FOR THE past twenty years or so, social scientists have affirmed what parents think when they are at their most exasperated and dyspeptic: children make you miserable. In 2004 Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University and others discovered that parents thought that looking after their children was about as enjoyable as doing the housework. Two meta-studies (studies of studies) in 2012 found that, in most of the research, self-reported “life satisfaction” (a measure of happiness) was a bit lower when there was a child in the house.

The effect was not large. But there is something odd about these findings. In rich countries at least, people decide to have children. A few children are doubtless unplanned but only a few. If children make parents unhappy, why do they keep having them? The puzzle, says Letizia Mencarini of Bocconi University, is why isn’t fertility even lower in countries where people have a choice? Parents far outnumber the childless at every stage of adulthood. A new generation of research helps answer that question, and suggests that children are more likely to make parents happy than was once thought.

spaCy is a modern Python library for industrial-strength Natural Language Processing. In this free and interactive online course, you'll learn how to use spaCy to build advanced natural language understanding systems, using both rule-based and machine learning approaches.

Veilid allows anyone to build a distributed, private app. Veilid gives users the privacy to opt out of data collection and online tracking. Veilid is being built with user experience, privacy, and safety as our top priorities. It is open source and available to everyone to use and build upon.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

Pacstall uses the stable base of Ubuntu but allows you to use bleeding edge software with little to no compromises, so you don't have to worry about security patches or new features.

Recently, I became curious about the origin of the common Japanese word “ありがとう” (arigatou), which is used in modern Japanese to express gratitude or simply say “Thank you”. I had heard from several people that it originally meant something like “It is hard for me to exist”, and for some time I accepted this explanation. After all, one way to write this word is “有り難う”, which contains a form of “aru” (to exist), and a form of “gatai” which can be used to mean the previous verb is difficult to do.

Democratic politicians everywhere should pay heed. When they fail to grapple with crime lawfully, with properly funded police and clean, efficient courts, they invite demagogues to do so lawlessly. As for Salvadoreans, if they re-elect Mr Bukele in February, as seems likely, he will have five more years to tear down their country’s democratic guardrails. And if one day they tire of him, they may struggle to get rid of him.

Det svenska uttrycket, liksom dess tyska förebild ”einem die Stange halten” har enligt Svenska Akademiens ordbok två olika ursprung, med från början lite olika betydelse. I det första fallet avser stången en lans eller motsvarande, och uttrycket bygger på att första ledet i en äldre stridsordning hade lansar som vapen som de höll mot fienden — och så länge de höll fienden stången kunde fienden inte ta sig framåt. Det andra fallet bygger på att skiljedomaren vid en medeltida tvekamp skilde de stridande åt med en stång när den ena parten gav upp och förklarade sig övervunnen. En numera utdöd variant av det uttrycket var ”hålla stången rätt emellan (två personer)”, med betydelsen ’medla på rätt sätt’.

LLM provides a Python API for executing prompts, in addition to the command-line interface.

[...]

To run a prompt against the gpt-3.5-turbo model, run this:

import llm

model = llm.get_model("gpt-3.5-turbo")
model.key = 'YOUR_API_KEY_HERE'
response = model.prompt("Five surprising names for a pet pelican")
print(response.text())

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Yuko Tamura wrote an insightful article about the many ways of abbreviating Japanese words and phrases. Today, I would like to follow up on this with a little overview of things abbreviated in the domain of grammar, where Japanese appears to be just as rigorous with cutting things out as it is with lexical expressions.