Luc

Yes? Who hasn’t?

Changing (not just translating) the title is sometimes clearly necessary to preserve a joke or reference for people who don’t speak the original language (otherwise they’d be reading that version already), but in most cases I find it unnecessary and just makes it hard to talk to others about it or find more info because you know it under completely unrelated names. The Wikipedia article translations about the author will sometimes mention them in a recognisable way, but sometimes not even that helps…

If pitch made differences in meaning at the word level, it would be called a tonal language afaik

English has pitch for other aspects of speech, such as indicating emphasis or what sentences are questions. Try saying “you did it” with an emphasis on the first word, without changing the volume or tempo: it’ll change pitch. If you raise the “it” instead, you get a question sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_declarative). The pitch could make a difference for how you understand a word, like you’d not think the person said “what’s that cent?” (same set of base sounds but, due to the question pitch, it’s more likely “… scent?”), but it’s not a fixed property of the word like in a tonal language

Variants of “mhm” are also tonal to me. I don’t know if this works the same in any English-speaking region but, where I’m from, “hm” with

• rising pitch is “I don’t understand”
• high-low-high is enthusiastic agreement
• low pitch is like acknowledgment that you’ve heard the person (and don’t voice an objection), and
• low-low with a pause between means “no”

Not sure that’s considered a word, though

Unrelated but this reminds me of a thing that happened earlier today while we were playing a board game. European languages aren’t considered click languages, but we still have them. One player asked a question of another, and someone from Turkey tsk’d. They made no other sound or head movement. Apparently this meant “no”! Native DE/NL speakers won’t understand that this is an answer to a question. We do use tsk here, just for other purposes. Was interesting to notice the culture difference!

Buying a Pixel to install GrapheneOS is not the only reasonable alternative to mainstream Android.

Each person has their own threat model. My priorities will be very different from a journalist in China, a whistleblower, or even my own mom. Some are more at risk of ransomware and a device with root is risky. For myself, I’d incur that risk as a power user and would rather my phone can be backed up so I don’t have to worry about it breaking. GrapheneOS devs/followers believe that security is the only thing you must ever want, nothing else matters, and everything else is irrelevant, as though Google or street thugs will come to your house and exploit your bootloader if you don’t give them data voluntarily. They just don’t realistically question the statements the project makes, like what threats are worth mitigating (ubiquitous tracking? Who cares, I’ve got security patches and a locked bootloader!) and what options they’re giving up by using GrapheneOS that’s about as locked-down as the average Samsung phone. The marketing game is super strong because it’s hard to argue against at scale: everyone’s situation is different and “don’t you want to be safe?”

Regardless of any browser, consider that there’s probably a half dozen background programs using the internet connection as well. You’ll want to install something like a firewall that you can turn on that blocks all connections except from some allowlisted apps you currently want to use. A simple message check from a handful of installed messengers can occupy that connection for a few seconds while you’re trying to load something that’s much more important to you right now in the browser

(that^ was my situation this morning on ~12kbps 2G network, trying to load my ~4KB grocery list webapp in the grocery store with bad reception… ended up connecting to the store WiFi and sold my soul with a checkbox ^^')

Add in a weather app updating, system update check, some app trying to download a new version, the keyboard sending telemetry or downloading new words, the OS trying to load a “generate 204” page to detect whether there is connectivity, the GNSS subsystem loading SUPL data for positioning, Google submitting its WiFi scan data to either obtain a location or improve their service, calendar sync…

The person I was talking about in the first paragraph was in a school that’s internationally considered a university! People in “we all went to university” bubbles may not all be that type of smart, although - yes - many of them will be. Degrees primarily show whether someone thrives in a structured school setting, and most people not acting very dumb is not surprising when they’re near (but below) the average

I’ve completed the highest and the lowest mainstream education levels in my country. Long story how that came to be, but what that taught me is that while university students frequently have an easier time memorising facts on paper than those who “work with their hands” (not sure if that’s how you say it in English), it’s not a given. There were kids smarter than me at the lowest level: they just couldn’t be bothered to do homework and wanted to skip class to buy or sell drugs. Some others in that school sounded really dumb whenever they asked a question, but when this came up with a teacher once, the teacher asked if I knew what grades the student in question ended up scoring (I didn’t) and that this is just their way of learning the subject matter effectively. Okay, at least for some of them :P. Meanwhile, not everyone whom I know with a university degree can hold a job

Btw, what I also found interesting is that people score differently on IQ tests through the ages, way too short timescales for brains to evolve at a population level so our actual smartness as a species isn’t what changed. I wrote some stuff here but then checked my facts and actually this is a better article so I’ll just link the Wikipedia instead :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect. But that’s not what you’re talking about since you don’t mean IQ scores literally but just how people act around you, if I understand correctly now. Just thought it interesting as an aside

I’d say that attitude, mental health, learning styles, social skills… lots of things play a role in how we perceive people’s wits besides their actual wits. People are hard to capture by one metric. Which is also why I’d call many of the examples in this thread into question btw: service workers often interact with someone only on a single topic, often even only during a single session (support call for example). It could sometimes also just be some neurons not making the right connection in that moment, rather than the person’s intellect. Or regarding the attitude they gain towards the general public: who needs support most frequently? Surely not the people that are particularly resourceful and make smart decisions. There’s a massive selection bias there

Okay, last anecdote. Two people with a university degree (one of them has even two university degrees in IT) are put in front of an Apple device which is of course super intuitive and needs no manual. It’s so easy that neither of us can figure out how to complete the unskippable device setup wizard. We call Apple support. The solution? Scrolling down. I tried that, but the part of the screen that I touched wasn’t a scrollable element and so I concluded there was nothing to scroll to, which of course the support person couldn’t know. The person receiving that call would fit right in in this thread with a story about someone not realising in 2026 that there is such a thing as scrolling down to find the ‘continue’ button below the form. Nobody (afaik) considers either of us dumb and yet there’s plenty of ways to end up as one of the service job examples in a thread like this xD

Factorio 2.1 was announced today, so that :)

I’ve been enjoying Age of Empires 1 lately. Or Slay if you like puzzle games. Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection is also great for that. I dunno, there’s so many options. Wanna be anymore specific about the type of game you’re looking for? It seems a bit silly to mention nearly every game ever made

A particular fellow student comes to mind who was slow to understand things, made a comparative lot of programming mistakes and so he took more time, but he also worked hard, stuck to a problem until it was solved, coordinated tasks well, and additionally brought positive spirits to any project group. I assume he’d score under 100 but I’d love to have him on my team if he applied with us today.

It’s hard to know for sure though, since 100 is the average by definition and most people will be relatively close to it. Not like 97 or 103 makes a big difference. It’s half the people you meet in public, like, (by and large) we all go to the same primary schools and supermarkets etc. Outside of those (so tertiary education, workplaces, online bubbles perhaps, etc.), there’s still a substantial fraction who learned a lot and/or have a good work attitude and go very far in life amidst people who didn’t have to work hard to get anywhere

It frankly seems strange to assume you basically never met anyone who is slightly below the average. From a statistics point of view, one might wonder if that’s a dumb thing to say ;) (jk)

Is all email still delayed by 30 seconds or more?

Support first denied it’s a problem, saying email was never meant to be realtime (doesn’t change I’m receiving OTPs on it and sitting there waiting for their server to get off its ass while it’s expiring) and to come back if it’s ever more than 5 minutes delayed. So I do some shell scripting to find those emails and supply a list of emails that were delayed more than 5 minutes (visible by the Received headers that the problem is between Runbox internal servers). Then they ghosted me. And ignored an inquiry about the ticket status iirc about a year later. Another year later, we moved away iirc for some calendaring reason, so I don’t know what things are like since about 2022. I self-host personal email and it often pops the “you’ve got mail” before the sign-up page finished loading. Feels like it’s coming from the future so fast compared to the experience I had at work 😅

I loved Runbox in every way except for this email delay. If this got fixed, I’d recommend it to people again as the #1 thing to use since this question comes up with some regularity on various platforms but this really bugged me and sometimes seriously got in the way

Edit: CC @ExtremeDullard@piefed.social — do @ mentions work when edited in?

Netherlands, it depends on the level and where you live:

• everyone: Dutch and English, and another language for 2 years
• higher¹ education: French and German, drop one or both after 3 years, keeping the other for another 1 or 2 years
• for kids that are still bored: +Latin, Greek, or Spanish as typical choices (depends what your regional school offers)
• in the province of Frysia, Frysian is mandatory
• in the overseas territories, it can be different again. Not all of them speak Dutch primarily, some don’t follow the Dutch education system. I tried looking it up but couldn’t easily find how it works in those regions (which may be a “country within the kingdom” or a “special municipality”, depending on the island)
• the existence of sign language did not come up, that I recall. So far as I can find, it’s only offered on schools specifically for kids that have some level of hearing disability

¹ “higher” is the term that is officially used. I find it a bit derogatory. Having done some of basically every education level, each one has strengths and it’s not like everyone from the “highest” one would be able to get a diploma on the “lowest” one. They’re just different. Idk what word is commonly understood for this

Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person

Or it was simply the best attempt at the time! Idk if you’ve ever tried to transcribe even your own words phonetically (where you know what sounds you’re enunciating) or tried to guess the spelling (much simpler than phonetics) for a new-to-you word in a foreign language even if you understand the language nearly as well (just don’t have the vocab yet) as a native speaker. It’s really super hard to find letters for sounds!

There’s people whose job is nothing but finding and arguing over the most accurate transcription, e.g. for dictionaries or research, of languages that long have a dictionary, pronunciation guides, learning materials, etc., but are wrong a decent fraction of the time.
Or when they’re not wrong, they’re getting outdated with evolving speech, e.g. “train” has shifted to something like “tchrain” but Merriam Webster claims the transcription is trān while their example pronunciation sounds out [tʒreˑjnə] (loosely: tchraaine) if you listen closely and compare to IPA charts (compare with their entry for “chart”, where they show the ch in the transcription but not the initial t! That looks to me like shart! lol)

We might need to give the olden times phoneticians more credit than this 😄. Of course I wasn’t there for it either but I was triggered by what sounds like a dismissive default assumption about people not doing their job properly while in reality we usually all try our best 🙂

You could always type it over and say you’ve recreated it, but that also didn’t fly. Why would overfitting a machine learning algorithm on the data and then having it predict next tokens be any different?

GSam Battery Monitor, I use to check things like until what time I was up or how cold it was in the bedroom overnight. The graphs show when my phone screen was on (when I set my alarm) and log the battery temperature which I’ve found matches room temperature after a few hours (with WiFi/data off so it’s not doing whatever background tasks if people are conversing in a group chat or so)

One time I was absolutely certain my alarms hadn’t gone off but you could see a little blip on the screen graph, once every minute, matching precisely the (turned off) alarms. Either Sam is in on it or I just slept really soundly that day :D

Apparently it has ads though. Wouldn’t recommend, I always had it firewalled because I didn’t think it needed internet access to display some offline data from my phone in the first place and apparently that also works as an ad blocker? Fun side effect. But so I’m very interested in any open source alternatives people know of!

This penny dropped for me when I heard someone from GB/IR use something like “that’s grand!” rather than great. That painted quite a literal picture in my head at the time!

In Dutch we call the city Peking also. Never knew why it was Bejing in English, figured maybe that’s what the Chinese say for it

Would they use violence though? We might still be better off with the paper conflicts that these people have with each other 🤔

Surely that’s just meant as a general concept and we don’t need to split hairs on the definition of that? Imagine an IQ test or whatever else people normally understand when using the word intelligence, and that such a person would get 1.5 times as many questions right

I don’t find that weird. I find myself relatively negligent for not having this sort of thing prepared in some way, if not by go bag then by having the copies at a friend’s or such

From the few artists I know in this thread and any self-descriptive titles, this is going to be rather out there but…

Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace are what a friend and I agreed is the perfect breakup music. I think it came up because it made me feel better during a breakup but I didn’t want to continue listening to it to avoid getting sick of it and it losing the effect next time. Or something, idk I was a teenager :p

BB: I will not bow • Crawl • Blow me away
3DG: Break • Scared • Riot

Didn’t know them at the time but Amity Affliction probably fits here as well. Soak me in bleach or Pittsburgh, for example

Elevator walker here. This is the first I’m hearing of it! Given that it’s not a thing being played or said in various European countries, where do they have this on repeat? Where did you hear it was bad for it? Any idea why bigger cities generally have markings on the sides of escalators to designate which side to stand, and which side to walk on, since that would only promote the bad-for-their-infrastructure behavior?

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalator_etiquette doesn’t mention anything about damaging the escalator. Walking along increases your chances of falling or something though. In Hong Kong they apparently measured 43% of accidents stemming from “moving or walking along”. Methinks a stationary bicycle rarely crashes… I’ll take my chances. Can’t be that bad if 57% of accidents stems from the people who just stand there. I’ve never met anyone who was in an escalator accident whereas most people who drive have a traffic accident at some point in their lives and loads of near-misses, so the escalator accident odds must be much lower than that, as well as the speed and consequences involved in escalator accidents, I’d assume