u/Conscious-Ball8373

The trend in the languages I'm aware of is for them to become grammatically simpler over time. They tend to lose features like verb conjugations (often replaced by auxiliary verbs and participles), noun and adjective declensions (often replaced by word order restrictions), grammatical gender and so on. To be fair, the languages I'm aware of tend to be pretty Euro-centric (I'm a native English speaker and have studied Spanish, Attic and Koine Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and Mandarin at various times - haven't gained particular proficiency in many of them, only really Koine Greek and Italian, but have learned enough to get a decent idea of the grammar of the others). But the tendency in all of them seems to be to lose complex grammatical features. From what I can tell, even earlier languages tended to be even more complex, with up to eight grammatical cases, dual number as well as singular/plural, and suffixes to indicate voice and mode as well as tense conjugations. Even Mandarin has gone through a similar simplification, albeit of a different kind, with the loss of affixes and the development of tonality and more restrictive word order, as well as the very deliberate simplification of the written characters in the 20th century. So I'm working from the premise that languages become grammatically simpler over time.

Given that, do we have any idea what motivated the development of grammatical complexity in the first place? Particularly since those languages developed in societies with fairly low written literacy and very high numbers of subsistence farmers.

Can someone recommend a text that describes some detail about the amateur construction of fin keels carrying ballast bulbs in strip-planked composite boats? I have Larsson and Eliasson, Dave Greer and the Gougeon Brothers books on hand but on a quick look through none of them describe a method of constructing fin keels. They have considerable detail on load calculations and keel bolt requirements but no details on the keel itself.

Seriously, been on holiday in Scotland and more than half the people we met on campsites were Italian. It's too hot in Italy in August, apparently.

I'm led in a field just south of Bath, looking at the sky. I can't remember the last time I was somewhere I could see the Milky Way, but I can pick traces of it tonight. Wow.

Application complete (biometric appointment) on 14 May. I didn't use a priority service.

I received an email from TLScontact who collected the biometrics but nothing from UKVI to confirm the application was complete.

Application was at the end of the spouse - 10 year route.

The application process did not ask for proof that we are still together but I received an email on July 29 asking for the usual set of letters addressed to both of us, which we provided on 6 August. ICheck your email people. This got filtered into somewhere in my email where I didn't see it - I just happened to do an email search for "UKVI" on the 2nd of August and this came up. It said the information had to be provided within ten working days, so if I'd missed it for another week and a half, my application would have been denied!

LR was granted today, 11 August.

I've made just about every possible mis-step through the UK immigration system, but here we are, eighteen years after I first arrived, with ILR. I'm off to buy some champagne British sparkling wine.

https://preview.redd.it/gslqdan7sfbh1.png?width=1122&format=png&auto=webp&s=3552a2f3ecd2527ecd96d9568c8f32d032fd9484

What the title says. I want this platform to fly towards Nauvis until it has a full hold of carbon, then return to Volcanus. But the interrupt to return never fires, even though "Allow interrupting other interrupts" is set.

TBH I've never used interrupts before (I use LTN just by habbit with trains and haven't ever needed interrupts with platforms before) so not sure if I'm expecting too much here.

I have a platform which just orbits Volcanus, collecting carbon and sulphur and sending it down to the surface. It's fairly wide (about 270 tiles) because its main point is to gather as much carbon as possible.

To try to improve how much carbon it gathers, I decided to put a single thruster on it and have it slowly shunt between Nauvis and Volcanus. But this has not gone well. If the thruster is full of fuel, it will set off at about 8km/s towards Nauvis. But quickly the fuel level drops and it stops and starts drifting back to Volcanus. Its equilibrium point seems to be where it has about 180 fuel in the thruster. At this point the thruster will run continuously, but the platform won't move away from Volcanus. It just sits there, burning fuel. It never drops anything to the planet, because it's technically still trying to leave, and it will never leave because the thruster will never build up enough fuel to move it.

I was kind of surprised by this. I knew that platforms went slower when the thrusters had less fuel and I knew that platforms need more thrust when they are wider. But I didn't realise that it was possible for a platform to move backwards while the thruster is firing.

I'm not sure I have an actual question beyond "has anyone else experienced this?" Obviously it's just the way the game works.

Drainage works on Crossways Lane has four-way temporary lights. By 8am traffic was backed the whole way up the hill from Dunkerton and all the way from the P&R round about in the other direction.

Scheduled to be there for three weeks, apparently. It's probably worth going through Cammerton and Tunley.

I have a ground water supply that comes out below 5 degrees and can supply 4-5 m^3 per hour for several days without significantly changing the water level. It's not free as such - costs about 5p per m^3 to pump out - but it's not exactly expensive, either. How can I best use it to cool my house?

Ideas floated so far:

Hook it up to an impulse sprinkler and point it at the side of the house with the sun on it.

Go to a breaking yard and get a car radiator + electric radiator fan. Pump cold water into a tank. Circulate this through the radiator with a small electric pump. Duct the resulting cold air into the house.

Any other ideas out there?

I applied for ILR on the ten-year route at the start of April. Biometrics appointment was mid-May. I got an email from TLScontact saying "Thank you for submitting your biometrics, we will now forward your information to UKVI" but haven't had the confirmation email from UKVI to say they have my application and are processing it. Should I worry?

On a tangential note, I've just realised that I can't go on the family holiday to Italy we were planning for August unless this comes through pretty sharpish... Feeling really stupid about now.

I'm trying to install 26.04 server from a live server ISO booted by PXE boot but just can't make it work. The machine is booting UEFI. I've got it to load grub and display the menu. Here's the menu entry:

menuentry "Install Ubuntu Server 26.04" {
        set gfxpayload=keep
        linux   /linux boot=casper iso-url=http://192.168.1.1/ubuntu-26.04-live-server-amd64.iso url=http://192.168.1.1/ubuntu-26.04-live-server-amd64.iso layerfs-path=minimal.standard.live.squashfs ip=dhcp fsck.mode=skip interface=enp3s0 ---
        initrd  /initrd
}

There's a fair bit of rubbish in there that LLMs have suggested to fix it with no luck.

It downloads the ISO but then says:

(initramfs) ubuntu-26.04-live-se 99% |******************** | 2747M 0:00:00 ETA ubuntu-26.04-live-se 100% |********************| 2783M 0:00:00 ETA "ubuntu-26.04-live-server-amd64.iso" saved done. Unable to find a live file system on the network  

Am I doing anything obviously wrong? I used to have this entry which just worked:

menuentry "Install Ubuntu Server 24.04.3" {
        set gfxpayload=keep
        linux   linux iso-url=http://192.168.1.1/ubuntu-24.04.3-live-server-amd64.iso ip=dhcp ---
        initrd  initrd
}

Do I need a new kernel / initrd to boot the 26.04 ISO maybe?

L'ho studiato da solo da circa tre anni ma ho bisogno di esercitarmi a parlare e ascoltare.

After upgrading to 26.04, it seems that Vim has learned some mouse interaction. Click+drag is now equivalent to visual mode, it seems. But visual mode doesn't automatically copy the selected text to the clipboard.

In theory vim can copy to the * register, which is the middle-button clipboard. That's not ideal, because I've got nearly three decades of muscle memory invested in select-to-copy, but it'd be something. But the version of vim that's installed by default is compiled without clipboard support. So it seems there is now no way at all to copy text from vim to the clipboard.

Ideally, I could just go back to the old behaviour and not bother retraining my muscle memory. Is there a way to do it? A quick google suggested `mouse=nicr` in vimrc, but it seems that disables the mouse entirely, you can't even select text like you used to be able to.

And who on earth thought that shipping vim in a default state where copying to the clipboard is not possible was a good idea?