Knowing quite a bit about the world of Costa Rican grocery stores -- many of which started using "Hiper-" (spanish for hyper-) as a prefix in their names a few decades ago, to one-up markets merely named "Super-" [1] -- I'm actually quite suprised they didn't just rename themselves "Hiper Mario" and save the legal fees. But bravo to them for winning against all odds.
Knowing quite a bit about the world of Costa Rican grocery stores -- many of which started using "Hiper-" (spanish for hyper-) as a prefix in their names a few decades ago, to one-up markets merely named "Super-" [1] -- I'm actually quite suprised they didn't just rename themselves "Hiper Mario" and save the legal fees. But bravo to them for winning against all odds.
We have the same in France. The first big "big surface" stores were named supermarché, then we got hypermarché and the funniest is that now we have superette, a small surface store, branded like the super/hyper but within the city center.
The "ette" French suffix is to reduce the main word.
> A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle something or someone.
Yeah, it's funny, a word consisting both of an augmentative (the opposite of diminutive) and a diminutive.
Same for me. My brain broke down somewhat, but luckily I am retired. I often ask AI like "What's the word for a smaller variant of something?", super helpful.
Were you thinking of „Verkleinerungsform“? Do people still use those Germanized terms? It feels a little old-fashioned to me, like saying „besitzanzeigendes Fürwort“ instead of Possessivpronomen.
I had the word "Verniedlichung" in mind, of course this is also not the right term, but as I been living outside of France for the past 25 years, switching daily between French, German and English, I am sometimes "stuck" and can't get the right word out. And this in whatever language I am thinking at the moment.
I now accept that I am losing my French while not being really fluent in any other language.
In a way? I always found it more sensible to use German words like "Namenwort" instead of "Nomen" to express German grammar, instead of using latin terms. After all Latin is a language that comes from a completely different language family to start with and is not used at all in Germany except when wanting to pretend you're fancy (law, medicine, grammar).
That's meaningful though, at least in my experiences in France circa twenty years ago, a supermarché would be a supermarket like here in the UK, and a hypermarché would have all kinds of other stuff like clothes, back to school stationery, seasonal gear/toys, etc. - as well as other mini shops around the edge, cutting keys, McDo, etc.
I think supermarché is more a type of shop that offers products that are traditionally from different shop (you've got a bakery, green-grocer, butcher, cheese-monger, electronics, etc... under one shop), while the hypermarché are really defined the "big surface" you mentioned.
So it make sense to have a superette in the corner of the street that offer everyday goods while an hypermarché have clothing, DIY materials, big appliances, etc. on sale..
Sorry I explained myself poorly: I wasn't saying that a superette wasn't a supermarket, I was pointing out that OP curious remark about superette being a "small big shop" wasn't as contradictory as it seems.
Also, while we're digging Wikipedia: the French one points to the national statistic institute that have a definition of an hypermarket as "non specialized store that's over 2 500 m^2 in surface and make more than a third of their revenue from food".
"Hiper" refers to something bigger than "Super", and it's common to respect that convention. Wikipedia defines both [1][2]. From this photo[3] the size of "Super Mario" follows that convention. It is obviously true that there are more options for names but congratulations to "Don Mario".
i think hypermarkets achieve their bigness not by being bigger supermarkets, but by selling everything a supermarket sells, and then also selling everything a department store sells.
Actually, "hiper-something" trend started with Hipermas, created by a bigger local supermarket chain (Corporación Supermercados Unidos, which owned others like: Más x Menos [More for less] and Pali). They were bought by and renamed to Walmart. Sharing the "hiper" prefix I only know HiperDiego, which like a Walmart big.
Here most are "super-" if they are big enough. if they are smaller "mini super-". All the categories before are self service.
If they are really tiny (a window) and not self service then they are called "pulpería".
This gets to the old saw, "knowing what question to ask is the most important thing". To the extent that LLMs can answer questions better than formulate which ones to ask, they may be inherently limited. We will see.
But it does seem they are good (to the extent that they are good at anything) at identifying the questions first if you ask them. It does mean you need an ok enough meta-question to start the chain of the reasoning, but that is the key insight of the recent wave of "reasoning models." First ask the LLM to reformulate the problem and structure an approach, or multiple approaches on how to address it, then have a second pass do just that.
Google search with less steps? Still a huge advancement, of course.
Wonder how much benefit a meta lang for describing these problems correctly for the LLMs to process into code, an even-higher level language perhaps we could call it English?
They linked to the same video, but to a specific timestamp within it - by adding '?t=325' to the URL, which tells Youtube to play the video from 5m25s rather than from the beginning.
It's still a theory. We definitely don't know the underlying mechanism(s) of action, and it's likely there's more hidden complexity there.
But rapid weight gain after weight loss (until you arrive somewhere near your old weight) is at least a well observed experimental effect. About 80% of people who lose weight, through any means, will revert back to their old weight.
i lost about 30 lbs a couple of years ago, white knuckling my way through starving myself on a medically supervised diet. within two months of going off the diet, i was back at the exact weight i started at, to the pound, and haven’t varied >2lbs since, no matter what i eat. consider me convinced on the setpoint theory.
There are lots of physiological parameters with set-points, such as body temperature. The problem for weight gain/loss is that instead of one set-point for body weight itself, you have maybe 5-10 set and operating points that are indirectly related to body weight, but not direct measurements of it. They don't all have to be "working right" to keep you healthy, but if too many become disordered at once, you're gonna have a problem.
Set-point theory is pretty much settled medical fact. The mechanism involves leptin, and you can easily see processes that defend bodyweight change in both directions. Though it will more aggressively defend weight loss than weight gain.
In addition prey animals will defend against weight gain more aggressively than non-prey animals. Which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If a lion gets fat he doesn't have nearly as much to worry about than if a gazelle gets fat.
> Also it's hard to be against gambling if your state runs a lotto, which is gambling.
How so? Different kinds of gambling have different characteristics that could make them more or less prone to problematic behavior.
With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
State lotteries also run games like Keno, which run every 5-15 minutes. They have also started to run apps which have instant-play games, which are roughly equivalent to turning your phone into a slot machine. Keno and instant-play games still feel like chance, though, and the apps often have warnings and usage limits that the sports betting sites don't have.
>With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted
Addictions don't reason. Win $10 and some people are hooked for life.
> or harder for addiction to become really problematic.
Example: a school teacher spending $200 a week on lotto tickets, not life devastating, but do we really want this in our society? This happens a lot.
Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!" It's essentially a hope tax for the lower and middle class. I can think of better ways of collecting taxes.
>> With the lottery, it's so boring and there's such a time lag between action and response that intuitively it seems like it would be harder to get addicted
> Addictions don't reason.
That argument was specifically based on how gambling feels and not reasoning.
Indeed, you can't argue state lotteries aren't gambling. But hey, there is a wide spectrum of how bad each form of gambling is, and lottery is very much on the lower end of it.
Very, very few people spend $200 a week on lottery tickets -- they spend a few dollars here and there a week. (Spending $200 is just silly and barely increases the chance of winning or return -- if someone can't see that, well, can't stop them from wasting money) Of course, I would like state lotteries to be further restricted, but that's still much much better than online sports betting -- people can lose six digits of wealth quickly, and that has a much bigger and immediate impact on lives than state lotteries.
> Lottos just trick the people with less money into paying more taxes on the hopes of "winning it big!"
How do you explain the school teacher spending $200 per week, then? The teachers here collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds. These are very wealthy people.
It was the teachers themselves who told me, but sage advice in general. You're quite right that teaching does tend to an attract a crowd that are out to lunch.
Still, the portfolio is public knowledge, so we can also verify what they say. In this case a stopped watch is still right sometimes.
If you had asked me five years ago if I'd be regularly ordering from walmart.com instead of amazon.com, I'd have thought it unlikely. But here I am -- I don't have to worry about counterfeits as long as it's sold & shipped by Walmart, and I can get same-day delivery (usually within an hour or two) for the cost of a tip. Their inventory is different (many more consumer staples, at better prices; many fewer random long-tail products), but it's replaced maybe 1/4 of my Amazon purchases. I also order from target.com once in a while; I never ever used to.
Amazon has not lost, but it is definitely losing its unique edge.
I bought and returned:
- Meta Quest headset / it arrived in a shipping box that was dented, with the quests product box damaged, and when I went to try it the system wouldn’t launch apps
- a usb memory card reader that advertised support for older Sony memory sticks but wouldn’t read them
- an electric kettle that burned my hand to pour water out of at a normal angle for use and despite high reviews on the product page
Those are three examples in the last couple of months…
Worth noting that the comment you reply to calls out buying only "sold & shipped by Walmart" items, as opposed to those from other vendors like your case.
Fair. When I bought the item I wrote about, I had no idea it wasn't direct from Walmart. IMO, as bad as Amazon does, they make who you are buying from very clear.
[1] https://ticotimes.net/2004/04/02/hipermas-supermarket-aims-f...
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