Having grown up in and lived most of my life in the Chicago area, the rationality of the grid system is rather nice. If you know your “hunnerts”¹ you can find anything. Every 8 hunnerts is a mile except for the first three miles south of Madison where the streets are numbered.² A handful of suburbs use numbered streets for north-south streets (Cicero and Elmwood Park—maybe others but those are the ones I know). In the city, there was a plan to have north-south streets named with the first letter indicating the distance in miles from the Indiana border, but it only really starts with “K-town”⁴ between Pulaski and Cicero Avenues and while most streets follow the pattern, it’s not universal.
Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.
The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.
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1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.
2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.
3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.
4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.
What I’ve seen is things like I ask a question about a piece of code during a PR, the author changes that code and my question vanishes into the ether with no indication (unless it’s lost in the noise of email notifications) that the code was changed and my question is no longer relevant (and if there was, perhaps an answer, the answer is also lost).
Yes. This specific aspect of GitHub is the reason why many teams don't want you to modify commits, but instead, add more commits. Which then also leads to squash-merging branches.
Other systems, like Gerrit, handle this much better!
I don’t know why the headline was changed for the link, but the headline here is misleading as it reads (to me) as if screens are replacing books and not the other way around. Prepositions are slippery things.
One of the big complaints about Han-unification in Unicode is that simplified and traditional forms share the same code points so display of simplified vs traditional is up to the font to manage.
That's not really accurate. An overwhelming majority of the simplified characters have had their own code points in Unicode ever since 1.0. Some more details here: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/chinese/
Always able to do it? Yes. Even before OpenType alternates, the extended ligature support in TeX 3.x would have also allowed for this sort of thing.
Why has no one tried it before? Because (a) nobody thought of it and (2) OpenType alternates, while they’ve been around for a while, have not always been supported in the sorts of programs that use monospace fonts (code editors and terminals)
One of the biggest myths that people believe is that war is an economic stimulus. In fact, the US entry into World War II delayed the economic recovery from the Great Depression (and created conditions for a recession after the war). One of the reasons that Republicans were so opposed to entry into the war was because they (correctly) believed that it would delay the US economic recovery. Wars have never been correlated with economic growth.
I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”¹, using AI to do the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend the day watching television and playing video games and getting dumber by the minute.
I would go a step further, in fact, and when I’m writing something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a reminder to not do that,³ although I’m far from immune myself (looking at my comment history, it’s upsetting to see the same verbal tics repeated when I have something to say).
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1. If you don’t know a word well enough for it to come to mind when you’re looking for a word for something, you may not know it well enough to use it in your writing.²
2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that’s just out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but even that I try to avoid.
3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had published a creative writing book which was largely based on his former students’ transcriptions of his lectures. During the lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.
> As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”
I don't think cheating is the right word here (ironically), which I think you are kind of acknowledging by putting it in quotes.
Based on your footnote, it sounds like you are more concerned that using a thesaurus is more likely to end with a worse result, since you are likely to use the incorrect word, or to use the word incorrectly.
This sounds more like the opposite of cheating; cheating is about unfairly getting a better result, but this concern is more about accidentally getting a worse result.
If you make it worse, it's cheating and getting caught. Sometimes you might luck into a correct usage of a word, but like using a LLM, the nuance of that word choice is not part of your thinking, so it's a loss of information that you did to try to appear to be a better writer.
Does learning/using new words make you a worse writer?
The handful of times I've used a thesaurus is usually 'for aesthetics', in that the word/phrase I have in mind clashes with the flow of the text. I know what I want to say, and I know how I can say it, but I _also_ know that I can jostle the wording around so that the rhythm doesn't deteriorate.
The question is how you acquire the new words. If you learn words from reading, you’ll have a better sense of their nuance than if you learn them from a thesaurus. Thesaurus writing is often easily identifiable thanks to the writer not catching the full meaning of the word. Some authors are better than others for challenging one’s vocabulary, notably Anthony Burgess and Cormac McCarthy. While I enjoy David Foster Wallace, I feel like he had a tendency to abuse medical terminology in an attempt to challenge the reader with unfamiliar vocabulary.
If I were to contemplate using a word I found in a thesaurus in my writing (and it was something that I didn’t already know), I would make sure to (a) read the definition in a dictionary and probably do a search on Google books to see the word in action.
Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.
The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.
⸻
1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.
2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.
3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.
4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.
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