Boy that unc/uncer looks tantalisingly close to modern German uns/unser. Wiktionary seems to have it descending from a different PIE root, n̥s vs n̥h -- I'm not at all familiar with PIE though.
n̥ is just the "not" prefix. The "ero" is the real root. The prefix applies to the root first, and then the other pieces have their meanings, usually. (Its a reconstructed language. There are both exceptions and things we don't know.)
"n̥-s-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(invert mine). Or roughly close to "we".
"n̥-h-ero-" is sort of < "not" next-is-inclusive-plural "mine" >.
So, plural-(group (invert mine)). Or roughly close to "us".
But both are pretty close to the same meaning. High German maintained a lot of PIE, and is very close in a lot of ways. Though... Welsh is closer.
Curiously, Old English unc is actually not related to German uns, at least, not after the Germanic language family had already formed. Old English at some point underwent a sound change[1] where the -n- sound disappeared before fricatives (sounds like s, f, v, z, sh, etc...). So "us" comes from an older common form "uns", which German inherited basically unchanged. This sound change also explains other correspondences between English and German where the n is missing, like mouth-Mund, tooth-Zahn, other-ander, goose-Gans or five-fünf.
As a born German, now more native English speaker (left at 8), I agree. But, unless I'm very wrong, uns/unser in modern German is not restricted to 2 people either - it can mean 2 or more, as in "unsere Gemeinde" (our church, referring to something shared by hundreds of people)?
That was my first thought too! So many things in old-english are very very close to modern German, so it's sometimes surprising to see these false-friends.
Based on the page you linked, they pretty clearly are false friends: Old English unc is unrelated to modern German uns, it is related instead to Old Germanic unk (while modern German uns is just Old Germanic uns).
A friend suggested a bottom-hinged door like that on a garbage chute, though well sealed, and as wide as the fridge, so the sides of the door don't get in the way of storing long objects in the fridge.
They seem to have mixed up horizontal and vertical, and if they did, then my reading is that they're saying the cost of the extra floor space (and the loss of the "shelf" space on top of the fridge) when using a chest fridge makes the economics unfavourable for people in dense urban areas, even with the energy savings.
At least, I'm hoping that's what they meant. If they really meant horizontal and vertical in the way they used it then I've got no idea either.
I didn't get it until reading your comment, but I think perhaps they meant 'vertical' as in 'it opens vertically' (chest freezer)—i.e. they didn't mix them up exactly, just used them differently than we expected.
Yeah, I understand your first sentence, but the last part of their comment was
"Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge."
Don't they mean a horizontal fridge is a chest fridge? Which would make it sound like they want their whole comment to be in support of a chest fridge? Which is why none of it makes any sense to me.
That's what makes me think they've simply mixed up horizontal and vertical, because you can't (conveniently) store things on top of a chest fridge, but you can store things on top of a vertical fridge. Basically I think they've got a coherent point if you swap vertical and horizontal throughout their whole comment.
Gorgeous photos. One point of feedback: I went to your shop to view prints, and while it was nice to see them "in situ", I couldn't see the actual images because of how they small they were in frame!
I really enjoyed your post and was surprised to see it not posted here. I guess now I can leave the comment I wasn't able to leave on lobste.rs :)
The format made for good lunchtime reading -- the care you put into making it easily readable shows. Are the illustrations actually hand-drawn? Looking forward to the next part(s) that you hinted at!
The illustrations are hand-drawn on my tablet, and then converted to SVG and touched up via an incredibly laborious and probably fairly unnecessary process.
Not the author, but when I want to make diagrams like this, I usually use tldraw! It has a nice nearly-hand-drawn feel that's casual and approachable for these kinds of sketches.
My current company uses Angular, and uses it reasonably well. Prior to working there, I'd never used Angular, so I feel well-equipped to comment on this.
We've also recently absorbed a vanilla(-ish) JS codebase largely developed by one dev which provides a point of comparison.
Angular has plenty of boilerplate and idiosyncrasy, but it being opinionated and "pattern-y" has advantages when you want devs who infrequently touch it to be able to jump in and make changes with some level of consistency.
Additionally -- and this is anecdotal, but I suspect it's a common part of working with a plain JS codebase -- tracking the flow of data through the Angular application is usually soooo much more straightforward, even when it involves navigating through many layers and files. The Angular codebase only has N types of things, and they tend to relate to each other in the same ways, and they're often quite explicit (such as explicitly defined component element names in HTML templates). In contrast the JS app has whatever it has built up with very few constraints keeping it consistent. Obviously that could be improved with discipline and structure, but reducing that requirement is one of the things a framework gets you.
I can't comment too much on React as my one experience working in a proper React codebase was in a team who were largely as clueless as me :)
My experience of working with Angular (admittedly several years ago when Angular versions 2-4 were current) was that it was pretty close to the React model (which was a huge improvement over the old angular.js), but also slightly worse than it in pretty much every area.
Most of the problems were the framework being too opinionated and not getting out of your way, whereas it is generally easy to "break out" of the abstraction when needed with React.
Driving in Melbourne -- I won't generalise to the wider Australia -- is often much the same.
Comparing to the experience of being a passenger on a bike in Saigon, the level of cooperation there is way higher, possibly due to a sort of necessity.
I had this feeling while observing traffic there, that, while the latency and throughput of the roads during high traffic times are still kinda awful, at least for bikes there's a slow continuous progress that simply wouldn't exist without cooperation.
Funnily enough, my experience driving in Los Angeles was distinctly not terrible. Traffic was usually good enough to drive in, though there was very little regard for the speed limit on the freeways! I suspect I may have just been lucky to miss the worst of the traffic.
reply