thebestaquaman

@thebestaquaman@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace?⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course, I’ll speak English in meetings and other settings where we’re talking about work and need to minimise the language barrier for practical purposes. I’ll also speak English in a lot of social settings, because these are nice people that I enjoy talking to.

  What I’m talking about is the silent expectation that a group of Norwegians talking at the lunch table should switch to English if one or more non-Norwegian speakers enter the room. I don’t like that silent expectation, and really appreciate the colleagues that learn Norwegian well enough that I can just keep the conversation going without feeling like I’m excluding them or feeling that I need to swap to English and fill them in on what we’re talking about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it really makes a difference, as long as you’re staying somewhere for any significant amount of time (i.e. months) it makes sense to start learning the language.

  I mean, it’s common courtesy to try to learn enough of the local language to buy stuff and ask for directions when your just on vacation.

  I was in Germany for half a year during my studies. To me it was obvious that I needed to learn the language from day one, because I had no intent of going around and expecting everyone else to adjust to me not knowing the language. I have a very hard time understanding how someone could move to a country for years, and still not learn the language because “it’s not permanent”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what's your take on employers banning the use of languages other than English between coworkers at the workplace?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I also work in a very international community, with a small minority Norwegians (in Norway). While we often communicate in English, I have to admit that I find it a bit strange that people choose to move to Norway and work in Norway, but don’t learn the language well enough to participate in a conversation at the lunch table.

  Sure, often we’ll swap to English if a non-Norwegian speaker comes in, but sometimes I’m just tired and don’t want to bother with the extra effort. I massively appreciate the colleagues that bother to learn Norwegian.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The guy that told me this lives close by, and we have plenty of crows here. His way of saying it made it clear that the “chicken-sized” crows we have around here are small compared to a raven.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently, ravens are so huge that if you see one you will not be in doubt that it isn’t a crow. At least that’s what I’ve been told.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨proportional reaction⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  While Python’s version does feel a bit backwards, it’s at least consistent with how list comprehensions are set up (they can also feel a bit “backwards” imo)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨proportional reaction⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I honestly can’t see how this is more readable than

  x = (y > 5) ? “foo” : “bar”

  I get that it’s a syntax that needs to be learned, but it’s just so clean and concise!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨proportional reaction⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For it’s faults, I think what makes C beautiful is that it gives you complete freedom do be an absolute idiot.

  Whenever I decide to hack something together with an arcane macro, I feel like an animal being released back into the wild, with the compiler yelling “Be free! Explore the mysteries of our incomprehensible world!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You donkey⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You could not be more hilariously wrong, and I support you for maintaining your position.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who plays like that x_x⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You spin the mouse wheel to control the scroll bar, so of course spinning the wheel towards you (down, if you align the mode with the screen), should make the scroll bar go down.

  This was, for a long time, uncontroversial. However, after touch screens became widely used, people started incorrectly assuming that the mouse wheel “moves the screen” (absolutely ludicrous), and decided that down was up and up was down, and that the sane way to scroll with a mouse wheel or touch pad was “inverted” and not “sane”/“normal”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨proportional reaction⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If there’s more than two branches in the decision tree I’ll default to a if/else or switch/case except if I want to initialise a const to a conditional value, which is one of the places I praise the lord for ternaries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who plays like that x_x⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never thought about this, but yes. When I play fps games it feels natural to use non-inverted, while for games where you’re not “aiming” but “looking around” it feels more natural with inverted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO 26300⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry for taking some time, monday morning suddenly hit me in the face… I’ve put up some files here that you should be able to download. The files can be opened with any plain-text editor (notepad, textedit, or similar).

  My recommendation is to create an account on overleaf, click “create new project”, and upload the files there. Then you can hit “recompile” to see how the document looks. My guess is that you’ll figure out how stuff works pretty quickly just by modifying that file. If what you want to write is a simple document, you can really just get going :)

  Feel free to let me know if you have any issues :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO 26300⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ahh, now I understand! I’ll try my best to make it less scary :)

  To start off

  why is there a need for external packages for a text document?

  There usually isn’t, as long as you only want a simple document. The most basic thinkable document would be

  \documentclass{article}
  \begin{document}
  This is the text in my document
  \end{document}
  

  However, you’ll likely want a title and author, so you can start off with

  \documentclass{article}
  \title{Fishes are nice}
  \author{Definitely not Jason Mamoa}
  \begin{document}
  
  \maketitle
  
  \section{Introduction}
  This is a text about why fishes are nice.
  
  \end{document}
  

  You have your “Super basic document”, with at title and author. You can make simple formatting changes by modifying the documentclass statement at the top. My recommendation with all the external packages (usepackage) is to look them up one-by-one as you need them. You’ll typically find a small handfull of packages that you need very often, and then you’ll probably end up copy-pasting those declarations over whenever you create a new document. For most basic documents I’m using like 2-5 packages at most (fancy math fonts, hyperlinks, pretty bibliography, etc.)

  Tables are straight up scary They take a little getting used to, I agree. For someone working a lot with tables, I would recommend getting used to them, but if you only very rarely need them, there are “graphical editors” that let you build a table in a GUI and then give you the Latex code for it. Overleaf has an integrated “visual editing” mode that makes the barrier to entry lower. However I don’t really recommend it for someone that really wants to learn to use Latex, because I think it prevents people from progressing past the very basics.

  plotting - I didn’t even try to comprehend it I’ve used Latex for years, specifically writing documents with a lot of plots. I have yet to attempt to learn to plot directly in Latex. I know some people that will create figures and plots directly in Latex, and I respect them. I use inkscape for figures, and python for plotting, and can get stuff looking pretty awesome that way. Learning to draw/plot directly in Latex is by no means a must.

  Please, make it any sort of user-friendly! As with other powerful tools, I think people are often overwhelmed coming in because of the massive number of possibilities, and the fine-grained control that is possible. My recommendation is to start out with something like the above, and progressively add complexity as you need it. Most people don’t require more than basic section (and sub- subsub- etc.) headers, tables, figures, and equations. In that case, you’ll need like 3-5 external packages and 3-5 “commands” (stuff like \begin{equation}). If you start out with the above example, you’ll probably learn the basics on your own in a couple hours :)

  I’ve held some latex-courses for beginners, so if you want, I could send you the “basic starting file” that the people taking the course have completed writing (with help) after about two hours :) I’ve been told that most of them feel pretty comfortable learning on their own once they have that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO 26300⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ohhh, I can sign off on this.

  The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.

  This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO 26300⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:
  • If it’s meant to be pretty, portable, and only for reading: pdf
  • If it’s text with no formatting: txt
  • If it’s formatted and editable: md
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ISO 26300⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you actually write all the headers and stuff

  I’ve used Latex as my go-to tool for writing anything that needs formatting for years, and I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean?

  I start off my document with a documentclass statement, which is one line…? And then I will sometimes usepackage a couple things for further document-wide formatting, but we’re still talking about a small handful of lines (like 5-10 at most).

  The preamble can grow quite large for big documents with a lot of specific formatting, but I have some boilerplate preambles with the most common packages lying around that I can copy-paste in. Usually however, the preamble grows as you’re writing the document and you add things dynamically as you need them.

  I would love to give you a better answer to your question, since my impression is that pretty much no one that swaps to Latex ever looks back, and I would love to help you learn. Feel free to expand on what you mean by “all the headers and stuff” and I’ll try to give a better answer :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hep mak fren⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hep look at Wuff. Hep do the bonking. Wife only good for seeking. Hep think he can bonk Wuff too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Like a baby⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The sound of a baby’s scream is an incredible feat of nature. In a way, it’s almost sad that we lose the ability to make that sound at a certain age.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks at litterally half the population: “This is a minority”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who have been in meetings to determine back to in office policy. What was the discussion like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly: I can understand that an open layout makes life harder for people in an already oppressive environment. This applies regardless of why the environment is oppressive any individual.

  Claiming that “open environments are sexist” implies that they’re somehow inherently oppressive towards one gender. That’s absolute bullshit in my opinion: Open environments are just generally crap for productivity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who have been in meetings to determine back to in office policy. What was the discussion like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry, but what?

  I hate open-plan layouts as much as the next guy, but how on earth are they sexist?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it sexist to say "I've never worn a wet dress before"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In general, I don’t think it’s right to lie down flat whenever someone accuses you of saying something wrong, just because they think it was wrong.

  It should be pretty fair to respond with a simple “why is that sexist? I think wet clothes are uncomfortable, so I assumed others did as well.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do movie actors or actress keep the skills they learned? Like no one would screw with Keanu after seeing all the John Wick films? And if they did would they just be fucked from the start?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Define “good”. I would say that any professional with dozens of hours of training, that could comfortably overcome any average person is “good”. Those are the people I trained with, and my impression is that Keanu is better than most of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do movie actors or actress keep the skills they learned? Like no one would screw with Keanu after seeing all the John Wick films? And if they did would they just be fucked from the start?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC, Keanu did some extensive firearms training in connection with John Wick. I’ve seen some footage of him on a training set with mobile targets, and would estimate that he’s better at handling a wide variety of firearms than a fair portion of military personnel are before the first time they see combat. This estimate is based on my own military training on similar courses.

  I know the movies are choreographed, but I definitely wouldn’t give someone without extensive training good odds against him, based on footage I’ve seen from his training.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s the little things⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If we want to go to extremes, zero surface tension means no nucleation barrier for critical bubbles. In practice, this implies that liquid water is unstable, and will spontaneously vaporise at all conditions.

  So yeah, all life ends pretty quickly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s the little things⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It relies on differences in surface tension. If a liquid has a lower surface tension (energy) towards one surface than another, you get the typical capillary effect. In the case of water, the water-air energy is lower than the water-<whatever your capillary is made of> energy, so you get a capillary effect.

  If water had exactly zero surface tension against every interface,

  • it would not exhibit any capillary action
  • life on earth would cease to exist quite quickly
  • your socks would remain dry
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't the Trump administration simply edit the Epstein files and release them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you make any edits that contradict the physical evidence, you’ve outed yourself.

  We’re talking about people that contradict both themselves and physical reality on a daily basis without their supporters batting an eye.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't the Trump administration simply edit the Epstein files and release them?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Export to jpeg. Compress.

  Can decent edits still be reliably detected?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come nobody does anything about North Korea?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Great, it seems like we agree on the major points here! I’m not denying any of the major issues of the Afghan war, nor any of the glaring problems with how the whole “nation building” attempt went about. I’m very well aware of the history of the Afghan war, and have seen several of the documentaries you refer to that point out that it was largely known that the Afghan army would likely desert once the coalition left.

  I’m not saying we don’t care.

  That is quite literally what you said in your first comment, and is literally the only thing I’ve disagreed with you on so far (“the world simply doesn’t care”).

  Many individual people did earnestly care, and tried their best.

  This is literally the point I’ve been trying to make, but it seems like you keep misinterpreting me as saying the whole invasion was a misunderstood humanitarian operation. I’m not saying that.