embedding, for example Riau Indonesian, so the claim about Pirahã is not isolated or crazy a priori.

The Chomskyan side of the argument has also been characterized by moving the goalposts and formal incoherence. See for example [3].

Basically, amidst a huge storm of verbiage and anger and inflated claims from both sides, all of which is about personalities and definitions and not at all about science, there are a few mildly interesting findings about Pirahã and language.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser) [1] [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5695/496.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5695/496.full) [2] [http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JA...](http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JAO0ZG.pdf) [3] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000114...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000114000412)

<comment><USER3> >> Other people have visited the Pirahã and done experiments with them. It is true that they do not understand counting, for example [1][2],

Those are not "other people". The first reference is a paper where Everett is one of the authors and the other is a paper from a collaborator of Everett: the author even studied the Piraha and their arithmetic skills while living with the Piraha along with the Everetts. Show me a paper on the Piraha language that has nothing to do with Everett and that duplicates Everett's findings.

>> The Chomskyan side of the argument has also been characterized by moving the goalposts and formal incoherence. See for example [3].

I don't think that reference means what you think it means. Actually I think it means exactly the opposite:

 _What I can say, what I have said, with most certainty is what recursion is supposed to stand for within the theory Chomsky has constructed—with remarkable consistency, I should add._

Which is what I've also heard before from critics of Chomsky in general (frex, I believe Alex Clark has said similar things, but I might be wrong). Chomsky himself has been remarkably consistent, to the point he sounds like a broken record, regarding what recursion in language means.

Whether "his side" (other linguists of his school) has been more or less consistent, I don't know but in any case I'm more interested in the fact that Daniel Everett seems to be a complete and utter sleazebag who is unashamedly taking advantage of a peoples who can't really speak for themselves (because he's standing in the way!) to further some obscure personal agenda.

>> Other linguists have also independently claimed that other languages lack recursive embedding, for example Riau Indonesian, so the claim about Pirahã is not isolated or crazy a priori.

I hadn't heard of Riau Indonesian, so I looked it up in wikipedia and I could not find anything about it lacking recursive structure. Instead it " _is considered by linguists to have one of the least complex grammars among the languages of the world,[citation needed] apart from creoles, possessing neither noun declensions, temporal distinctions, subject /object distinctions, nor singular/plural distinction._"

<comment><USER4> > I hadn't heard of Riau Indonesian

Googling "hierarchical syntax riau" seems to pull up the relevant stuff, if you're interested.

<comment><USER3> Googling that with quotation marks brings up only your own comment- for a moment there I thought you were making a joke about recursion.

I'll have a look at the stuff that comes up without quotes, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a huge fan of Mumford, but I think he's stretching a bit when he says that natural images have grammar like language has grammar. The production processes for the two phenomena are enormously different. A natural image is formed when a collection of objects is illuminated by incoming light, and the resulting image is projected onto the retina. The human brain is not involved at all in this process (leaving aside nitpicking about how humans may have shaped the environment). In contrast a natural language sentence is produced when an idea occurs inside the brain, and then various linguistic production processes transform the idea into a serial form, as text, speech, sign language, etc. The latter process involves constraints, capabilities, and eccentricities of the human brain at every stage.

Maybe you could argue that human brains _perceive_ images using grammar-like structures.

<comment><USER6> You're treating input/output as the same.

We receive speech coming from a source and parse it using a grammar. One could imagine it being a similar process for the perceiving images captured by the retina.

For output, when a human paints an image they are panting from an imaged visualized inside of their mental canvas, just like we realize thoughts produced within our minds as speech.

<comment><USER7> > when a human paints an image they are panting from an imaged visualized > inside of their mental canvas

Yes, but images produced by humans are a tiny fraction of images processed by the eye. But _every_ written or spoken sentence was ultimately created by a human brain.

That's why it seems like a big stretch to claim there is a 'universal grammar' involved in visual processing, if you believe that grammar is primarily a way for brains to encode information for communication purposes...

<comment><USER8> > Yes, but images produced by humans are a tiny fraction of images processed > by the eye.

Processed by the eye, yes, but that rises to 100% for images processed by the brain. The brain appropriates images by imparting its processing on the lower level visual cortex. Perception is an active process.

<comment><USER9> This seems... Wrong. Consider, kids process images and sounds long before they are capable of sentences.

<comment><USER8> Vision and language are processed by distinct brain areas, which mature at a different pace.

That doesn't rule out the possibility of grammar-like processing in visual areas.

<comment><USER9> Apologies for neglecting this over the weekend.

This is true. I did not mean to say that just because I think it is wrong, that it is. However, the claim seemed to be that the images experienced by the brain are fully synthesized by the brain. Which seemed off.

Again, just because it seems off to be does not mean it is wrong. Not my field, and whatnot. I can even see something to be said for visual processing going in stages such that the stage that you are cognizant of is effectively on images constructed by you. That seems to be a different claim, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why do linguists like Chomsky assume that grammar is a completely radical break from animal brain functioning? I think it is mainly because of a deeply rooted assumption in Western religion and much (but not all) of Western philosophy that human beings have free, moral, non-material souls that animals lack.

<comment><USER11> Chomsky's reasoning is that the arbitrary complexity (recursive structure) of human language implies some sort of low level computational engine to do the relevant computations. I don't have an opinion either way. We can see that LSTMs can emulate this kind of logic, but they also make mistakes. Also, I'm not sure that human reasoning is as logical as it might seem. E.g. I read somewhere (lost the reference) that the earliest languages may have lacked the ability to arbitrarily nest clauses. So maybe humans only emulate logical thinking.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi _We can see that LSTMs can emulate this kind of logic, but they also make mistakes._

Humans can also make mistakes when processing language. We're still better than LSTM's, but I'm not sure we can claim a qualitative difference.

Furthermore, even though we _can_ process sentences with very deep embedding like "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped", my intuition is that we are not using our normal language processing systems for that. When I read that sentence, I just fail to process it and then I invoke my logic systems to try to determine the structure and decode it, in a way that feels totally different from processing a normal sentence (I'm not understanding it in real time, in a natural way, but rather solving a small puzzle). So I personally don't find the Chomskyan arguments based on that kind of corner cases very convincing.

<comment><USER3> >> "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped"

That is indeed a contrived example of recursion, but recursion (in the sense of embedding) can be much simpler and easier to parse. For example:

"John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, is coming over for dinner".

This sort of embedding is what makes human language infinite in scope- you can keep embedding sub-sentences for ever, and so you can produce new utterances forever.

This ability to infinitely extend and recombine the meaning of utterances is what gives human language its expressive power, and what is absent from animal languages, so far as we know.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Examples like that are parsable because they are similar to what we would call, in programming, tail recursion (i.e., recursion that doesn't really need recursion). It's true that you can embed an infinite number of subsentences ("John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, who had an affair with the bartender, Jack, who hated his sister, Lisa, who was a fan of Lady Gaga, is coming over for dinner") but you only need two "stack frames", one to remember John and the other for the rest.

The middle part is basically equivalent to saying "Mary had an affair with the bartender, Jack. Jack hated his sister, Lisa. Lisa was a fan of Lady Gaga". My intuition is that it's parsed basically as separate sentences. Once you finish one of them you can just forget it, you only need to remember John (as there is more information about him in the end). Sentences where you need to remember more elements (i.e., you actually need unbounded recursion) become unparsable in real time as my previous example.

Of course, I don't have scientific evidence to back the things I'm saying, it's just intuition, but the same can be said of the Chomskyan theories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article doesn't seem to make a strong case that a hierarchical tree is the best model for language (or motor control, or image recognition). Just because you _can_ model something as a tree doesn't mean that's the most parsimonious or effective model. The relative lack of success thus far of symbolic parse tree based techniques in NLP compared to techniques grounded in other models should be a strong hint that trees are not the best map of the territory.

<comment><USER12> I do not work on NLP, but my understanding was that, for purely syntactic work, standard parse-tree-based techniques had been quite successful in NLP; and that it is only for semantic work that symbolic representations begin to show weaknesses. Since we often care about the meanings of words, this is a pretty strong limitation; still, it suggests that standard grammar-and-parse- tree approaches do capture something significant about how human languages work.

Is this inaccurate?

<comment><USER7> I don't work in NLP either, but from my understanding, the boundary between syntax and semantics is never as clean as one might imagine, and each language draws the boundary differently, so in general the utility of just looking at syntax can greatly vary.

Another issue is that many real life sentences have more than one possible parse, and we use context and semantics to disambiguate, e.g. how do you parse 'fruit flies like a banana'.

<comment><USER13> ...vs. "time flies like an arrow."

If you try to parse natural language with a strong distinction between syntax and semantics, you get a lot of ambiguous parses.

Most current successful NLP work uses statistical models. (Don't mention those to Chomsky.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this not almost tautologically true? Will not any collection of related information have the potential to be represented by some sort of hierarchical structure?

<comment><USER15> It can be represented as a hierarchical structure as long as the relationships are simple. In any of his examples if you added a number of extra relationships to complicate what is there, the hierarchical structure becomes a generic graph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While we like to think of Grammar as a perfect logical structure, in practice, "the brain" (or some higher level structure) processes things in a highly probabilistic fashion. This is how we are able to understand imperfect information (and the mention of the animal "grammar" is on point - a pet can learn and find their way around a house easily)

It's probably something more complex than a LTSM structure, but the point stands.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem with representing processes with grammars is that you can represent pretty much any process with a grammar, right up to the level of Turing machines and the Lambda calculus etc. The question is, always: how useful is it to do this in practice?

With language, we assume that there is some sort of underlying structure that can best be modelled as a grammar (well, some of us do). In simple terms, we assume that natural language already has a grammar so that we can hope to eventually reconstruct it somehow- either by hand, or by automated inference etc.

Unfortunately, in practice every effort to do that sort of thing undertaken since Chomsky's Syntactic Structure was published in 1957, has been met with failure and even theoretically the outlook is bleak (see Gold's result and a ton of bibliography on inductive inference before and after it).

In short, the problem is not that it's hard to convince ourselves that there are processes in nature that are best modelled using hierachical representations, like grammars. The problem is that even armed with those representations we've so far proven incapable, with all our science and technology, to accurately use such representations to fully model those processes.

Basically, our current situation regarding the modelling of complex hierarchical processes is like being given the key to heaven, but no map to the damned gates.

<comment><USER17> > Basically, our current situation regarding the modelling of complex > hierarchical processes is like being given the key to heaven, but no map to > the damned gates.

More accurately, you have been given a key that is _claimed_ to be the key to heaven, but no one has yet found a gate that the given key opens, yet you insist on asserting that it is the key to "the damned gates".

<comment><USER3> Ouch.

Look, no. Grammars look like "the key to the gates" because of the equivalence between grammars-language-automata etc. You can write up grammars for fully Turing-complete languages, or indeed context-free languages that allow you to declare Turing-complete automata.

You can create grammars that display infinite recursion with minimal effort:

      A --> ε
      A --> Aa
      a --> <whatever you please>

So it's not like someone (cough, Chomsky) woke up one nice day and thought "blimey, I'll tell the world that grammars are a powerful tool for modelling hierarchical processes". It's that they _are_.

We _have_ used grammars in practice to model complex hierarchical processes- except it's only those processes that we already know how to model, because we came up with them ourselves, like the aforementioned Turing-complete ones.

The problems begin when we try to fit a process we hardly understand to a grammar. That is not a limitation of the tool itself. It's a limitation of our ability to use it.

<comment><USER11> To me, and I think many other outsiders, putting a lot of emphasis on the equivalent of grammars-language-automata looks like mathematical naivety. I don't say this to be rude but because you (and Chomsky) claim to be able to interpret the implications of these mathematical results, but I don't think you are doing so correctly. Grammars look like a human (mathematical) invention and not some deep mathematical structure, and these results appear shallow. In the broader context, _lots_ of mechanisms are able to do Turing complete computation.

This doesn't just apply to grammars. There is a huge array of formalisms (e.g. logics, type systems) out there and most just look like the result of someone saying "what if I did this?".

<comment><USER3> >> I don't say this to be rude but because you (and Chomsky) claim to be able to interpret the implications of these mathematical results, but I don't think you are doing so correctly.

It's alright- if I'm being naive, I'm being naive.

But- what am I missing? You're saying we're doing it wrong- how? For me the intuition that infinite generative ability flows naturally from unbounded recursion, like an egg from a hen's bottom, is kind of obvious. Is it naive? I guess it's empirical, for me at least.

Also, btw, I was introduced to the idea of language equivalence through Hopcroft and Ullman, so from the point of view of computer science, where it's been very useful, in practical terms. I guess if you're coming from a mathematical or theoretical physics background it might sound a bit silly, but it's allowed us to make a lot of progress, for instance to create a few thousand different architectures and languages... but maybe I shouldn't be bringing _that_ up as progress...

Anyway, I don't know- how would you interpret the observation correctly? Where are we going wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yeah no,

The problem is that language is not simply a hierarchical representation of reality. Human language involves a number of uniqe specific qualities - <USER2> that I can't list all of them off the top of my head but just for example, _symbolic representation_.

Sure, an animal represents the world in its brain. But a lot of animals don't get that a symbol in the world can represent another symbol in the world. I know a common example is pointing - only the most representation-adept animals "get" that a person can use their finger to indicate something else.

And this, symbolic representation, is just one aspect of human language broadly.

</comment><comment><USER19> By recursion Chomsky means of the same component, which is potentially infinite. Hierachical and recursion is like the difference between regular expressions and context free grammars.

Of course, in practice, most people struggle with just a few levels of recursion. So I'm not sure I agree with Chomsky - but that's his theory.

BTW the grammar-related Piraha ideology of immediate experience is appealing, as theories and abstractions can obscure what's actually happening, and reminds me of DNA's ruler of the universe.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks a lot for posting this! It made me very happy. I hold the same opinion as him and for many years I've searched the literature looking for people with similar views!

</comment><comment><USER21> > _the feud between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett_

"Don't sleep, there are snakes" which recounts the experience of Everett among the Pirahas people is a fantastic book.

<comment><USER22> Pretty sure Chomsky won that 'fight' hands down.

<comment><USER21> Pretty sure he didn't. Also, Everett book isn't only about the controversy with Chomsky, it's about his own experience in the jungle and his coming of age. It's a great book even if you absolutely love Chomsky.

<comment><USER3> He did too. Everett tries to make the point that because Piraha doesn't use recursion (which we only know by his own account, and nobody else's, since nobody else knows Piraha as well as he and the Piraha do, also by his account) then Chomsky must be wrong.

How is Chomsky wrong if Piraha doesn't have recursion? According to Everett, always, Chomsky's position that recursion is the distinguishing characteristic of human language, must necessarily mean that _all_ human languages have recursion.

This is exactly like saying that, because it only snows in winter, it's not winter if it's not snowing.

For Chomsky to be right, it suffices for a single human language to display recursion. If even one human language displays recursion, then humans in general can learn any language that displays recursion- because we know well that human infants learn the language of the linguistic communities they're reared in (and therefore any human can learn any human language). For instance, even a Piraha baby raised in a Brazilian family would learn to speak Portuguese, and Portuguese has recursive embedding.

Everett of course claims that Piraha, somehow magically unlike any other human being in the world, are incapable of learning any other language than Piraha. He also claims that they were unable to learn simple arithmetic, beyond 1 + 1 = 2, despite his, um, best efforts.

In fact, all human languages except Piraha, and only by Everett's account, display recursion. Which makes Everett's claim about Piraha so hard to accept. The fact that he remains the only (self-professed) authority on Piraha makes it even harder to take him seriously.

Generally, it's not so much that Chomsky has won anything here. Everett is so clearly a total troll, and his books the printed equivalent of clickbait, that it's ridiculous to even claim there is anything like a debate to be had. It's like "debating" a climate denialist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hasn't Chomsky's idea been fairly comprehensively disproven? I seem to recall a survey of language features that concluded there were no clusters of grammatical constructions of the form his theory predicts.

<comment><USER24> No, not at all. I think people might be surprised at just how basic the structures that he uses his evidence are.

The Piraha study was a study with poor research practices (subsequent researches have found conflicting findings from Everett's), and always ignored one massive problem, as told by a joke:

"Professor Chomsky! There's a language in Brazil that doesn't seem to have recursion or large numerals!"

Chomsky doesn't turn around.

"Can they learn Portuguese?"

"... Yes."

That's a lot of what his theories are-- that for a set of features in human language including types of structure like recursion, every homos sapiens has the ability to use them in language.

<comment><USER21> Not a very good joke. Everett doesn't argue that the Pirahas are a different species; they're human so of course they can do what humans do!

What he's saying (and I think demonstrated pretty well) is that _not ALL languages are based on the same fundamental structures_ : to show this, one counterexample is enough.

<comment><USER22> I don't know anywhere that Chomsky (or anyone) claimed that ALL languages are based on the same fundamental structures, but Wikipedia talks about it, and has links to articles showing that _Everett 's own examples_ include recursion. See here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Recent_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Recent_controversy)

<comment><USER21> The paragraph on Wikipedia has links to a grand total of 3 articles, one of which by Everett himself, and the other two by the same trio of people. So it's disingenuous to write that Wikipedia "has links to _articles_ ".

Wikipedia points to a controversy started by 3 people, to which Everett responded, to which the same 3 people responded again.

It's difficult to go any further since said articles are behind a paywall.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Investing in an open mobile development platform - <AUTHOR> http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2010/02/investing-in-open-mobile-development.html

<comment><USER2> I flagged this article because I think the headline "MySQL-Monty about the importance of open in mobile & why Apple can not win" is over-editorializing. I think it's fair to personally draw that conclusion from the article, but that isn't the article's headline, nor is it what the author is really saying. The author is talking about the importance of open vs. closed platforms, and iPhone is _both_. Apple went out of their way to make what at the time was the very best mobile browser available.

To me, the post is a marketing ploy for the author's latest investment. if I was going to editorialize the headline, I might write "Why MySQL Monty is investing in the cross-platform and open source company MoSync."

<comment><USER3> His argumentation is weak. He says _it [is] of outmost importance that the platform that grows to be the dominant one for native applications is an open one_

And why do he think this so important? Is it because _On the Internet it's (somewhat) safe to say that the philosophy of open is winning_ or is it the rhetorical question _do we want this to be an open world or a closed one controlled by one company._

He never considers that a completely open platform will be very open to trojans and other malware. There are so many (Windows) users that happily download trojans from web sites, that it is no fun at all. A fully open platform might not be the best for phones to most users. The optimal system might be only be semi-open, where all apps are sandboxed and vetted by some party.

Just like cars: the government make restrictions on the cars (e.g. requires seat belts, ability to brake, strength when crashing) and can take cars off the street if the government deems them unsuitable. The government has solid institutions for this: Department of Transportation, NHTSA, etc.

Apple's vetting is far from perfect, but some kind of vetting is probably required to avoid ending in the situation we would have if cars were not vetted at all.

So, if we find Apple's vetting bad, then let's discuss how the vetting process can be improved instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

(please fix the headline).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No thanks, I don't need any more "open" products from Monty the same way MySQL was so open he cried wolf for months when Oracle purchased Sun.

Speaking of open-source, MoSync seems to support: Android (1.5, not 2.0), Moblin 2, Java ME, S60 and Windows Mobile. Out of these 3 are probably 100% open-source (Android, S60, Moblin) while the rest of the bunch have nowhere near the iPhone level of "lock-in". Where is the need for MoSync exactly ?

Not saying I might not use their SDK, I was thinking about <http://phonegap.com/> not long ago (which is also open-source), but I don't see why is he bragging about "open" so much, there is nothing revolutionary to talk about.

<comment><USER5> Yea. I think Monty has lost some (maybe a lot) of credibility.

<comment> X-Istence He has lost all of his credibility. When he kept crying about MySQL being sold to Oracle after he sold it to Sun it was not just annoying but it looked pathetic like he wanted to get his old company back now that it was going to what I gather he once considered a competitor.

Monty's ranting in general is starting to get annoying and I hope that in the near future he realises that nobody is listening to him and that maybe it is time to call it quits.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple released a macOS update no one can install - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/ea7qtv/help_update_10152_wont_install/ <comment><USER2> 10.15.2, the version in question, installed on my 2017 MBP last night with no problems.

Several of the reddit comments mention that freeing up disk space solved the problem.

Title seems like clickbait.

<comment><USER3> >Title seems like clickbait.

Yes; I just installed the beta for 10.15.3.</comment></comment>


Mac OS X Portal Performace - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/3726/quick-look-mac-os-x-portal-performance

<comment><USER2> Their screenshot comparison is inaccurate. It didn't look right to me, so I duplicated their screenshot on my own Mac at 2560x1600. My Mac Portal screenshot matches their PC screenshot in sharpness. For some reason it looks like the Mac version was not running at 2560x1600 (or even close) in their screenshot.

Here is the Mac screenshot I made: <http://bayimg.com/image/eamojaack.jpg>

Their Mac one: <http://images.anandtech.com/doci/3726/Portal2Mac.png>

Edit: thought_alarm noted that there was just an update that fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation". That's probably what was going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference that stuck out to me the most was the lighting. Look at the transparent pipe at the top of the room or the shadows and specular highlights coming from the office on the left. At least for now, it seems that the graphics engine may not quite have feature parity with the Direct3D version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't find this surprising. Windows gaming software (which includes games, drivers, libraries and OS) has been tweaked and optimized over the course of the last 15 years or so. Each new graphics driver release brings improvements.

The Mac world is at the beginning of this path. While it might take shorter (because people know what they're doing), it won't be instantaneous.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tried it on my Core 2 Duo mini today. It sucked. It complains that it doesn't recognize the Windows version of my graphic chipset, and then when I continue it goes full screen with a pixelated image of something and starts flashing. I had to command-Q it to get out.

And as far as the article goes, I don't consider it a valid test when you are running on non-Apple hardware.

<comment><AUTHOR> The test results may not be completely definitive, but I think they they bring up an interesting point: now that Apple is getting what it wants (large-scale adoption), how is it going to handle relations with third-parties in a rapidly moving industry such as gaming? As the article points out, the fastest Apple- sanctioned GPU you can buy is a GTX 285. At nearly a year and a half old, that card is _ancient_ from that industry's perspective. OpenGL 3.0? NVIDIA released their _4.0_ drivers for Windows / Linux a month ago. As much as we all may recognize that Microsoft has issues, their third party device / driver support is something that Apple could learn from.

<comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, Apple still doesn't care much about gaming on the Mac. I'm sure they could offer better graphics cards if they wanted to, it's just low on their list of priorities.

Hopefully Steam will get enough people to start using Macs for gaming that Apple feels pressure to start offering decent video card choices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The poor performance verses Windows doesn't surprise me. Consider, my Mac is about a year old; while it's a Pro model, it was the entry level model. Despite this, the game plays well (no human perceptable stutter) at full resolution and settings. Valve isn't really motivated to optimize this game due to its age and how the current Mac hardware pool surpasses what PCs were (even accounting for the Mac platform's GPU lag) when Portal was originally released.

The real proof in the pudding is when Valve starts to release Mac/PC dual releases like they've been hinting at. If they have the same problems Blizzard has getting decent performance for their hybrid releases, Apple _might_ finally notice that their lagging on GPU support is a problem and not something they can continue to dismiss/hand off as the developer's responsibility. (I know... dream on.)

<comment><USER6> I heard somebody say something to the effect that the iPhone was the phone Steve Jobs wanted (thus explaining how the company executed so perfectly on it).

Sadly, they went on to say it was obvious Jobs isn't a gamer.

I love my Macbook. I'm thrilled with Valve for their decision to make OS X a first-tier platform. I wish to no end Apple would take gaming more seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They released an update today that, among other things, fixes "screen fuzziness caused by color correction operation".

It's an interesting comparison, but considering that Steam/OS X is barely 2 days old it's a little early to start drawing conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER8> I just played my second game of Mac portal today, and before the game started, Steam downloaded an update.

It didn't fix any visible bugs for me, but it looks like it introduced a new one. Now when I look into the portals, all I see is black instead of the room on the other side. Yesterday when I played, I could see through portals fine.

It is just a glitch on my specific hardware, or did any other Portal Mac player get this too? I figure that if all of us are getting this bug, it'll probably be fixed soon. But if it's just me, I might be outta luck.

<comment><USER9> This isn't a bug, it's a graphics setting. You can control how many iterations go into drawing the contents of each portal. The lowest setting is 0, which doesn't draw any. I don't have it installed so I can't tell you exactly how to change it, but the option's in there somewhere.

<comment><USER10> I found the setting you're talking about, and if doesn't fix this bug. The portals still render as big black holes no matter the setting (well, if you set it to 0, the portals are obscured by blue/orange flame energy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The only bug I have is that I don't get any sound. I haven't really tried anything yet to fix it, but played for about 3 minutes. Anyone have any thoughts on what may be the issue though?

<comment><USER12> I had that too the first time I started the game. I quit and restarted it and the sound worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone else had a problem where the menus have no text. As in, I can't see the menus at all. I figured it might be a font problem but couldn't work out what it could be.

<comment><USER14> I have same issue. Latest patched Steam, 10.6.3. on 1,1 Mac Pro. Tried -autoconfig on launch in case of video issues. Runs fine on same system under BC, Win7. Menus are there and can find them after clicking around, dialog boxes also text-less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do we know that there aren't optimizations left to be done on the engine? This is two days after launch on a new backend. Surely there is room left to grow.</comment>


Judge Declares Some Pacer Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/04/01/judge-declares-some-pacer-fees-illegal-but-does-not-go-far-enough/ <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"Five years ago, in a post called "Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records," I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER ("Public Access to Court Electronic Records"). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging from 10 cents to $3 (or, in some cases, much more). _I chronicled the many excuses that the courts have provided for charging what amounts to $150 million in fees every year for something that should—by all reasonable accounts—not cost much to provide._ "

Related Paper:

"The Price of Ignorance: The Constitutional Cost of Fees for Access to Electronic Public Court Records"

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3026779](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3026779)

Excerpt:

"This paper examines the _public's interest_ in free electronic access to federal court records and considers the relative strength of legal and policy arguments to the contrary. Part I performs an accounting of the true costs of a free-access regime. Part II details the benefits of free electronic access to federal court records.

Part III argues that, in the tradition of Richmond Newspapers, _free access to electronic court records is a constitutionally necessary element of the structure of our modern Judiciary._ "</comment>


What Advice Would You Give to a CSS Beginner? - <AUTHOR> http://www.impressivewebs.com/advice-css-beginner/

<comment><USER2> Run</comment>


Senators Urge Google and Amazon to Reconsider Domain Fronting Ban [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wyden%20Rubio%20Letter%20to%20Amazon%20+%20Alphabet%20re%20Domain%20Fronting%20Ban.pdf <comment><USER2> This is interesting. What exactly is the use case that Senators Wyden and Rubio have in mind that their trying to help people with?</comment>


Ask HN: Should you pay to present at an event? - <AUTHOR>

Awhile ago I posted this thread about David Rose and Why NY Angels (his organization) Charges Entrepreneurs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155973
Since then I've been approached my many conferences (DEMO, TechCrunch Disrupt, NY Venture Summit, etc) who charge to present and their reasoning behind doing so.
I totally understand that it costs a lot of money to put on a conference (to reserve the space, logistics, food, etc) and the organizer should be compensated for their time. But how do you feel about paying to present at an event? Especially an event like DEMO which charges $18,500 just to present? <comment><USER2> Absolutely not! without presenters there is no draw. It is a two way street, you get exposure and they get valuable content. Most conferences make there money of admission fees as well as booth space for vendors, to then try to squeeze margins by charging the people that are providing the content and draw, is not, in my opinion, a solution to get the best content, but rather it will attract sales oriented speakers, in which, the audience will feel like they are being pitch to the entire time. When money is involved, the highest bidder gets the floor and they are not always going to provide the best content, because in some way they have to make up that out of pocket money. It creates an agenda beyond disseminating information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, very well said.</comment></comment>


New Research About Kids' Screen Time and Mental Health - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/5437607/smartphones-teens-mental-health/ <comment><USER2> "screen time" is so general though. What were they doing on the screens?

Sure, I know plenty of parents who stick their kids on YouTube with no monitoring, who end up watching Jake Paul for hours.

But I also know plenty of parents whose kids spend their screen time drawing in paint apps, playing with redstone creations in Minecraft, and generally doing stuff that I (as a parent of 2 who aren't quite that age yet) would LOVE my kids to be doing.

I'm sure the former is more common than the latter, but I wish articles like this weren't so "screen time is BAD" and would differentiate and encourage parents to instead push their kids towards educational-but-entertaining screentime.

If I hadn't spent my entire childhood on screens learning to code in BASIC and playing in Paint, I wouldn't have had my career, which has now let me support my family and give them a comfortable life (whereas I grew up in poverty).

<comment><USER3> Your comment is valid, but screens today are generally for a consumption model vs an interactive one you and I grew up with. I get the whole painting, drawing, etc - but mastery of those are still very much founded in the physical realm of many mediums.

The other thing this article fails to touch on is the damage that can be done to younger eyes. Screens can literally burn retinas. Apple, for example, made quiet reference to the improvements in their new iPhone displays that they are easier on eyes ([https://www.cultofmac.com/581646/iphone-xs-max-display-is- sc...](https://www.cultofmac.com/581646/iphone-xs-max-display-is- scientifically-healthier-for-your-eyes/)). I've also seen the MPE (maximum permissable exposure) metric reference more and more lately.

Finally, I'm sure you spent as much time in front of the screen writing code when you were growing up, just as I did. But it meant going to sit down in front of a desktop. You weren't laying with it in bed, on Facebook or sending Snaps 24/7\. The difference of access today is 180 from when I was using technology as a teenager. I don't think technology is bad when it has a purpose, but I would say the majority of youth are not using technology in a manner that's constructive to their future long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Parent here. The problem is the battle you are up against when trying to limit screen time. When it is the iPad vs. anything else constructive or worthwhile, the iPad is almost always going to win. The best minds of our generation have figured out how to addict us to screens and have succeeded. Moreover, as a parent, it is often a difficult and incessant struggle to monitor and control content (e.g., age inappropriate YouTube videos). And the large tech companies don't seem interested in solving these problems. Just the opposite.

<comment><USER5> It seems to me that a big part of the problem is parents' screen time.

Kids I see (disclaimer: mostly in the <5 years old range) desperately want to play with other people, but often are left bored while the adults / older kids around are stuck staring at their smartphones. Fertile ground to develop their own screen addictions.

Instead of monitoring and controlling kids' content, how about working with them on some physical projects, reading aloud, going for a hike, or even doing chores together?

<comment><USER6> I wonder how much time in average we got playing with our parents.

I was in primary schoold in the 80s and I remember seeing my father 10 min before going to bed, my mother was mostly dealing with stuff (administrative tasks, house keeping, shopping, cooking, checking homeworks) and outside of Scrabble I don't remember playing anything with her. We'd watch tv news or vapid tv drama together at best, rest of time I'd do whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't hurting anyone nor illegal.

Compared to that it seems to me parents nowadays are a lot more feeling guilty of not spending enough time with their kids, even as they spend a ton more in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> I'm about same age as you and I don't remember spending much if any time with my parents. The same goes for all the kids I knew. Most of us kids played with each other or toys we had around the house. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents but even there nobody played with me. We did go to parks often so there was joint activities but they were very hands off.

These days I am a father to a 1 year old and I've been spending a lot of time with him (work from home on my own schedule). My worry is that I will spend too much time with him as he grows up, and not leave enough space for him to develop on his own through exploration and individuality. Of course I haven't had to deal with screen time yet and I realize that will be a serious challenge. My goal is to get rid of any smart devices by the time he is curious about them. We don't own iPads or tablets in general and I don't plan on buying any. I have no doubts I can curtail my own phone browsing usage but say the same for my wife who is constantly on hers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> seems to me causation could easily be the opposite direction than what they are implying.

If kids who are depressed are more likely to spend more time on social media/the internet, limiting their "screen time" isn't going to make them less depressed.

<comment><USER9> You underestimate the power of boredom as a motivating factor to go do something!

<comment><USER6> Depending on the mental state of the kid, "doing something" might not be better in every case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It'd be helpful if kids actually got a greater chance to see things like where their food came from or the factories where the things they use get made. Our modern economy cuts off and hides much of the world and gives them a filtered, fake sense of reality. When you consider the kids are stuck in a fake reality, it seems obvious it should cause mental issues.

<comment><USER11> What farm and/or factories that you visited had the biggest influence on your life?

<comment><USER2> I've visited dozens of farms and factories, and they without-a-doubt inspired me to become a geek in the first place. I absolutely loved seeing how things worked as a kid, pulling things apart, and growing up with a technical dad who took us to farms and factory tours and stuff.

Seeing automation at factories is what got me into robotics and science fiction. Seeing the awesome machines at farms (massive tractors, trashers, large scale crop watering, etc) blew my mind, and got me into mechanics and vehicle tech. I now hack on cars as my primary hobby (both mechanically, and electronically).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other news, correlation is _still_ not causation.

<comment><USER13> "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is this worrying? Some kids have mental health problems. This doesn't show that more kids have mental health problems now.

<comment><USER15> Actually this article starts with that right? ie 7 hours is worse than 1 hour (implying more is worse).

>>> Young people who spend seven hours or more a day on screens are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety than those who use screens for an hour a day, finds a new study published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports.

Are you suggesting 1 hour is harmless and 7 hours is extremely rare (assuming that is already proven) and _hence_ nothing is new in this article?

<comment><USER14> No, I'm saying that there is no causation here. Kids who spend a lot of time in front of screens could be doing so because they have mental health issues or because of another reason entirely (e.g., lack of parenting) that also causes more mental health issues.

If the same number of kids have mental health issues as before there were so many screens, there is nothing to worry about. I'll start to worry if more kids have mental health problems, and then it makes sense to figure out what is causing that increase.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't this still be useful information as a diagnostic tool? If someone is on a screen for 7 hours a day, it's twice as likely they're depressed. That seems worth disseminating.

<comment><USER14> The original title was "There's Worrying New Research About Kids' Screen Time and Their Mental Health." My point is that the article doesn't have anything worrying in it. Having a new diagnostic tool isn't something to worry about. If anything, it's the opposite.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>