artzmeister

3 年前議論

Is your point entirely based on statues an emperors? None of what you said proves anything and you make baseless claims about them not caring about the natural world or philosophy. Bother to read actual Roman and Greek sources of the time and you will find yourself contradicted soon (Plutarch's Parallel Lives might be of use, then Cicero, etc). Seems clear to me that this opinion is not your own.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

I would expect this answer from a reddit thread or a youtube comment, but not from HN. One would think such a silly and ignorant view of history would not be found here, but alas, it was.

Yours seems to be one of those opinions that can be summed up as "lol Greeks good Romans steal" when there is no shortage of technology and civil law improvements the Romans brought to light. To mention a few: a senate, aqueducts, urban planning, sanitation, civil engineering much better than that of the Greeks (see domes and arches), many ideals that are still present in today's governments, farms of quasi-industrial level production, and so forth.

That the Greeks made more developments in Maths is true - it was more of a cultural thing anyway. Your post also completely ignores the fact that Greece flourished under Roman rule and managed to keep many of its freedoms, with the protection of a giant empire. Romans also distributed Greek texts to all corners of the known world, wherein learned people could be found.

Your comment seriously sounds like that of a child, not at all something of the level of HN.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

Anselm's argument did not stand the test of time. Plato's and Aquinas' did, though :)

artzmeister

3 年前議論

common lispers unite

artzmeister

3 年前議論

Regardless of the reason, calling out such behaviour is always good, more so since many millions use outlook still.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

One additional bit of recommendation for Firefox: the Tridacyl extension only works on it.

It's a vim motions extension that works much better than the ones on Chrome/Brave. You can use it on every page except the Firefox settings, etc.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

There is some element of truth to what they said, though. Not to take away from these other examples, but it is more than seeing new nuances, as in, it can become an entirely new paradigm of thinking. In English, things feel very limited and strict, and your expressiveness (so I find, at least) has an upper limit. With something like Latin, you can express more, with less, and in completely new ways that you would not think about at all in English.

There is more to this argument, but this is a good start, I think.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

Hehe could be :)

artzmeister

3 年前議論

I agree. When in school, I had very little interest for learning English and Spanish, or languages in general. Now, with newfound maturity and curiosity, I'd like to learn lots of them and about them.

There is also the issue of approach: learning the grammar of a foreign tongue before the rest is tedious and will bring kids very little. If, however, you learn my immersion and naturally, then you are sure to be hooked. That's how I learned English anyway, on my own.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

For sure! The book that gets the most amount of praise and the one I personally used and can highly recommend is `Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata Pars I: Familia Romana` or LLPSI, for short.

It is a "natural method" book, which means it teaches you the language using the language itself. This may seem hard and counter-intuitive, but it starts off really easily, with sentences that just about anyone could understand, and there are images to help you visualize things. The advantage of this method is that it teaches you an intuitive understanding of the language, as if you were learning by immersion. That is how humans generally learn languages: we don't think of grammar when we read or speak, we just do it.

That isn't to say you won't learn grammar, but rather, it means that grammar will be a complement, not your main focus. For grammar-related queries, Allen & Greenough's dictionary is a really good one. You can find it hosted online by the Dickinson College.

As a dictionary, there are the Latinitium ones, which are really good, and serve Latin to English as well as the contrary. For support and to see what other Latinistas are up to, there is the Latin & Ancient Greek discord server (sorry, I don't have the link on me right now), and from there you can join the LLPSI one.

What I did was to read a bit every day of either LLPSI I & II or some more advanced books when I was able to for about a year and a half. Now, I can read a lot by Cicero and some other authors. It's well worth it :)

Happy learning!

artzmeister

3 年前議論

There is benefit to all in learning Latin. I cannot explain it, it's one of those things you just have to experience.

Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all!

Nice article.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

You're right, and it makes sense. Let me propose another perspective then: would a well-meaning, good person not be liable to culpability if he or she worked on a feature that actively monitored its users for data to sell to advertisors, much more than if such a person was working with something like Flutter or Go, since the latter workers are doing net positive things?

I suppose I got a bit carried away originally, but the point is just that - can one truly be well-meaning if he works in such a feature as that of the first example?

Moreover, when it comes to the examples you cited, I agree that we all share fractional culpability, some more than others. But we do not have a choice in being humans, or in paying taxes to our governments. We do, however, have a choice when it comes to working for Google.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

You see a lot of people here in the comments, as well as the author in the article, talking about how "there are good and well-meaning people working at Google" and "it sucks that people unfortunately hate us =(". A genuine question: if one is a good, well intentioned human being, supposedly with principles, and ends up actively contributing to a dystopia or at least a much worse society, is that person excused because of "oh, the leadership fell off!" or "because I had good intentions"? At all? No, you'd be piled up with all the others that sold their morals and their society for money. People think of a dystopia as if it would come from an evil dictator, or a greedy corporate man, but the reality is that the dystopia will come with a charismatic smile and a promise of something better. You'd perhaps be right to criticize my calling of it a "dystopia" (for now), but my point stands.

artzmeister

3 年前議論

Dude, yes! I was reading this and thinking "if only there was one for Latin..."!

There is a big Latin & Ancient Greek server on Discord, and the people over there would love your project for sure. Lots of them being Italians, it would be even better. Since you're wondering about the help of experts, there would be no better place to go to than there.

I dream of a unified platform for the classics - translation, archive of books, and so on... equidem adjuvabo si quidam tamen capiat umquam consilium. Vale!

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