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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 11th, 2024

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  • I think most larger (or older) immigrant communities have their own dialect. Runglish is Russian spoken with lots of words borrowed-adapted from US English.

    In parts of Eastern Ukraine and Western Russia, there is also surzhyk, which is a difficult-to-describe blend of both languages, often difficult to comprehend to those who do not speak both or dis not grew up in the area.








  • Matrix clients aren’t great

    IMO the main advantage that Matrix-Element has for normal users is the branding: Element is Element on the web, Android and iOS. (Snikket is trying to do the same for XMPP though)

    Matrix is too difficult for “normal” people

    Agreed. Simple user+password login to a hosted (non-matrixdotorg) server takes 5-6 pages to click through.

    Matrix public rooms have a CP problem

    I was spammed with racist copypasta on XMPP once too. But being in large Matrix chats guarantees being invited/messaged.

    …Matrix also pisses metadata to any server it federates with, including matrix [.] org

    Replication+sync is a strange decision for chats. It sort of makes sense for slower fediverse posts, but creates a lot of strange scenarios and privacy issues with chats. Also, matrixdotorg is used for key backups and vectordotim is used for integrations IIRC.


  • I hosted Matrix for several years. It mostly works fine, apps look consistent, bridges are nice, but is a pain in the ass in some aspects. Onboarding sucks. Data needs constant cleanup (or gigabytes of storage, even for a dozen users). Sometimes notifications are delayed hours. Sometimes images don’t load.

    New Element Server Suite is more corporate-oriented, requires Kubernetes (!) to run, includes defacto mandatory services. Element X has no feature parity with Element Classic, especially calls.

    I ran Snikket many years ago for a few months. But now they have smooth invites/onboarding, admin panel, and always had reliable notifications. Even bridges through Slidge. I plan to switch back to Snikket soon.

    More details






  • 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.


  • Yaky@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzI'm there!
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    2 months 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 have been reviewed. And you could help identify others’ observations too.


  • Yaky@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzLatin names suck
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    3 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.



  • I have to perform a context switch between “v” and “w” sounds, so words and phrases that contain both (e.g: “very well”) sometimes end up with only “w” sounds. (My native language does not have a regular “W” sound)

    But even after 20 years speaking it, English pronunciation is complete nonsense. Most of the time, you just need to memorize the words. Because trying to figure out how to say something, you also need to know if the word is borrowed from any other languages that use Latin alphabet, and then pronouce it pretending to speak that language. Simplest example: Mocha (moh-ka) and matcha (maht-cha). But there are countless borrowed words that don’t change spelling in English.



  • 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)