Yaky
@Yaky@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Why do russian parents insist on being treated to home cooked meals? 3 days ago:
You see Ivan, birthday is for other people to eat, drink, and have fun, not for you.
Kinda like a big wedding in the US I guess? Bride and groom are not the ones having fun.
- Comment on Why do russian parents insist on being treated to home cooked meals? 3 days ago:
AFAICT restaurants were few, expensive, and difficult to get into (i.e. not for regular people on regular basis), and the option for regular people would be stolovaya (cafeteria?) which is simple, probably mediocre food.
So seems like if you don’t have the connections and want decent food, make it yourself.
- Comment on Why do russian parents insist on being treated to home cooked meals? 3 days ago:
Are they (post-)soviet boomers? There are some cultural things that I noticed too, some amusing, some frustrating.
- Home food is automatically better than restaurant food, as you said. Also, somehow, any burger is automatically viewed as McDonalds burger (i.e. bad)
- Unsolicited advice and unprompted attempts to help.
- Insistence on getting you a gift or accepting a never-requested gift. “Here’s a nice thing, it was expensive and difficult to get, you should like it”.
- Viewing self as “a burden”. Being offered food, comfort, or accomodation is rejected because “I don’t want to impose”. Sometimes goes into “suffering builds character” mindset, which is nonsense.
- Comment on Why does most American's give shit to the French when if not for them we would have lost the revolution? 4 days ago:
From what I remember: France refused to join US war in Iraq in 2003, and around the same time I started hearing nonsense like “freedom fries” and “google french military victories and you get no results lolololol”, and it was all really fucking stupid. But some of that seemed to remain in popular culture.
- Comment on Is there a culture/country that doesn't have sarcasm in its language? 4 days ago:
Sounds pretty similar to US stereotypes towards Eastern Europeans, who are “always grumpy” and “rude”.
- Comment on Is there a culture/country that doesn't have sarcasm in its language? 4 days ago:
(Not first-hand knowledge) I read somewhere that tonal languages such as Chinese make it difficult to express sarcasm the same way Indo-European languages do, with accent and inflection.
- Comment on What's with companies naming things "MyNoun"? 1 week ago:
“I use a messenger”
“Which one?”
“You know, Messenger, the Facebook one”
- Comment on If you had native-level fluency in a language, and don't talk in that language for a while, can you develop an accent later-on when trying to talk in that language again? 1 week ago:
Not sure about an accent, but it will be noticeable.
From personal experience: I am aware that I often use structures specific to my current English-speaking region while speaking one of my native languages. Also, my slang and cultural references are really outdated. So I do not have an accent exactly, but it would be possible to tell something is off.
- Comment on For No Reason in Particular Here's a Bunch of Games Where You Kill Nazis 2 weeks ago:
Metro 2033 (and at least one of the sequels) had a (post-apocalyptic russian) nazi faction as enemies.
- Comment on Why doesn't my phone put all of my apps to "sleep" by default? 2 weeks ago:
Some general examples: Any active navigation keeping track of your location if you switch apps. Pebble monitoring notifications to be sent to a smartwatch. Email or chat client periodically checking for messages.
There is a Developer Setting in Android to instantly kill off-screen apps, but that would make multitasking a hassle.
On that note, what I have witnessed is the opposite, phone OS being overly eager to put apps in sleep / idle mode, to the point of ignoring user settings of “do not optimize battery” and “allow background processing”. Many (most “normal”) apps handle notifications through Google, but many FOSS and independent apps need to run in the background to check for messages, updates, etc.
- Comment on I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings 5 weeks ago:
When I was taught that Philo Farnsworth, a “farmer” who “invented” television by using the idea of plowing a field in parallel lines to display an image, I was completely dumbfounded. A farmer figured out how to build a vacuum tube, fire an electron beam, deflect it at phosphor-coated surface, and do so in lines, varying the intensity, to display an image? This simplistic “history” skips about 50 years of progress in vacuum tube design and absolutely fascinating mechanical television.
On that note, The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow is a good book about scientific progress, and really drives a point about incremental nature progress.
- Comment on genius 5 weeks ago:
IIRC that entire plane was a DIY plane from a popular kit, not a commercial vehicle.
(not clicking on a Google shortlink)
- Comment on I'm there! 1 month ago:
More of a self-directed way, but check out eBird for submitting bird observations and iNaturalist for almost everything else. The cool part about iNaturalist is that your observations also get identified by other people, so you know the submissions haave been reviewed. And you could help identify others’ observations too.
- Comment on Is there a word or (concise) phrase to describe the paradox of sharing something (like a website) that you don't like, but because you're sharing it you're tacitly helping it? 2 months ago:
That sounds like a Streisand effect, or a variation of it.
- Comment on Latin names suck 2 months ago:
IIRC the “migratorius” part is only partially true, they migrate, but relatively short distances, so their year-round range is still pretty much the entire continental US.
They do gather into flocks in fall-winter and then split back into pairs in spring-summer, which is interesting.
- Comment on Whatever happened to the days when shit just...worked? 2 months ago:
Heck, my first smartphone ran Android 4.0. Compared to current Android 16 more than a decade later, the only practical change I could think of is granular permissions.
- Comment on Does anyone know of a plug-in or extension that will make your web browser convert all websites into what they would look like in 1999? 2 months ago:
There’s FrogFind, search engine + converter/proxy for old machines. Runs via non-secure HTTP of course, which was standard in 1999.
Some sites have simple variants, such as
- Comment on Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years 2 months ago:
For me, it was not monthly, but rather “when it bites you in the ass”.
- Delete all empty rooms and federated rooms without local users.
- Clean up state_groups_state table.
- Delete old media.
All of this is made worse by having more active users and made better by having a large hard drive (my VPS had 20GB, which I almost filled up with the db and media after a few years, with only few users)
- Submitted 2 months ago to selfhosting@slrpnk.net | 7 comments
- Comment on Why do some people have so many tabs open on their browser? 2 months ago:
The only instances of this I have seen (on mobile) were not very tech-savvy people who click links in messages and apps, rarely open the browser, and/or don’t understand how to use the browser to begin with.
- Comment on On new installations, Android rebinds the power button to open up Google Assistant 3 months ago:
The best explanation I saw several years ago: Large tech companies drive change through competing individual teams and projects. So some manager pitched a half-assed idea, somehow convinced upper management to go with it, got developers to heroically implement it, and might have gotten some bonus for doing so. It doesn’t matter if there was no value as long as some decision maker thinks there is (or does not care, or numbers were fudged anyway).
It is literally change for the sake of change.
- Comment on Is (Matrix) Element Server Suite overkill for a dozen users? 3 months ago:
Ironically, this was the first thing I tried for Matrix deployment circa 2019. Worked like a charm… Until a reboot. Then, since I did not know where anything was installed and how it worked, I had no idea where to even start.
I guess it would make more sense now that I know a bit more.
- Comment on Is (Matrix) Element Server Suite overkill for a dozen users? 3 months ago:
What will I see? I mean I am seeing some corporatization and incompatibilities as I described.
- Comment on Is (Matrix) Element Server Suite overkill for a dozen users? 3 months ago:
Same for me, I initially went with Matrix for the bridges.
I think for XMPP it’s gateway or transport, Slidge author (Nicoco) has developed some in the last year.
- Comment on Is (Matrix) Element Server Suite overkill for a dozen users? 3 months ago:
Any hidden nuances that one has to know for Snikket nowadays?
E.g. with Matrix Synapse, user accounts cannot be deleted via API, DB accumulates hundreds of thousands of records in state_groups_state taking up space, and for client-side, onboarding is a pain
- Comment on Is (Matrix) Element Server Suite overkill for a dozen users? 3 months ago:
Why did you switch? I went from Matrix to XMPP around 2019 since Riot/RiotX (matrix client) at the time would not get notifications in time and/or was a battery hog. And then went back to Matrix when it seemed more stable, to avoid messing with prosody configs.
- Submitted 3 months ago to selfhosting@slrpnk.net | 20 comments
- Comment on When was the last time you actually laughed while playing a game? 3 months ago:
Stardew Valley has plenty of silly and funny moments to begin with. But the last patch added a “green rain” event, and during the first occurrence, all villagers are hiding inside, except Demetrius. This guy is just walking around in a full hazmat suit, collecting samples and babbling about mushrooms.
- Comment on Is there a way to listen to only the radio topics I actually care about? 3 months ago:
And its neighbor, WSTB 88.9 The Alternation, with local bands, indie/emo/pop-punk, sometimes clueless DJs, regular news and weather.
- Comment on What options of resistance are programmers creating to not submit to AI culture? 4 months ago:
AI is a tech debt generator.
Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)
AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.