barsoap

Most of the production line is already roboticised. Less with Mercedes than say VW because Mercedes sells more leather seats and walnut interiors but by and large it's mostly robots.

Apptronik says that Mercedes is exploring use cases like having Apollo inspect and deliver components to human production line workers.

...I fail to see how that isn't better solved with logistics robots on rails or wheels. I suspect it's Apptronik coming to Mercedes and saying "hey wanna try this we pay" and Mercedes says "why not" and Apptronik goes "wee, cheap publicity".

It’s frustrating in online communities when someone asks a technical question and is met with an interrogation instead of an answer, on the assumption that they don’t know what they want to do.

You'll find that technical questions from experienced people tend to include "To do X, I'm doing...". Basically for two reasons: They're already accustomed to zooming out and looking for other approaches before even asking a question, aren't lost in the weeds, therefore asking the question top-down is natural, secondly, because they can predict the inevitable "you don't actually want to do this" answers if the approach is even a little bit off the beaten path.

Consider the flipside: Helpful people wasting their and your time teaching you how to build a flux compensator when all you wanted to do was make some coffee. Just buy a machine off the shelf. Interrogating, alas, is warranted in the majority of cases that's why it became a thing in the first place because most people aren't trying to engineer a novel flux-compensated coffee machine.

*materiel.

Not useful against modern armoured vehicles but they'll still fuck up a motor block plenty. Or something like a transformer, radio equipment, any, well, materiel, as long as it's not hardened.

Also useful to one-shot Deathclaws. Shot to the face, either armour piercing or explosive don't remember, definitely the best way to deal with those buggers in FO:NV.

Yes, that’s what “Englishes” is supposed to mean, roughly speaking

Oh I'm not doubting the existence of the term "Englishes", it's just that I'm quite sure I only speak one of them. I can do CS technobabble and go for a more academic register, I can be colloquial, but overall it's still the same, broad, variety. I can also do the same in German and it's all Northern Standard German (Missingsch).

This is about a many-one vs. many-many relationship. Compare "Looking at other players' head" vs. "Looking at other players' hands": Both times we're talking about multiple heads and multiple hands, but in the first case you have a head per person, in the second you have multiple hands per person. If it was "other players' hand" you're probably talking about a game of cards. Though TBH this is quite awkward because idiomatically it's "looking at the head of other players", how dare you use an actual genitive.

Be the reason why you used the plural as it may, it's exactly these kinds of semantic details and edge cases where language evolves easily because you can say either "hand" or "hands" and be understood because people have the context that you're talking about poker or gloves, context which takes precedence over your choice of plural. Within your poker or knitting club, as the case may be, a standard will emerge and you have a little, baby, micro-variety of English. If it matches up with what other clubs are producing then the variety grows and stabilises.

Not at all linguists are convinced that Euro-English can be classed as a variety, true, but that's mostly because there's no proper definition of a language variety when used as a Lingua Franca, all the definitions linguists have assume native usage. Pretty much all of the discussion is about "do we want to define this such or not", not "are there things which can be identified as typically Euro-English". It's an identifiable thing, what linguists are arguing about is whether it's a variety.

And, again, I have to emphasise language proficiency of many speakers who use these identifiable forms: C-level speakers have access to poetic registers, language at its most "anarchy is order" stage. To class much of what they do as "mistake" is akin to classing Yoda speak as "broken English": Very much not it is, poetic register it uses, many a renowned writer using the construction you can witness. A non-native speaker preferring that construction is not a mistake, it's an idiomatic preference (Yoda doesn't always use OSV, btw).

and, interestingly enough, noting that some of them appear to be arising or at least acceptable in native English too

That's not terribly uncommon. Drastic example: Drop a native English speaker into Germany and within a couple of months they're going to catch themselves saying "handy" instead of "mobile" when speaking English... and then fight it tooth and nail. But "beamer" for "projector" will fly straight past their language integrity sensors, presumably due to lack of sexual implication. Humans are funny like that.

Immersion aside languages, especially related languages, can have common evolutionary directions. E.g. Low Saxon and English both lost the ge- prefix in past participles and simplified case structure the exact same way after splitting into different languages. Low Saxon lags behind when it comes to getting rid of noun classes but the evolutionary direction is definitely there^1^. A change affecting all English varieties could conceptually very well start in Euro-English as one of the erm "source" languages of Euro-English could be further ahead in a shared evolutionary direction, accelerating the process of the change happening in Euro-English, and then finally the other varieties saying "oh, that's neat, why didn't I think of that".

^1^ Low Saxon would use "Looking at the players their hands", btw, both for a many-one and many-many relationship. Decide for yourself how well that works in English.

Where is the community of speakers that finds all these “Euro English” forms acceptable?
With the people from your own country, you speak in your native language, and you use English for the rest of the world, regardless of whether the speaker on the other end is European, Asian, African, or anything else

In Europe. English is the Lingua Franca, if you have a Danish plumber talking to a French electrician on an Italian building site it's going to be in English. The examples though are mostly from Brussels, which also explains why there's so many administrative terms in there.

And, true, English is an international Lingua Franca. We have a lot more contact with other Europeans than with, say, Japanese, though, and also way more shared history with it.

except I doubt these groups have actually been studied systematically and compared within themselves and against other Europeans’ Englishes.

Have you tried to address that doubt by doing a literature review, there's studies going back to at least 2000. Also that's not how you use the plural of English, or do you mean that each of them speak multiple varieties? Going out on a limb, the Slavic languages are quite steadfast indeed when it comes to number agreement across cases. Are you speaking Slavo-English? If another linguistic group doesn't mind that kind of construction and adopts it, might that constitute Euro-English?

“Competences”, “planification”, “to hop over” (=to refrain from)? Sorry, that stuff is downright grotesque.

So, I have heard, is Indians using "doing the needful". Native English speakers using that phrase, mind you. People also get their underwear in a twist over "aks" which, as a variant, goes back to at least Old English. It may go back further but we don't have written evidence for Proto-West-Germanic so it's impossible to tell.

Except that this is language change from within the native community,

To call the one evolution and the other mistake you need to do better than "one group learned the language at an earlier age", as a linguist making that claim you'd have to demonstrate that both sets of changes follow fundamentally different laws, or one side follows laws, the other doesn't.

And, FWIW, I have lost count how often people assumed I'm a native English speaker. Even Brits managed to pin my accent to their east coast, which isn't terribly wrong but still on the wrong side of the North Sea. And I didn't even start to learn the language that early, only starting at age 10 or so nowadays kids are starting at 6.

and who can’t understand the calque

Oh. That's a nice one. Find me a European language where "flea market" doesn't translate properly. Also Euro English doesn't always use calques, e.g. Spitzenkandidat didn't get turned into point candidate but even if it did it'd be perfectly cromulent as it matches English "to take point". The translation "lead candidate", I think, comes from Anglophones. It's not terribly precise, semantically speaking. They're not leaders as-such, they're spear tips thrust by their party.

European languages have been in intense contact with each other for time immemorial there's plenty of common structure underneath the differences, even among those that aren't descendants of PIE. Flea market, for example, works in Hungarian and Finnish. As said: Find me a language where it isn't understood.

English elsewhere is losing "whom" because monolingual native speakers by and large seem to be incapable of understanding the difference even if you point out to them that they're using "he" vs. "him" all the time. If your native language is a romance one you might be in a similar boat, if it's Slavic or Germanic, most of which retain a lot more case structure than English, it's dead obvious and not using "whom" sounds plain wrong. The evolutionary inertia thus has a different direction, doesn't mean that it's not following proper evolutionary laws, that it's a mistake to bat an eye on the overuse of "who".

the examples in the article are too vaguely described, and I’m sure many European ESLs would find them grammatically unacceptable too

I wouldn't ever drop the s for he/she/it but the rest is perfectly cromulent. Remember these aren't high school mistakes they're stuff that C2 speakers use, practically native-level "mistakes", just as you'll see American generals writing reports using "less" instead of "fewer", or "good" instead of "well", or "who" instead of "whom" (shudder). "was" instead of "were". That's language evolution, plain and simple, things change as they always have and the language does different things in different places.

Useful fact: Both Ireland and Malta have English as official languages so you're guaranteed availability of those locales (unlike say en-DE, which exists, (at least according to ICU), while en-FR doesn't).

Fun fact: Both don't have it as sole official language, though, and each EU member only gets to nominate one of their official languages as an official language of the EU, which means that with Brexit English ceased to be an official EU language. The commission manoeuvred around that though and still kept it as working language. With the Brits out of the picture though they're not writing passive-aggressive memos regarding language use any more and the Irish certainly will not stoop down to that level, Euro-English can finally evolve freely and within ten years we'll start telling Anglophones that it's incorrect to say "there were five people at the party" (you attended), it's "we were five people at the party". Deal with it.

For now, ML/AI is too unreliable to be trusted in a deployed direct attack platform

And probably can't ever be trusted. That "hallucinations can't ever be ruled out" result is for language models but should probably apply to vision, too. In any case researchers made cars see things and AFAIU they didn't even have to attack the model they simply confused the radar. Militaries are probably way better at that than anything that's out in the open, they've been doing ECM for ages and of course never tell anyone how any of it works.

That doesn't mean that ML can't be used, though, you can have additional non-ML mission parameters such as the drone only acquiring targets over enemy territory. Or that the AI is merely the gunner, there's still a human commander.

The EU spends plenty of grant money on FLOSS. It's part of the general Horizon grants, there's a bug bounty programme (as replacement for the hackatons which didn't work as well as imagined), and last but not least the EU publishes lots of software as FLOSS.

You don't want to make that stuff contingent on big tech misbehaving. The fines go into the general EU budget but the EU doesn't get to keep it, membership fees are lowered in the next year by the same amount thus the windfall goes to member state's budgets.

You're right, brain fart. Still rare earths aren't rare, and lithium isn't non-toxic. Ballpark lead? Where's a toxicologist when you need them. The ores also tend to contain little lithium: Lead and tin are rarer but have very pure ores in rather dense deposits, in that sense mining lithium is nearly as annoying as mining rare earth metals: It's close to everywhere but still hard to get at.

"Rare earth metal", not "rare metal". Rare earth metals don't occur naturally in concentrations comparable to other metals: Noone ever found a lithium nugget, oxidised or not, you have to sift through cube metres of soil to get at a little bit of the material no matter where you get your soil from.

And lithium being light doesn't mean that you want to have it in your ground water. Do you want to medicate, or overdose, the whole population on the stuff.