Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?
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For many years, Polish state railways (PKP Intercity) had this hilarious javascript code ("irez.js") on their online booking site. I'm 90% sure it was mentioned on this forum, otherwise just google the filename to get at least a yearly dose of WTF. Recently I noticed that the original script was taken down, and replaced with something new, with a slightly different flavor of badness. Representative line:
The method name translates to "WasWholeCompartmentBookedForADog".
And then, there's "handlingOfProblematicPriceReductions" (it seems the code doesn't hadle them yet)
The whole thing is available on https://bilet.intercity.pl/eic_js/zakup_biletu_plugin.js, enjoy.
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@sebastian-galczynski Welcome back, lurker!
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I think this illustrates their attitude towards customers just perfectly.
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dalej_modal_bilet_pies_caly_przedzial = true;
Dalej dalej modal Gadgeta!
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@sebastian-galczynski said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
The method name translates to "WasWholeCompartmentBookedForADog".
You say "translate," but I think the word you're looking for is "decrypt."
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@mzh it's just as cryptic as before.
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@sebastian-galczynski said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
The method name translates to "WasWholeCompartmentBookedForADog".It is WasWholeCompartmentNotBookedForADog, because why not convolute the logic with a negation.
This reminds me that in elementary school we had to read a book called "About a dog who traveled by rail", based on a real rail-travelling dog Lampo,
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@adynathos Is that a direct translation? Like, could it have meant "was none of the compartment booked for a dog"?
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@pie_flavor said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
direct translation
"was a whole compartment not selected for a dog?"
But it can be understood as "was a whole compartment selected for a dog?" too, so @sebastian-galczynski translation is also right.
In conclusion, I would not trust a "yes" or "no" answer here.
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@adynathos Yep, it's negated. Somewhat, but not quite. The function returns true only if there actually is a dog, but there's less people (not including the dog) than beds (it only executes when a sleeping car is being booked). If there's no dog, the return value is false:
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So remember, when booking a sleeping car with a dog, always leave one bed empty. Otherwise, the dog gets the whole compartment, and you're kicked out and sleep on the floor in the corridor.
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@sebastian-galczynski said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
So remember, when booking a sleeping car with a dog, always leave one bed empty. Otherwise, the dog gets the whole compartment, and you're kicked out and sleep on the floor in the corridor.
: As it should be.
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@adynathos said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@sebastian-galczynski said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
The method name translates to "WasWholeCompartmentBookedForADog".It is WasWholeCompartmentNotBookedForADog, because why not convolute the logic with a negation.
Not really. Polish language is like that, people often ask negative when they mean positive. "You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog, did you?" Answering "yes" is confirming that it is indeed booked.
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@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog, did you?
You're asking two questions here.
"You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog"
"did you [book the whole compartment for a dog]"In lojban, xu can be put before a statement to ask "is this statement true", and the response is either go'i, which means "[the preceding statement]" or na go'i, which means "[the logical negation of the preceding statement]".
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog, did you?
You're asking two questions here.
"You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog"
"did you [book the whole compartment for a dog]"In lojban, xu can be put before a statement to ask "is this statement true", and the response is either go'i, which means "[the preceding statement]" or na go'i, which means "[the logical negation of the preceding statement]".
In American,
you say@Polygeekery says 'No.'
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog, did you?
You're asking two questions here.
But one in Polish.
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@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog, did you?
You're asking two questions here.
But one in Polish.
xu do zasyve'u lo mulpau sabnu ku lo pa gerku .i xu na go'i
Now I have asked two questions in lojban as well.
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@ben_lubar it's -5 degrees right now, but it'll be +5 later today.
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Polish and Lojban in one thread, like a dream come true!
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@coldandtired There are some dreams I really don't want to come true: Being chased by dinosaurs; waking up in bed with my dead mother-in-law; Polish and Lojban in one thread. Just NO!
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@hardwaregeek przesadzasz.
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@coldandtired said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Polish and Lojban in one thread, like a dream come true!
One moment, adding items to nightly Stage simulation blacklist....
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@coldandtired said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
like a dream come true
Like that DEEP DREAM thing Google invented a while ago?
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@coldandtired said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
like a dream come true
Like that DEEP DREAM thing Google invented a while ago?
You already had a dog in the picture, that's practically cheating!
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@ben_lubar I don't know which is funnier: the fact that the dog's head has smaller dog heads on the front and back, the bear just casually hanging out on the wall, or the gremlin peeking out from my hair.
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@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Polish language is like that, people often ask negative when they mean positive. "You didn't book the whole compartment for a dog, did you?" Answering "yes" is confirming that it is indeed booked.
Doesn't that seem stupid to you?
At the risk of killing the joke by explaining it, I am demonstrating that the same can happen in English.
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Like that DEEP DREAM thing Google invented a while ago?
In that dream, every compartment is booked for a dog, because the compartment is made of dog.
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@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Gadgeta!
Wait, who fused with Vegeta this time?
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
xu do zasyve'u lo mulpau sabnu ku lo pa gerku .i xu na go'i
adjfksl; jkdf;fdj faj;fjkf jfafaj;
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@greybeard said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
xu do zasyve'u lo mulpau sabnu ku lo pa gerku .i xu na go'i
adjfksl; jkdf;fdj faj;fjkf jfafaj;
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@magus said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Gadgeta!
Wait, who fused with Vegeta this time?
https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/3/33745/953101-gado4.jpg
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@magus said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@gąska said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Gadgeta!
Wait, who fused with Vegeta this time?
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@greybeard said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
xu do zasyve'u lo mulpau sabnu ku lo pa gerku .i xu na go'i
adjfksl; jkdf;fdj faj;fjkf jfafaj;
Not even made-up languages can make sense of it.
But I can say that the text is 96 percent probable to be human-generated and not random.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
made-up languages
is there any other kind
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@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
made-up languages
is there any other kind
Real.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@ben_lubar said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
made-up languages
is there any other kind
Real.
lojban is a real language.
English is a made-up language.and vice versa.
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@ben_lubar English is probably not the best example, because English is made up of words borrowed from other languages.
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." — James Nicoll
However, English is significantly more "real" than Lojban:
- English is used as a primary language by about 360 million [babbel.com] to 400 million [Wikipedia] people, and more than a billion others as a secondary language.
- English has evolved naturally over a period of hundreds of years, from its origin as a Germanic dialect, influenced by contact with the Celtic people they overran and Norse invasions, heavily influenced by Latin through the Norman French conquest, further influenced by Latin and Greek through scientific borrowings for new discoveries and inventions, and the aforementioned mugging of many languages from around the world.
- The influence of other languages comes mostly from neighboring, linguistically related languages, and results in at least some degree of word recognition among those languages. I.e., a speaker of English can recognize some German, French, Latin and Greek words due to similarities with English words, and vice versa; knowing English is helpful for learning (some) German words and (I assume) vice versa.
In contrast:
- Lojban has an unknown but small number of speakers (the lojban mailing list has about 500 subscribers), none of whom speak it as their primary language.
- Lojban has existed for about 30 years; was created by a group of specific, identifiable individuals; and derived not from an attempt to communicate, as natural languages do, but from a psycho-linguistic experiment on whether language constructs influence a speaker's thought patterns.
- Lojban vocabulary is derived from algorithmic synthesis of words from unrelated and completely dissimilar languages (mostly English and Mandarin), and results in word forms that are, for the most part, (IMHO) completely unrecognizable to a speaker of any of its source languages. Knowing English (or Mandarin) AFAICT is not helpful to learning Lojban.
Given these facts (and suppositions and inferences), Lojban and English would seem to be not even in the same universe of "real-ness" and "made-up-ness."
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@hardwaregeek @ben_lubar The important distinction for languages is not "real" vs "made-up" (because that's ill-defined), but "natural" vs "synthetic"
Natural languages:
- Arise out of the way people speak over a long period of time
- Usually have high ambiguity
- Show traces of their ancestry throughout, but interpret it differently at each step.
- Usually progress from spoken -> written (with back-influence as well)
- Are native languages (at least when they're at their height)
- Are studied descriptively (how people actually use the language)
Synthetic languages
- Are created "out of whole cloth" for a specific purpose at a specific time
- Usually have much reduced ambiguity (cf programming languages)
- Have very reduced vocabularies and circumlocutions.
- Have little ancestry, or have discrete versions.
- Usually start as written, then add spoken forms.
- Are not native to anyone (or at least to any sizeable communities)
- Are proscriptive (have a "right" and a "wrong" way to use them).
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@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
but "natural" vs "synthetic"
I believe it's "constructed", but yes.
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@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Usually have high ambiguity
AIUI, the entire (or at least a major) point of logical languages like Lojban is to completely remove all ambiguity.
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Are studied descriptively (how people actually use the language)
...
Are proscriptive (have a "right" and a "wrong" way to use them).There are certainly natural languages that are proscriptive. The Académie française is perhaps the most obvious example of proscriptive language study and regulation, but some other languages have similar proscriptive bodies.
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@hardwaregeek said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Usually have high ambiguity
AIUI, the entire (or at least a major) point of logical languages like Lojban is to completely remove all ambiguity.
Which is silly and will limit/eliminate any use as an actual communication language. Because human thought is ambiguous. It also kills any chance for word-play, which as someone whose only form of humor is puns, is just sheer punishment.
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Are studied descriptively (how people actually use the language)
...
Are proscriptive (have a "right" and a "wrong" way to use them).There are certainly natural languages that are proscriptive. The Académie française is perhaps the most obvious example of proscriptive language study and regulation, but some other languages have similar proscriptive bodies.
But even then, French linguistics is descriptive. The Académie française can regulate all they want, but they're a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. Contrast that with C#--the language is what the designers say it is, and anyone who violates that can't complain if things break. In fact, conforming compilers must error/warn on certain violations.
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@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
Which is silly and will limit/eliminate any use as an actual communication language.
I don't think there was much danger of that happening, anyway.
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
It also kills any chance for word-play
I suspect there are words that are sufficiently similar as to allow for some word-play, though much more limited than other languages.
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
someone whose only form of humor is puns, is just sheer punishment
But we were discussing the bad things about Lojban, not the good.
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
The Académie française can regulate all they want, but
they're a lagging indicator, not a leading indicatorthe French people mostly ignore them.FTFY, as far as I can tell.
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@hardwaregeek And that last part is why it's a natural language. If you bite your thumb at a standards-compliant compiler, it'll barf and not compile. You can try, King Kanute-style, to hold back the tide of a natural language but it won't be successful.
Edit: and puns are the best thing ever.
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@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
puns are the best thing ever.
No.
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
King Kanute-style, to hold back the tide
Although he is typically used as an example of pride and arrogance, there is an alternative interpretation that seems to me to better fit his actions. Some see his attempt to hold back the tide as an act of humility; knowing he would fail, he was demonstrating his powerlessness in the face of God/nature.
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@hardwaregeek said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
puns are the best thing ever.
No.
Yes. <sticks fingers in ear, yelling "I can't hear you!">
@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
King Kanute-style, to hold back the tide
Although he is typically used as an example of pride and arrogance, there is an alternative interpretation that seems to me to better fit his actions. Some see his attempt to hold back the tide as an act of humility; knowing he would fail, he was demonstrating his powerlessness in the face of God/nature.
Yeah. I was going for the more conventional analogy there, but it's the same
meme.
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@benjamin-hall said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
<sticks fingers in ear, yelling "I can't hear you!">
It would probably work better if you stuck one finger in each ear.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
But I can say that the text is 96 percent probable to be human-generated and not random.
One should be able to infer the use of a QWERTY or similar keyboard.
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@hardwaregeek said in Is the whole compartment booked for a dog?:
The Académie française is perhaps the most obvious example of proscriptive language study and regulation
Also, as far as I am aware, the Académie only regulates vocabulary, not grammar. I don't think there is any normative French grammar (in France). Not that there aren't many grammar books, of course, but none of them is supposed to be normative in the way the Académie dictionary is suppose to be normative for individual words.
You could probably argue that the citations and other sentences used in the Académie dictionary are automatically examples of the normative grammar, but even if that is true, they would only be examples.